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Sure, Why Not? There's a First Time for Everything |
That's the entire list. You can see that it's blank. But how can that be? We all know that the US has freed dozens if not scores of nations from their evil and repressive governments, and installed a democracy where people lived happily ever after, swamped with freedoms and overwhelmed with human rights. We know this because we've read and heard it hundreds, or maybe thousands, of times, in all the US history books. We've seen it in so many movies and even read it in comic books when we were kids. It must be true. So why is the list empty? How can that be? Sadly, the list is empty because nothing we were told was actually true. The US did indeed "free" scores of countries from their governments, but the Americans didn't do that to install democracy and make the people free. They did it to install a new dictator more pliable to US political and commercial interests, to effectively colonise those countries and open the way for US corporations to freely plunder each nation's resources. Freedom and democracy didn't even enter the picture. And that is the topic of the next section in this series. It is the story of how the US, while preaching "democracy, freedom and human rights" at home, was actually running around the world installing dictatorships - more than 45, at last count. Not only that, while telling Americans that it was defending freedom and installing democracy, the US CIA and military were actually undermining and destroying functioning democracies and replacing them with dictatorships - in at least 13 clear cases. Iran is one of the most obvious of these, where the CIA arranged the overthrow of the beloved leader of a perfectly-functioning democracy and installed the Shah as one of the most brutal dictators in modern history. In 2000, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright stated: "In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran's popular Prime Minister, Mohammed Massadegh. The Eisenhower Administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons; but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs." Americans appear to be inexplicably ignorant of all these facts which are not in dispute - not even by the US government and the CIA - and where the information is widely available to anyone who cares to look. More than this, a great many Americans flatly deny these facts of history, stubbornly refuse to accept that their government has done such things, and much too often respond with fairly nasty hate mail when confronted with the truth. In spite of the power of US propaganda and brainwashing, the vast extent of such simple-minded ignorance is difficult to fathom. There are a few countries where some kind of participatory democratic government did result after US intervention, but none of these are clear cases, and none involve "freeing" the population or the country. Nevertheless, I will list them for you here. Japan Japan is still under US military occupation, though we don't normally describe it as such in polite company. After WWII, the US installed (for its own purposes) a participatory government in Japan, but it functioned as a single-party country with the LDP continuously in charge from the war's end until very recently with only one short break. There is much of Japan that the Japanese do not control, and neither the government nor the people have any say in the matter. More than one Japanese Prime Minister has attempted to force the US out of Okinawa, but instead discovered that the US had him forced out of office. South Korea The US supported Syngman Rhee's dictatorship for a long period after the Korean war. Public uprising against his brutality led to a US-backed military coup by Park Chung-hee in 1960, but it was only in 1992 that South Korea finally had what we might call a democracy, and it was neither initiated nor supported by the US. The people of South Korea simply rose up in arms against US-backed oppression and finally formed their own government. No credit to the US here. Taiwan When the US stuck its nose into China's internal affairs after WWII, it supported Chiang Kai-shek in his one-party KMT dictatorship for some 40 years. It was only in 1996 that Taiwan had its first civilian election, after which Chen Shui-bian was elected - and then imprisoned for massive corruption. The US had half a century to install a democracy but preferred to support a dictatorship until the repressive government could no longer survive. The US then tried to take credit for the introduction of 'freedom' and 'democracy', but that's a long stretch. Afghanistan Don't make me laugh. A still-primitive tribal society, destroyed by decades of foreign proxy wars, has the outstanding advantage of a "speaker of the house". Charming. Iraq This one is curious and notable, mostly for the stuff nobody tells you. Iraq does indeed have what appears to be a participatory democratic government, and one indeed installed by the US. Sounds good so far. But then, things are not always what they seem. The US-orchestrated transfer of power to the Iraqis appears to have some gaps that are not apparently widely-known. One would be Paul Bremer's "Coalition Provisional Authority Orders" which control virtually everything of consequence in Iraq - and which (by Bremer's own 'laws') cannot be repealed by any subsequent Iraqi government. These orders include total freedom for American firms to plunder Iraq, the right to buy up all the nation's infrastructure, to control all the oil production and marketing, and even for Iraqi farmers being forced to purchase Monsanto GM crop seed, making the entire agricultural food supply of Iraq dependent on the US forever. Not only that, but we read persistent reports of US military officials simply walking into an Iraqi "cabinet meeting" and issuing US-backed instructions on government policy - orders which cannot be disobeyed. Does that sound like "freedom and democracy" to you? Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia . . . The US, rather than install democracies in these nations, spent its time interfering in local elections, then overthrowing locally-elected leaders in favor of dictators it could manage better - Marcos, Suharto . . . No credit here, sorry. We could persist, and list country by country those places where false claims of installing democracy have been made, but that might be pointless. We have nations like Grenada and Haiti, where the US in fact frustrated a half-decent democratic government and re-installed a preferred dictator - while telling the American people the exact opposite. But I'm not going to do all your research for you. You can easily check these for yourself. Return to Index |