A lesson on Western inequity from, and for, the leftwing
Paul Craig Roberts
Finian Cunningham, Jeremy Kuzmarov, Daniel Kovalik, KJ Noh, and Ron Ridenour have published a useful compendium of some of Washington’s regime changes and public deceptions since World War II. The information they have collected is well known and largely correct. The authors use the information to reach the reasonable conclusion that by its own actions the US government over time has discredited the belief that the US government is a well-meaning one holding out hope to the world.
I don’t much care for the book’s title Killing Democracy. Democracy has long been dead in the West. No western government represents its people. A few years back former American president Jimmy Carter more accurately described the United States as an oligarchy. In Europe the effort has been underway for decades to destroy national sovereignty and unite Europe in an authoritarian government in which the people have no voice.
It is truth and respect for truth that has been killed. The authors make this point themselves, noting the failure of the media to perform its function, instead perpetrating false narratives that serve secret agendas.
The authors provide histories of some of the regime changes such as Iran, Guatemala, Bolivia, Ukraine, and currently underway Venezuela. Indeed, Washington even changed the American regime with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, thus launching America into the Vietnam War and the continuation of the Cold War doing the presidencies of Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter until Reagan and Gorbachev could shut it down only to be revived by the Clinton regime.
Not all of the information in the book is in my opinion correct, and although most of it is, the information is not always presented in a truthful context.
An example of the former is the explanation of the overthrow of the Allende Government in Chile by the CIA. Washington being what it is, there is little doubt that Henry Kissinger claimed responsibility in order to rise further in Nixon’s estimation of him. Also little doubt that Pinochet got Washington’s approval before he acted. However, Pinochet responded to public demand in Chile, not to the CIA.
The leftwing speaks of Allende as elected. This is not the case. There were three contestants for the office. Each had around 1/3 of the vote. Allende’s percentage was a point or two higher. On the basis of Allende’s promise to respect Chile”s constitution, the elected legislature appointed Allende president.
In my opinion, Allende would have been a moderate socialist reformer. However, this role was prohibited to him by several revolutionary minded far left and communist groups that Allende proved unable to control.
Activities of these groups produced widespread public opposition to Allende’s regime. For example, revolutionary groups got control of the food supply in the capital city Santiago. They distributed food to the population on the basis of support for their organizations. Most did not support groups to the left of Allende.
Housewives protested every evening by stepping outside and banging together their pots and pans. Housewives also carried kernels of corn in their purses, and when they encountered military personnel in the streets, they would throw the corn at their feet and cackle like chickens.
Elsewhere, revolutionary groups seized farmland from owners. Protests against the Allende government broke out all over Chile. The country was running out of food. The elected legislature called on the military to remove Allende, a fact never told by the leftwing. Pinochet was forced to take action.
All the while the Chilean, American, and European left-wing propaganda was running full force. We read about Pinochet’s navy on the river that runs through Santiago dumping murdered bodies into the depths of the river. Imagine my surprise when I visited Chile to find that I could walk across the river without getting my knees wet or walk from rock to rock without getting my toes wet.
I know the facts because my research associate and co-author Karen Araujo spent two years researching the facts, and we wrote a book titled Chile: Dos Visiones: La Era Allende-Pinochet published in Spanish in 2000 by Universidad Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile. We could not get an American publisher because left-wing propaganda had prevailed over the facts.
Karen, fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, lived in Chile doing the Allende-Pinochet era. She had experienced it, and her boyfriend at the time was one of the missing.
If memory serves, it was 1996 and 1997 that the Institute for Political Economy financed Karen to return to Chile for two years to discover the true story. She used the newspaper morgues. She hunted down and interviewed witnesses. She had access to General Pinochett and to the military officers who led the assault on the revolutionary elements who had doomed Allende. She had access to the so-called “Chicago boys,” American-trained economists to whom Pinochet entrusted the provisional government until a new constitution could be prepared and presented to the public for a vote. The left-wing propaganda that Pinochet intended to be a dictator is a total lie. Pinochet stood for election and stepped down when he lost.
After I read Karen’s report, I traveled to Chile, met with and questioned Pinochet, the Army and Navy military officers, and the Chicago boys. All of Karen’s findings were confirmed. Outside of Chile the true story of Allende’s overthrow is unknown. It is buried perhaps forever in leftwing propaganda. One can only wonder how many other true stories are buried in propaganda.
When I say that the leftwing’s account of Western inequity is not always correct, I am referring to the part of the story that they leave out. There was another side to colonialism. It woke up peoples and brought them into the modern world. The leftwing’s understanding of colonialism would be improved if they were to read Burden of Empire by L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan.
I often stress the attacks on Western civilization that have succeeded in destroying the belief system of the West, thereby making the belief system susceptible to abandonment and collapse. Considering truths, long well known to me, but brought to us again by Killing Democracy, I task myself for an explanation of how I can continue to defend Western civilization in view of its failings. The answer I think is that Western civilization has successes as well as failures and the focus has been overwhelmingly on the failures, not on the successes. Humans everywhere are fallen, not just in the Western world. Also, much of colonialism happened independently of government. Cecil Rhodes operated as Cecil Rhodes, not as the British government.
India was ruled by the East India Company, a joint stock company charted in 1600 that evolved from a spice trader into a de facto colonial ruler due to the lack of Indian unity and national awareness. The East India Company, a private organization, commanded its own army and governed vast territories until 1858 when the British government took control of an enterprise that was 258 years old. For the British government colonialism, just like slavery, was an inherited institution, not a policy initiated by the government. The denial of this basic indisputable fact by the leftwing discourages confidence in their presentations even when they are right.
Ideology is the bane of truth. We live in a world in which denunciation has gone too far. Denunciation threatens the existence of civilization. We must learn to leaven demand for reforms with appreciation of our successes, or we will cease to exist.
Note: I think that Karen Araujo has a few copies of the book. If you contact her at karenarau91@gmail.com you might be able to purchase a copy.