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Washington Bullets

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‘To seek less than preponderant power would be to opt for defeat,’ Nitze’s staff wrote in 1952. ‘Preponderant power must be the objective of US policy.’ — location: 230 ^ref-20338

It is the native who is the savage. The colonizer is civilized, even in his — location: 318 ^ref-64278

brutality. — location: 319 ^ref-17170

It was only in 1977 – as Additional Protocol I – that the Geneva process acknowledged that wars of national liberation were to be considered as armed conflicts under the framework of the Conventions, and therefore to be subjected to international law. But that was only because the formerly colonized, newly independent states in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) – formed in 1961 – fought to bring in this addition. — location: 324 ^ref-13999

movements for national liberation grew across the colonized world. These movements did not merely demand political freedom against colonial regimes. We are part of the human race, they said, and therefore we are part of universal ideas of freedom and humanity. — location: 360 ^ref-44364

The British would fight brutally to hold on to Malaya and Kenya but would accept the partition of India as long as their airbases in northern Pakistan remained untouched. — location: 380 ^ref-21288

The principle contradiction in the years after 1945 was not along the axis of West–East – the Cold War – but North–South – the imperialist war against de-colonization. — location: 384 ^ref-27671

It is important to recognize that the UN Charter provided the legal framework for lawless interventionism. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and not the almost two hundred states in the UN General Assembly, have the power to decide when and how to intervene against sovereign states. — location: 414 ^ref-9806

From 1945 to 1989, the USSR operated as an umbrella against the fully lawless usage of these UN loopholes, these mechanisms to offer the old colonial states a back door to continue their colonial wars in a modern form. — location: 417 ^ref-2912

It was the USSR that used its veto to defend the process of national liberation, from the struggles of the Palestinians to the struggles in South Rhodesia, from the South African freedom struggle to the liberation war in Vietnam. — location: 423 ^ref-3614

‘No amount of horror stories demonstrating the crimes of the Kremlin will convince millions of people in the free world that Soviet-inspired Communism is their main problem because they know,’ he said sharply, ‘that it is not.’ — location: 430 ^ref-44009

When offered a very small amount of the Marshall Plan – less than what was given to Germany, the key belligerent of the war – the USSR declined the money and relied upon its own population to generate resources. — location: 457 ^ref-55714

Western Europe was now one of the spokes for the projection of US power. — location: 492 ^ref-3771

In the name of anti-Communism, the Colombian oligarchy subordinated itself to Washington, DC. — location: 507 ^ref-29077

The Final Act of the Ninth International Conference of American States, Bogotá, signed by the ruling classes of Latin America, pledged to ‘prevent agents at the service of international communism or any totalitarian doctrine from seeking to distort the true and the free will of the peoples of this continent’, namely to be governed by a caste of the oligarchy. — location: 515 ^ref-31593

the oligarchies of Latin America will ‘proceed with a full exchange of information’ about Communists and take ‘measures necessary to eradicate and prevent activities’ of the Communists. — location: 518 ^ref-53798

Dollars brought back to life the cadaver of Europe’s reactionary political bloc. It had permission to use maximum force against the Communists. Washington would manage the world media on behalf of this doddery fascistic government. — location: 560 ^ref-40972

In France and Italy, the Communists emerged as the most powerful political forces – largely because of their leadership in the antifascist resistance. — location: 572 ^ref-18331

The money did not come only from the US Treasury. It also came from the transnational corporations. Exxon Corporation contributed almost $50 million to the Christian Democrats in Italy from 1963 to 1972. This was a soft coup against the Communists. — location: 580 ^ref-47164

The main contradiction of this new period was between the forces of decolonization (which included the USSR when it allied with anti-colonial national liberation movements) and imperialism. This contradiction – between North and South – rather than the Cold War – between East and West – shaped the character of US-led imperialism. — location: 598 ^ref-29923

The United States, the NSC notes, must make sure that ‘nothing can be allowed to interfere substantially with the availability of oil from those sources to the free world’. — location: 601 ^ref-1545

So, in this prison house of psychological warfare it is perfectly acceptable for the Free World to claim resources from the colonized world, which should be forced to surrender its wealth for the sake of someone else’s freedom. — location: 611 ^ref-52668

Dhahran Air Base is located in the oil region, and so the deal to have US troops based there was insurance against any Communist-led rebellion. That same year, the Saudis agreed to a 50-50 split on — location: 619 ^ref-46407

oil profits within ARAMCO between the United States and the Saudis. This was the price that the Saudis were willing to pay; they would rather leech their resources to the United States to maintain their power rather than share the benefits of resources with the oil workers. — location: 621 ^ref-30446

After Bandung, the Third World bloc was stronger, and it was able to draw the Soviets in as a more reliable shield. — location: 633 ^ref-15465

Over the course of the 1960s, a broad understanding emerged in the former colonial world about the necessity of freedom from colonialism and from imperialism. — location: 636 ^ref-34314

The temperament of the various national liberation struggles differed based on the class alignment of their leading organizations. It is this difference that fractured the new nations in the anti-colonial world. — location: 637 ^ref-51490

The cause of underdevelopment is none other than the subsistence of imperialist domination, and thus it can be overcome only through a struggle against and by total victory against imperialism.’ — location: 659 ^ref-31869

Cuba’s revolution of 1959 could not be contained. Everything that the new revolutionary government led by Fidel Castro did was rational and logical, from land reform to control of electricity and housing — location: 661 ^ref-21708

prices. Each time the government moved one of these reasonable policies, it was met by resistance from the local landowners, from the Cuban property owners, and from the US transnational firms. — location: 663 ^ref-15993

this resistance that proved the Marxist analysis of capitalism, that the social development of the people was constrained by the hideous prejudice of private property. — location: 664 ^ref-5913

The US embargo and the turn to Communism was a consequence of the impossibility of the United States to tolerate a free country in the Caribbean. — location: 668 ^ref-55977

The export of the revolution, the Cuban leadership felt, was the essence of their revolution. At the Tricontinental conference in 1966, Castro announced that this new body would ‘coordinate support for revolutionary wars of liberation throughout the colonized world’. — location: 681 ^ref-35627

‘we are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults against it. For us, the best or worst shout against imperialism, whatever its form, is to take up arms and fight’. — location: 685 ^ref-53066

It was this colonial violence that set the tactical terms for the armies of national liberation that came to Havana in 1966. They did not want violence; violence was imposed upon them. — location: 698 ^ref-30428

whatever its local characteristics, imperialist domination implies a state of permanent violence against the nationalist forces’. — location: 700 ^ref-33266

No question that two decades later the apartheid regime of South Africa would not have fallen without the victory of the Angolan liberation forces, with the Cubans against the South African regime — location: 709 ^ref-21801

Democracy in Portugal and in South Africa was taken by the gun. It was not given by liberalism. — location: 710 ^ref-12690

A condition of amnesia was produced by the corporate media and the profession of history-writing, both of whom became stenographers of power. — location: 714 ^ref-5002

Violence of the colonizer was slowly justified in humanitarian terms, with the West re-establishing itself as the architect of humanity who would now need to manage the violence of the native. — location: 716 ^ref-34208

The war against the English was premised against a desire by the European settlers to break out of the Thirteen Colonies and conquer the entire continent; this was a war for colonization, not a war against colonialism. — location: 730 ^ref-1477

Earlier, the United States had gone into the 1812 war against the British to seize Canada; some hoped to go to war against the Spanish for Cuba and Florida; yet others called for the genocide of the Native Americans so that the settlers could have the entire continent for themselves — location: 741 ^ref-65040

US imperialism was born not in the harbours of Havana and Manila in 1898, but on the vast territory that would eventually stretch from New York to San Francisco. But this ‘internal colonization’, with its full-scale genocide of the Native peoples, did not fully appear to be colonialism since it was muddied by conceptual blankets such as ‘territorial expansion’ and the ‘frontier of settlement’. — location: 744 ^ref-33571

the definite independence of the United States from the state system of the Old World, the beginning, in fact, of its career as a world power’. Or, to be frank, of an imperialist state. — location: 753 ^ref-51193

the US absorbed these countries into its orbit, forcibly defeating the national liberation forces in each of these places. — location: 756 ^ref-57954

Cuba’s revolutionaries were denied a role at the peace talks in Paris, and US General William Shafter did not allow General Calixto García to attend the Spanish surrender in Cuba. This was symbolic of the usurpation of the gains of that war by the United States. — location: 757 ^ref-1784

What Kipling did not recognize was that the main political leaders in the United States masked their imperialism by various forms of anti-imperialism. — location: 762 ^ref-63306

What imperialism truly represents, he continued, is the ‘mighty movement and mission of our race’. — location: 765 ^ref-40936

This was an old trick – the mission of civilization as the objective of imperialism, when it was clear from all evidence that the objective was to plunder wealth and subordinate sovereignty. — location: 768 ^ref-38160

‘The trade of these islands,’ he said, ‘developed as we will develop it by developing their resources, monopolized as we will monopolize it, will set every reaper in this republic singing, every spindle whirling, every furnace sprouting the flames of industry.’ — location: 771 ^ref-43352

The US should throw its weight but only ‘under conditions which will see preserved these precious freedoms’. — location: 780 ^ref-36392

the full force of the United States would be used to make sure that ‘developing nations evolve in a way that affords a congenial world environment for international cooperation and the growth of free institutions’. — location: 789 ^ref-44652

The US, the authors write, has an ‘economic interest in assuring that the resources and markets of the less developed world remain available to us and to other Free World countries’. — location: 792 ^ref-41615

stability is a synonym for anti-Communism. — location: 807 ^ref-60933

‘It is important,’ Bissell and his colleagues wrote, ‘for the US to remain in the background, and where possible, to limit its support to training, advice, and material, lest it prejudice the local government effort and expose the US unnecessarily to charges of intervention and colonialism.’ — location: 818 ^ref-5732

Anyone who pushed an agenda that resembled economic nationalism, anything that threatened the market domination of transnational corporations — location: 846 ^ref-16134

Allende nationalized the copper sector and told the main companies – Kennecott and Anaconda – that he would compensate them by forgiving the $774 million in excess profit taxes that they did not pay. — location: 932 ^ref-62699

‘Aid, therefore, to a neo-colonial state is merely a revolving credit, paid by the neo-colonial master, passing through the neo-colonial state and returning to the neo-colonial master in the form of increased profits.’ — location: 939 ^ref-35924

The government that stands against imperialism and stands with its people has to be portrayed as out of touch and isolated long before the tanks leave the barracks. — location: 952 ^ref-14826

The CIA ran a programme to influence Chilean mass media, with the suggestion that it was the Soviets – who had no real purchase in Chile – who wanted to undermine Chilean democracy. They funded the parties of the far right in the Chilean Congressional elections of March 1969. When this failed, and when it appeared that the socialists would win the 1970 presidential elections, the CIA attempted to create dissension, to split the socialist vote, and to ensure the victory of the far right. Allende won the election on 4 September 1970. — location: 956 ^ref-16614

It was the CIA, the right wing in the army, and the Chilean oligarchy that had tried to undermine democracy. — location: 964 ^ref-31464

What Allende was saying had resonance across the Third World. His speech at the UN in December 1972 depicted a world in struggle between the power of transnational corporations – backed by the United States and its allies – and sovereign states. — location: 988 ^ref-24503

When the shadow of the Third World and the Soviet bloc receded two decades later, it became much easier for the United States and its allies to use diplomatic isolation as a tool for regime change. — location: 996 ^ref-10187

To be a popular uprising, masses of people are needed on the streets. But if the masses are behind the government – as was the case with both Mossadegh and Árbenz – then how to fabricate the popular character? — location: 1010 ^ref-25366

when Árbenz and his family were leaving the country, a well-dressed crowd, funded by the CIA, stood near at hand, yelling abuse at the family, and then watching as the military forced Árbenz to strip naked before he could board the plane to Mexico. — location: 1013 ^ref-61863

The deal was that the mafia would intimidate the union members and murder Communists, while in exchange the French and US authorities would allow them to bring heroin into Europe. This was known as the French Connection. — location: 1049 ^ref-22148

what Bosch found soon enough was that all the main mass organizations in his country had been either fronts of the CIA or had been hollowed out by the AFL–CIA. One of his close advisors – Sacha Volman – was a CIA asset who hollowed out the main peasant organization (Federación Nacional de Hermandades Campesinas, FENHERCA), while the AFL–CIA had created and shaped the main trade union, Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores Libres (CONATRAL). — location: 1069 ^ref-62379

It is one thing to wink and acknowledge a role in a coup from another generation; it is always to be hidden when the Manual for Regime Change is actively in use. — location: 1078 ^ref-29462

The CIA did not know that the Army had turned. They authorized a massive bombing of the country, and a barrage of radio broadcasts. — location: 1091 ^ref-29308

As part of its psychological warfare, the CIA sent leading Communists ‘death notice’ cards each day for a month in 1953. — location: 1107 ^ref-19503

‘that PKI deaths on the island of Bali now total about 10,000 and include the parents and even distant relatives of crypto-Communist Governor Sutedja.’ — location: 1141 ^ref-30017

‘With 500,000 to one million Communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.’ — location: 1150 ^ref-51161

a ruthlessness was let loose upon the earth, as the most toxic political ideologies were given full license to kill. — location: 1174 ^ref-20503

the United States and its allies would either suffocate the truth or else frame the story so that the Communists essentially killed themselves. — location: 1176 ^ref-59906

No documents were released until the USSR collapsed. Denial of the documents came alongside ongoing encouragement, participation, and complicity by the US government in the massacres conducted by the Guatemalan army against any dissent. — location: 1182 ^ref-33699

Popper’s liberals viewed any left-wing criticism of the US state and society as conspiratorial; the actual conspiracy theorists — location: 1198 ^ref-28137

The idea of the conspiracy theory was used to delegitimize genuine investigation of covert behaviour by the government. Implicit faith in the goodness of US power generated the view that the US government would never use illegal means to secure its ends, and that if there was any suggestion that the US had fomented a coup – that suggestion was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. — location: 1202 ^ref-16717

Those who suggested that the US participated in a conspiracy against the Árbenz government would be roundly mocked as conspiracy theorists. Later, when the documents proved that the critics had been correct it was too late. — location: 1205 ^ref-9792

Free. Freedom. It was a public relations coup for these words to be associated with the West, and to paint the USSR and its allies, as well as the newly independent post-colonial states, as dictatorial and authoritarian. — location: 1214 ^ref-30092

What freedom meant was not the freedom to be fully alive – to have the resources to eat, to learn, to be healthy – but to have free elections and a free press; although even this entire definition had the ring of falsity, — location: 1222 ^ref-26072

It was more important to strengthen the spine of the liberals and of the anti-Communist left. — location: 1235 ^ref-19838

Protestant sects, particularly those with US roots, he felt, preached the Gospel of individual enterprise not social justice. — location: 1302 ^ref-62994

In February 1951, John Playfair Price, a British diplomat who had most recently served as Consul-General for the British in Khorasan, Sistan, and Persian Baluchistan (in the outer rim of Iran), said, The answer to Communism lay in the hope of Muslim revival in which Pakistan was well qualified to assume leadership. Persia may well prove to be the bridge for Muslim unity. The Muslim world is a reservoir of strength. Communism can be checked by a faith stronger than its own and that faith lies in the Middle Near East. — location: 1320 ^ref-15161

the cleric told him that what drove the people to communism was misery and desperation. Communism, he told Warne, ‘was the worst enemy of Iran and that to stop communism the present deplorable condition of the people should be improved. — location: 1337 ^ref-7426

1949, ‘In so far as a modern Pan Islamic movement is designed to create a common front against Communism, it is evident that we should do everything in our power to assist it.’ No such divides of Shia and Sunni, Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi held this movement back. That it did not happen was merely from lack of will. — location: 1346 ^ref-3931

a new kind of belligerent, orthodox Islam seeded what would later emerge in force against socialism and against the modern world. — location: 1362 ^ref-45752

a regional anxiety of the US imperialists about an increase in the influence of the USSR and China around not only Asia but also Eurasia. It is important to put in this context the new relationship between the US and China forged in 1972, to weaken fatally any attempt to create a united Communist front in the continent. — location: 1390 ^ref-15700

  1. Covert action in South Yemen and Eritrea as well as in Iran and Afghanistan. — location: 1409 ^ref-46423

CIA and US military intelligence began to operate against the People’s Democratic Republic of Southern Yemen, which was governed by the Marxist National Liberation Front from 1969, and had drastically improved the conditions of its people (including land reform and equal rights for women); this government had to be undermined. — location: 1410 ^ref-52448

People such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a fundamentalist who threw acid on the faces of female students at Kabul University, would become the main recipients of CIA funds through Operation Cyclone – a CIA programme to finance and arm the mujahideen, fighters for God, against the Afghan government. It was this programme that created the chaos that provoked the Afghan government to seek help from the Soviet Union. — location: 1415 ^ref-10341

‘We funded the worst fellows right from the start, long before the Iranian Revolution and long before the Soviet invasion.’ — location: 1420 ^ref-17956

The military dictatorship of an increasingly ‘isolated’ Park Chung Hee that ran from 1961 to his assassination by his own intelligence chief in October 1979 could have led – thanks to already militant working-class and student unrest – into a broad revolution. This is what Kim told Brzezinski. The matter was settled with another military coup led by young officers, in particular General Chun Doo Hwan, who eventually became the coup’s president. — location: 1440 ^ref-62722

in November 1980. In May of that year, in the southern city of Gwangju, a popular uprising fought against the Chun dictatorship. Chun sent in the military on 18 May, who opened fire and killed hundreds – if not thousands – of people. — location: 1446 ^ref-896

Gwangju uprising was an ‘internal threat’, with ‘at least’ 150,000 people involved. None of this impacted Washington, where – on 30 May – a meeting at the White House concluded that ‘the first priority is the restoration of order in Kwangju by the Korean authorities with the minimum use of force necessary without laying the seeds for wide disorders later’. — location: 1451 ^ref-58287

The US government had no real problem with the crackdown in South Korea. Far better to let the South Korean military use lethal force than tolerate ‘another Iran’; — location: 1459 ^ref-44705

‘Whatever the contradictions, whatever the oppositions, solutions will be found as long as confidence reigns.’ — location: 1535 ^ref-24281

Under immense pressure from the United States, the UN passed resolution 661 (August 1990), which provides the template for all future sanctions regimes. This resolution allowed the UN to enforce a medieval siege against the people of Iraq from 1990 till the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. — location: 1586 ^ref-12890

Hussein wondered why the USSR had not intervened to prevent the escalation of the US armies in the Gulf region. — location: 1603 ^ref-64826

Saddam’s Culture Minister, Hamid Hammadi, put the point plainly. The United States was not worried about Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, he said; Kuwait was hardly the real issue. US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie had basically given Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait just before she went on vacation. Nor was the United States worried about Iraq’s military power – severely depleted by the war against Iran; the Saudis knew that Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait would stop at their border, since he had made no claim on Saudi land. Something else was afoot, Hammadi pointed out. ‘All these developments intend not only to destroy Iraq,’ he told the inner circle, ‘but to eliminate the role of the Soviet Union so the United States can control the fate of all humanity.’ — location: 1605 ^ref-41396

That means that the United States and its allies will face a full-scale regional guerrilla war if there is any bombing run on Iran. These militias are the deterrent for Iran. This is not aggressive; this is merely a defensive posture against the wrath of imperialism. — location: 1955 ^ref-28701

Iran’s politics are defined by the immense pressure put upon the country by the United States and its regional allies (Israel and Saudi Arabia). — location: 1958 ^ref-54206

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