A Red Menace in the Mirror

[polly7]

by John R. Hall / May 20th, 2016

In mid-August of 1948, sweltering summer heat was largely negated by high pressure and the frigid winds of Cold War. The Second War to End All Wars still smoldered in the recent past, while the witch hunt of McCarthyism loomed on the near horizon. Of course, I knew nothing of this, having only recently earned a birth certificate and U.S. Citizenship as a reward for successfully negotiating Mom’s birth canal, and taking my first breath in America’s Heartland.

As though the sixty million casualties of World War II weren’t enough, by the time I turned five, the Korean War had begun and ended, leaving yet another trail of blood and dead bodies in its wake. By then, I’d already heard America’s favorite expression of the day; “Better dead than Red” enough times to understand that there were rival lands full of evil Reds, otherwise known as Communists, somewhere across the sea, which sought the demise of my town, my country, and all those dear to me. A frightening prospect for a still innocent Nebraska rug rat. Lucky for me, Superman could be counted upon to keep an x-ray eye on things.

In the mid-60s in mainstream U.S.A. “Better dead than Red” was still the favorite expression, and President Ike’s Domino Theory was being used with ever-increasing enthusiasm. From the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba, to the Vietnam War fiasco, to countless incursions, assassinations, high-level bribes, coup d’etats, and bombings across a wide swath of the globe, U.S. Intelligence and military operatives were up to their elbows in blood 24/7. But I never found out about the dirtiest aspects of U.S. history until much later in life. Unfortunately, new information still rears its ugly head with disturbing regularity.

Back when I was fresh out of high school, I still thought that the folks Tom Brokaw would call “America’s Greatest Generation” had been the force of truth and justice that kicked Hitler’s ass, liberated the concentration camps, soundly thrashed Japan, and won World War II. This was surely the one bright time in America’s history of which we could all be proud. Now it appears that an American intelligence operative named Ernst Hanfstaengl befriended, financed, groomed, and was largely responsible for Hitler’s rise to power. Later Wall Street would make massive investments in Hitler’s Germany to the tune of nearly half a billion dollars by 1941. The list was long, and included Standard Oil, Ford, General Motors, and numerous American banks. Adolph had I.B.M. to thank for organizing his death camps.

Like all Americans, I’ve been lied to all my life. By the time I was out of high school, I’d probably said the Pledge of Allegiance to Old Glory at least two thousand times and stood at attention for the rocket and bomb-glorifying Star-Spangled Banner almost that often. In history classes I learned little or nothing about the Great American Holocaust, in which perhaps two hundred million Native Americans were slaughtered. Teachers barely paid lip service to the abominations of African slavery, upon which the nation’s vile version of Capitalism was built. I was taught that my nation was the greatest democracy in the history of earth, and that the U.S.A. was a land of freedom and justice for all. If only Hunter S. Thompson had shared his 180 Degree Philosophy with me early on. You know, the one which declares that whenever a U.S. politician or media figure opens his mouth and regurgitates words, the truth is exactly 180 degrees from what we hear.

Full article: http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/05/a-red-menace-in-the-mirror/

Is this part true? (plus more in the article): "Now it appears that an American intelligence operative named Ernst Hanfstaengl befriended, financed, groomed, and was largely responsible for Hitler’s rise to power. Later Wall Street would make massive investments in Hitler’s Germany to the tune of nearly half a billion dollars by 1941. The list was long, and included Standard Oil, Ford, General Motors, and numerous American banks."

And when so many million Soviets had been killed fighting Hitler, why were they so despised? Or were they, really?


Seeing Red: Nixon and the 1970 Presidential Election in Chile

by Mateo Pimentel / May 20th, 2016

Given the political atmosphere that surrounded the 1970 Chilean presidential election, and even the global tensions of the Cold War at the time, the initial outrage that United States President Richard M. Nixon expressed at the nomination of Chile’s leftist candidate, Salvador Allende, is easy to grasp. After all, Nixon had been elected to the US Senate 20 some years prior to Allende’s victory, and a much younger Nixon had established himself as a prominent anti-communist, garnering national attention. Then, there was Allende: 1970 Chile’s newly, democratically-elected Marxist president, a man who had campaigned under the auspices of a left-leaning party called Unidad Popular (UP). Allende’s party was comprised of a largely diverse electoral bloc of leftist factions, including Chile’s Socialists and Communists. From the outset, the significance of the Allende victory seemed to portend for Chile, at least, a democratic realization of the revolution that many had hoped would midwife a future of democracy, pluralism, and liberty.

Despite the fact that a leftist cohort of fractious political groups was able to achieve this, Nixon’s rage about the 1970 Allende presidential victory in Chile hardly comes into focus if one assumes that the election alone was enough to make Nixon holler “that sonofabitch … that bastard Allende” deep inside of White House walls. No. In fact, unless the Allende election gets ramified further, much of the significance of this critical point in Latin American history risks obscurity. Parsed a bit more, what likely incensed Nixon most about the Allende victory was that the historic event marked the crossing of a critical political meridian for the Chilean Communist Party, and, very plausibly, Communism in general. Ultimately, however, Nixon’s decision to intervene and force the toppling of Chile’s democratically-elected Allende government was incredibly megalomaniacal and imperialistic.

Allende shared much in common with the Cuban and Guatemalan revolutionaries that had come to power before him; this gave Nixon great pause. Like the Central American and Caribbean revolutionaries, Allende had himself attributed the underdevelopment and poverty of his nation to a predatorily exploitative “symbiotic alliance” between the Chilean ruling class, the bourgeois oligarchs, and American private interest. So, when Allende and the UP stood together and denounced Chile’s imperialists, ruling class, national and foreign reactionary interests, and the national and foreign major capitalists (who conspired to puppeteer the country like economic marionettists), they effectively denounced the privileged 10 percent of the country that had a monopoly on half the nation’s income.

Frankly, the success of the UP was a denunciation of an entire system that had relegated most Chileans to privation, scarcity, or utter indigence. It was a system that deliberately marginalized its people. The remedy, as Allende and others had promulgated, was to reject Chile’s position as a capitalist country whose social sectors, industries, and markets were all dominated by, and subservient to, foreign capital. Pedro Vuskovic, Allende’s first minister of economy, described the state’s mandate plainly: “…to destroy the economic bases of imperialism and the ruling class by putting an end to the private ownership of the means of production.”

Full article: http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/05/seeing-red-nixon-and-the-1970-presidential-election-in-chile/

[MisterP]

1. the Second Red Scare was well-funded like the First which gave us the Klan and fundies

but also used by the likes of Senator Bilbo, George Sylvester Viereck, Elizabeth Dilling, Lawrence Dennis, Gerald Burton Winrod, Gerald LK Smith, and Nesta Webster to repaint themselves as patriotic after having said we were on the wrong side in WWII; the Wallace campaign's 1948 registration of Southern African-Americans was what set it off
http://conelrad.com/books/print.php?id=368_0_1_0

some argue there was even a Brown Scare whose participants ginned up the Red Scare