Know your BFEE: WikiLeaks Stratfor Dump Exposes Continued Secret Government Warmongering

[Octafish]

11. While most everyone I know doesn't mind paying taxes to make the USA a better place...

...we really as a government seem to be into the overkilling enemies foreign and domestic thing a lot since November 22, 1963.



How to Make Money Off War (The Short Form)

Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anti-Communism

Author: Stephen G. Rabe
University of North Carolina Press, 1988

The Republicans captured the White House in 1953 after they claimed that the Truman administration had been "soft on Communism" and after stating that they were determined to turn the tide against the "Red menace." Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, had spoken of "twenty years of treason," and Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had pledged that Republicans would "roll back the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe."

Secretary Dulles warned that conditions in Latin America were comparable to "conditions as they were in China in the mid-thirties when the Communist movement was getting started," and that the time to deal with this rising menace was "now." In a telephone conversation with his brother, Allen, head of the CIA, he said that "the Communists trying to extend their form of despotism in this hemisphere." In a cabinet meeting he spoke of the need to convince Latin Americans that Communism was "an international conspiracy, not an indigenous movement."

In 1954, Latin America had 13 dictators among its 20 nations, and the anti-Communist declarations by dictators pleased the Eisenhower administration. According to the author, Stephen Rabe, when people wanted the U.S. State Department to "intercede on behalf of the political prisoners rotting in the dungeons of the dictator Pérez Jiménez," Dulles refused. President Eisenhower awarded a Legion of Merit to Peru's dictator, Manuel Odría. Jiménez received his Legion of Merit from the U.S. ambassador in a grand ceremony in Venezuela, winning congratulations for his "energy and firmness of purpose" in having "greatly increased the capacity of the Armed Forces of Venezuela to participate in the collective defense of the Western Hemisphere" and his "concern toward the problem of Communist infiltration."

In Guatemala in 1954 the regime of President Arbenz was pursuing democracy and reform and worried the Eisenhower administration. Arbenz had become Guatemala's president in 1951, according to Rabe the country's first ever peaceful transition of power. Arbenz pledged to create an economically independent capitalist state and had begun to build ports and highways. He convinced the legislature to enact a modest income tax, the first in Guatemala's history, and launched a program of land redistribution, including a loss of 1,700 fallow acres that had belonged to his family. Rabe estimates that "Guatemala's new social welfare programs were more modest than those advocated by liberal Democrats in the United States and Laborites in Great Britain." In 1953 the Eisenhower administration estimated that Communists in Guatemala numbered around 1,000, and it saw Communist influence in organized labor and in the agrarian reform movement. Arbenz's ruling coalition consisted of 51 congressional deputies, four of whom were Communists. In January, 1954, President Eisenhower told Guatemala's foreign minister that he "couldn't help a government which was openly playing ball with Communists" and that the United States was "determined to block the international Communist conspiracy." The Arbenz regime replied that their land reform would undermine the appeal of Communism. According to Rabe, the Eisenhower administration rejected explanations from the Arbenz administration and concluded that Arbenz was either a "dupe" of the Communists or worse. Secretary Dulles spoke of the impossibility of producing evidence tying the Guatemalan government to Moscow but that he and the administration had a "deep conviction that such a tie must exist."

CONTINUED...

It's the strangest thing. Devilish, really.