The same neo-liberal and neo-conservative factions of the US/Western power and money structure are reacting to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as they did to Trump’s electoral victory in 2016. Disbelief has been followed by overreaction and escalation. Why? Because neither event fits the historical narrative of big “P” Progress. The election of a “rich, racist and misogynist” white man should not have followed a two-term presidency of the likes of Obama. Similarly, neither invasions nor wars should be waged in and by countries populated mostly by white people anymore. They are “supposed” to be fought in countries that have little or no market value, by people with darker skins who have little or no worth.
The Iran-Contra crisis is nothing more than a symptom of a much more serious disorder in U.S. foreign policy. This disease is the militant theology of anti-Sovietism. Left unchecked, its virulence may turn everyone into a corpse.
America’s enemy is the Soviet Union. It is always the enemy. This is a doctrinal cornerstone of our state religion.
Not surprisingly, U.S. foreign policy is now deformed and incoherent. Blocked from the imperatives of a secular world politics, Washington defines every move in terms of its effects on Soviet power. As a result, America faces widening circles of terrorism and, ultimately, war.
In the Middle East the U.S. has meddled in the internal affairs of Iran, Lebanon and Libya. In Central America and South Africa it has sustained corrupt oligarchies and repressive regimes while fostering lawless interventions [the Reagan Doctrine] against pro-Soviet states. In Europe, ignoring the opportunities for arms control, the U.S. has deployed cruise and Pershing II missiles in five NATO countries, a deployment that degrades nuclear deterrence as it generates renewed spasms of anti-Americanism.
Worn threadbare, anti-Sovietism must cease being the central source of America’s national faith. Its replacement by an authentic and purposeful source of foreign policy, however, cannot take place amid the desolate networks of our current society. Imprisoned by a materialism that overrides all other goals, Americans stand in the ruins of consciousness, content to be casualties of endless manipulation.
In many respects, our oppression as Americans is greater than the oppression of many other peoples throughout history, including several of those we described as “enslaved.” Never before has a single society been more vulnerable to instant disappearance. Never before have individual members of a society been less effectual in producing a change that could bring survival.
Controlled by images that make thinking almost impossible, we Americans remain quiet in the world, living in it tentatively, as if democracy meant only obedience. George Orwell’s gloomy prophecy in “1984” described a world of sophisticated surveillance techniques and the disappearance of privacy, where Big Brother watched all but was himself invisible. Ironically, the homogenizing and socializing effect of TV and the electronic media now makes such control unnecessary. Americans don’t need to be kept in line by external political constraints. As we have already been baptized into a singular political theology from earliest childhood, the possibilities for dissent, for heresy, are removed in silence.
It should not be surprising, therefore, that the issues of nuclear war and human rights arouse substantially less interest among Americans than that of “Old Coke” versus “New Coke,” or that the imperatives of foreign policy are drawn less from the lessons of history than from “Rambo.” Living in a society where so few people read books, and where at least one in four of today’s school-age children won’t graduate from high school, it is easy for Americans to exchange their dreadful freedom for a stabilizing idolatry of conflict.
Television is the primal force in American “thought.” Small wonder, then, that our emperor wears no clothes or that our policies provide appropriate raw material for the theater of the absurd. How could it be otherwise? Overwhelmed by an illusory of pictures that is taken as truth, an entire nation is overrun by gibberish, engrossed and satisfied by lies that hurl us relentlessly toward necropolis.
From this social world a viable foreign policy can never emerge. Tantalized by bright packaging, jingles and ritualized coded messages, America finds its only solace in the mythical world of success and glamor. Today, intelligent college students want to be lobbyists.
To whom does this society belong? Let us be frank: It is to the characterless mass-man or woman, who epitomizes mediocrity, cowardice, thoughtlessness, compromise and servility; a creature of strong appetites but no taste, of surface confidence but no ideals, of great zeal and even diligence, but no meaningful aspirations. Our only hope for a new foreign policy — one that can save us from degradation and nuclear war — lies in those who brood and dream at the edge of this society, in those remaining creative dreamers who would reveal the desolation and fragility of a country directed by “solid citizens.”
Speaking of humankind as a whole, Rimbaud once complained that “we are not in the world.” So it is with America today. We stand, as a nation, outside the world, drawn to our final rendezvous with extinction because we have steadfastly refused to become persons. How much treasure, how much science, how much labor and planning, how many centuries have we ransacked to make possible the grotesque carnival of our current foreign policy?
The answers will cause pain. Our deference to fools, who have placed this nation on a disastrous course, flows from a society that celebrates falsehoods. But there is still time for a change in direction. To accomplish this change, America must first learn to differentiate between the reasonableness of secular political competition and the hopelessness of theological conflict in world affairs. And this, in turn, will require the rescue of individual Americans from a society that positively despises authentic thought.
The American Horror Story: Death Squads and the Disappeared in Central America
A lot here, so digest in bite-size morsels.
I was heavily invested in the antiwar movement during the early 80's, to the degree of spending days and nights in jail and having agents of the FBI showing up at my places of employment a few times; of being abused by cops; of having my phone line tapped; and being followed by persons unknown. So, if I sound a bit "passionate" when these subjects are broached, there is good reason.
No doubt.... These are touchy political matters. Iran-Contra, to the mind of many, permanently de-legitimized the American political system, if the US-funded and orchestrated "civil wars" in Central America hadn't already. As manager at New World Resource Center and as an active member in the Sanctuary Movement, I had many opportunities to meet both American activists and refugees from Central America, hearing horror story after horror story of friends and family members being killed and/or disappeared simply because the victim happened to be a school teacher, a union member, a religious person, etc.
Like I said, historical memory is not easily erased. Neither are the cultural and political repercussions linked to those memories. Forty years may seem like a long time ago for those of us living in the spectacular now. But we didn't have our parents macheted to death in front of us; or witness our brother being beaten, kidnapped, thrown into a van, and then driven away--never to be seen again. Again and again and again.
Our tax dollars, just like the massacre of thousands in Gaza, paid for the training of death squads and the endless supply of weapons that killed a countless number of innocent people in Central America. And while we rightfully fear that our complicity in supporting Israel could breed a new generation of bin-Laden-like"terrorists," how could our complicity in the death and destruction in El Salvador, Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central America NOT create its own manifestation of blowback in the form of emigration to here?
If we are to acknowledge the wrongs of our past, where and when do our responsibilities and obligations end with respect to rectifying them? When did they end for indigenous Americans? For blacks? For women? For gays? For animals?
***In the wonderful show, Northern Exposure, the Indians celebrate Thanksgiving as the Day of the Dead with various traditions including costumes, parades and throwing tomatoes at white people.***
To quote our new president, "We're not innocent." We may not be able to totally reverse the wrongs of our history, but at minimum we need to own them--to compassionately admit and submit. This country never misses an opportunity to engage in wars; it's long overdue for it to begin waging peace. Let it begin at home.
The Sanctuary Movement in Chicago
The sanctuary movement in Chicago arose in the aftermath of civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, funded in part by the US government, during which nearly one million refugees sought asylum in the United States between 1980 and 1991. Among those who had been killed in El Salvador were four US missionaries, and they became the face of a new organization: the Chicago Religious Task Force for Central America. It advocated for federal foreign policy changes toward Central America and encouraged domestic communities to host Central American refugees. In Chicago, they created a framework that connected undocumented immigrants with churches that were willing to provide them sanctuary.
+During the 1980s, the United States supported a counterinsurgency war in El Salvador and directed a guerrilla insurgency in Nicaragua.
+In December 1981, the Salvadoran Army massacred close to 1,000 men, women, and children in the village of El Mozote and in neighboring hamlets. +Denying that a war crime had taken place, the Reagan administration certified to Congress that same month that the Salvadoran government was making progress in human rights and requested more U.S. aid for the government.[1]
+In April 1985, former CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner testified before a Congressional committee that the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan guerrillas, known as Contras, had engaged in numerous acts of “terrorism.”[2] Only the previous month, President Ronald Reagan had praised the Contras as “the moral equal of our founding fathers.”[3]
+In response to a suit by Nicaragua, the World Court ruled in June 1986 that the U.S.-directed war against Nicaragua constituted illegal aggression under international law and that the U.S. must cease its support for the Contras and make reparation payments to Nicaragua.[4] The U.S. refused to comply.
+After Congress had temporarily banned aid to the Contras, administration officials illegally raised money through arms sales to Iran and other means. The covert operation came to light in the Iran-Contra Congressional hearings in the spring of 1987, leading to the prosecution of fourteen U.S. officials and agents.[5]
+Although Congress had banned U.S. aid to the Guatemalan government based on human rights abuses, the Reagan administration aided this government’s counterinsurgency war as well.
+Between 1981 and 1990, an estimated one million refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala fled repression and violence in their homelands and entered the United States.[6]
+In late 1987, the Reagan administration’s Office of Public Diplomacy was forced to shut down after an investigation by the General Accounting Office concluded that the agency had engaged “in prohibited, covert propaganda activities designed to influence the media and the public to support the Administration’s Latin American policies.”[7]
+U.S. citizens opposed to U.S. intervention formed the Central America movement, a loose-knit coalition of over 1,000 local, state, and national organizations. Their efforts reinforced those of Latin American leaders promoting peace negotiations and an end to foreign intervention.[8]
+In the aftermath of the wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, truth commissions determined that state security forces and associated rightist paramilitary groups were responsible for 85% of assassinations and murders in El Salvador, and 93% in Guatemala, while leftist rebels were responsible for 5% in El Salvador and 3% in Guatemala.[9]
