Stephen Von Sychowski
Communist Party of Canada, Prince George Collective
When representatives of the United States government talk about fighting for democracy, one wonders what they think democracy is. Perhaps they should look it up or read a book. Because "democracy" is defined as "government of, by, and for the people" according to Webster's dictionary. It is not defined as "Government of, by and for a foreign Plutocracy."
Over the decades the United States, sometimes with help from their cronies in the other governments of the western capitalist world, has overthrown countless governments of both a democratic and non-democratic nature. And not once has a democratic regime been put in place or even allowed as a result.
The United States has the highest military spending in the world, it spends over one third of the total funds spent on military funding per year in the world. And it would have to in order to keep up its grip on power all around the world. How do they do it? Well on top of brute military might they also use secret, behind the scenes attacks.
The secret government of the United States (the security council/CIA) was created after World War Two, at the start of the Cold War, because of fear that the U.S.S.R may overtake the United States and destroy the capitalist system. It was composed of mercenaries and spies including ex-Nazi's, who were saved from punishment by the U.S.A, to be used as spies against the Soviet Union. These Nazi war criminals included the "Butcher of Leon," Klause Barbie, who was responsible for numerous deaths in Nazi camps.
One of the first missions of the CIA was to rig and manipulate the elections in Italy after World War Two, after the reign on Mussolini's fascist party, the Communists, who had a large part in the capture and execution of Mussolini, had gained a significant amount of support. Enough support that the United States government feared that they could soon have a communist nation in Italy if the elections were not dealt with. Sure enough the Italian communists mysteriously lost the election despite their high rankings in the polls not much earlier.
In Iran the Shah had been thrown out of his thrown by a popular uprising, a left-leaning government was installed. It quickly moved to nationalize Iran's oil fields and use the oil money for the betterment of the Iranian people. But this too was not acceptable to the United States government, so the CIA backed a coup which reinstalled the Shah who ruled the country as a puppet of the U.S. government and oil corporations until 1979. In 1979 another popular uprising took place against the Shah and the United States, terrorist attacks began by extremist groups, targeting America. All as a direct result of the United States overthrow of the democratic government of Iran.
In Guatemala, the U.S. overthrew the democratic government because, although it was not Communist, it allowed the existence of the Communist Party. It also began to nationalize land and turn it over to the landless, and impoverished peasants. The U.S. first sent an army of mercenaries from Honduras but they failed to overthrow the government. The United States then bombed the capital of Guatemala, overthrew the democratic government and installed a military dictatorship. The land reforms were reversed; the Communist Party and other opposition parties were outlawed. Opponents of the new regime were executed. The United States government called their work in Guatemala "operation success"
In 1961 the CIA trained Cuban exiles in Guatemala for the Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro and the Communist Party who came to power through democratic revolution in 1959. However the United States saw that there was no popular support for the invasion in Cuba and that the exiles were being crushed. So they cut their losses and provided inadequate air cover for the invaders. They left their own men to be captured or killed in battle. But the United States has continued a war against the people of Cuba secretly. There are at least eight documented attempts on the life of Fidel Castro engineered by the CIA. Although he claims there have been over two dozen. The United States has hired the mafia to try and assassinate Castro. They have even laced his cigars with cyanide and LSD.
In 1964 the United States began the official war on Vietnam. The French had just given up Indochina as a colony, and now the United States wanted it instead. But the war did not start with the Gulf of Tonkin incident as we are lead to believe; the war began secretly, and was led by the CIA. The United States first installed the oppressive right-wing dictator Diem and his secret police network in South Vietnam in 1954. It then started to sabotage North Vietnam by such methods as contaminating their oil supplies. South Vietnam had been launching raids in the Gulf of Tonkin, one night a U.S. battle ship and a North Vietnamese ship exchanged fire. We have been told by our governments and the media that it was the Vietnamese who attacked the American ship. It was not until 1991 that we learned the truth of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when former CIA man John Stockwell wrote in The Praetorian Guard, that it was in fact the United States which fired first on the North Vietnamese. The rest is history, numerous casualties on both sides, the infamous Mai Lai massacre, and a nation that remains torn to this day.
The CIA led a coup to oust the socialist leader Salvador Allende in Chile and replaces him with a right wing military dictator named Pinochet who carried out massive campaigns of oppression and murder. Governments were also overthrown in Brazil, Laos, Zaire, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Ghana, Greece and Cambodia, none of these governments were replaced by any form of democracy, they were replaced by dictatorships who were friendly to the interests of the United States, but not friendly to their own people, and in the eyes of the capitalist ruling class, that's all that matters.
These are all examples from the past, but don't think it's not happening right now, the U.S. is currently gearing up for war against Iraq, it has marines in the Philippines and Columbia helping to smash the revolts of the people and/or leftist guerrilla movements and keep U.S. interests afloat. They recently overthrew the government of Afghanistan, which was oppressive and un-democratic to begin with, and replaced it with a new, slightly less oppressive, but still not democratic government. The U.S. continues to send aid to Israel so it can continue to oppress the Palestinian peoples, and attempt to overthrow their government as well. No democracy has ever come from U.S. foreign intervention, in fact it has been most common that governments that are far worse, more oppressive and less democratic have come from these interventions. The people of the word must be left to choose their own leadership; they are not less capable of choosing for themselves then we are. The United States once said it stood for self determination for the nations of the world, one wonders where those ideals have gone.