The West's most embarrassing allies?

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Could we see a cite showing someone using the term "ally" for Trujillo, in a context other than trying to overthrow him?

"He may be a son-of-a-*****, but he is our son-of-a-*****." - Cordell Hull, US Secretary of State (1933-1944).

That's the famous one, though it's often mistakenly attributed to FDR speaking of Somoza.

Plus, of course, the fact that there was heavy US support for his installation. And Trujillo's declaration of war in support of US interests during WW2.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp



"He may be a son-of-a-*****, but he is our son-of-a-*****." - Cordell Hull, US Secretary of State (1933-1944).

That's the famous one, though it's often mistakenly attributed to FDR speaking of Somoza.

Plus, of course, the fact that there was heavy US support for his installation. And Trujillo's declaration of war in support of US interests during WW2.

Ok, thanks for the quote.

I wonder how deeply embarrassed Hull really was, though. Its not like US foreing policy pre-1940 was Wilsonian (despite Hulls past) To some extent the underlying assumption of this thread, or at least of many posts, is that the US said "we are for democracy and freedom everywhere" and then failed to live up to it. But in fact US for policy from the death of Wilson to the ascendance of Clinton was either isolationist or explicitly realist more often than it was self-consciously Wilsonian. It was often A. We really dont care about the rest of the planet or B. We care about threats to OUR freedom or C. We care about threats to our freedom, or to those of our allies who are already free. It was rarely "We are going to bring freedom to everyone" And in those periods when it was, like under JFK or Carter, there often were some real attempts to pressure at least some of our own allies in a democratic direction (note the Time article about our unworthy ally)

Probably the most "hypocritical" period would be under the Eisenhower admin, when there was still a fair amount of wilsonian rhetoric covering a very unWilsonian for policy.

As for Dom Rep declaring war on Germany, so what. Lots of folks did that - by the end of the war almost everyone who wanted in on the UN did that. They werent all US allies in a serious sense.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp
That's the famous one, though it's often mistakenly attributed to FDR speaking of Somoza.

I thought it was attributed to LBJ speaking of Somoza.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Originally posted by lord of the mark

Probably the most "hypocritical" period would be under the Eisenhower admin, when there was still a fair amount of wilsonian rhetoric covering a very unWilsonian for policy.

Curiously enough, the Eisenhower administration was the first one to take a tough stance against Trujillo.

As for Dom Rep declaring war on Germany, so what. Lots of folks did that - by the end of the war almost everyone who wanted in on the UN did that. They werent all US allies in a serious sense.

The Dominican Republic declared war on the Axis on December 8th 1941.

[Dr Strangelove]

Are you guys too young to remember President Diem of South Vietnam? During his reign he came to the conclusion that Buddhism was a front for Communism and so, in a country which was 95% Buddhist, he banned Buddhism. Buddhist monks protested by burning themselves in public. A number of these self-immolations were caught on TV. There were even instances in which South Vietnamese troops shot monks in an attempt to prevent them from turning themselves into human funeral pyres. At President Kennedy's request, in one of its few successful assassination attempts, the CIA managed to remove Diem from power.

[Traianvs]

lol, yeah Diem was a noob, but so were all the west's puppets in South Vietnam

[GePap]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


I dont know what we were "meant to be" and by whom. I do know that during the cold war, as during WW2, we were engaged in a difficult global struggle, in which it was almost certainly not possible to apply a strict morality test to our allies.

What struggle? There was no actual war between the superpowers. The entire "Cold War" was an insane arms race and jockeying for position. If anything, our behavior in the Cold war is far more reprehesible than Western crimes in WW2 because there was no actual big war going on.

That and the fact that the struggle was supposedly one of ideas, not tanks, not brute force. And in the end, the West was willing to support tyranny over millions because they did not even trust their own ideas. Had people in the US or Europe trully believed that human beings out there wanted democracy, and that democratic forces could on their own beat communism, why then did they support tyrants, murderers, and psychos?

That does not mean we did not make mistakes, or that some of our politicians were not immoral in their political choices, but it does mean that to take it out of context, to simply imply, as this kind of 'satire' tends to, that our stands were complete hypocrisy, is incorrect.

The "context" does not remove the irony. It gives some the ability to rationalize our crimes. It can never make up for them.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


I dont know what we were "meant to be" and by whom.

By ourselves, by the words of our politicians, by our religious leaders- we were apparently meant to be morally superior to the godless atheistic hordes in the Cold War and we were certainly meant to be morally superior to the Nazis and Axis in WWII.

I think you're being quite disingenuous.

Take your own country- 'one nation UNDER GOD' since 1954.

As opposed to which nations, one might ask ?

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Pardon, but was solidarnosk organizing a state intell HQ?

Which has what to do with basic human rights ?

There is a long tradition of being able to form workers' associations in the United Kingdom and of having the right to strike.

Margaret Thatcher and her right wing governments simply decided to take the hypocritical stance of crowing about the lack of human rights (and workers' rights) in the Soviet Bloc, whilst doing their level best to take away human rights in the United Kingdom and to deter workers from striking or being able to join or remain in a trades' union.

Turning to Jaruzelski at a banquet, she proclaimed her support for "freedom of expression, freedom of association and the right to form free and independent trade unions." It is vital for the government, she said, to hold "a real dialogue with representatives of all sections of society, including Solidarity."

'Time' Nov. 1988


'Freedom of association'- well, she certainly wasn't thinking of G.C.H.Q. , was she ?

Also, IIUC, Thatcher fired people

That's a neat circumlocution for 'She said one thing when in Poland, and did another thing at home'.

She was and remains a magnificent example of hypocrisy, right down to her (historically uninformed) espousal of what she described as 'Victorian' values.

Is that what the Polish govt did? I thought they arrested people.

As did the British government:

The draft Code on picketing provides, among other things, that a lawful picket will very rarely exceed six people ‘and frequently a smaller number will be sufficient’. Responsibility for deciding the ‘right’ number of pickets rests on the police. If a picket refuses to leave a picket line when told to by the police he or she is liable to arrest for obstruction. Trade union officials are to be responsible for ‘ensuring that pickets understand the law’; and the Code lists a large but, it says, not comprehensive range of ‘essential supplies and services’ with which picketing should not interfere at all.


Although still only in draft, the Code seems to be taking effect. Two weeks ago, police limited the CPSA picket at the Brixton office of the Department of Employment to six, and arrested for obstruction those pickets above six who refused to move.

There were protestations by the police and Jim Prior that this was nothing to do with the draft Codes, but they seemed a trifle disingenuous.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200706250054

Written by one Tony Blair, funnily enough...

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by lord of the mark

Pinochet achieved his coup on his own,

Err, shurely shome mishtake ?

The ball started rolling with the 1970 election of Salvador Allende as the president of Chile. Allende immediately took steps to socialize the country's economy, taking business ownership away from several large U.S. corporations and handing them over to local workers. Kissinger and President Nixon, hardly amused by a country in the Western Hemisphere "going communist," gave the nod to the CIA to stage a military coup, resulting in the kidnapping and (possibly mistaken) murder of Chilean chief of staff Rene Schneider. By 1973, under pressure from militant groups on the right and left, and buckling under a U.S. embargo, the Allende government was overthrown by Gen. Pinochet's forces. Allende was killed in a firefight.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/03/14/RVGVQ5DN7N1.DTL

I believe (although I can't find the exact figures at the moment- in excess of $8 million ) that the amount of funding spent on the coup in Chile exceeded that for the Nixon election campaign.

Which begs the question, why was the U.S.A. spending more money to destabilise a democratically elected foreign government than the presidential candidate of the Republican Party was spending on his election campaign ?

The initial coup was bloody, but the regime was more moderate afterwards

Yes, it 'moderately' disappeared dissidents and intellectuals, 'moderately' had women raped by dogs, and 'moderately' took people for one way journeys to city dumps- the helicopter trips over the Pacific tended to be one way too- apparently the abdomen of the victim would be slit open so that the body would sink... what an eye for detail crypto-fascists have.

Led by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Condor was a highly organized anti-terrorist, anti-communist military intelligence operation carried out by six "Southern Cone" countries (Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil), roughly between 1973 and 1980. During that time, anywhere from 15, 000 to 30,000 people were tortured or murdered by the group, all in the name of keeping communist forces from gaining a foothold in South America -- and keeping corrupt military dictatorships in power

Well, who can be bothered keeping accounts of all the names and addresses of those pesky students and long-haired types ? Some of them were probably even Communists.

ultimately left power peacefully

So that's all right then. Pity for these folks:

Declassified U.S. embassy documents reveal that U.S. officials were well aware of the executions and tortures by the junta, and were concerned about the difficult "public relations situation."

If you didn't laugh, you'd go mad.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by GePap
The "context" does not remove the irony. It gives some the ability to rationalize our crimes. It can never make up for them.

So you think it was reprehensible to ally with Stalin in WWII?

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by molly bloom
Margaret Thatcher and her right wing governments simply decided to take the hypocritical stance of crowing about the lack of human rights (and workers' rights) in the Soviet Bloc, whilst doing their level best to take away human rights in the United Kingdom and to deter workers from striking or being able to join or remain in a trades' union.

There's nothing necessarily hypocritical there. "Human rights" aren't some fixed bag of things people either have or they don't; people can have different conceptions of which rights are covered.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by molly bloom


Err, shurely shome mishtake ?

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/03/14/RVGVQ5DN7N1.DTL

I believe (although I can't find the exact figures at the moment- in excess of $8 million ) that the amount of funding spent on the coup in Chile exceeded that for the Nixon election campaign.

Which begs the question, why was the U.S.A. spending more money to destabilise a democratically elected foreign government than the presidential candidate of the Republican Party was spending on his election campaign ?



Yes, it 'moderately' disappeared dissidents and intellectuals, 'moderately' had women raped by dogs, and 'moderately' took people for one way journeys to city dumps- the helicopter trips over the Pacific tended to be one way too- apparently the abdomen of the victim would be slit open so that the body would sink... what an eye for detail crypto-fascists have.




Well, who can be bothered keeping accounts of all the names and addresses of those pesky students and long-haired types ? Some of them were probably even Communists.



So that's all right then. Pity for these folks:



If you didn't laugh, you'd go mad.

1. thats a book review about condor, I dont trust it as reliable on the history of the coup.

2. the info on condor lumps Chile in with Argentina and its dirty war.

3. the US funded opposition to the Chilean govt, including opposition parties, media etc. Are you including all that in the amount for "funding the coup"

4. As your own source states there was growing opposition from both right and left.

5. Again, from what I understand, Pinochet and the military had their own motives, and were eager and able to move on their own.

6. According to wiki, 3000 political opponents were killed by the regime, not 30,000, and almost 1000 in the first 6 months. By the 80's they were relaxing many restrictions on civil liberties.

[lord of the mark]

BTW, the US has laws on what constitutes proper picketing as well. Its fair, to prevent picketers from interfering with others rights to enter a premises.

Enforcing such law is hardly comparable to what happened in Poland.

I would never have voted for Thatcher myself, but that doesnt mean she did what she condemned in Poland.

[MOBIUS]

Current most embarrassing allies have to be the Saudis, I'd say...