Are we ahistorical, riding above history unaffected by it and unconnected to it?
Do events like 9/11 happen completely apart from history, do they precipitate out of nothing; or are they more like rain that is produced by a culmination of processes that begin in the movements of the jet stream?
For the Daily Kos readership, the events of 9/11 should be easy to trace back to the way the CIA and other actors like Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson played a role in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It is fairly well understood now, that Bin Laden received training in the subversive use of high explosives and munitions from the US Military. The best study of how the CIA wound muslim extremists up and set them loose in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then just dropped the whole enterprise and left the Mujahadeen to starve, can be found in great detail in Stephen Coll's Ghost Wars By the way, it includes the story of current Sec Def Robert Gate's involvement as a CIA officer in the "Af-Pak" theater.
But what about linkages to this hemisphere? What about Central and South America?
Sept 11, 1973. Santiago, Chile. Today, President Salvador Allende’s body, on a stretcher and covered by a white sheet, was carried out of the presidential palace after the building was subjected to heavy shelling by Pinochet's tanks, in a coup supported and encouraged by Nixon, Kissinger and the CIA.
Present day. The lesson of history is that Americans don’t learn lessons from history. Thus, dreadful pigeons that have been circling all these years may yet come home to roost.
What inspired primarily American multinational corporations to be so upset with Allende that they pushed the US government into supporting the overthrow of a democratically elected leader? He was going in a direction in economic policy inspired by FDR’s New Deal. For one thing, Chile had adopted Social Security.
The “hair on fire” urgency, which Kissinger is often quoted expressing, was that these policies might prove popular enough that other countries would adopt them. The new military dictator, Augusto Pinochet, was willing to go along completely with economic direction by Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of Economics graduates, who became part of the dictatorship. To fully implement these policies, it was necessary to silence dissent through torturing and murdering anyone who might become opposed. Tens of thousands were subjected to this, at first, quite out in the open so the shock would really suppress dissent in the public. Because of worldwide outrage, the repression went underground. Los Desaparecidos, Spanish for the Disappeared, became widely used terminology.
One of the things that struck me in reading Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine,” which looks at the connection between “shock and awe,” torture and re-engineering economies in favor of big business, was Milton Friedman’s reaction to being asked about the economic decline that Chile had gone into, some months after the coup.
Friedman’s response was to direct more extreme measures and counsel the hesitant to think about how doctors must be ready for necessary action to heal sickness of the body, even to the point of amputations.
An interesting feature of the torture was getting people to turn against altruism, empathy and social being towards selfish survival.
Absolutely convinced of the rightness of this approach to Free Market economics, these people were willing to countenance some of the most extreme torment for millions, in country after country. Now, many of these populations are waking up after their nightmare and embracing progressive, social democratic reform policies.
Given the purposeful lack of information and public education in the US about the true history, are we destined to repeat it? Is Obama likely to wind up the way Allende did?
Some would say the US is nothing like Guatemala or Chile, or Brazil, or Argentina.
But there is an old bromide which waggishly proclaims, “politics would be great if it weren’t for the people involved.” Sometimes the yin and yang of American politics is an eternal conflict between those who are social as individuals; and those who actually don’t like other people and are essentially anti-social.
A strong willed academic like Friedman is free to contemplate policies in their perfection without being concerned about how real people are affected. The power behind the free market experiments that necessitated regime change was not academic, but money - US multinational business. It was those interests that pushed Congress and the White House to act against Allende.
You might say that was then, but this is now.
When you look at the way Republicans of today are using the same arguments, those experiments with entire countries were testbeds for how tactical uses of words can be used, never mind the truth.
A great failed opportunity is the way we refuse to look at this history. Those policies that are precisely the ones being pursued today were massive failures. Time and time again. This begins with the way NAFTA uproots peasant communities in favor of multinational agribusiness, but goes all the way back to the overthrow of Allende in Chile, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and all the way back to the establishment of the Monroe Doctrine.
One of the great silent testimonies to the scale of failure is the number of people being uprooted and forced to walk north. Hundreds of thousands of people a year, especially since the adoption of NAFTA, are running from something, not seeking opportunities as low wage workers in the US. This has been going on for many decades prior to NAFTA, however, and that is why there are now millions.
Why does this not matter to people?
The policies that the US pursued, which are still affecting people, could in time be turned around - especially if citizens in the US saw that the greater good for everyone in the American Hemisphere was in fact to deal with those economic policies. It isn't too hard for our brains.
The reason Republicans want to focus on punishing people crossing a fenceline is that they are hypocrites.
What they want is to blame the victims and get everyone to argue over how much to punish them, and not look at the greed of the big banks and multinationals in wanting to run people out of home countries so that big business can profit, and then turn them into factors for lowering wages in the US, so that big business can profit. That is a win-win, seen from the penthouse office suites.
We are such peasants. We have been falling for this game for 500 years.
You'd think a college education would change that.
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It is obvious that the media promotes this virtual black out on information about our true history. But why is the blogosphere complicit in this?
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The reason that comprehensive immigration reform isn't happening is that our whole political system is stuck on the way Republicans frame the issue (really a group of issues) and everyone is stuck in reaction to it.
The reason we are all stuck in a giant logjam is that Democrats and progressives have not aggressively promoted a different coherent way of projecting a foreign policy vision that is global in scope and addresses a way to make history.
When you analyze this, at the root is a massive myopia pervasive in American culture, and a lack of willingness to look at the whole big picture and see the truth of it.
We can only change this paradigm by becoming conscious of how the world works and then developing a pragmatic and functional alternative to the well-articulated prognostications of the neo-conservatives and the so-called neo-liberals.
A start would be to research the roots of illegal immigration in NAFTA and in the role that multinational banks and corporations have played over the past century and a half south of the border. A larger embrace of what is going on that takes in the entire hemisphere would ultimately result in greater social justice for a democratically interconnected hemisphere.