Who were The Contras?

Who were "The Contras"?

Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers".  But Oliver North's aide in the field, Robert Owen, sent him a memo in March of 1986, reminding the brash Lt. Colonel that their leader, Adolfo Calero, is "a creation of the United States government", and he warned North that those around Calero,

"Unfortunately, they are not first rate people; in fact they are liars and greed and power motivated. They are not the people to rebuild a new Nicaragua. In fact, the FDN has done a good job of keeping competent people out of the organization. If it hasn't, then Nicaragua is lost forever with the type of leadership that has emerged ..."

 

Remember, this is the assessment of a young American know-it-all, member of the clique that rejected all forms of Latin American government that dared to put the welfare of its people before the demands of Wall Street.  To give a voice to the alternative view, let me quote the consummate playwright of his day, the heir of Samuel Beckett, himself the heir of James Joyce, I speak of Harold Pinter, who was also an activist of considerable note.  In his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech, he said: 

" I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador."

I strongly urge truth seekers to watch the entire Nobel speech:

The point Pinter is making here is, Wall Street does not intend to allow any Latin American country to increase the cost of labor in any way.  The reason Jean-Bertrand Aristide, President of Haiti, was carried off bodily by US Marines to the Central African Republic is the same reason as Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State presided over the deposing of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya — both of these leaders raised the minimum wage for their starving people.

Wall Street knows full well that any such rise in the cost of labor will spread to every other country in the region.  And Wall Street tells the Marines what to do, don't think they don't.  And they tell Hillary and Obama what to do.  And they get precious little resistence from either one.

This might be an appropriate time to mention where the US policy of treating Latin America like slave colonies began.  The Reagan team sprang from the Eisenhower team, which was dominated by Sec'y of State John Foster Dulles and brother Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence.

Here you see the painting "Glorious Victory" by the great Mexican artist Diego Rivera, depicting Foster shaking the hand of the fawning new Guatemalan dictator, Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, shortly after the overthrow of the populist hero Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.  Arbenz had the temerity to nationalize vast tracts of unused land belonging to United Fruit Co., now Chiquita, to provide subsistence farmland for his people.  United Fruit was a client of Sullivan and Cromwell, still the biggest law firm on Wall Street, of which Foster was a partner, and Allen a working lawyer.

You can see also the face of Ike on the bomb, Allen resting his chin on Foster's shoulder, the bananas which represented the only value in the land to them, the sellout bishops and clergy, the sellout military, the poor crushed by the labor and killed by the Secret Armies sent in even then.

Anyone wishing to be familiar with this subject should watch Bill Moyers's masterpiece from 1987, The Secret Government - the Constitution in Crisis.

Better yet, watch it four times.

The Poisonous Profit Motive

This is a piece I wrote years ago for another blog I had, the only remnant worth saving.  But I believe it is so, and a valid point.

In the late 1970's, a friend of mine got a job as a pattern-maker at the time-honored Portland Stove Foundry here in Maine, a company that had stood at the top of its craft for a hundred years. They made cast-iron wood stoves for heating and cooking. A number of his other friends were working there too, in various tasks — hard, hot, heavy, dangerous, but honest work, and producing a high quality product. During his tenure, the company was acquired by, as he told me, a bunch of young bankers, who soon fired the long-time foreman because the man didn't agree with their cut-corner methods. Then they began to make the low level decisions themselves. And their decisions, my friend told me, were not sound, in the light of any level of practical expertise.

Ultimately, there came the day when they put a load of scrap iron from the yard into the #1 furnace — covered with snow and ice — and the steam in the melt exploded and ruined the fine old furnace. Before long they decided to strip out any assets and equipment they could sell, and make a run for it, leaving only a shell and a memory of the grand old company. As we have seen, this was the beginning of a trend in the USA.

During the W decade, 50,000 factories — not jobs, factories — were lost in this country, closed down or moved piece by piece overseas. If it had been my son whose friend lost his pattern-maker job back then, and I were asked my opinion, what would I answer? My question back then had been, "what do bankers know about casting iron"? My reply now would be to ask a different question, "what made those young men want to become bankers?" And my answer would be, "It seems there is a growing epidemic of avarice in this country, that raises profit to the pinnacle of human ambition, replacing quality, community, permanence, and all the foundations of the society that spawned us." We now can look back on the "Greed is Good" decade that followed in the 1980's, also known as the Reagan Revolution, and see just how it played out.

It is plain now to me that the profit motive is an improper motive. It is a motive which is destined inexorably to lead to disease and decline in society, just as addictions do in personal life. Putting profit first is a definition of addictive behavior. Eating only dessert is a recipe for illness.

ISIS IS US!

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Wolfowitz Doctrine: Destroy all former Soviet client states

Wolfowitz Doctrine:
Destroy all former Soviet client states

 —"We're gonna take down seven countries in five years" Gen. Wesley Clark —

General Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO, was astonished to hear, immediately after 9/11, from one of his former subordinates, that the Bush administration was going to invade Iraq.  "Why??" he asked, but the other general did not know.  A few weeks later, the full story came through — "We're gonna take down seven countries in five years".

All our wars are phony wars, all our excuses for wars are phony excuses.

That is lesson #1.  We are predators, not saviors.

Watch the brief version of his statement here, recorded in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, before a live audience at the 92nd St. Y in New York City.

Watch the brief version of his statement here, recorded in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, before a live audience at the 92nd St. Y in New York City.

Watch the brief version of his statement here, recorded in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, before a live audience at the 92nd St. Y in New York City.

On a different occasion, before the Commonwealth Club of California, Gen. Clark explains the significance of the Wolfowitz Doctrine.  It was, he tells us, "a coup - a policy coup".

It must be noted here that Paul Wolfowitz is one of the foremost disciples of Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago "philosopher" and father of Neo-Conservatism.  Listen to the general's account of his early meeting with the Defense Department official.  Very important information that every American needs to understand, and far too few have even heard of.

You can also view the full hour-long 2007 interview from which the first clip was taken at Democracy Now! below.

Staged Coup in Ukraine

DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE.  THINK FOR YOURSELVES! Watch my seven minute excerpt below.  Full transcript included at my YouTube site. There is also a link there to the full video from RT. STEPHEN COHEN: In November 2013 the EU told Yanukovich, then the President of Ukraine: “sign an agreement with us or go to Russia”, and Putin said “why do they have to choose, let’s have a three-way agreement of trade and financial aid to Kiev” - you remember that, it was very clear. Lavrov, Russian foreign office and everybody… and Europe said “No” and Washington said “No, we can’t do that”. Now, what’s happened: near a year later, they ask Putin “please come to Minsk and discuss with Poroshenko. Russia, Ukraine and Europe, the three-way deal.” Four thousand people have died, one million people have been turned into refugees, the Donbas has been destroyed for the agreement that could have happened without one shot fired in November one year ago. . . . Why did the West exclude Russia from the negotiations in November, that’s the question. Do you know the reason why? What would you think? SOPHIE SHEVARDNADZE: What?  Well, you tell me. STEPHEN COHEN: I think it was about NATO expansion, that trade agreement.

Secret armies in Europe Operation Gladio, the Strategy of Tension

Secret armies in Europe

Operation Gladio:
The Strategy of Tension

"These authoritarian plans were part of a sweeping covert strategy developed in the earliest days of the Cold War by U.S. intelligence officials, including [CIA Chief Allen] Dulles, to counter a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe by creating a “stay-behind network” of armed resisters to fight the Red Army. Code-named Operation Gladio, these secret CIA-funded networks attracted fascist and criminal elements, some of which later played subversive roles in West Germany, France, and Italy, disrupting democratic rule in those countries by staging terrorist acts and plotting coups and assassinations."

— The Devil's Chessboard — Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government
by David Talbot, Kindle Version, location 4968

For a taste of the TRUTH about Gladio, watch this brief clip from the 3-hour BBC documentary, interviewing Vincenzo Vinciguerra in his life-in-prison cell, regarding the bombing in Peteano of which he was the perpetrator.  He explains the motive behind all the bombings carried out during the decades of Operation Gladio:

"When you were on the Right, you were not supposed to attack the State or its representatives.  You were supposed to attack civilians, women, children, innocent people outside the political arena. For one simple reason: To force the Italian public to turn to the State, to turn to the regime and ask for greater security.  This was the precisely the role of the Right in Italy.  It placed itself at the service of the State which created a strategy, aptly called the "Strategy of Tension", in so far as they had to get people to accept that at any moment, over a period of thirty years, from 1960 to the mid-eighties, a State of Emergency could be declared.  So, people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security of being able to walk the streets, go on trains, or enter a bank.  This is the political logic behind all the bombings."

I would urge anyone who wants to be knowledgeable about the world they live in to watch the entire 3 hours.

It should be noted that, whereas the European version of Operation Gladio faded out in the '80s, it continues in Turkey and Central Asia — Chechnya, Ingushetia, Ukraine, and the like; the actual target being stalked is, of course, Russia, the ultimate prize.

For more information, I recommend the Swiss researcher Dr. Daniele Ganser, who is the recognized expert on the subject.  Here is an audio interview in English, which will bring you up to speed on the subject in large measure.

Brzezinski Created Al-Qaeda out of Available Mercenaries and Crazies

Brzezinski Created Al-Qaeda out of Available Mercenaries and Crazies

 — He lured the Soviets into Afghanistan —

In 1998, former Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was interviewed by Le Nouvel Observateur:

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [From The Shadows] that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. In this period, you were the national security advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into the war and looked for a way to provoke it?

B: It wasn’t quite like that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement in Afghanistan, nobody believed them. However, there was an element of truth in this. You don’t regret any of this today?               

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war." Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: “Some agitated Moslems”? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today...

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West has a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid: There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner, without demagoguery or emotionalism. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among fundamentalist Saudi Arabia, moderate Morocco, militarist Pakistan, pro-Western Egypt, or secularist Central Asia? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries...

http://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/brzezinski_interview