Praktik
Philosopher
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2007
- Messages
- 5,244
This is an important point. To be honest I think that we could definitely say that a giant portion of American individuals involved in the decision making process regarding Nicragaua, Guatemala, Panama, Chile (etc) honestly and genuinely believed in the communist threat and that democratic capitalism was the best antidote to a system that caused so much misery around the world.
I spent a lot of my time during my early years of my politics reading devouring Chomsky, Zinn, Pilger, Fisk and the rest and I should state that I think that Chomsky, Pilger and Fisk have a good systemic understanding of how decisions like arming right-wing death squads get made. There's a lot of useful analysis there and some good models for understanding international relations and war and propaganda. But if you read that stuff exclusively, and it comes out in their writing from time to time, the appalling atrocities you read about can end up inducing an emotional reaction. You end up painting the decision makers as "evil". Or as you're responding to Randfan, heartless imperialists seeking hegemony. Witness the anti-Bush stuff circulating all over the place, especially among CT diehards. Not to say that the writers mentioned ever descend to the levels we see on the net, but you can see it in particularly strident prose that resurfaces now and then, in a tone of outrage. To be honest, a lot of things they write about deserve outrage - but it can cause one to lose their rational, detached perspective on things.
There is likely only a very tiny portion of the decision makers that could actually qualify as evil. The rest will all have rationalized their decisions in a number of ways, including classic Cold War anti-communism, protection of the homeland, dreams of the miracles of the market and messianic democratic idealism. They were genuinely pursuing what they thought would be best, for the world and for America, and sometimes for America exclusively. There's nothing wrong in theory with wanting to protect the interests of your country, and believing that you're actually doing so makes tough decisions with brutal consequences easier to stomach.
The real issue here is those rationalizations: their history, their promotion, the degree to which they are shared by leadership. They coincide quite nicely with the crass needs of the nation-state such as access to resources, profit and maintenance of a sphere of influence. This perhaps explains their success, since worldviews and politics that negatively affect those interests never really seem to rise to dominance. Sometimes they get carried away. Was Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh truly a communist threat? Or were his politics more of the social democratic vein? Were the left-wing movements in all central and south american countries all going to result in Soviet style communism - or would it have looked different in many places?
Convincing cases have been made that in many ways, the Soviet threat was overblown. Sometimes it was more reality-based than others. Castro letting in nuclear weapons was a genuine security threat. Was a Sandinista government really posing a similar threat? Was Noriega?
Is Chavez?
Likely not. While I share your sentiment Randfan that most of the American leadership were not so crass and hearltless as alleged, the results of their decisions were certainly horrendous and sometimes even contrary to the self-interest they were protecting (such as the installation of the Shah).
The main problem is not the "evilness" of the individuals making the decisions, but the ideas in their heads that cause them to make decisions with evil outcomes.
