Russia has polluted our elections, trying to suppress or
increase the vote for particular candidates by planting false and inflammatory
information in our media. Another
government stole our sacred right to choose our own leaders. As Bob Dylan sang in Like a Rolling Stone, “how does it feel?”
If it feels rotten, if you feel degraded, violated, and
outraged, then remember what Malcolm X said about the “chickens coming home to
roost” with the assassination of John Kennedy, whom he argued had accepted “a
climate of hate” at home and “twiddled his thumbs” during the American assassination
of our faltering ally, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, just three
weeks earlier.
The chickens have similarly come home to roost with today’s
Russian interference. The disturbing
truth for Americans is that our government has made a career out of influencing
and indeed stealing elections using the Russians’ media tricks and more, like funding
candidates, stuffing ballot boxes, and then arming the phony electoral victors.
The crime of interfering in other
countries’ right to choose their own leaders has been at the core of U.S.
foreign policy for the past 100 years, and continues today.
To extend Martin Luther King’s 1967 remarks
about the violence of urban riots versus the violence of the U.S. invasion of Viet
Nam, “the greatest purveyor of (election interference) in the world today is my
own government.”
Throughout Latin America, U.S. money, fake news, and coups
kept the people Franklin Roosevelt called “our bastards” in power throughout
the 20th century. There is
probably not a single country in Latin America where the United States did not
covertly pollute an election. For
example, when a looming right-wing electoral victory threatened U.S. Congressional
support for the brutal but pro-U.S. military in the civil war in El Salvador in
1984, the United States stole the election for moderate figurehead Napoleon
Duarte. The brutal war, in which Duarte
had little control over the slaughter by the Army, continued another five years
and another 50,000 dead before Congress, disgusted with yet another massacre of
church leaders, cut off the Army. This
led rapidly to a peaceful resolution of the ten-year conflict. Guatemala 1954, Chile 1970, Nicaragua1990…CIA-planted
fake news and CIA-spurred demonstrations destabilized elected democracies.
In Africa, the CIA spread fake news to legitimate outlets
when opponents of our favorite dictator Joseph Mobutu invaded Shaba province in
1978. Mobutu was a brutal, corrupt
dictator, but he gave the CIA free hand in staging military interventions in
other African countries. But who wouldn’t
support President Carter flying in U.S.-armed Moroccan paratroopers when the
rebels were forcing white women to dance naked on tables in Kolwezi bars before
raping and shooting them? Oh, sorry, that was fake news, planted in
respected European media and picked up in American media.
Even the war in Viet Nam, in which the U.S. insistence on
choosing the government of Viet Nam resulted in three million deaths over 30
years, came from our intervention in an election – in France!
Few Americans know that we shipped French
troops back to Viet Nam in 1945 to seize the country back from the Vietnamese
liberation army after Japan withdrew, and even fewer know that we did it not
because of any concern about Viet Nam, but because of an election in
France. Our ally Charles De Gaulle feared losing the December
election to the Communist Party, which was pro-colonialism. He convinced Harry Truman that without the
resumption of colonial rule in Viet Nam, the Communists would win in France. Since the United States was fixing elections in
Italy to keep Communists out of power it was no great stretch to start a war in
Viet Nam to keep Communists out of power in France.
All this begs the question, how should we respond to this
attack on our country? How about making
a pledge not to back non-democratic “friends” who help us with our military,
covert, and economic projects, and thereby letting other countries have the
right we feel so keenly cheated of right now, the right to choose their own government. That would mean the end of military and
covert assistance to Saudi Arabia, Uganda, Afghanistan, Iraq, and scores of
other governments. In short, it means
the end of what the Pentagon calls the Long War for control of the Muslim
world, from West Africa to East Asia. How
does that feel?
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