The underlying practice behind the foreign policies of Western capitalist nations is imperialism, a process historian Michael Parenti describes as “the process whereby the dominant investor interests in one country bring to bear military and financial power upon another country in order to expropriate the land, labor, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets of that other country.” Western politicians have never had a desire to protect “human rights” or “freedom.” Their own actions, which we will now extensively explore, are a clear testament to that.

Pre-Cold War Imperialism and Capitalism (~1800-1945)

In 1919, would-be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, called Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin “the embodiment of evil.” One is left dumbfounded at the hypocrisy after taking the time to examine the crimes of Churchill’s own country. At the time Churchill made that statement, the UK was subjugating much of the world as an open-air prison, with countless hundreds of millions of people living as virtual slaves under the horror of British colonialism. The United Kingdom is guilty of having committed the most unspeakable crimes to the entire populaces of Pakistan, India, Iraq, Burma, and much of Africa.

A book by Caroline Elkin, Britain’s Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, details what happened in Kenya, one of Britain’s many colonies. She notes that almost every man, woman, and child, in the country, which totalled several million people, was herded into labor camps or detention areas. Thousands died from beatings, disease, starvation, and labor. The following quotation from an article from The Guardian is a highly detailed and extremely gruesome account of occurrences in the camps. The following quotation details brutal methods the British used to torture the natives of their colonies. Skip it if you’re queasy:

“The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as ‘Labour and freedom’ and ‘He who helps himself will also be helped’. Loudspeakers broadcast the national anthem and patriotic exhortations. People deemed to have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled. Unless you have a strong stomach I advise you to skip the next paragraph: Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favorite technique was to hold a man upside down; his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles.”

British imperialism was not limited to Africa. A famine caused by the British in 1857 in India, its colony at the time, killed 29 million people. Little aid was diverted to relieve the effects of the famine, as it would’ve cut into the record profits being made at the time. The British administrator of the colony dismissed those that wanted to aid India as “humanitarian hysterics.” Another famine, also deliberately caused by the British, in the colonized Indian province of Bengal in 1943 killed 4 million people.

Colonial era imperialism had unapologetically racist overtones. Churchill for one said, “I do not admit … that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.” Racism has always been a justification for imperialist and expansionist actions capitalist countries have engaged in- including the systematic extermination and deportation of Native Americans by the US. It’s important to recall that the same people that have committed or been complicit with the atrocities being listed were the same kind of people who believed themselves worthy to preach to working classes about how “evil” communism was.

Churchill’s feelings on communism and Lenin summed up the attitudes felt by every large capitalist state, most of which were just as genocidal as Britain, on the topic of communism. Like those of the British Empire, France was committing atrocities in its colonies in west Africa, as well as enforcing colonial rule on the people of Indochina. The Russian Empire that preceded Lenin was an absolute monarchy that encouraged racist pogroms against Jews, in which people gathered to burn Jewish homes and shops and kill the owners in brutal ways. It also enforced Russian cultural supremacy onto other minor ethnicities encompassing the Russian Empire. Austria-Hungary and Italy were repressive monarchies, which were subjugating the people of the Balkans and Libya. The Belgian colony of what they called the “Congo Free State” was particularly murderous. 10 to 15 million innocent Congolese were slaughtered by the Belgians as they, like the British, enslaved every native they could get their hands on. Portugal was committing genocide in its colonies of Angola and Mozambique. In many instances, the Portuguese sprayed lethal chemicals onto civilian areas that had been liberated by anti-colonial resistance groups. The “opening up” of China to trade was, in practice, its opening up to Western domination. China was invaded several times and lost much of its land and ports to Western imperialists. The economic and political situation China endured for a hundred years was so degrading it is referred to as the “Century of humiliation.” The US was sucking dry the resources of their colonies in Cuba and the Philippines. In the Philippines, as many as 1.4 million civilians were killed as a result of American suppression of Filipino resistance. American soldiers regularly burned and massacred entire villages, often subjecting their inhabitants to rape and torture first. The countries of Central America might as well had just been American colonies too, considering they were under constant US military occupation to ensure American businesses had access to their resources. Smedley D. Butler, a veteran-turned-activist, was the most decorated American Marine at the time. He gives his account on what he did there:

“I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-classed muscle man for Big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street….”

This was the era in which Soviet Union, the “Bolshevik baby,” was born into. The capitalist states had literally divided the world between them. In it’s creation, the USSR became the only major force in the world that was resisting foreign domination, that stubbornly refused to be part of the submissive bloc that the colonial powers had mandated over the entire world. It’s no wonder the capitalist states chose the Soviet Union in particular to thoroughly demonize as “evil” despite acknowledging their own crimes and the crimes of fellow imperialists.

Imperialism during the Cold War (1945-1991)

Ushered in by the Russian Revolution, the influence of communism and socialism grew considerably during the 20th century. Near the beginning of the century, the Western capitalist states were still the most powerful in the world, although they were not as formally aligned as they are today. The emergence of communism had great potential to provide a power or political bloc that contested their own. It was an alternative route for the nations and peoples of the world. From the standpoint of Third World countries, the capitalist approach of the West probably meant being forced into economic subservience to powerful European countries. Up to the 20th century, that had indeed been the case with China, Indochina, India, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

Communism, in theory at least, meant being independent from exploitation and using your nation’s resources and labor for the benefit of your own people. Fresh out of the era of colonialism, the West was frightened that these ideas could catch fire quick and pose a threat to their global hegemony; it did both. Needless to say, the West vehemently tried to stop the spread of communism. Of course, capitalists attempted to justify their opposition to this growing threat by saying the West was, to quote the Truman Doctrine, helping “free peoples” resist “subjugation by armed minorities”. Nonetheless, the Cold War saw the US oppose communists even when the communists had the majority of their people their side. The US supported dictatorships in the name of opposing dictatorships, and committed crimes against humanity in the name of protecting it; all to preserve capitalism and to not allow US/Western dominance to be diminished.

Vietnam

In 1945, Vietnam was in a celebratory mood, as it had just regained its national dignity. It had been a French Colony since the 1880s, and the country had declared independence under a large communist movement led by Ho Chi Minh. Denouncing French colonial rule, the new government said about the French:

“They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Center and the South of Vietnam in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people from being united. They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood…. In the field of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people, and devastated our land.”

Unfortunately for the Vietnamese, the capitalist powers would rather have an impoverished, devastated and divided Vietnam than a communist Vietnam. The Vietnamese movement against colonial rule was quickly gaining control of the entire country. Following the end of World War II, the French began simultaneously bombing and invading the nation to keep its grip on their colony. What became known as the “First Indochina War” commenced soon after Vietnam declared independence, fought between those that were for independence and French colonialists. France killed 300,000 civilians trying to reclaim Vietnam. The United States provided 80% of France’s military funds during its brutal attempts at re-conquest. In 1953, the United Nations proposed a ceasefire, saying the French should withdraw to the South of the country (as it was a place of lesser resistance) and elections should be held in 1955 to determine what government the Vietnamese people desire. Although the agreement was settled, the US and France instead decided to establish a puppet government and create the country of “South Vietnam” in the part they were occupying. They also refused to partake in the agreed upon elections, aware that doing so would likely result in a communist victory. As then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower later revealed in his memoirs:

“I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, a possible 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.”

Two governments were created: the communist North Vietnam and the capitalist South Vietnam. One of the stark differences between the two was that the North Vietnamese government was actually created by the Vietnamese themselves, the South’s government was put in place by Western powers.

The communists in the North still wanted to reunify the country under a government independent of Western imperialism. Luckily for them, supporters of this idea were plentiful in the South. A guerrilla movement in South Vietnam arose: the National Liberation Front, known in the US as the “Vietcong”. The West had already lost control of half of Vietnam; losing the other half to the communists would’ve been nightmarish. A plan to militarily crush the Vietcong had to be created.

The West had little initial reason to pour troops into the country to fight the communists after the French lost the first time, so they had to make up an excuse. They made up a story about a North Vietnamese boat that shot at an American ship near the North’s territorial waters (the Gulf of Tonkin incident). Why American military ships were thousands of miles from American waters and right next to a hostile nation’s waters was not really debated. There was a tacit assumption in the US that our military had the right to do whatever it wanted, no matter violations of sovereign territory. Justified by the boat-shooting incident, American troops poured into the artificial country of South Vietnam to protect their freedom from the commies. The freedom-loving South Vietnamese regime the US was trying to defend killed 30,000 people in political repression, jailed thousands more, and never held elections.

The US military was the largest, most technologically advanced, and most effective fighting force on earth. This military, along with several allies, sent a total of over a million troops to Vietnam to beat back the insurgency and lost to a guerrilla army made mostly of peasants. More bombs were dropped on Vietnam by the US than all bombs dropped on anyone by all parties in World War II. 500,000 infants were born with birth defects because of American use of Agent Orange, a poisonous chemical used to kill any crops that could’ve been aiding communists. Massacres of villagers committed by capitalist forces, either through indiscriminate air bombing or ground troops, were very regular. 1 to 3 million civilians were killed by the US or its allied forces. Though the fighting between US forces and the Vietcong occurred in the South, the US continuously bombed the communist North. A journalist in North Vietnam during the war, Wilfred Burchett, wrote of American bombing of the country in his book Vietnam North:

“all school buildings in Thanh Hoa province and the other coastal province I visited, together with all hospitals and sanatoria, had either been bombed to smithereens or had been evacuated in expectation of bombing. Any large building of brick or stone in the countryside was an automatic target for American pilots, doubtless reported back after the bombings as ‘barracks, military, warehouses,’ and so forth.”

Korea

Much like in Vietnam, the US bombed countless civilian targets in North and South Korea during the Korean War. Almost every building in North Korea was reduced to rubble and 1.5 million North Korean civilians were killed, as well as hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians. A common complaint from US pilots was that so few buildings were left standing that they were running out of places to bomb. The Air Force general Curtis LeMay who directed the bombings, tried to justify targeting civilian populations earlier in his career by saying “there are no innocent civilians.” In describing his branch’s performance during the Korean War he said: “we bombed all of North Korea and all of South Korea, too.” With the help of the US, the South Korean armed forces rounded up and killed 200,000 to 1 million of its own people suspected of being communist sympathizers in the “Bodo League massacre.”

Nicaragua

Even if a communist/socialist movement clearly had popular support as demonstrated by national elections, it would not be spared from capitalist, or more specifically American, military suppression. Ironically, the US would carry out such suppression of democracy in the name of protecting democracy. In 1979, the American-backed Somoza family dictatorship in Nicaragua was overthrown by socialists called the Sandinistas. The Somoza family had been known for regularly taking anything they wanted from the national treasury and handing it to other family members or friends. For the next ten years after the revolution, Washington would arm and fund the “Contras,” a counter-revolutionary guerrilla force opposed to the socialist Sandinista government. The US continued to use the Contras as a proxy army that waged a civil war against the Sandinistas even though the people of Nicaragua wanted the Sandinistas to remain in power. A 1984 election in Nicaragua produced a landslide victory for the Sandinistas, and the election was declared fair and legitimate by international observers. A report by American lawyer Reed Brody charged that the Contras, the army that the US was training and funding, was engaging in:

“…attacks on purely civilian targets resulting in the killing of unarmed men, women, children and the elderly—premeditated acts of brutality including rapes, beatings, mutilations and torture—and individual and mass kidnappings of civilians for the purpose of forced recruitment into the Contra forces and the creation of a hostage refugee population in Honduras; – assaults on economic and social targets such as farms, cooperatives and on vehicles carrying volunteer coffee harvesters; – intimidation of civilians who participate or cooperate in government or community programs such as distribution of subsidized food products, education and local self-defense militias; – and kidnapping, intimidation, and even murder of religious leaders who support the government…”

A Human Rights Watch report simplified the hypocrisy in US policy toward Nicaragua:

“…while the Bush administration [the senior Bush] proclaims its support for human rights and free and fair elections in Nicaragua, it persists in sabotaging both.”

Iran

Before the 20th century, Iran was ruled by kings called “Shahs.” The country was making a slow transition to democratic governance, but this would soon be disrupted by Western imperialism. In 1953, the democratically-elected Mohammed Mossadegh took office as Prime Minister. Iran’s oil was controlled by the British “Anglo-Iranian Oil Company” at the time of his election.

One of Mossadegh’s first decrees was to nationalize Iran’s oil, returning the country’s natural resources to the public, or for the benefit of the Iranian people. Britain and the US became worried that control of the formerly obedient Iran was slipping from their grasp, and that access to oil would become more restricted. So, the American CIA and British MI6 paid elements in the Iranian military to overthrow Mossadegh and re-establish the rule of the totalitarian Shahs. For the next twenty-six years, the Iranian people endured the rule of another Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, whose regime was feared for its extensive torture. It also killed several thousand political opponents and facilitated a cult of personality around the monarch. The US remained the lifeline of the Shah for the duration of his reign, giving military and monetary aid to the highly unpopular leader. President Carter said:

“Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership, and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.”

In 1979, two years after Carter said this, the Iranian Revolution occurred, in which the Iranian people demonstrated their love by toppling the Shah. Some of the protests during the revolution had up to 9 million participants, making them possibly the biggest protests in human history.

Indonesia

In the early 1960s, the democratically-elected president of Indonesia, Sukarno, was undertaking wide-scale humanitarian public efforts to alleviate poverty, such as building schools, homes, and medical clinics. The Communist Party of Indonesia, though not part of the government, backed him in his efforts. In 1966, the Indonesian military, acting on the advice of the US, enacted a coup and forced Sukarno to transfer power to the autocratic Suharto, who remained in power until his death 1996. His regime took an extreme anti-socialist stance. Using names and aid given to him by the US, Suharto killed 500,000 to 3 million people that were either leftist or affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party in just the first two years of his rule. Tens of millions more were jailed, raped, or tortured. The public sector was virtually eliminated and social programs were dwindled to almost nothing. Suharto invaded East Timor for bogus nationalistic reasons in 1975. His forces killed 200,000 people out of a population of only 700,000 (which was made possible by the large amounts of arms the US provided him). It resulted in an uproar from the UN, which immediately demanded Indonesia withdraw. Diplomatic and political support for the invasion from the US was the decisive factor in preventing any international measures from stopping the genocide and occupation.

The massive privatization that accompanied Suharto’s rule maintained him his Western allies for life. In fact, Indonesia is currently one of the “freest” markets around. It also has one of the worst education systems in the world. Sweatshops are common and hunger is a widespread worry. Medicine is for the elite. Many are forced to use the same rivers they drink out of as toilets. However, it is a very hot place for the international business community to exploit cheap labor and extract resources. Writer and journalist Andre Vltchek describes the economic divide in Indonesia:

“The gap between the rich and poor keeps growing, as totally ridiculous images are becoming the norm all over the country: huge pre-fabricated shopping malls and five-star hotels coexist with open sewers and child beggars; a make-believe world of a very few super-rich and the majority of those living in unimaginable misery, in both the pre-feudal countryside, and those anarchic, polluted and congested cities with no planning.”

The effects of US influence on Indonesia are perhaps a classic example of American priorities. Even if it means halting humanitarian advances, smashing a functioning democracy, committing outright genocide on the people and impoverishing hundreds of millions of them, the US will support it if it serves the interests of capitalism.

Guatemala

In 1954, the Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz, who was democratically elected, made land reform that involved giving ownership of land to the families that worked on them and establishing councils so that the workers could collectively make decisions. Most of the firms that had been in control of Guatemalan land and labor had been American, and the land reform was highly unfavorable to them. In response, the US accused Arbenz of being a communist (though this was far from true), and ordered the CIA to instigate a coup and overthrow him.

Arbenz is toppled, and for the next few decades, Guatemala is ruled by a string of American-supported dictators that utilize politically-motivated death squads to silence opposition. Following the coup, Guatemala plunges into a civil war in which 200,000 die, most from governmental sanctioned terror. In 1982, Ronald Reagan said of one of the dictators:

“President Rios Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment … I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice… [and he is] totally committed to democracy.”

Rios Montt was convicted of genocide by a Guatemalan court in 2013. (Ironically, the day after Reagan said this, December 6, 1982, Montt’s death-squads killed 162 people including 67 children in one of the many small villages that were suspected of being anti-government).

Chile

The socialist Salvador Allende was narrowly but surely elected president of Chile in 1970. The US covertly began disseminating anti-Allende propaganda throughout Chilean society and within the Chilean military. American operatives secretly met with Chilean officers and generals and pressured them to forcefully remove Allende. The US got the coup it wished for in 1973, when the military, under the general Augusto Pinochet, overthrew Allende. The new government scrapped the constitution and smashed every element of democracy Chile had. US Secretary of State at the time, Henry Kissinger, saw the transition from democracy to dictatorship as well as America’s part in it as necessary. He said,

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

Pinochet, the general who instigated the coup and assumed power afterward, announced how he intended his rule to proceed in saying “not a single leaf moves in this country if I am not the one moving it. I want that to be clear!” He immediately began Gestapo-styled raids, going door to door and rounding up leftists for execution and torture. 5,000 are estimated to have been killed, 30,000 tortured, and possibly hundreds of thousands jailed. All this occurred while the West cheered from the sidelines. Only until Pinochet was quite sure leftist sentiment was squashed, in 1990, did he relinquish power to a democratic government. Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister, praised Pinochet for this:

“I’m also very much aware that it is you who brought democracy to Chile, you set up a constitution suitable for democracy, you put it into effect, elections were held, and then, in accordance with the result, you stepped down.”

She conveniently forgets that there had been no need to “bring” democracy to Chile — it had existed before Pinochet’s dictatorship. He was only able to “bring” democracy to Chile because he was the one that had destroyed it in the first place.

Brazil

Adding to the list of Guatemala, Iran, Chile, and Indonesia, the US helped kill democracy in Brazil. In 1964, the US sent logistical support and arms to Brazil’s police and armed forces to assist them in overthrowing the democracy of Brazil because the president, Joao Goulart, was slightly left-leaning. Declassified documents reveal that the US speculated that the coup may result in resistance from groups that supported Goulart. If resistance to the coup broke out, the US had plans to militarily involve themselves in the conflict by bombing Brazilian cities, though this ultimately did not happen. The military junta that replaced Goulart was filled with pro-US, anti-communist generals. The CIA agents that were operating in Brazil reported back to Washington on the coup they had helped instigate, and confirmed that the smashing of democracy would assist American business ventures. Their report read:

“The change in government will create a greatly improved climate for foreign investments.”

Cuba

In 1952, a Cuban military coup resulted in strongman Fulgencio Batista becoming military dictator. Batista was highly corrupt, involved in organized crime, and made good use of a secret police that killed about 20,000 people. Many lived in slums and unemployment was between 15 and 20 percent. American companies owned Cuba’s entire oil industry, almost all cattle ranches, and 90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions. Batista was supported by and allied with the United States. The US ambassador to Cuba described Cuban-American relations: “I ran Cuba from the sixth floor of the US embassy. Cubans’ job was to grow sugar and shut up.” In a strange bout of honesty, John F. Kennedy himself admitted in an interview the harsh conditions in which Cubans lived:

“I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime.”

Batista was deposed by the Cuban Revolution in 1959, which would establish a socialist government in his place. Of course, this didn’t settle well with the American ruling class and business owners that had practically owned Cuba. The revolution was made of Cubans, was raised in Cuba, and succeeded because Cubans wanted a new Cuba. Still, Kennedy referred to the revolution as a result of “outside communist penetration.” Two years after the revolution, the US invaded, landing 1,500 CIA-trained operatives on Cuban shores, in attempts to start an uprising against the new government (talk about outside penetration). The invasion failed mostly because the exiles had enormous difficulty trying to recruit people to oppose the only Cuban government that had ever strived to help the people. Kennedy said the intent of the invading force was to “regain their island’s freedom,” not acknowledging that there was none to regain; a US-backed dictatorship existed before the revolution. For decades after the failed invasion, the US engaged in a secret campaign of state terrorism against the island known as “Operation Mongoose” to destabilize its internal affairs. Author Keith Bolender opens his book, Voices from the Other Side, with brief examples of the damage the American operation inflicted on the Cuban people:

“For half a century the Cuban people have endured almost every conceivable form of terrorism. The bombs that have destroyed department stores, hotel lobbies, theaters, famous restaurants, and bars- people’s lives. The second worst act of air terrorism in the Americas, resulting in the deaths of 73 civilians. An exploding ship in Havana Harbor, killing and injuring hundreds. Attacks on defenseless villages. Teenagers tortured and murdered for teaching farmers to read and write. Biological terrorism causing the deaths of more than 100 children…”

According to US policymakers, the purpose of these attacks was that the US wanted to see a Cuban government “with which it can live in peace,” despite the fact that all the aggression was coming from the US. Cuba would’ve loved to see a United States with which it could live in peace.

Dominican Republic

One of the many American-backed autocrats of Latin America was Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. In 1937, he directed his forces to execute all Haitians they could, merely because of his own racist tendencies, resulting in 20,000 civilian deaths. He killed an additional 30,000 in political repression to remain in power. The Dominican Republic saw an opportunity to start anew with a legitimate and democratic government when Trujillo was assassinated in 1961. Elections were held in 1962, and in 1963, the left-leaning Juan Bosch was inaugurated president.

However, a military coup, conducted by generals that wanted another member of the Trujillo family to rule, deposed Bosch only a few months into his presidency. The country descended into a state of quasi-civil war, with street battles regularly occurring between Bosch supporters and supporters of the military coup. Although Bosch was the legitimate elected president, the United States formulated a plan to keep the leftist Bosch out and the pro-capitalist military dictatorship in. The US had learned its lesson from Cuba 5 years ago: if you sit back and let a people decide a national government for themselves, it might not work in the interests of capitalism or American businesses. So, the US invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965. It turned out to be a simple in and out mission. US troops landed, put down the forces that desired a democratic government, installed Joaquin Belaguer as pro-America dictator, and left. 2,000 pro-democracy fighters and 1,000 civilians were killed due to the invasion.

Latin America

Throughout the Cold War, the regions of Central and South America experienced countless dictatorships that fluctuated in and out of existence. Almost every country in Latin America had a right-wing dictatorshop at one point; some lasting for decades, some for a few years. Some existed at the start of the Cold War, but many arose specifically when socialist or communist groups were on the rise, with the intent purpose of crushing them. We’ve already examined the examples of Chile, Dominican Republic, and Brazil, in which the government was (democratically) drifting to an unacceptable point of leftism, and the US and right-wing forces in the country agreed that establishing a rightist dictatorship was necessary.

In 1975, the dictatorships of Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia began a large and coordinated campaign to eliminate leftist attitudes that were strongly pervasive in their societies. During the campaign, called Operation Condor, over 60,000 people were killed. 30,000 more are documented as having “disappeared” according to governmental records, although this meant killed as well. The US provided the logistical and technical support needed to conduct the repression, and handed the governments names of suspected leftist or democracy advocates to have them arrested. 400,000 were incarcerated in total, many of whom were tortured for extensive periods.

Africa

During the Cold War, many countries in Africa were repeating what the US had done in 1776; declaring independence, declaring themselves a free country, not a colony, and militantly struggling against the occupying armies. However, the US, which ideally should’ve been the country most understanding of their cause, found themselves supplying the colonialists. Most of the African rebels were socialists or communists, while the colonialists themselves were among America’s allies in NATO. This made picking a side very easy for the US. One of the colonial countries, Portugal, was at the time a nationalist, semi-fascist dictatorship. While, in words, the US made vague and brief statements about how African countries should be able to determine their own affairs free of foreign domination, in practice arms were flowing from the US to Portugal to crush rebels in Mozambique and Angola. John Marcum, an American scholar who was in Angola during it’s war for national liberation against the Portuguese, wrote:

“By January 1962 outside observers could watch Portuguese planes bomb and strafe African villages, visit the charred remains of towns like Mbanza M’Pangu and M’Pangala, and copy the data from 750-point napalm bomb casings from which the Portuguese had not removed the labels marked ‘Property U.S. Air Force’”.

China

China had a communist revolution in 1949. The nationalist, capitalist, one-party government of the Kuomintang preceded the communist government. The 30 years of its rule saw millions, or at least several hundred thousand, die each year from starvation and disease. Those that were killed by political repression numbered in the millions as well. The Western and American governments not only never criticized this government but instead condoned the Kuomintang and sent them massive amounts of military aid. When the communists came to power, however, the West suddenly started to pretend to care about the people of China and presented themselves as humanitarians that needed to free the Chinese from their repressive government. The West only reacted this way because the communists reclaimed all Chinese resources for the people of China, putting a severe dent in Western domination of the world. Politicians in the United States publicly accused one another’s poor policies as having been the reason China was lost to communists. The major question in American politics in 1949 was “Who lost China?!” Intellectual Noam Chomsky comments on this:

“In 1949, China declared independence, an event known in Western discourse as “the loss of China” – in the US, with bitter recriminations and conflict over who was responsible for that loss. The terminology is revealing. It is only possible to lose something that one owns. The tacit assumption was that the U.S. owned China, by right, along with most of the rest of the world…”

In 1978, China reopened itself to foreign investment. It resulted in the US owning significant amounts of capital in China and benefitting from trade, and China is now very profitable for the US. Coincidentally our relations with China are not as bad as they used to be, and the two countries are actually major economic partners.

Disguised colonialism/imperialism

The extensive decolonization that occurred during the 20th century is interpreted by many Western scholars as the “end of empires” or the “end of colonialism”. However, the dozens of countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that broke free from foreign colonialists only to become puppet states that took orders from the West only broke free on paper. Their military sizes, economic policies, social affairs, infrastructure capacity, was largely if not wholly determined by the West. When told to violently suppress an internal political group, third world puppets would do so. When told to allow room for an American military base, they did so. When told to take an anti-communist stance, they did so. If they obeyed, they would receive trade benefits, military aid and technology, and maybe even free money from the West.

The fact that Western countries are not currently conducting large scale occupations of much of the world, as they were about 130 years ago, creates an unfortunate illusion: that they are not in control (let me emphasize that we are not conducting large-scale occupations; the US has 700 military bases in foreign countries, so we are sort of conducting a minor-scale occupation of the world). Nonetheless, when any country steps out of line, when they challenge the Western line on politics or economics, criticize American foreign policy, the West is quick to show them who’s boss. Bombing or outright invasions usually do the trick, as the US did to the unobedient Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Haiti in 1994, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 1986 and 2011, and others. Outright colonialism no longer exists, but the US and West still exerts authority over the world with few restraints.

Post-Cold War Imperialism (1991-present)

The dissolution of the USSR and most other communist states around 1990 meant the US had become the world’s sole uncontested superpower. Before the 90’s, the US and the USSR were in a competition for global influence. In taking any action, each had to consider the other’s reaction. Now that the USSR is gone, the US has become a man amongst kids, free to pick on or assault whoever it wants.

Sudan

In 1998, the US launched cruise missile strikes on a factory in Sudan because it was thought to be making weapons for terrorists. The factory turned out to be a pharmaceutical plant that produced the majority of medicine for the malaria-stricken country. Because of its destruction, tens of thousands of Sudanese are estimated to have died due to diseases that medicine from the plant could’ve alleviated. Sudanese requests to the British for replacement pharmaceuticals were denied.

Iraq

Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded the country of Kuwait in 1991 with the goal of annexing its territory and oil. The American press and government used every denunciation possible to get the people of America and the people of the world to understand that Saddam was an aggressive totalitarian and that it was therefore necessary to militarily intervene in the conflict. They pointed out his use of chemical weapons and his massacres of the minority Kurdish ethnicity within Iraq. What they rarely covered was how this aggressive totalitarian used to be a friend of America, and only stopped being our friend when he stopped acting in our interest. During the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam invaded Iran with the similar goal of annexing territory and oil. However, Iran was a mutual enemy of the US – so Saddam was a good guy (and was even made an honorary citizen of Detroit). Western media and governments put aside his aggressiveness and dictator-ness at that time, and American weapons flowed to his regime. Only when he invaded Kuwait, a major oil supplier to the US, did he become the genocidal madman we know him as. As pointed out by American or British governments, Saddam committed ethnic genocide, but they didn’t mention that he did so with arms, equipment, and chemicals that they themselves gave him.

The “we must defend poor Kuwait from that dictator” attitude in the US also forgot that the Kuwaiti leadership was much like Saddam: run by a dictator, extremely repressive, non-elected, etc. After the Western states and their allies intervened and had pushed Saddam’s forces out of Kuwait, we nonchalantly restored the Kuwaiti king to his throne (not an exaggeration, our Kuwaiti ally is a monarch).

This first war with Saddam’s Iraq was the First Gulf War. From 1991 to 2003, the West pushed for tight economic sanctions against Iraq at the UN, disallowing much food or medicine into the country. UN statistics say these sanctions resulted in 1.2 million deaths in Iraq, 500,000 of them children.

Convinced Iraq was considerably weakened, the US invaded in 2003. The US said an invasion was necessary to disarm Saddam of his “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” despite very ambiguous intelligence and doubtfulness among analysts as to the existence of such weapons. A US-led inspection after the invasion even concluded that he never had WMD’s, confirming what so many had been saying before the war even began.

Half-way through the occupation of Iraq, the US started to slowly change the reason they had invaded: instead of WMD’s, the reason for the invasion had been to bring democracy to Iraq. Many forgot about our big WMD blunder, but this mistake could be rectified if our politicians and press sources just reminded everyone that we “freed” Iraq. For some reason Iraq was special. Highly authoritarian dictatorships also existed in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, and Yemen, yet the US felt no need to bring them democracy. The difference was that they were our dictators; they were obedient. Had we ordered them to disarm, as we did Iraq, they would’ve obeyed. We wanted oil from them, as we did Iraq, and they opened their markets. None but Saddam would dare deny the United States oil. In the eyes of America, the other dictatorships were fine just the way they were; they had no need to be brought “democracy.” Iraq was the rotten egg that wouldn’t follow orders. As the British Empire shrouded its desire for expansion in silly excuses such as “civilizing savages” and “educating the world,” imperialist countries do the same today, saying they must liberate countries from dictators, thought they usually end up economically exploiting the countries they’ve liberated.

Once Saddam was toppled, control of Iraqi oil was swiftly handed over to American businesses like Shell, Chevron, and ExxonMobil. Coincidentally the same companies that profited off the war had given millions to Bush’s campaign. Profits of these companies soared upon their seizure of Iraqi oil fields. Polls show that most Iraqis preferred the country’s oil resources to remain under the control state-owned public institutions, not foreign corporations. Ironically, the US consistently tried to present it’s actions as a legitimate representation of what the Iraqi people wanted. In 2005, a poll showed that around 85% of them opposed American presence in the country. Once it started to become obvious, many US officials thought it would be counterproductive to continue hiding that the war was mainly waged for oil. The once-head of the U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq admitted: “Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that.” Even our current Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel accidently one-upped the pro-war crowd in saying “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”

The results of the war still resonate today with many Iraqis. The American invasion unleashed a civil war, which to this day kill hundreds every month. Following the Battle of Fallujah, in which the US military used weapons with chemicals like depleted uranium and white phosphorus, cancer rates and birth defects are through the roof. In just a few years after these chemicals were used, birth defects have increased 17 times. A reporter who visited the city quoted a local doctor as saying:

“it’s common now in Fallujah for newborns to come out with massive multiple systemic defects, immune problems, massive central nervous system problems, massive heart problems, skeletal disorders, babies being born with two heads, babies being born with half of their internal organs outside of their bodies, cyclops babies literally with one eye — really, really, really horrific, nightmarish types of birth defects.”

Based on varying estimates, 100,000 to 600,000 Iraqi civilians died as a result of the Second Gulf War (commonly called “the Iraq War”) and 4 million became refugees or homeless as a result of the destruction. 4,487 Americans were killed. A statistic not counted in the official death toll is the 3,000 American servicemen that were driven to suicide during their service. Tens of thousands more lost limbs, were in some way injured, or still suffer from psychological trauma today.

The War on Terror

When observing America’s “enemies” of the 21st century, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, one can’t help but notice that they all used to be our friends. This only goes to further debunk the myth that the US is working in the interests of others and not itself. The Islamist radicals that the US is fighting today in Afghanistan used to be our proxy army. Much of the same groups we are fighting now were fighting against the Soviets in the 1980s. At that time, we gave them supplies, ammo, guns, you name it. Ronald Reagan, justifying American support for them, argued: “these men are the moral equivalents of our founding fathers,” in reference to what would become the Taliban and their leaders. In 1993, the British newspaper The Independent even did a praiseful article describing the humane building projects one of the former Islamic leaders was undertaking after the war, entitled: “Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace: The Saudi businessman who recruited Mujahideen now uses them for large-scale building projects in Sudan…”. The “Saudi businessman” was Osama bin Laden.

Since the invasion in 2001, the war in Afghanistan has killed at least 20,000-34,000 civilians and 3,500 soldiers of the American-led coalition. Heroin production in Afghanistan has increased 40 times since the start of the war. Russia, the country most affected by Afghan heroin, estimates the trade and consumption of the drug has caused 1 million deaths worldwide since then.

Death by hunger

Capitalist systems revolve around profit; everything that is produced is only produced because it made money for someone somewhere. For a business to go out of its way to distribute food to people just because they are hungry will not make profit, so it doesn’t happen. Capitalism suffers from a strange phenomenon: inherent hunger, even when food is available. Including the 925 million people chronically starving today, international capitalism has always suffered from countless people going without food; not as a result of famine, miscalculations, bad planning, or economic recession, but because it is just part of the system.

There is enough food for everyone on the planet. There are 7 billion people on earth and we produce enough food to feed 10-12 billion. The cause of starvation is not a shortage of food, but the inefficiency (if not criminality) of the economic system distributing it. Varying estimates from different sources say that around 30,000 to 60,000 people die of hunger every day. Taking even the smaller estimate, that 30,000 a day die of starvation, means that 11 million die each year. Again, this is a direct result of capitalism, and production for profit. It is simply against the nature of capitalism to distribute food in a humane manner; to those who need it or regions where hunger is prevalent.

Counting the deaths of communism and capitalism

A go-to anticommunist argument that is used to invalidate everything about Marxism as a critique of capitalist economics, the concept of socialism as a replacement to capitalism, and to prove that communism is evil, is the simple phrase “communism killed 100 million people.” This phrase is used so often by anti-communists, it has completely lost any theoretical value or historical context, if it had any in the first place. Backers of the phrase use it so blindly and flippantly, most are unaware that the effects of capitalism have killed far more than 100 million people, nor are they even aware of the claims’ original source. They arrive at 100 million by twisting and manipulating facts and events in obvious attempts to just pin the highest death toll possible on communism.

Let’s assume that the claim is true: communist leaders and governments have killed 100 million people. We’ll debunk some of the inaccuracies behind this claim later. For now, let us calculate capitalism’s death toll using the methodology anti-communists use to calculate communism’s death toll. For one, anti-communists always take the largest estimate possible (i.e.: if the estimated death toll for some event is between 5 and 12 million, anti-communist scholars pick 12 million and state it as fact). Second, they take any unnatural death that may have had a slight relation to a communist government, and blame it on communism as an ideology (i.e.: if a person in China died due to a drought while Mao was leader, his death is automatically the fault of communism).

If we were to use the rationale anti-communists use, then the death toll for capitalism is over 1 billion. Even if we used more legitimate means of calculation, the number would still be over 1 billion. Today, 30,000 to 60,000 people will starve to death in capitalist countries. This means capitalism kills 100 to 200 million people every ten years. An additional 10 million children die through preventable diseases in capitalist countries every year (and therefore 100 million every ten years). With these two statistics alone, we find that capitalism kills 200-300 million people every 10 years: up to triple what communism has supposedly killed in its entire existence. (Adding on to this are the indeterminable number of victims of expansion, war, or oppression capitalist states have engaged in).

The “communism killed 100 million people” claim arose out of estimates made in the “Black Book of Communism,” published in 1997. The book immediately captured the attention of anti-communists, as it introduced what looked like a simple criticism no communist could deny: their ideology killed 100 million people. Using the flawed methodology described earlier, the book claims that crimes of communists resulted in the following death tolls: China: 65 million, USSR: 20 million, Vietnam: 1 million, North Korea: 2 million, Cambodia: 2 million, Eastern Europe: 1 million, Latin America: 150,000, Africa: 1.7 million, Afghanistan: 1.5 million. Anti-communists fail to mention the sentence that comes immediately before the numbers are given, in which the authors themselves state that the numbers are “rough approximations” based on “unofficial estimates.” In other words, two anti-communist authors are just guessing how many people died under communism. The book also takes anything an anti-communist claims as gospel. For example, an anti-communist Cuban exile, hardly a reliable source, claimed he witnessed Che Guevara shoot a 12-year-old boy. This claim was stated in the book as fact.

Before the Chinese communists came to power in 1949, millions of people were dying of starvation and preventable diseases each year. Changes in the methods of food production and medical distribution resulted in this coming to an abrupt stop in the years following the communist revolution. Food was produced for consumption by the people rather than for profit or monetary gain by landlords, and therefore production increased to the point that all could be fed. The same has happened with other communist governments which inherited a people left impoverished by the previous capitalist system. This forces us to notice the fact that deaths by starvation and disease in underdeveloped regions are systemic problems under capitalism, caused by its inability to distribute resources on the basis of human need, but on the basis of whatever makes the most profit. Therefore, it is far more legitimate to say anyone killed by starvation or disease under capitalism was killed by capitalism than to say the same for communism.

Let’s take a case study of this theory on China. The anti-communists say communism killed about 65 million people there. The bulk of the supposed 65 million died in the Great Chinese Famine, in which 20 to 43 million died out of a population of about 650 million (of course, anti-communists usually say 43 million). The famine lasted for about 3 years, and was the result of poor economic planning combined with the worst floods and droughts China had seen in decades. This is in contrast to the continuous starvation China previously experienced under the capitalist regime, which lasted several decades and continued even under excellent weather conditions. Furthermore, the famine that occurred under the communist government could have been prevented by simply not going ahead with the swift agricultural changes that caused the majority of the famine deaths. Capitalism on the other hand can’t help but let millions of people starve. Nonetheless, most contemporary authors would never attribute these deaths to capitalism, although they occur as a result of the system’s nature.

Ideological Hegemony

A member of the Black Panther Party once said, “We’re taught at such a young age to hate communists, yet most of us haven’t the faintest idea what communism is.” What Americans are taught about communism truly must be one of the most effective and profound examples of brainwashing and ideological ignorance: our society skips teaching us what it is and goes straight to teaching us to hate it. Let’s be honest; Americans are miserably lacking in any actual analysis of communism or the history of communist countries, but for the past 100 years we’ve been practically dizzy with blind hate for just the word “communism.”

Distorting facts

The Red Scare of the early 1920s became a sort of point of realization for the corporate-owned media in the US. For hundreds of years before, radical dissent was usually quashed by simple force in capitalist countries (e.g.: the military would simply open fire into crowds of striking workers). During the Red Scare, the wealthy came to realize force was not always necessary; if they could simply manipulate public opinion against communism or other radical ideas, they would be secure in power. As historian Howard Zinn said, if they can control our minds, “they will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.” Ever since the strategy of relentlessly demonizing communism was discovered, it has remained policy to this day.

This strategy doesn’t come without it’s falsifications and fibs. Michael Parenti explains examples in which capitalist analysts or politicians have manipulated reality to serve an anti-communist agenda:

“…the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard… If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike, this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom.”

Let us add to the list of things to which anticommunists give double standards. If immigrants come from Cuba to the US, we will hear that they immigrated because communism made their lives unbearable. If immigrants come from Mexico or the 20 other countries in Latin America, we never hear that it is because capitalism made their lives unbearable. When the USSR invades Hungary to prevent rebels from overthrowing the communist government, it is looked at in the West as a desperate attempt of the government to suppress its own people. When the US does the exact same thing to suppress rebellions in Vietnam or the Dominican Republic, it’s because we’re their angel saviors who have come to protect them. Anticommunists blame every death even slightly related to communism on communism itself, but never blame the hundreds of millions that have died from imperialism, capitalist repression, and famines in capitalist countries on capitalism. When the Soviet Union experienced an economic stagnation, or a mere slowdown in growth during the 70’s and 80’s, the capitalist analysts declared the failure of the socialist system. They proclaimed that they knew socialism was a doomed system from the beginning, and that the only way to save Russia would be for it to adopt the free market. When the global capitalist economy collapsed into depression or recession in 1929 and 2008, mainstream analysts never declared the failure of capitalism. Rather, they sugarcoat the disaster our economic system led us into and say the economy is just experiencing “hard times.” They accuse communist countries of attempting to brainwash their citizens into liking the communist system. They say it is totalitarian for communist societies to place too much emphasis on praising communism or the state. This accusation attempts to imply that in the US, we’re not brainwashed with pro-America, pro-militarism, anticommunist ideals or taught that “we’re lucky to be free.” An American opposing communism for it being ideologically totalitarian would have to ignore the fact that in the US we’re relentlessly bombarded with the ideas that patriotism is a good thing, it is glorious to die for our country, we live in the greatest nation in the world, and that we have “freedom.” By anticommunists own standards, surely Americans must be severely brainwashed.

Feeding Repression

If communists everywhere are excessively targeted with violence, warfare, intimidation, and repression, whether they be a government or a non-ruling political party, what should they do? Is it possible to passively endure this aggression? Without doubt this is not an option, as the military machines and intelligence agencies of developed capitalist nations could easily scrape them off the earth were they not to resist in some way. When confronted with an adversarial force, any group, any army, or any country is left with two options: respond with equivalent force, or let the original force defeat you. If capitalist nations aggress toward communists, as has been the case throughout their overlapping existence, we can expect communists to respond with some form of resistance or countermeasures. Yet, capitalists still use such defense as a means of criticizing communists and making them out to be the aggressors. If communists increased state security forces, arrested foreign-funded political dissidents, disallowed some literature, purged certain minded people from politics, it was used as evidence that they were being repressive, not defensive. This is not to diminish the fact that communist governments have made mistakes or committed excess repression, a fact which leaders like Mao and Stalin have acknowledged and regretted about their own governments in certain instances.

The point is that although capitalists accused communists of being internally repressive, the aggression coming from capitalists in the first place is what necessitated repression. If capitalist nations truly wanted to see a communist world without repression, they shouldn’t have practiced state terrorism against them, sabotaged their technology, spied on them, infiltrated them, funded and armed anti-communist groups, tried to assassinate their officials, encouraged coups to overthrow their governments, made threats against them, or outright attacked them militarily.

Communism is bad, even when it’s good

Knowledge of positive aspects of socialist societies is not allowed to spread very far in capitalist countries. Especially during the Cold War, information on anything communists did to help their people or modernize their country was scarce in the US to the point that it was practically censored. Most Americans had no clue that Soviets had economic rights that they didn’t even know could exist. From its beginnings, the Soviet Union fed and educated its young, rather than making them work 14 hour days to eke out a living, as wealthy industrialists in the capitalist world did. The Russian Empire was one of the poorest areas in Europe, but industrialized rapidly when it became the Soviet Union, experiencing growth rates double and sometimes quadruple what countries in the West were experiencing. In just 25 years, the USSR accomplished economically what had taken the US and other powers a century to accomplish. Education at any level, college or elementary, didn’t cost Soviets a dime. Once a Soviet citizen graduated, he was guaranteed employment; almost always in his field of expertise, giving the Soviet Union virtually no unemployment. Health care was free and available to all. The cost of housing was never more than 5% of an individual’s wage, meaning there were no homeless. Workers had a month’s paid vacation and women had up to two years paid maternity leave. Even when the mother returned to work, childcare was free. Most recreational activities were also free. Racist or sexist laws and practices were outlawed.

How horrific it would’ve been for the ruling class of the United States if any of this information had reached the ears of working class Americans. Retaining a job, a house, paying medical bills, and paying for education have always been things that put a heavy burden on many Americans. Actually allowing them to know that citizens of socialist countries did not have these problems might give people the ridiculous idea that socialism is the solution to these problems.

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