Here are some paragraphs (with their sources from the end notes) from
The Political Economy of Human RIghts Vol. 1: The Washington Connectins and Third World Fascism. I think we need it as an
antidote for Jimmy Carter PR, and to be prepared to judge (and hopefully influence!?!?!?) the awful policies that will be pushed even if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz manage to win the USA Presidential election.
.> In an interview with the leader of the guerrilla group that captured the National Palace, Tad Szulc learned that the factor that immediately precipitated the action was President Carter’s letter to Somoza praising him “while our people were being massacred by the dictatorship” (“Commander Zero”). To the guerrillas, the letter “meant support for Somoza, and we were determined to show Carter that Nicaraguans are ready to fight Somoza, the cancer of our country.” A second factor may have been the “earlier [Carter "Human Rights"] administration decision to release aid funds to Nicaragua despite the Somoza repression [which] has already hurt the American image in liberal circles [in Latin America], to say nothing of the effect in leftist groups in the region.” The guerrilla action was timed to coincide with the session of the Nicaraguan congress to approve a loan from the United States.^282
.> Carter is a man who is loyal to his friends. Only a few weeks after his letter to Somoza, President Carter “telephoned the royal palace [in Iran] to express support for Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, who faced the worst crisis of his 37-year reign.”^283 This time, Carter’s communication followed the machine-gunning of demonstrators by the Shah’s military forces, armed and trained in the United States, which took thousands of lives according to dissidents. To make sure that the message was clear, the world’s leading exponent of Human Rights reemphasized it several times, for example in a statement to the Shah’s son in Washington on October 31:
.> .>Our friendship and our alliance with Iran is one of our important bases on which our entire foreign policy depends,” Carter told the young prince, who is undergoing training at the U.S. Air Force Academy. “We’re thankful for this move toward democracy,” Carter added, referring to the Shah’s liberalization policies. “We know it is opposed by some who don’t like democratic principles, but his progressive administration is very valuable, I think, to the entire Western world.”^284
.> It soon became clear even in the United States that those who allegedly “opposed democratic principles” and the Shah’s “progressive administration” included virtually the entire population, no longer able to tolerate his U.S.-backed corruption and oppression. Exactly as in the case of Nicaragua, so in the case of Iran, Carter’s explicit rejection of any concern for democracy or human rights helped to trigger the explosion.285 And just as the United States began to search for some alternative to Somoza when the scale of internal opposition (crucially including business elements) reached such a level that he lost his usefulness, so also in Iran the United States finally backed off from the Shah and began to seek other means to ensure that the country can play its intended role in the U.S.-dominated global system.^286 Events in both Iran and Nicaragua in the fall of 1978 illustrate once again the consistent lesson of history: the United States will give massive support to the regimes of torturers and gangsters that it imposes by force and subversion as long as they are successful in maintaining the kind of “stability” that suits U.S. interests, in the manner that we have discussed (see chapter 3). But when popular resistance threatens this “stability,” the U.S. government, never ceasing to proclaim its advocacy of democracy and human rights, will search for alternatives that will prevent the kinds of social and economic change that are perceived as harmful to the interests of those who dominate U.S. society, however beneficial they might be for the victims of U.S. power.
.> In Nicaragua, the September bloodbath indicated to Washington that its long-standing support for the Somoza dictatorship was no longer contributing to “stability”. It therefore offered to “mediate” between Somoza and the broad-based opposition. But these efforts met with little immediate success. Alan Riding wrote from Managua that 10 weeks after the September slaughter “hope has given way to disappointment and anger” as “moderate and leftist opposition leaders are distressed by their growing conviction that Washington believes the country’s deep crisis can be resolved by replacing the Somoza dictatorship with an equally conservative, though less brutal successor.”287 They are, in short, learning the lesson of history. The moderate and left opposition, Riding continues, “think Washington, fearing ‘another Cuba,’ is searching for stability rather than for social and economic change or even human rights—repeating, as they see it, American policy during its occupation of Nicaragua between 1912 and 1933, and its subsequent support for the Somoza family.” Were the U.S. system of brainwashing under freedom not so effective, Riding might have perceived and gone on to explain that there have been and remain very powerful reasons, rooted in the U.S. socioeconomic system, for the long-term consistency of U.S. policy and the concern of the United States for the very specific form of “stability” on which we have commented repeatedly, not only in the case of Central America but wherever U.S. influence reaches. Nicaraguans are aware that the U.S. proposal “skims over social problems and ignores the guerrillas,” and they are also no doubt aware of the reasons, which are inexpressible within the U.S. doctrinal system. They further “note that the Carter Administration was silent when the National Guard killed 3,000 people in crushing the September insurrection, but moved quickly to mediate when it recognized the popularity of the Sandinist guerrillas.” And we strongly suspect that the “tens of thousands of Nicaraguans [who] are fighting for a new society as well as a new government” do not consider the behavior of the Carter Administration to be an odd and inexplicable deviation from traditional U.S. benevolence, but rather have a much better understanding of the forces working to block their efforts than do those in the U.S. media who occasionally report their disillusionment with U.S. tactics.
.> As the dust was settling in Nicaragua and people were returning to the ruins of their homes to bury the dead, thoughtful commentators[Sarcasm Alert!!] in the United States attempted to assess what had taken place...
- ^282 Tad Szulc, “Rocking Nicaragua—‘The Rebels’ Own Story, Anger at Carter letter and other U.S. actions motivates pro-Castro guerrillas, a spreading problem for Washington in Central America,” Washington Post (3 September 1978). Szulc also found that the anti-Somoza campaign involved “virtually every civic organization in Nicaragua, including businessmen and the Roman Catholic Church,” and that its intensity was such that “any gesture toward Somoza [from Washington] would backfire.” This was the State Department assessment prior to the President’s letter to Somoza.
- ^283 UPI, “Carter phones support to Shah; troops again fire at crowd,” Boston Globe (11 September 1978). (See also [*The Washington Connectin and Third World Fascism**(Chomsky and Herman)] chapter 1, section 5, and notes 80, 88.)
- ^284 Edward Cody, “The Shah of Iran Given Assurance of U.S. Support,” Washington Post (1 November 1978).
- ^286 On this matter, see Access to Oil—The United States Relationships with Saudi Arabia and Iran, report of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Henry M. Jackson, Chairman, U.S. Senate, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1977. The report emphasizes Iran’s role [in the time of The Shah] in blocking any “threats to the continuous flow of oil through the Gulf,” which “would so endanger the Western and Japanese economies as to be grounds for general war.” It notes further that “the most serious threats may emanate from internal changes in Gulf states...if Iran is called upon [sic] to intervene in the internal affairs of any Gulf state [as it already has, with U.S. blessings and in coordination with Britain and Jordan in counterinsurgency in Oman] it must be recognized in advance by the United States that this is the role for which Iran is being primed and blame cannot be assigned for Iran’s carrying out an implied assignment” (p. 84, our emphasis). Thus “a strong and stable Iran” serves “as a deterrent against Soviet adventurism in the region” and “against radical groups in the Gulf” (p. 111). This is, of course, ** the real reason for the enormous build-up of the Iranian military [of The Shah] by the United States and the reason why the United States found the Shah’s regime “progressive,” whatever the facts might be.
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