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So many Americans naively believe this fairy story about their country, when the reality is a lot darker and more brutal. The intervention in Iran was neither a
by flimsypremise 3y ago
So many Americans naively believe this fairy story about their country, when the reality is a lot darker and more brutal. The intervention in Iran was neither an isolated event, nor was even close to the first coup that the US perpetrated at the behest of business interests. Starting with Samoa and Hawaii in the 1800s, an extremely violent occupation of the Philippines in the early part of the 20th century, and interventions in Honduras, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, The Dominican Republic and Costa Rica, the US had a long history of this sort of behavior before Iran. Often undertaken under the guise of fighting communism or some other nebulous threat, these acts were in fact naked money grabs intended to secure the dominion of US corporate interests, established during colonialism, over land, labor and assets like oil, lumber and precious minerals in countries where local governments were attempting to seize back control of these assets, and in many cases grant them back to the often poor and rural communities that should have owned them in the first place.
Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes is a good overview of the many "interventions" the US undertook to replace regimes that threatened the economic domination of the West. For the lazy, Wikipedia provides a decent list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
It's a bizarre sort of internal contradiction that allows people to believe in the overwhelming power of the United States while refusing to accept that the exercise of that power has shaped pretty much everything about the modern world. From Korea, where the US propped up a puppet regime staffed by Japanese collaborators post-WW II, leading to a civil war and partition, to Iran, to Russia, which was bankrupted and impoverished by US interests after the end of the Cold War. Those same interests then hand-picked a certain Vladimir Putin as a successor to their man Yeltsin. Unfortunately, most Americans are entirely ignorant of what actually occurred during these events because they were either never reported in the news, or reported in the distorted and propagandistic fashion that the US media tends to adopt.
- zackees 3y ago[dead]
- jasmer 3y ago[dead]
- ImHereToVote 3y agoHasn't stopped. https://theintercept.com/2023/08/09/imran-khan-pakistan-cypher-ukraine-russia/ https://theintercept.com/2023/08/09/imran-khan-pakistan-cyph...
- flimsypremise 3y agoThey've done it so many times at this point that they don't actually have to bother sending in the CIA, they just make their preference clear and let the "or else" remain unspoken.
- metabagel 3y agoThe U.S. isn’t responsible for Putin coming to power. Putin handpicked himself to succeed Yeltsin.
- flimsypremise 3y agoPutin didn't have that kind of power nationally during the Yeltsin years. He was powerful in St. Petersburg, but he would never have risen to national prominence had Yeltsin not hand-picked him as his successor. Yeltsin, in turn, was propped by a coalition of Western interests who had helped him orchestrate a slate of "market based" reforms known as shock therapy, which in effect bankrupted the country while simultaneously conducting a fire sale of everything valuable to western business interests. People forget, but when Putin rose to power the American press lavished him with praise as "someone we could do business with", and Putin even broached the idea of joining NATO with President Clinton at one point. Had Bush not (needlessly) pulled out of ABM treaty a year later, the first in a series of utterly pointless provocations of a country we at that point viewed as a potential ally, our relationship with Russia might look very different today.
- chrysler 3y ago[dead]