The Power Principle - II: Propaganda

Horhey · Aug 15, 2012

This episode reviews each US intervention and how it was sold or largely concealed from the American public.

Keep children away from computer. Graphic death squad killings shown
[video=youtube_share;b1J9ybfRWSk]http://youtu.be/b1J9ybfRWSk[/video]

You may have to sell [intervention or other miltary action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine.

--Samuel Huntington, Harvard Government Professor, Foreign Policy Advisor, Author of "The Crisis of Democracy" for the Trilateral Commission, White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council (1977-79)
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The Editors of the "agenda setting" New York Times declared on August 6, 1954, that the CIA-backed coup in Iran was "good news indeed":

The New York Times: THE IRANIAN ACCORD

Costly as the dispute over Iranian oil has been to all concerned, the affair may yet be proved worthwhile if lessons are learned from it: Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism. It is perhaps too much to hope that Iran's experience will prevent the rise of Mossadeghs in other countries, but that experience may at least strengthen the hands of more reasonable and more far-seeing leaders.
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-Essentially invoking the internal version of the "domino theory"/Mafia doctrine.

The Washington Post: The Stakes in CAFTA

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

THE HOUSE is getting ready to vote on the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), a deal that would bind the five nations of Central America plus the Dominican Republic to the U.S. economy.

While the United States has been focusing on terrorism, a new challenge has been brewing in its own hemisphere. House members should consider this challenge before voting to slam the door on Central America's pro-American leaders.

The peace process in Central America succeeded, ending leftist insurgences in El Salvador and Guatemala and leading to elections in Nicaragua that removed its Marxist leadership. Democracy already had displaced often populist dictatorships across South America; in Mexico, a pro-American, pro-market presidential candidate succeeded against the long-ruling and traditionally leftist Institutional Revolutionary Party.

In the past few years, however, an attempt has been made to revive the political challenge once represented by Mr. Castro. It centers on Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who combines Castroite rhetoric with the financial clout of Venezuelan oil. Mr. Chavez has spread his money around the region, sponsoring anti-American and anti-democratic movements and promoting alternatives to U.S. initiatives. To counter the U.S. trade agenda, for example, he has put forward a "Bolivarian Alternative."

This has given critics of the United States something to advocate. El Nuevo Diario, a Nicaraguan newspaper that is critical of CAFTA, praised the Bolivarian Alternative recently, asserting that "America is for the Americans, not for the North Americans." In Costa Rica, critics of CAFTA who draw inspiration from Mr. Chavez have made no secret of the fact that they oppose the deal because they oppose the United States.

Most House Democrats don't want to hear this; they claim that CAFTA is opposed by "pro-poor" groups in the region. But this claim is troubling on two levels. First, CAFTA would actually help the poor: It would create 300,000 new jobs in shoes, textiles and apparel;

But second, the defeat of CAFTA would help not anti-poverty movements but anti-American demagogues, starting with Mr. Chavez. For them, the retreat of the United States from partnership with Central America would be a major victory.
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Translation from Newspeak: Those who oppose the US-dominated mercantilist free trade system such as "populists" = "authoritarian", "Marxist," (the Sandinista's policies didnt match the definition). Those that accept this system = "democratic", "pro American" and so on. Even if these so called "democratic governments" and "democratic forces" are murdering and torturing tens of thousands of people or are fixing their elections.

The words democracy..freedom, patriotic..justice..are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

--George Orwell, All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays
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Horhey · Aug 15, 2012

Case in point:

REMARKS OF ANTHONY LAKE

Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs

"From Containment to Enlargement"

September 21, 1993

Throughout the cold war, we contained a global threat to market democracies: now we should seek to enlarge their reach, particularly in places of special significance to us.

The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement -- enlargement of the world's free community of market democracies.
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There is at the head of this great continent a very powerful country, very rich, very warlike, and capable of anything. The United States seems destined to plague and torment the continent in the name of freedom.

--Simon Bolivar, 1829
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Hearings before and special reports made by Committee on Armed Services of the House of Representatives on subjects affecting the naval and military establishments

The underdeveloped world's growing dissatisfaction over the gap between rich and poor nations will create a fertile breeding ground for insurgencies. These insurgencies have the potential to jeopardize regional stability and our access to vital economic and military resources. This situation will become critical as our Nation and allies and potential adversaries become more and more dependent on these strategic resources.

Our superpower political and military status is dependent upon our ability to maintain the economic base derived from our ability to compete in established and developing economic markets throughout the world. If we are to maintain this status, we must have unimpeded access to these markets and to the resources needed to support our manufacturing requirements.

--U.S. General Alfred M. Gray, Jr., Commandant of the Marine Corps (1987-91)
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Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America

By Walter LaFeber

Washington helped right-wing militarists fight wars that were not for democratic objectives, but instead aimed at perpetuating the wide class differences between rich and poor.
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Horhey · Aug 28, 2012

Hans Morgenthau wrote that:

American Foreign Policy

By United States. Department of State. Historical Office

The forces that in the interwar period erected the specter of Communist revolution into a symbol of all social reform and social change itself are at work again...

In embarking upon a holy crusade to extirpate the evil of Bolshevism these forces embarked, as they do now, in actuality upon a campaign to outlaw morally and legally all popular movements favoring social reform and in that fashion to make the status quo impregnable to change. The symbol of the threat of a non-existent Communist revolution becomes a convenient cloak, as it was for German and Italian fascism, behind which a confused and patriotic citizenry can be rallied to the defense of what seems to be the security of the United States, but what actually is the security of the status quo.
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The Power Principle - II: Propaganda

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