“Backyard” Déjà Vu & Sy Hersh’s Price of Power

Allende, Kissinger & Pig Empire Imperialism

In light of the fact that our beloved Pig Empire is now publicly supporting a slow-motion right wing coup in Venezuela (a coup that the U.S. already tried to kick off at least twice over the past decade and change) – I thought I might take a moment to teach a little bit of history about the historical and ideological underpinnings of US foreign policy as it pertains to developing nations in America’s sphere of influence; which has at various times included the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia as well as South and Central America, in the area that is commonly known as “Latin America.”

Today’s quotation comes to you from “The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House” by arguably the greatest investigative “war” reporter of our time, Seymour Hersh.

Reading Hersh can be something of an acquired taste; please keep in mind that we’re talking about a guy who has forgotten more than you and I will ever known about cartoon super villains like Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney – the facts and quotations in Hersh’s work tend to come at you fast and heavy, like a raging torrent of righteous accusation from an author who knows the material like a fish knows water and firmly expects you to keep up as you read along. Once you catch the frenetic rhythm of Hersh’s writing however, the rewards for the diligent student of Pig Empire corruption, murder and hypocrisy are immense, and the same is true of “The Price of Power” – a book that functions as Sy’s extremely unauthorized biography of infamous genocidal warmongering freak, former National Security Advisor and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The above passage comes from the twenty-first chapter of the voluminous tome, appropriately titled “Chile: Hardball.” Understanding it however, requires a broad stroke grasp of the U.S. relationship with Chile prior to the democratic election of Salvador Allende, a socialist, in 1970. As detailed in this chapter, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had been involved in shaping Chilean politics on behalf of both the American government, and powerful U.S corporations with interests in Chile, throughout the mid-1950′s and into the late 1960′s, with an astounding degree of success. Quoting Hersh – “by the mid 1960′s Chile had become widely known in the American intelligence services as one of the CIA’s outstanding success stories. The Agency had managed to penetrate all elements of Chilean government, politics and society…” This included, not coincidentally, helping influence the Chilean elections of 1958 and 1964 towards U.S. puppet, corporation-friendly candidates and against Salvador Allende Gossens, a member of the Socialist Party; we’ll come back to him in a moment.

Economically, the CIA’s control of Chilean politics allowed for the creation of a strongly-pro American corporate paradise with companies like the Chase Manhattan Bank, PepsiCo, International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) and especially Anaconda copper, reaping immense profits at the expense of the Chilean people; who grew more destitute even as conditions for U.S. corporate profit taking grew more favorable. As is common in situations of rising inequity, heartless pillaging and squalid poverty, this phenomenon began to galvanize the Chilean people towards left wing economic redistribution programs and naturally, the already immensely popular Salvador Allende – a situation that terrified corporate America as much or more than it terrified the aggressively anti-Communist U.S government and its covert arm in Chile, the CIA.

This created a unique problem for the Nixon White House because, while Allende was indeed an avowed socialist and ran on a platform of “land reform, nationalization of major industries, closer relations with socialist and communist countries, and redistribution of income” the reality is that he represented a very different type of left wing leader than the revolutionary communists the U.S. was waging the cold war against in places like the Soviet Union, China and closer to home in Cuba. As the above quotation from Price of Power notes, Allende’s willingness to use Chile’s democratic process and peacefully accept the results of elections opened the door to democratically elected socialist movements in the West, or even the United States itself – a possibility that neither the corporatist Nixon, or the imperialist Kissinger could tolerate; even as the Cold War wound down from the hysteria of the post-WWII period and into the long grinding detente that Nixon and his National Security Advisor would orchestrate.

In the late summer of 1970, during a meeting of the influential 40 Committee, Kissinger is reported to have uttered the now infamous quote “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people” and thus, the race to destroy Allende was on. Once again, the CIA was tasked with rigging the Chilean elections, this time with the offer of a sizeable war chest from the previously mentioned American corporations. Unfortunately for the Pig Empire however, Allende, running at the head of a newly-formed united leftist coalition, won anyway – immediately sending Nixon into a rage and putting the CIA in the business of ousting the newly-elected government, even before it took office if that was at all possible.

What followed was a three year terrorist campaign of propaganda, violence, false flag incidents, economic sanctions, financial sabotage of the Chilean economy by a massive coalition of western nations (see Nixon’s infamous “make the economy scream” quote), the bugging and surveillance of Chilean diplomats and officials in the United States, assassination attempts and at least two separate, CIA backed coup plots – one of which finally struck home on September 11th 1973, leading to the death of Salvador Allende and the rise of genocidal right wing dictator (and brutally anti-communist western ally) Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

While the CIA-backed 1973 coup and the U.S. government’s long term support of Pinochet (including looking the other way when the dictator order the assassination of former Chilean ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier; who was killed with a car bomb on a busy Washington D.C. street) is one of the most heinous crimes in the history of the Pig Empire, for the purposes of our discussion what’s important is to recognize the similarities between the pre-coup situations in early-70′s Chile, and today in Venezuela.

In Chile we see a long-term, concerted plot to maintain American corporate dominance; a plot that spans multiple presidencies, crosses political party lines and involves rigging elections, causing economic devastation and fostering (ultimately successful) coup attempts. In Venezuela, the United States has been trying to bring down the left wing government since at least the 2002 attempted coup against Hugo Chavez, an effort that has involved attempting to interfere with elections, causing economic devastation and fostering (still unsuccessful) coup (and possibly even assassination) attempts. This too is a policy objective that has spanned multiple presidencies (in both countries) and sees the U.S. government backing a violent fascist minority opposition movement against a democratically-elected left wing government they’ve driven into the ground through economic warfare. Both Chile (copper) and Venezuela (oil, preferably traded in petrodollars) have key strategic resources that matter to powerful U.S. corporations and Pig Empire planners. Both countries have been the target of extensive propaganda campaigns in the U.S. media, then and now, designed to justify what is clearly an illegal coup attempt on behalf of western imperialist/capitalist interests.

More important than the operational similarities at work here however, is the matching ideology that underpinned the Nixon White House’s war against Allende and the now decade and a half (at least) long war against the Chavez and Maduro governments in Venezuela. The Pig Empire’s quest to topple the left wing government of Venezuela didn’t begin with Maduro’s supposed corruption, it began when Hugo Chavez decided to use the nation’s vast oil reserves to help the poorest people in Venezuela; oil reserves American corporations could be using to generate enormous profits. We were fostering coup attempts long before the right wing opposition voluntarily boycotted the most recent Venezuelan elections and our media lied every bit as much about Chavez as it does today about Maduro.