Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, North Korea, etc
This point is especially important. I’m in the middle of reading (and recording) Philip Agee - Inside the company, a CIA diary. He was a former CIA case officer who defected and escaped to Cuba. In Ecuador, he ran several of the 15+ operations the CIA was running in that country. These programs included everything from running US-friendly assets in the government, infiltrations of labor unions, control of religious institutions, control of youth orgs (especially catholic and conservative ones), journalists (especially getting them to put out anti-communist agitprop), leftist-org penetration agents, witting and unwitting police captains. They ran both ultra-conservative and social democratic / center-left media and political orgs.
These campaigns destabilized and divided the country, and the CIA was laughing while people on the streets were killing each other.
Their #1 goal: to get the Ecuadorian government to cut ties with Cuba and denounce communism, expel Cuban diplomats, and alienate them from Cuba and the USSR. If any org was even vaguely pro-Cuba, regardless of how left it was, the goal was to either take it over from the inside, or if that proved impossible, then make a new org friendly to US interests.
The US knows that the greatest threat to capitalist-imperialism and its overall power, is the threat of a good example, in the form of nations who reject its dominance. Anti-communism becomes the new witch-hunting campaign to unite all these disparate groups, to act on behalf of US interests.
Well said! That’s an interesting book, I’ll have to give it a look. The US knows its enemies very well, it isn’t irrational, it follows a concrete set of interests, the interests of profit and accumulation.
This point is especially important. I’m in the middle of reading (and recording) Philip Agee - Inside the company, a CIA diary. He was a former CIA case officer who defected and escaped to Cuba. In Ecuador, he ran several of the 15+ operations the CIA was running in that country. These programs included everything from running US-friendly assets in the government, infiltrations of labor unions, control of religious institutions, control of youth orgs (especially catholic and conservative ones), journalists (especially getting them to put out anti-communist agitprop), leftist-org penetration agents, witting and unwitting police captains. They ran both ultra-conservative and social democratic / center-left media and political orgs.
These campaigns destabilized and divided the country, and the CIA was laughing while people on the streets were killing each other.
Their #1 goal: to get the Ecuadorian government to cut ties with Cuba and denounce communism, expel Cuban diplomats, and alienate them from Cuba and the USSR. If any org was even vaguely pro-Cuba, regardless of how left it was, the goal was to either take it over from the inside, or if that proved impossible, then make a new org friendly to US interests.
The US knows that the greatest threat to capitalist-imperialism and its overall power, is the threat of a good example, in the form of nations who reject its dominance. Anti-communism becomes the new witch-hunting campaign to unite all these disparate groups, to act on behalf of US interests.
Well said! That’s an interesting book, I’ll have to give it a look. The US knows its enemies very well, it isn’t irrational, it follows a concrete set of interests, the interests of profit and accumulation.