Vrij Nederland-journalisten Harm Ede Botje en Mischa Cohen suggereerden in hun maandblad van januari 2019 dat critici van de politieke interventies van de ‘filantroop George Soros’ gemotiveerd kunnen zijn door ‘antisemitische’ ressentimenten. Ook de mainstream-journalist Ian Buruma, die Soros de ‘personificatie van het Westen’ betitelt, meent dat ‘volksmenners en antisemieten’ Soros haten omdat deze mensenvriend niet alleen ‘rijk,’ is, maar tevens ‘een wereldburger, Joods, en een vrijdenker,’ die ‘gelooft in’ wat George en zijn fans een ‘open samenleving’ achten. Maar hoe ‘tolerant en vrij’ is de neoliberale orde die Soros, het zogeheten ‘symbool voor de verdediging van de open, democratische samenleving,’ voor ogen staat? In een artikel daarover, gedateerd 29 december 2019, stelde de Amerikaanse auteur William Engdahl, een ‘strategic risk consultant,’ het volgende daarover:
For anyone familiar with the history of the Soros Open Society Foundations in Eastern Europe and around the world since the late 1980’s, will know that his supposedly philanthropic ‘democracy-building’ projects in Poland, Russia, or Ukraine in the 1990’s allowed Soros the businessman to literally plunder the former communist countries using Harvard University’s ‘shock therapy’ messiah, and Soros associate, Jeffrey Sachs, to convince the post-Soviet governments to privatize and open to a ‘free market’ at once, rather than gradually.
The example of Soros in Liberia is instructive for understanding the seemingly seamless interplay between Soros the shrewd businessman and Soros the philanthropist. In West Africa George Soros backed a former Open Society employee of his, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, giving her international publicity and through his influence, even arranging a Nobel Peace Prize for her in 2011, insuring her election as president. Before her presidency she had been well-indoctrinated into the Western free market game, studying economics at Harvard and working for the US-controlled World Bank in Washington and the Rockefeller Citibank in Nairobi. Before becoming Liberia’s President, she worked for Soros directly as chair of his Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA).
Once in office, President Sirleaf opened the doors for Soros to take over major Liberian gold and base metals assets along with his partner, Nathaniel Rothschild. One of her first acts as President was to also invite the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, AFRICOM, into Liberia whose purpose as a Liberian investigation revealed, was to ‘protect George Soros and Rothschild mining operations in West Africa rather than champion stability and human rights.’
Verschillende media hebben op Soros’ dubbelrol gewezen. Zo berichtte AllAfrica.com, de Afrikaanse website dat ‘aggregates news produced primarily on the African continent about all areas of African life, politics, issues and culture,’ op 11 oktober 2012:
Report gathered by this paper has revealed that Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's interest in hosting in Liberia a base for the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) appears to have had more to do with protecting the George Soros and Rothschild mining operations in West Africa than in championing stability and human rights.
Op zijn beurt wijst Engdahl bovendien op het volgende:
Soros Foundation’s Ukraine branch, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. His IRF doled out more than $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine’s independence from Russia in 1991. Soros also admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests that brought the current government into power.
Soros’ foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his American wife who had been in the US State Department. In 2004 just weeks after Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation had succeeded in getting Viktor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine, Michael McFaul wrote an OpEd for the Washington Post. McFaul, a specialist in organizing color revolutions, who later became US Ambassador to Russia, revealed:
‘Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities — democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. — but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and a few other foundations sponsored certain U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity Center, the Eurasia Foundation, Internews and several others to provide small grants and technical assistance to Ukrainian civil society. The European Union, individual European countries and the Soros-funded International Renaissance Foundation did the same.’
Tenslotte schrijft deze bekende geopolitieke deskundige:
George Soros is also using his new European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank to lobby his Ukraine strategy, with his council members such as Alexander Graf Lambsdorff or Joschka Fischer or Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, not to mention former ECB head, Jean-Claude Trichet no doubt laying a subtle role.
George Soros, now 84, was born in Hungary as a Jew, George Sorosz. Soros once boasted in a TV interview that he posed during the war as a gentile with forged papers, assisting the Horthy government to seize property of other Hungarian Jews who were being shipped to the Nazi death camps. Soros told the TV moderator, ‘There was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was — well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets — that if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would.’
This is the same morality apparently behind Soros’ activities in Ukraine today. It seems again to matter not to him that the Ukrainian government he helped bring to power in February 2014 US coup d’état is riddled with explicit anti-semites and self-proclaimed neo-Nazis from the Svoboda Party and Pravy Sektor. George Soros is clearly a devotee of ‘public-private-partnership.’ Only here the public gets fleeced to enrich private investors like Mr. Soros and friends.
Critici van dit ‘public-private-partnership’ lopen het gevaar door Amerikaanse liberals en hun Europese sociaal-democratische partners te worden uitgemaakt voor antisemieten. Daarmee hopen en verwachten de pleitbezorgers van het huidige kapitalisme een democratische discussie onmogelijk te maken. De grenzen van ‘het debat,’ zoals dit in hun kringen zo pedant heet, moeten bepaald blijven tot een kleine rijke elite die niet democratisch gecontroleerd kan worden. De ‘corporate media’ hebben daarbij tot taak het grote publiek te verwittigen wat de officiële versie van de werkelijkheid dient te zijn. En zodoende kan mainstream-opiniemaker Buruma de wereld zonder enige ironie meedelen dat juist de veroordeelde beursspeculant Soros, en niet een grote westerse denker of auteur, de belichaming is van het tot voorbeeld strekkende Westen, onder leiding van de Verenigde Staten, een neokoloniaal imperium dat zich, volgens mijn oude vriend Ian, ‘na 1945’ heeft:
ingezet om een nieuwe wereldorde te scheppen. De ideologische basis van de zogeheten ‘vrije wereld’ was vrije handel, internationale samenwerking, en in theorie de bevordering van democratie.
Hoe die ‘nieuwe wereldorde’ er werkelijk uitziet, bleek al acht jaar na het einde van de Tweede Wereldoorlog, toen de CIA zijn eerste succesvolle ‘regime-change’ organiseerde die, volgens de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst zelf, model stond voor alle toekomstige buitenlandse interventies van Washington en Wall Street. In het begin werden die gewelddadige staatsgrepen aangestuurd door de Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Foster Dulles en zijn broer Allen, de ‘first civilian director’ van de CIA. Beiden waren voormalige Wall-Street advocaten, die zich hadden laten inhuren om de belangen van grote Amerikaanse concerns te verdedigen. De Amerikaanse voormalige staatssecretaris van Financiën in de regering Reagan, dr. Paul Craig Roberts, schreef in september 2014 naar aanleiding van de publicatie van professor Stephen Kinzer's boek The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (2013) dat ‘hun demonisering van hervormingsgezinde regeringen’ vaak eindigde ‘in het omver werpen’ van democratisch gekozen regeringen. Overigens, wat vandaag de dag officieel ‘regime change’ heet, is een continuïteit van het Amerikaans overzees beleid, zoals die al sinds het begin van de twintigste eeuw vorm kreeg. Paul Craig Roberts:
Kinzer’s history of the Dulles brothers’ plots to overthrow six governments provides insight into how Washington operates today.
In 1953 the Dulles brothers overthrew Iran’s elected leader, Mossadegh and imposed the Shah, thus poisoning American-Iranian relations through the present day. Americans might yet be led into a costly and pointless war with Iran, because of the Dulles brothers poisoning of relations in 1953.
The Dulles brothers overthrew Guatemala’s popular president Arbenz, because his land reform threatened the interest of the Dulles brothers’ Sullivan & Cromwell law firm’s United Fruit Company client. The brothers launched an amazing disinformation campaign depicting Arbenz as a dangerous communist who was a threat to Western civilization. The brothers enlisted dictators such as Somoza in Nicaragua and Batista in Cuba against Arbenz. The CIA organized air strikes and an invasion force. But nothing could happen until Arbenz’s strong support among the people in Guatemala could be shattered. The brothers arranged this through Cardinal Spellman, who enlisted Archbishop Rossell y Arellano. ‘A pastoral letter was read on April 9, 1954 in all Guatemalan churches.’
A masterpiece of propaganda, the pastoral letter misrepresented Arbenz as a dangerous communist who was the enemy of all Guatemalans. False radio broadcasts produced a fake reality of freedom fighter victories and army defections. Arbenz asked the UN to send fact finders, but Washington prevented that from happening. American journalists, with the exception of James Reston, supported the lies. Washington threatened and bought off Guatemala’s senior military commanders, who forced Arbenz to resign. The CIA’s chosen and well paid ‘liberator,’ Col. Castillo Armas, was installed as Arbenz’s successor.
We recently witnessed a similar operation in Ukraine.
President Eisenhower thanked the CIA for averting ‘a Communist beachhead in our hemisphere,’ and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles gave a national TV and radio address in which he declared that the events in Guatemala ‘expose the evil purpose of the Kremlin.’ This despite the uncontested fact that the only outside power operating in Guatemala was the Dulles brothers.
What had really happened is that a democratic and reformist government was overthrown because it compensated United Fruit Company for the nationalization of the company’s fallow (braak liggend. svh) land at a value listed by the company on its tax returns. America’s leading law firm or perhaps more accurately, America’s foreign policy-maker, Sullivan & Cromwell, had no intention of permitting a democratic government to prevail over the interests of the law firm’s client, especially when senior partners of the firm controlled both overt and covert US foreign policy. The two brothers, whose family members were invested in the United Fruit Company, simply applied the resources of the CIA, State Department, and US media to the protection of their private interests. The extraordinary gullibility (goedgelovigheid. svh) of the American people, the corrupt American media, and the indoctrinated and impotent Congress allowed the Dulles brothers to succeed in overthrowing a democracy.
Keep in mind that this use of the US government in behalf of private interests occurred 60 years ago long before the corrupt Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes. And no doubt in earlier times as well.
The Dulles brothers next intended victim was Ho Chi Minh. Ho, a nationalist leader, asked for America’s help in freeing Vietnam from French colonial rule. But John Foster Dulles, a self-righteous anti-communist, miscast Ho as a Communist Threat who was springing the domino theory on the Western innocents. Nationalism and anti-colonialism, Foster declared, were merely a cloak for communist subversion.
Paul Kattenburg, the State Department desk officer for Vietnam suggested that instead of war, the US should give Ho $500 million in reconstruction aid to rebuild the country from war and French misrule, which would free Ho from dependence on Russian and Chinese support, and, thereby, influence. Ho appealed to Washington several times, but the demonic inflexibility of the Dulles brothers prevented any sensible response. Instead, the hysteria whipped-up over the ‘communist threat’ by the Dulles brothers landed the United States in the long, costly, fiasco known as the Vietnam War. Kattenburg later wrote that it was suicidal for the US ‘to cut out its eyes and ears, to castrate its analytic capacity, to shut itself off from the truth because of blind prejudice.’ Unfortunately for Americans and the world, castrated analytic capacity is Washington’s strongest suit.
The Dulles brothers’ next targets were President Sukarno of Indonesia, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and Fidel Castro. The plot against Castro was such a disastrous failure that it cost Allen Dulles his job. President Kennedy lost confidence in the agency and told his brother Bobby that after his reelection he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces. When President Kennedy removed Allen Dulles, the CIA understood the threat and struck first.
Warren Nutter, my Ph.D. dissertation chairman, later Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, taught his students that for the US government to maintain the people’s trust, which democracy requires, the government’s policies must be affirmations of our principles and be openly communicated to the people. Hidden agendas, such as those of the Dulles brothers and the Clinton, Bush and Obama regimes, must rely on secrecy and manipulation and, thereby, arouse the distrust of the people. If Americans are too brainwashed to notice, many foreign nationals are not.
The US government’s secret agendas have cost Americans and many peoples in the world tremendously. Essentially, the Foster brothers created the Cold War with their secret agendas and anti-communist hysteria. Secret agendas committed Americans to long, costly, and unnecessary wars in Vietnam and the Middle East. Secret CIA and military agendas intending regime change in Cuba were blocked by President John F. Kennedy and resulted in the assassination of a president, who, for all his faults, was likely to have ended the Cold War twenty years before Ronald Reagan seized the opportunity.
Secret agendas have prevailed for so long that the American people themselves are now corrupted. As the saying goes, ‘a fish rots from the head.’ The rot in Washington now permeates the country.
Letwel, Paul Craig Roberts is een insider, die van binnenuit de realpolitik van Washington en Wall Street meemaakte. Daartegenover staan de Nederlandse outsiders, al dan niet verbonden aan het universitaire milieu en/of de zelfbenoemde kwaliteitsmedia. Het telkens weer interveniëren in soevereine staten, en het omver werpen van democratische regeringen, wordt door Buruma verhuld achter een waas van propagandistische begrippen als ‘intens beleden internationalistische opvattingen,’ zoals ‘samenwerking tussen landen, vrijhandel en politieke vrijheid voor allen,’ waardoor de ‘landen’ in ‘Oost-Azïe [nooit] zo lang in welvaart en vrede [hebben] geleefd als onder Amerikaanse bescherming na 1945.’ Kennelijk behoort Vietnam niet tot Oost-Azië en ook Indonesië niet. Het zijn voorbeelden van hoe onbetrouwbaar Buruma’s opinie-werk is. De steun die Washington verstrekte aan grootschalige gruweldaden in Indonesië is immers algemeen bekend:
The Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 (Indonesian genocide, Indonesian Communist Purge, Indonesian politicide, or the 1965 Tragedy were large-scale killings and civil unrest that occurred in Indonesia over several months, targeting PKI party members, Communist sympathizers, ethnic Abangan Javanese, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists, often at the instigation of the armed forces and government. It began as an anti-communist purge following a controversial attempted coup d'état by the 30 September Movement in Indonesia. The most widely published estimates were that 500,000 to more than one million people were killed, with some more recent estimates going as high as two to three million. The purge was a pivotal event in the transition to the ‘New Order’ and the elimination of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) as a political force, with impacts on the global Cold War. The upheavals led to the fall of President Sukarno and the commencement of Suharto's three-decade authoritarian presidency… Despite a consensus at the highest levels of the US and British governments that it would be necessary ‘to liquidate Sukarno,’ as related in a CIA memorandum from 1962, and the existence of extensive contacts between anti-communist army officers and the US military establishment — training of over 1,200 officers, ‘including senior military figures,’ and providing weapons and economic assistance — the CIA denied active involvement in the killings. Declassified US documents in 2017 revealed that the US government had detailed knowledge of the mass killings from the beginning, and was supportive of the actions of the Indonesian Army. US complicity in the killings, which included providing extensive lists of communist party officials to Indonesian death squads, has previously been established by historians and journalists. A top-secret CIA report from 1968 stated that the massacres ‘rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965–66
Belangrijk voor een juiste beoordeling van Ian Buruma’s doortraptheid is het feit dat hij op dinsdag 16 juli 2002 in The Guardian ervoor pleitte dat ‘we too’ in Europa, ‘must do the dirty work, and take the risk of being held accountable,’ om de simpele reden dat ‘wij’ onze NAVO-bondgenoot niet langer konden belasten om helemaal alleen al ‘het smerige werk’ te doen. Immers, ook ‘wij’ Europeanen, profiteren van de Amerikaanse terreur in het buitenland. Vanwege ondermeer deze collaborerende houding kreeg Buruma in 2008 de Erasmus-Prijs, genoemd naar de man die De Lof der Zotheid (1509) heeft geschreven, waarin de grote humanist stelt dat de bron van alle oorlogen de zotheid is, want:
Is niet de oorlog het zaad en de bron van alle hooggeprezen daden? Maar is er nu wel iets zotters te bedenken dan om de een of andere oorzaak zulk een strijd te ondernemen, waarbij elk van beide partijen altijd meer schade dan voordeel heeft?
Buruma’s bepleite ‘smerige werk’ leidde in Guatemala tot ‘a series of U.S.-backed authoritarian rulers,’ waarbij in de jaren tachtig ‘a genocidal scorched-earth campaign against the indigenous Maya population’ van start ging, waardoor ontelbare ‘other human rights violations were committed, including massacres of civilian populations, rape, aerial bombardment, and forced disappearances.’
De Italiaanse historicus Piero Gleijeses, hoogleraar United States foreign policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University kwam tot de slotsom:
that Guatemala was ‘ruled by a culture of fear,’ and that it held the ‘macabre record for human rights violations in Latin America.’ These violations were partially the result of a particularly brutal counter-insurgency strategy adopted by the government. The ideological narrative that the 1954 coup had represented a battle against communism was often used to justify the violence in the 1980s. Historians have attributed the violence of the civil war to the 1954 coup, and the ‘anti-communist paranoia’ that it generated. The civil war came to an end in 1996, with a peace accord between the guerrillas and the government of Guatemala, which included an amnesty for the fighters on both sides. The civil war claimed the lives of an estimated 200,000 civilians in all.
Dit alles weerhield ook mijn oude vriend Geert Mak niet om de VS te prijzen als de ‘decennialang ordebewaker en politieagent’ van de wereld, terwijl de ‘powerduider pur sang’ Bas Heijne spreekt van het ‘in alle opzichten superieure Amerika.’ Ik blijf wat langer bij dit onderwerp stilstaan omdat de gecorrumpeerde Nederlandse massamedia volkomen onverschillig blijven voor het leed dat hun propaganda legitimeert, en waaronder vele honderden miljoenen burgers elders gebukt gaan. Het universitaire wereldje alhier is al even intellectueel corrupt. Zo beweerde de universitair docent van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, Ruud van Dijk, in zijn opiniestuk 'Amerika is nog steeds de onmisbare natie' in de Volkskrant van 19 december 2015:
exceptionalisme is een vast onderdeel van de Amerikaanse identiteit. Het is ons vitale belang, en daarom onze plicht, er alles aan te doen dat het zich zo manifesteert dat het internationale systeem er stabieler van wordt. Voorlopig schieten we daarin tekort.
De redenen waarom de VS — in de woorden van Mak — als 'ordebewaker en politieagent' van de wereld dient op te treden, zijn volgens Van Dijk (foto links) de volgende:
[i]n de eerste plaats omdat de liberaal-democratische orde van onze tijd grotendeels op Amerikaanse initiatieven teruggaat. Amerika zit in het dna van het internationale systeem. Verder hebben de VS sinds 1945 een centrale rol gespeeld bij handhaving en uitbouw. Het is daarom twijfelachtig of de diverse internationale verbanden, juist ook in hun onderlinge samenhang, effectief kunnen blijven zonder Amerikaanse voortrekkersrol.
Van Dijk's stelling dat er sprake is van een 'liberaal-democratische orde’ is een propagandistisch cliché, zoals hijzelf weet, tenzij feiten niet tot zijn bewustzijn kunnen doordringen. In werkelijkheid heeft de buitenlandse politiek van de VS niets te maken met een ‘democratische orde,’ maar juist met het tegenovergestelde ervan, namelijk met een uiterst agressieve, neoliberale wanorde, zoals al sinds de gewelddadige omverwerping van de Iraanse democratie in 1953 het geval is. De lezer die hier meer van wil weten, adviseer ik het goed geïnformeerde boek All the Shah's Men, an American coup and the roots of middle east terror (2008) te raadplegen van de Amerikaanse voormalige New York Times-correspondent, Stephen Kinzer. Hij toont in zijn uitgebreid gedocumenteerde 'National Bestseller' aan dat:
[b]y violently pushing Iran off the path to democracy in 1953, the United States created a whirlpool of instability from which undreamed-of threats emerged years later.
The central theme of this book is that the Islamic right was seen as a valuable U.S. ally during the Cold War... There is an unwritten chapter in the history of the Cold War and the New World Order that followed. It is the story of how the United States — sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly — funded and encouraged right-wing Islamist activism. Devil's Game attempts to fill in that vital missing link.
Vijf jaar later merkte op zijn beurt Stephen Kinzer op dat eveneens de:
effects of U.S. intervention in Latin America have been overwhelming negative. They have had the effect of reinforcing brutal and unjust social systems and crushing people who are fighting for what we would actually call 'American values.' In many cases, if you take Chile, Guatemala, or Honduras for examples, we actually overthrew governments that had principles similar to ours and replaced those democratic, quasi-democratic, or nationalist leaders with people who detest everything the United States stands for…
In an opinion piece, he wrote in 2016 that Aleppo had been liberated from the violent militants who had ruled it for three years, but were liberated by Assad's forces. However, the American public was told ‘convoluted nonsense’ about the war. He further noted: ‘At the recent debate in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton claimed that United Nations peace efforts in Syria were based on "an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva." The precise opposite is true. In 2012 Secretary of State Clinton joined Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in a successful effort to kill Kofi Annan's UN peace plan because it would have accommodated Iran and kept Assad in power, at least temporarily. No one on the Milwaukee stage knew enough to challenge her.’ […]
In April 2018, he added:
‘According to the logic behind American strategy in the Middle East — and the rest of the world — one of our principal goals should be to prevent peace or prosperity from breaking out in countries whose governments are unfriendly to us. That outcome in Syria would have results we consider intolerable.’
Kenmerkend voor het Nederlands academisch niveau is dat Ruud van Dijk 'History of International Relations' doceert en
courses in the history of recent international relations, but also… American Studies (in Dutch and English). I am also the coordinator of the BA and MA programs in the History of International Relations.
Men mag daarom ervan uitgaan dat dr. Ruud van Dijk op de hoogte is van het feit dat de VS in 1954 de regering van de democratisch gekozen president Jacobo Árbenz ten val bracht, nadat hij het parasitaire systeem van grootgrondbezit wilde aanpakken. Ook de gevolgen van die interventie, een misdaad aangezien zij een ernstige schending was van de soevereiniteit van een ander land, zijn vandaag de dag nog merkbaar. Op 26 november 2010 schreef ik op mijn weblog het volgende:
Voor me op mijn bureau ligt een brief van Unicef, het kinderfonds van de wereldgemeenschap. Op de enveloppe staat:
‘Bijna 1 miljoen kinderen in Guatemala zijn ondervoed. Zij willen maar één ding: zonder honger naar bed.’
Dit was het resultaat van het feit dat Washington er in 1954 de democratie vernietigde. Voor de geïnteresseerde: Wikipedia schetst de achtergrond die noodzakelijk is om te beseffen hoe exemplarisch het geval Guatemala is wat betreft de Amerikaanse buitenlandse politiek, en hoe propagandistisch Ruud van Dijk's beweringen zijn:
Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. September 14, 1913 – January 27, 1971) was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who served as Defense Minister of Guatemala from 1944–1951, and as President of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954.
He was ousted in a coup d'état engineered by the United States government and CIA, and was replaced by a military junta, headed by Colonel Carlos Castillo. He went into exile after the coup and died in Mexico in 1971...
In the 1890s, the United States began to implement the Monroe Doctrine, pushing out European colonial powers and establishing U.S. hegemony over resources and labor in Latin American nations. The dictators that ruled Guatemala during the late 19th and early 20th century were generally very accommodating to U.S. business and political interests. So unlike other Latin American nations, such as Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba, the U.S. did not have to use overt military force to maintain dominance in Guatemala, and the Guatemalan military/police worked closely with the U.S. military and State Department to secure U.S. interests. The Guatemalan government exempted several U.S. corporations from paying taxes, privatized and sold off publicly owned utilities, and gave away huge swaths of public land.
In 1930, the dictator General Jorge Ubico came to power, backed by the United States, and initiated one of the most brutally repressive governments in Central American history. He created a widespread network of spies and informants, and had large numbers of political opponents tortured and put to death. A wealthy aristocrat (with an estimated income of $215,000 per year, in 1930s dollars) and a staunch anti-communist, he consistently sided with landowners and urban elites in disputes with peasants. He implemented a system of debt slavery and forced labor, and passed laws allowing landowners to execute workers as a 'disciplinary' measure. He also openly identified as a fascist; he admired Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler, saying at one point: 'I am like Hitler. I execute first and ask questions later.' Ubico was disdainful of the indigenous population, calling them 'animal-like,' and stated that to become 'civilized' they needed mandatory military training, comparing it to 'domesticating donkeys.' He gave away hundreds of thousands of hectares to the United Fruit Company (UFCO) and exempted them from taxes, and allowed the U.S. military to establish bases in Guatemala.
Ubico considered himself to be 'another Napoleon.' He dressed ostentatiously, and surrounded himself with statues and paintings of the emperor, regularly commenting on the similarities between their appearances. He militarized numerous political and social institutions — including the post office, schools, and symphony orchestras — and placed military officers in charge of many government posts. He frequently travelled around the country performing 'inspections,' in dress uniform, followed by a military escort, a mobile radio station, an official biographer, and cabinet members.
Ubico's repressive policies and arrogant demeanor eventually led to a widespread popular insurrection, led by middle-class intellectuals, professionals, and junior army officers. In July 1, 1944 Ubico resigned from office amidst a general strike and nationwide protests. Initially, he had planned to hand over power to the former director of police, General Roderico Anzueto, who he felt he could control. But his advisors noted that Anzueto's pro-Nazi sympathies had made him very unpopular, and that he would not be able to control the military. So Ubico instead chose to select a triumvirate of Major General Bueneventura Piñeda, Major General Eduardo Villagrán Ariza, and General Federico Ponce Vaides. The three generals promised to convene the national assembly to hold an election for a provisional president, but when the congress met on July 3, soldiers held everyone at gunpoint and forced them to vote for General Ponce, rather than the popular civilian candidate Dr. Ramón Calderón. Ponce, who had previously retired from military service due to alcoholism, took orders from Ubico and kept many of the officials who had worked in the Ubico administration. The repressive policies of the Ubico administration were continued.
Opposition groups began organizing again, this time joined by many prominent political and military leaders, who deemed the Ponce regime unconstitutional. Among the military officers in the opposition were Jacobo Árbenz and Major Franciso Javier Araña. Ubico had fired Árbenz from his teaching post at the Escuela Politécnica, and since then Árbenz had been in El Salvador, organizing a band of revolutionary exiles. On October 19, 1944 a small group of soldiers and students, led by Árbenz and Arana, attacked the National Palace.
By 1950, a handful of U.S. corporations controlled Guatemala's primary electrical utilities, the nation's only railroad, and the banana industry, which was Guatemala's chief agricultural export industry. By the mid-1940s, Guatemalan banana plantations accounted for more than one quarter of all of United Fruit Company's production in Latin America.
Election
In March 1951, Árbenz assumed the presidency after Guatemala's second-ever universal-suffrage election, marking the first peaceful transition of power in Guatemala's history. He campaigned as a reformer and garnered 60% of the vote by promising to make Guatemala an economically independent, socialist state that would shed its colonial-era dependence on the U.S. His predecessor, Juan José Arévalo, had successfully begun a series of reforms to open the political process to all citizens. Arévalo's extension of voting and labor rights threatened the power of the traditional elite and led to more than twenty failed coup attempts to oust him.
Land reform
Arbenz set land reform as his central goal as only 2 % of the population owned 70 % of the land.
Árbenz continued Arévalo's reform agenda and, in June 1952, his government enacted an agrarian reform program. The agrarian reform law (decree 900) gave the government power to expropriate only uncultivated portions of large plantations. Estates of up to 670 acres (2.7 km2) were exempted if at least two-thirds of the land was cultivated; also exempt were lands that had a slope of more than 30 degrees (a significant exemption in mountainous Guatemala). The land was then allocated to individual families. Owners of expropriated land were compensated according to the worth of the land claimed in May 1952 tax assessments. Land was paid for in twenty-five year bonds with a 3 percent interest rate. Arbenz himself, a landowner through his wife, gave up 1,700 acres (7 km2) of his own land in the land reform program.
While Árbenz's proposed agenda was welcomed by impoverished peasants who made up the majority of Guatemala's population, it provoked the ire of the upper landowning classes, powerful U.S. corporate interests, and factions of the military, who accused Árbenz of bowing to Communist influence. This tension resulted in noticeable unrest in the country. Carlos Castillo, an army officer, rebelled at the Aurora airport in the early 1950s, was defeated and shot, surviving his injuries. Castillo then spent some time in a Guatemalan prison before escaping and going into exile in 1951.
Coup
May 1975 CIA internal memo, released under the Freedom of Information Act, describing the CIA's role in the overthrow of Árbenz. Instability, combined with Árbenz's relative tolerance of Guatemalan Party of Labour (PGT) and other leftists influences, prompted the CIA to draw up a contingency plan entitled Operation PBFORTUNE in 1951. It outlined a method of ousting Árbenz if he were deemed a Communist threat in the hemisphere.
The United Fruit Company — now renamed Chiquita — a U.S.-based corporation, was also threatened by Árbenz's land reform initiative. United Fruit was Guatemala's largest landowner, with 85% of its holdings uncultivated, vulnerable to Árbenz's reform plans. In calculating its tax obligations, United Fruit had consistently (and drastically) undervalued the worth of its holdings. In its 1952 taxes, it claimed its land was only worth $3 per acre. When, in accordance with United Fruit's tax claims, the Árbenz government offered to compensate the company at the $3 rate, the company claimed the land's true value was $75/acre but refused to explain the precipitous jump in its own determination of the land's value.
In 1952, the Guatemalan Party of Labour was legalized; Communists subsequently gained considerable minority influence over important peasant organizations and labor unions, but not over the governing political party and won only four seats in the 58-seat governing body. The CIA, having drafted Operation PBFORTUNE, was already concerned about Árbenz's potential Communist ties. United Fruit had been lobbying the CIA to oust reform governments in Guatemala since Arévalo's time but it wasn't until the Eisenhower administration that it found an ear in the White House. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration was still flush with victory from its covert operation to topple the Mossadegh government in Iran the year before. On February 19, 1954, the CIA began Operation WASHTUB, a plan to plant a phony Soviet arms cache in Nicaragua to demonstrate Guatemalan ties to Moscow.
As it happened, WASHTUB was unnecessary. In May 1954, Czechoslovak weaponry arrived in secret into Guatemala aboard the Swedish ship Alfhem. The ship's manifests had been falsified as to the nature of its cargo. The U.S. took this as final proof of Árbenz's Soviet links. The Czechoslovaks supplied, for cash down, obsolete and barely functional German WWII weaponry.
'The direct contacts between the Soviet Union and the Árbenz Government consisted of one Soviet diplomat working out an exchange of bananas for agricultural machinery, which fell through because neither side had refrigerated ships. The only other evidence of contact the CIA found after the operation were two bills to the Guatemalan Communist Party from a Moscow bookstore, totalling $22.95.'
The Árbenz government was convinced a U.S.-sponsored invasion was imminent: it had previously released detailed accounts of the CIA's Operation PBFORTUNE (called the White Papers) and perceived US actions at the OAS convention in Caracas that year as a lead-up to intervention. The administration ordered the CIA to sponsor a coup d'état, code-named Operation PBSUCCESS that toppled the government. Árbenz resigned on June 27, 1954 and was forced to flee, seeking refuge in the Mexican Embassy.
After the coup, Frank Wisner organized an operation called PBHistory to secure Árbenz Government documents. PBHistory aimed to prove Soviet control of Guatemala and, in so doing, hopefully provide actionable intelligence with regard to other Soviet connections and personnel in Latin America. Wisner sent two teams who, with the help of the Army and Castillo Armas's junta, gathered 150,000 documents. Ronald M. Schneider, an extra-Agency researcher who later examined the PBHistory documents, found no traces of Soviet control and substantial evidence that Guatemalan Communists acted alone, without support or guidance from outside the country.
In verband met de lengte meer de volgende keer over academische propagandisten als dr. Ruud van Dijk, wiens beweringen als ‘Washington streeft nog altijd naar een wereld waarin individuele vrijheden — fundamentele rechten van de mens — de norm zijn’ volstrekt onweersproken blijven.
2 opmerkingen:
om te weten hoe dulles klonk kun je dit beluisteren en zien https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi18ywCJTRA
en die andere boef, terrorist in maatpak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czT0ScGx-Fc
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