Before The Age of Donald - Part Two by Dave Jaffe

          Before The Age of Donald - Part Two by Dave Jaffe


        What took place in Brazil in the last 50 years wasn't an aberration. It's part and parcel of U.S. foreign policy. Wherever the United States goes in the world its government works to overthrow or undermine all left wing governments and even slightly left tilting leaders.
     Republican and Democratic governments alike often conspire to overthrow leaders who don't respect U.S. governments or American owned businesses.. If elected governments often financed by the United States, can do the job, so much the better for America. Yet if that doesn't work, the U.S. will push for the military in most countries to do the dirty deed. And if the country's military aren't up to doing the work, then U.S. armed forces will invade a country and kill many people.
     "The destruction was mutual," former U.S. president Jimmy Carter said about the U.S. backed war in Vietnam and later in Indochina. Yet here Carter wasn't telling the truth. The U.S. lost close to 60,000 troops in this terrible war. Over 180,000 Americans in uniform were wounded there. These are huge casualties by any measure and even at the time I lamented these terrible statistics.
     Yet the U.S. forces in Indochina killed close to 50 times as  many people. Between 1954 and 1975 the U.S. armed forces killed over 2 million Vietnamese, 650,000 Cambodians, and 300,000 Laotians. To-day nobody I know of talks about this. When U.S. president Barack Obama visited Laos, he didn't even apologize for the U.S. war in Laos that killed one tenth of the Laotian people.
      The communists in Cambodia, known now as the Khmer Rouge, took power in 1975. They then killed over one and a half million people. This was genocide and was a terrible act. Everybody or at least many people know about this., for the media publicize this fact again and again. Yet very few media outlets mention the U.S. killings in Cambodia or in Vietnam or Laos.
     From 1954 to the present day, the United States government  helped overthrow leaders in the following countries: Cambodia, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Grenada, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia (twice), Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil and the Congo. These are the ones I remember or found through my own research and the work of others. Yet there may have been other places that I haven't mentioned.
      Once in power many of the leaders of the countries mentioned above, plundered their countries's treasuries, tortured and/or murdered left wing people, crushed all unions and throttled all democratic movements. They also opened their country's borders to unrestricted U.S. investment.
    "They want we've got," U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson told American troops at the height of the Vietnam War. "And they're not going to get it." Whatever President Donald Trump does to some of his citizens it will have been done before by many governments who owe their rule to U.S.- backed money and power. I truly hope it won't be as bad.