The Outrageous Hypocrisy of U.S. “Indignation” at “Interfering in Elections”

January 10, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The leaders of the U.S. are livid with indignation, shocked, by the allegations of their own intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. How dare they violate our sovereignty, especially since (as the U.S. rulers never tire of saying), the very essence of America is its “democratic principles,” its “free and fair elections,” and its noble and self-sacrificing efforts to spread that democracy around the world.

This sanctimonious horseshit was sharply punctured by a January 6 op-ed in the Boston Globe by Stephen Kinzer, “We’ve been hacking elections for more than a century.” Kinzer was a New York Times correspondent and is now a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and he lays bare an ugly slice of the reality of how the U.S. interfered in elections in other nations, and knows a thing or two about the reality of U.S. respect for other nations’ elections and sovereignty.

Kinzer runs through 13 cases between 1898 and 2014 of the U.S. blatantly interfering in elections of other countries.  The cases he cites are: Cuba, 1898; Hawai’i, 1900; Italy, 1948; Vietnam, 1955; Indonesia, 1955; Lebanon, 1957; Dominican Republic, 1965; Chile, 1964; Chile, 1970; Israel, 1975; Nicaragua, 1984; Honduras, 2009; Ukraine, 2014.

In Hawai’i (which had been an independent country), the U.S. annexed it and then staged elections in which most native Hawai’ians were not allowed to vote.

In Lebanon, it funded pro-U.S. candidates to Parliament, who then “chose” the leader the U.S. wanted as president. When people rose up in protest the U.S. sent troops to suppress them.

In the Dominican Republic, the U.S. backed a military coup against popularly elected President Juan Bosch. When people rose up against the military dictatorship, the U.S. sent 23,000 troops to crush the rebellion, killing about 4,000 Dominicans and setting up a brutal dictatorship.

In Chile in 1970, the CIA spearheaded a multi-pronged effort to block Salvador Allende’s election, including the assassination of a Chilean general who refused to lead a revolt against Allende. Allende was elected in spite of this, so the U.S. organized a coup against him in which hundreds of thousands were tortured, “disappeared,” imprisoned, or murdered. According to Kinzer, “An American official asserted that intervention in Chile was made necessary by ‘the stupidity of its own people,’ which they expressed by voting for a candidate we opposed.”

In the Ukraine Kinzer says: “as protesters gathered there in an effort to overthrow their elected government, a senior State Department official appeared in the crowd to encourage their revolt. She was caught telling an aide which Ukrainian politician was ‘the guy’ Americans had chosen to be Ukraine’s next leader, and asserting that the United States would ‘midwife this thing.’ A few weeks later our ‘guy’ became prime minister—setting off a crisis that ended with Russian military intervention.

This is a small sample of these interventions. Check out the American Crimes series for more examples, or Google “U.S. interfered in elections in”, and you will be reading for hours. All of this bears out what BA says in BAsics 1:3: 

The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy, but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism.

 

 

 

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