Comment on The crusade against Lemmy devs, lemmy.ml, and so-called "tankies"
Cricket@lemmy.zip 1 week agoNot as much as you’d think, honestly.
Okay, I don’t have numbers to back up my claim, but the strong impression I have is that any country that tries to implement any government system the US doesn’t like or especially if they try to nationalize some industry or make their markets or their resources more difficult for American companies to access get swiftly overthrown, either overtly or covertly. The only reason to take a step like that would be if those companies had a sweeheart deal in the first place, i.e., wealth extraction.
I’m also involved in politics. There’s legit ideology there, just like there was legit ideology in the Soviet Union.
Sure, I don’t doubt that many people who get into for instance the State Department have legit ideology. But the fact remains that the foreign policy of the US has remained fairly stable across multiple administrations from both parties, which essentially amounts to saying “promoting freedom and democracy” but in actuality promoting expanding military power around the world and expanding economic power as a result of that military presence at just about any cost.
What are you thinking of there? I can’t really come up with anything past the 80’s. Some leaders will blame the West for their own domestic protesters, but it’s always BS. If the US couldn’t find one guy for that long they certainly can’t whip up an entire nation.
See en.wikipedia.org/…/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U… and worldpopulationreview.com/…/united-states-involve…
Those are only the ones that we know about, which is very likely a fraction of the recent ones because most of this stuff is secret and will continue to be so for 50 years. I don’t agree at all that it’s always BS. If you’re talking about Bin Laden, that’s a completely different kind of case that’s unrelated to intelligence efforts to manipulate other countries and also because as far as I know the US didn’t have any presence in Afghanistan before 9/11.
US-friendly governments keep coming to power in different places, especially in Latin America, and often under contentious circumstances. Do you think that that keeps happening because the people of those countries love the US? I would be more inclined to believe that the CIA was involved in overthrowing governments when those governments claim that than not. Because it’s happened dozens and dozens of times in the last 80 years. There’s a strong pattern there, almost like a habit.
Here’s a good quote from that Wikipedia article:
A 2016 study by Carnegie Mellon University professor Dov Levin found that the United States intervened in 81 foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, with the majority of those being through covert, rather than overt, actions.[98][99] A 2021 review of the existing literature found that foreign interventions since World War II tend overwhelmingly to fail to achieve their purported objectives.[100]
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days ago
My sense of the Cold War examples is that they happened in places that were on a kind of knife’s edge already. Like Chile - there was an existing underfunded, previously influential and endogamous military that didn’t need to much encouragement to take down Allende, electoral mandate be damned. They managed to gain influence across a lot of Latin America at the time, but there’s no comparable place now. In modern places like with unstable governments, the US has been losing ground this decade, as opposed to running the show.
If the US was secretly replacing otherwise-stable governments all over the world, it would take vast numbers of people all over and be much too hard to perfectly to cover up. France’s program in north Africa ended up an open secret, for example. You don’t need it to explain anything either; so, it’s not supported by Occam’s razor. And obviously, how could I falsify that idea? This is when it starts feeling like arguing against a conspiracy theory. Every thing you can say against it gets twisted into evidence for a successful coverup.
There’s been open interventions like Iraq and Libya, and legitimate controversy about them, but neither of those guys were remotely elected (which is what I was asking about). Intervening in the sense of throwing their weight around in lesser ways definitely happens, both in secret and in open, but China is also notorious for it, and has even taken a couple swings at Canada deep in the US sphere.
My point there was just that a lot of the decision makers believe they’re doing something noble (and the rest just want to get re-elected). At least in my country, which is culturally very close to the US, foreign policy isn’t a deliberately self-serving enterprise. (Although the fascist/“far-right populist” movement obviously goes in exactly that direction, and claims it’s a virtue)
The first example I was thinking of there is Venezuela. Conditions in the nation are really bad, there’s been mass migration out of it, and it’s not hard to find a Venezuelan that hates Maduro and friends. He can say it’s the CIA planting people, but even if you agree that none of the situation is actually his fault, it’s not the CIA - people do blame the current government. Same story during the Arab Spring. Really, dictators will usually say an enemy manufactured any civil unrest, and the US is the obvious choice for some of them. Others blame local rivals, and historically Jews were popular.
Also, Maduro is still in charge of Venezuela, which goes back to the knife’s edge thing. The US appears to be gearing up for an open armed invasion to dislodge him, because just the considerable public support for the opposition and whatever clandestine programs weren’t enough.
Interesting, I might have to read that. In my head the banana republic coups worked like half the time, but maybe that’s just because nobody talks about the failed ones.