CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Overthrow:
Regime Change Begins in Corporate Boardrooms
20 Corporate Crime Reporter 17(11), April 21, 2006
Hawaii, Cuba, Phillippines, Puerto Rico,
Nicaragua, Honduras, Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam,
Chile, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
What do these fourteen governments have in common?
You got it.
The United States overthrew them.
And in almost in every case, the overthrow can be traced to corporate interests.
In Hawaii, the sugar companies didn’t want to pay export duties –
so they overthrew the queen of Hawaii and made Hawaii part of the United States.
In Guatemala, United Fruit wanted Arbenz out.
Out he went.
In Chile, Allende offended the copper interests.
Allende – dead.
In Iran, Mossadegh offended major oil interests.
Mossadegh out.
In Nicaragua, Jose Santos Zelaya was bothering American lumber and mining companies.
Zelaya – out.
In Honduras, an American banana magnate organized the coup of the Honduran government.
And on down the list.
Democratic Party critics charge that the Bush administration is ripping the
United States from a long history of diplomacy by violently overthrowing governments.
Not true, says former New York Times foreign correspondent Stephen
Kinzer.
Kinzer says that in fact the opposite is true.
“Actually, the United States has been overthrowing governments for more
than a century,” Kinzer said in an interview with Corporate Crime
Reporter.
He documents this in a new book: Overthrow:
America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (Times
Books, 2006).
Overthrow is the third in a series of regime change books by Kinzer.
His previous two:
All
the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
(2003).
Bitter
Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (1982).
Together, they would make a remarkable “regime change” boxed set
for the holidays.
Kinzer left the Times last year.
He says that the parting was “perfectly amicable” – although
he doesn’t sound convincing when he says this.
After all, Kinzer is an anti-authoritarian Noam Chomsky in authoritarian garb.
This became clear during an interview
Kinzer gave on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross earlier this
month.
Gross tried to get Kinzer to concede that if we hadn’t overthrown these
governments, the Soviets would have taken over, or today, radical Islam will
take over.
Kinzer didn’t give an inch.
For example, Gross said that had we not overthrown these fourteen governments,
“the Soviets might have won the Cold War.”
“I don't think that's true at all,” Kinzer responded. “In
the first place, the countries whose governments we overthrew, all countries
that we claimed were pawns of the Kremlin, actually were nothing of the sort.
We now know, for example, that the Kremlin had not the slightest interest in
Guatemala at all in the early 1950s. They didn't even know Guatemala existed.
They didn't even have diplomatic or economic relations.”
“The leader of Iran who we overthrew was fiercely anti-communist. He came
from an aristocratic family. He despised Marxist ideology.”
“In Chile, we always portrayed President Allende as a cat's paw of the
Kremlin. We now know from documents that have come out that the Soviets and
the Chinese were constantly fighting with him and urging him to calm down and
not be so provocative towards the Americans. So, in the first place, the Soviets
were not behind those regimes. We completely overestimated the influence of
the Soviet Union on those regimes.”
When Gross asked Kinzer what he thought of the “spread of radical Islam,”
Kinzer didn’t hesitate.
“We sometimes like to think that our interventions in these countries
don't have effects, but when we break down the doors of foreign countries and
impose our own leaders, as we did in Iran and as we've recently done in Iraq,
we outrage a lot of people,” Kinzer said. “We like to think that
everybody will soon calmly come to realize that by rational standards, this
was a good thing to do. But that doesn't happen. We are not able to change cultures
as easily as we are able to change regimes.”
The United States had a hand in many other overthrows, but Kinzer limited his
cases to those where the United States was the primary mover and shaker.
So, for example, while the United States played a role in the overthrow of Lumumba
in the Congo, Kinzer says that it was primarily an operation by Belgium on behalf
of large Belgian mining interests.
This might be the most important book to read as the United States approaches
a showdown with Iran.
President Bush says he’s trying to bring democracy to Iran.
In fact, Iranians had democracy once.
And we crushed it.
Kinzer is now on tour promoting his book.
And he’s got a gig at Northwestern University in Chicago, where he lives.
He’s teaching a course in regime change.
(For a complete transcript of the interview with
Kinzer, see 20 Corporate Crime Reporter 17, (11-16), April 24, 2006).
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