From 1950 to 1953, the US waged war against Korea. In the war 2 million civilians were killed. After the US had bombed everything else in North Korea they began bombing the dams. US air force journals described the destruction with pride. This caused the wiping out of rice fields, which led to the starvation of countless people. Interestingly, in the Nuremberg trials (held just a few years before) the US had held Germany guilty of a war crime for opening Holland's dikes: an action essentially identical to the bombing of North Korea's dams by the US. From 1952 through 1954, senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin chaired the Subcommittee on Un-American Activities. It was a witch-hunt: innocent people were accused of being communists (which was never against any law), and careers were destroyed as the accused were encouraged to denounce others, who were then "blacklisted" and could not thereafter find employment. In 1953 the US paid street mobs and army officers to harass Iran's nationalist premier: Mohammed Mosaddeq. Mosaddeq was considered a danger to US interests because he wanted more for his country than the 20% share of its oil revenues that Britain was allowing at the time. Mosaddeq had driven the British out of his country in 1951. The US pulled off the coup that gave the Shah of Iran absolute power over the country. This resulted in putting the British back in the Iran oil business -- with a new partner: the US. The two countries began sharing 80 percent of Iran's oil revenues. It was good for US business, but bad for the Iranian people who hated the Shah's regime (and by extension, the country that put him in power.) The US would pay the price years later in 1979 when the Iranian people overthrew the hated Shah, installed Khomeini in his place, and took 52 members of the American embassy hostage for 444 days. In 1954, President Eisenhower approved CIA plans to topple the government of Guatemala. Arbenz, the country's leader, was a social democrat who had patterned his policies after Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Arbenz had tried to break his country's dependence on the US based United Fruit Company (which owned nearly half of Guatemala). He expropriated 400,000 acres of company-owned land and gave it to landless Mayans to farm. In compensation, he offered to pay United Fruit 1.2 million dollars. In the company's eyes it wasn't nearly enough. The CIA proceeded to frame Arbenz as a communist. They parachuted Russian-made arms into Guatemala. They paid 150 "liberators" to march in from Honduras under the command of exiled Colonel Armas. They also paid malcontents in the Guatemalan army to sit back and watch the revolution occur. In conjunction with the land force, four war planes, flown by pilots under US contract, bombed Guatemala City. When this still failed to spur a popular uprising, CIA chief Allen Dulles asked Eisenhower to send more bombers: which he did (a fact he later concealed in his memoirs.) The US-chosen Armas was set up as the new leader of Guatemala. He proceeded to run a brutal police state. He rounded up 9,000 liberals (mostly indigenous people) and executed hundreds. The peasants lost the land that Arbenz had given back to them -- they also lost the vote. Over the next 35 years between 150,000 to 200,000 died as a result of his oppressive regime and "death squads". But Armas was beholden to the US for having set him up in power -- and that was good for US business. In 1955 in Montgomery Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white person. She was thrown in jail. According to Montgomery's segregation laws, African Americans were required to pay their fare to the driver, then get off and reboard through the back door. (Sometimes the bus would drive off before the paid-up customers made it to the back entrance.) They were then required to sit in the back "colored" section of the bus. If the white section was full and another white customer entered, blacks were required to give up their seats and move farther to the back; a black person was not even allowed to sit across the aisle from a white person. These humiliations were compounded by the fact that two-thirds of the bus riders in Montgomery were of African descent. The incident with Rosa Parks was the last straw for the African American community. A bus boycott was organized and many were spurred to action, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who went on to fight a non-violent battle for equal rights... and eventually paid for it with his life. In 1957, Orville Faubus, the governor of Arkansas, employed 270 armed troops to prevent 9 African American children from attending Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower had to call out the National Guard to escort the children into the school. So incredibly massive was the ignorant bigotry of some US citizens and government officials. In 1958 Eisenhower concluded that "there's a campaign of hatred against us in the Middle East - not by governments but by the people". He asked the National Security Council to look into the matter, and they gave their analysis as follows: "there's a perception in the region that the US is supporting corrupt, brutal, and harsh regimes, and is blocking democratization and development, and is doing so because of our interest in controlling the oil reserves in the region. It's difficult to counter this accusation because it's accurate. It is natural for us to support status quo governments and to prevent democracy because we want to maintain control over the energy resources of the region." In the 1960 election, the Kennedy campaign staff illegally wiretapped the phones of the Stevenson campaign -- and the Stevenson campaign staff returned the favor with an illegal wiretap on the Kennedy staff's phones. The evidence indicates that mayor Daley of Chicago manufactured at least 10,000 votes for Kennedy, while about 100,000 votes for Nixon were unjustifiably "disqualified". The Chicago Tribune reported: The election... was characterized by such gross and palpable fraud as to justify the conclusion that Nixon was deprived of victory. The New York Herald Tribune reported that in the same election, 100,000 votes were counted in Texas for Kennedy -- votes that never existed. |
| Contents | Prev | Next |
