Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The figure of Mohammad Mosaddeq, Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953, is an uncomfortable one for both sides of the US-Iran rivalry. For the US, Mosaddeq is a constant reminder that the dictatorial reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi after 1953 came into being with a US intervention to overthrow the constitutionally elected Mosaddeq. The US would provide strong support for the Shah in the coming decades. Mosaddeq is someone who challenged Western powers to defend Iranian national interests. This alone should, a priori, afford him a place of honor in the Islamic Republic established by Ruhollah Khomeini after his return from exile in 1979. However, Mosaddeq’s nationalism was grounded on democratic secularist convictions that are at odds with the ideology of the Islamic Republic, which in recent years has shut down its already limited avenues of democratic participation within the system.

In their book “The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954”, David S. Painter and Gregory Brew revisit Mosaddeq’s nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, the ensuing tensions with the US and the UK, and the Western powers’ final decision to remove Mosaddeq. As the title of the book already suggests, the oil dispute was the obvious point of contention but the early 1950s events in Iran would not have unfolded as they did absent the weight of much larger conflicts.

Among them was the desire of many Third World nations to manage their natural resources. In the age of decolonization, newly independent countries found themselves in a paradoxical situation. For the first time, they enjoyed political sovereignty but were tied to their former metropoles by long-term contracts to exploit their natural resources. Iran was never formally colonized. Still, the original oil concession Britain obtained in 1901, with very disadvantageous terms for the Persian state, had much to do with Persia’s internal weakness at the time. This fragility had been exacerbated by imperial competition between Russia and Britain for influence over Persia.

The oil dispute in Iran in the early 1950s took place against the background of an increasingly intense Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. In a time of strong ideological polarization, there was little place for a leader such as Mohammad Mosaddeq, who followed a policy he called “negative equilibrium” as he did not want to align Iran with either of the two blocs.

Mosaddeq became prime minister in 1951 after the Majles (the Iranian parliament) decided not to ratify the so-called Supplemental Agreement negotiated by the Iranian government and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The British company, founded in 1909, had been exploiting Iran’s oil for four decades. The Supplemental Agreement fell short of what most Iranians demanded. The Majles appointed Mosaddeq as prime minister after his proposal to nationalize the Iranian oil industry was unanimously approved by the parliament.

When nationalization was implemented, British leaders became convinced that Mosaddeq would have to go for the oil dispute to be settled in terms favorable to London. In October 1951, after Iranian troops took over the Abadan oil refinery in southern Iran, the last AIOC personnel departed the country. Mossadegh had Iran’s oil infrastructure in his hands but faced the major challenge of keeping the oil industry running without foreign technicians. Finding export markets for the oil products was even more complicated as Britain imposed an oil boycott and sanctions on Iran.

Diverging from the British position at this point, Washington “sought a solution that would restart the oil industry and preserve Iran from communist control while not endangering U.S. interests in the region”, write Painter and Brew.[1] At the same time, the Shah did not dare make a move against Mosaddeq since both his political figure and the cause of nationalization were widely popular in Iran. US officials acted as mediators between Mosaddeq on the one hand, and the AIOC and Britain on the other. There was no common ground to be found, however. Mosaddeq argued that Iranian oil belonged to the country after nationalization. Consequently, he wanted international companies to buy Iranian oil at a price higher than that offered to other developing countries where Western companies controlled the oil industry.

David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954. Click here to buy.

Mosaddeq was open to international companies returning to Iran to help operate the oil infrastructure as long as it was under Iranian control. British diplomats in Tehran sought to destabilize the Mosaddeq government and have it replaced with a new one that would be more amenable to British interests. The crisis escalated in October 1952, when Mosaddeq ordered the British embassy to close and its citizens to leave the country.

By the end of 1952, the US presented to Mosaddeq the so-called ‘package proposal’, which would have recognized Iran’s ownership of the oil industry but still envisaged Iran selling most of its oil to a consortium of international oil companies. The thorniest issue was compensation payments to the AIOC for Iran’s oil nationalization. As the authors note, the US and the UK insisted that “payment could not be limited to physical assets but also had to cover lost future profits.”[2] Mosaddeq rejected the ‘package proposal’. The reason was not that the Iranian prime minister failed to understand the specifics of the oil trade, as it has often been suggested. Rather, Painter and Brew argue, Mosaddeq understood very well the risks of being trapped in continuous compensation payments to AIOC if it agreed to the terms of the deal. Iran would have been in nominal control of its oil industry but, in truth, once again dependent on the British company’s compensation wishes.

Painter and Brew situate the US decision to consider the forceful removal of Mosaddeq around April 1953. With the British forced out of the country, the US operatives in Iran stepped in to mobilize the Iranian clerical and political groups that opposed Mosaddeq as well as the military. Bribes were a common means to achieve the desired result. Although there was no love lost between the Shah and Mosaddeq, the monarch had to be talked into the coup by his Western backers as he feared a failed move against Mosaddeq could backfire. The Shah finally signed two firmans (royal decrees): one dismissing Mosaddeq and the other one appointing General Fazlollah Zahedi as the new prime minister. While street mobilizations headed by bribed local gang leaders took place in Tehran, significant sectors of the army carried out an operation against Mosaddeq on August 16, 1953.

The prime minister had been alerted of the impending coup and loyalist troops defended his residence and the army headquarters. After the failed coup attempt and the Shah’s departure from Iran, the Tudeh Party took to the streets and used the opportunity to call for a republic. The US ambassador to Iran convinced Mosaddeq to order the police and the army to repress the Tudeh protests. As Painter and Brew remark, “ironically, Mosaddeq’s decision to crack down on the Tudeh, which illustrated his anti-communism and his desire for U.S. support, helped seal his fate.”[3] On August 19, 1953, with the streets empty of Tudeh demonstrators, the army moved once again to overthrow Mosaddeq, who was not prepared for a second coup attempt. Soldiers took the ministerial offices and Radio Tehran, while Mosaddeq was finally captured. The former prime minister was later sentenced to three years of prison and would die under house arrest in 1967.

Although the Shah returned from his short exile and General Zahedi was installed as prime minister, the removal of Mosaddeq did not immediately solve the oil dispute. Nationalization was a popular cause in Iran, and Mosaddeq’s forced departure from the scene did not change this. Negotiations dragged on until late 1954 when the Iranian government agreed to pay limited compensations and retain a largely symbolic control of its oil industry. The US sweetened the deal with a military and economic aid package of $120 million.

“The Struggle for Iran” partly draws on documents about the US role in the coup first released in 2017 and is particularly strong in covering the economic dimension of the conflict. Painter and Brew’s work helps debunk some of the most common myths about the coup. Although anti-communism and opposition to nationalization were strongly connected, the authors explain Washington viewed nationalization as the biggest threat. Successful nationalization in Iran could have resulted in other Third World nations following the same path.

Painter and Brew also note that it is unfair to portray Mosaddeq as an irrational and stubborn leader who was unwilling to compromise. Orientalist tropes were rife in contemporary assessments of Mosaddeq by British and American leaders. Mosaddeq was described as “incapable of rational thought”, “dominated by emotions and prejudices,” or a “reckless fanatic”, among many other condescending and offensive remarks.

Painter and Brew argue that the British were never interested in finding a negotiated solution to the conflict and “used talks as a stalling tactic to buy time”[4] for Iran to experience the negative economic impact of Britain’s oil boycott and allow covert actions against Mosaddeq to run their course. In “The Struggle for Iran”, Painter and Brew importantly reflect how the tragedy of the coup was not only that the US and Britain removed a constitutional leader in a foreign country, but also that the intervention “halted the progress Iran had been making toward representative government. Autocracy was the outcome.”[5]

[1] David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, “The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954,” (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023), p. 64.

[2] Ibid., p. 129.

[3] Ibid., p. 170.

[4] Ibid., p. 208.

[5] Ibid, p. 212.

Documents released by the Bill Clinton administration showed that in the first half of 1973, Kissinger and Nixon had more bomb tonnage dropped on Cambodia than was dropped by the Allies during all of World War II.

The US war on the Viet Cong led Washington to attempt to cut off their supply lines, which zigged and zagged over the borders colonial powers had drawn on Southeast Asia, in and out of Cambodia. In a fruitless bid to cut off those supplies, the US began bombing Cambodia in the 1960s, but the intensity of this bombardment increased over time.

The renewed 1969-1973 bombing campaign was Kissinger’s idea, “Operation Breakfast.” Sophal Ear writes, “The diary entry of Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, reads [on March 17, 1969]: ‘ … Historic day. K[issinger]‘s “Operation Breakfast” finally came off at 2:00 pm our time. K really excited, as is P[resident].” The following day, Haldeman wrote: ‘K’s “Operation Breakfast” a great success. He came beaming in with the report, very productive.'”

What kind of genocidal psychopath “beams” at beginning the illegal bombing of a country with which the US was not even at war?

By early 1973 Kissinger’s bright idea had already so disrupted Cambodian lives that disgruntled peasants there turned to the Communists, the Khmer Rouge. Kissinger and Nixon ordered even more bombing as the Communists approached the capital, Phnom Penh.

Embed from Getty Images
Victim of U.S. Bombing Error. Phnom Penh: Wearing head bandage, this young Cambodian youngster is one of some 300 casualties of bombing error on Neak Luong by U.S. warplanes August 6. He and other victims are awaiting transportation to hospital after having been brought here by Navy boats August 7.Getty Images/ Bettman

So Washington upped the ante. Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan reported that in February through August of 1973, “2,756,941 tons’ worth [of bombs were] dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all.” To repeat, in all of World War II the Allies dropped 2,000,000 tons of bombs, including the nuclear warheads at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The authors conclude that Cambodia may have been the most bombed country in world history.

Owen and Kiernan imply that hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died in this carpet bombing. Cambodia only had a population of 6.7 million then, so half a million dead, which is a plausible estimate, would be over 7% of the entire population. That would be like killing 16 million Americans.

While they say that 10% of the targeted sites were indiscriminate, the fact is that bombing populous villages from 30,000 feet is always indiscriminate. Most of the hundreds of thousands dead were certainly innocent noncombatants, a concept Kissinger never understood; or in a darker reading perhaps he understood it and had contempt for it. Responding to the repeated nuking of islands in Micronesia in above ground tests, Kissinger said, “There are only 90,000 of them out there. Who gives a damn?”

Anthony Bourdain, the great traveler and food enthusiast, wrote in his 2001 memoir, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milosevic.”

The Netanyahu government’s carpet-bombing of Gaza is a direct descendant of Kissinger’s Operation Breakfast.

“Gaza Guernica 1.1,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/IbisPaint, 2023.

Yuval Abraham of +972 Mag writes, “The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip.”

It is estimated that the Israeli Air Force massacred 15,000 Palestinians in Gaza from the air, very few of them combatants.

Abraham underlines, “the army significantly expand[ed] its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (‘matarot otzem’).”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s mealy-mouthed assertion that Israeli “precision munitions” can kill Hamas without killing large numbers of innocent civilians is mere Israeli propaganda. The precision munitions were set to kill large numbers of noncombatants in a total war of the Kissingerian sort. As Israeli targeting of the Palestinians (it is not a war, since the latter have no heavy weapons or air force) resumes, so will the high body counts, assuming the Netanyahu government permits enough societal organization to survive to permit the counting.

Reuters: “LIVE: View over Israel-Gaza border”

Kissinger’s butchering of villagers from the air threw Cambodia into such volatile political turbulence that a genocide resulted in which 20% of the population was killed, littering the country with sun-drenched white skeletons.

The Communists defeated him in Vietnam, where they still rule as preparations are made for Kissinger’s burial. The Lao People’s Revolutionary Party rules Laos. The Cambodian People’s Party, with roots in Communism, rules Cambodia, though it has turned to supporting a mixed economy model.

I don’t predict any sort of victory or longevity for Hamas itself, but it is clear from this history that you can’t use air power to destroy radical movements with genuine grassroots. Palestinians if anything will come out of the carpet-bombing (and the even more deadly denial of potable water and sufficient food) more radicalized than ever. They will still be on Israel’s doorstep even if they can be crowded into south Gaza as the maniacal Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant diabolically plans.

Kissinger rose to positions of power where he could overrule what he thought of as the soft and namby-pamby laws of war enacted in 1945 and after. Despite being a refugee from the Holocaust, he never escaped his formation in a Central European tradition of elite and profoundly amoral statecraft in the service of an unbridled nationalism and for the purposes of the super-rich in their white tuxedos.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – This year marks the anniversaries of two drastically different events that loomed all too large in my life. The first occurred a century ago in Hollywood: on October 16, 1923, Walt Disney signed into being the corporation that bears his name. The second took place in Santiago, Chile, on September 11, 1973, when socialist President Salvador Allende died in a military coup that overthrew his democratically elected government.

Those two disparate occurrences got me thinking about how the anniversaries of a long-dead American who revolutionized popular culture globally and a slain Chilean leader whose inspiring political revolution failed might illuminate — and I hope you won’t find this too startling — the dilemma that apocalyptic climate change poses to humanity.

This isn’t, in fact, the first time those two men and what they represented affected my life. Fifty years ago, each of them helped determine my destiny — a time when I had not the slightest hint that global warming might someday leave them again juxtaposed in my life.

In mid-October 1973, as the Walt Disney Corporation was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding, I found myself in the Argentine embassy in Santiago, Chile, where I had sought refuge after the country’s military had destroyed its democracy and taken power. Like 1,000 other asylum seekers, I was forced to flee to those compressed premises — in my case, thanks in significant part to Walt Disney. To be more specific, what put me in peril was Para Leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck), a bestselling book I had cowritten in 1971 with Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart that skewered Uncle Walt’s  — as we then called it  — “cultural imperialism.”

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That book had been born out of Salvador Allende’s peaceful revolution, the first attempt in history to build socialism by democratic means rather than by conquering the state through armed insurrection. That Chilean road to socialism meant, however, leaving intact the economic, political, and media power of those who opposed our radical reforms.

One of our most urgent cultural tasks was contesting the dominant stories of the time, primarily those produced in the United States, imported to Chile (and so many other countries), and then ingested by millions of consumers. Among the most prevalent, pleasurable, and easily digestible of mass-media commodities were historietas (comic books), with those by Disney ruling the market. To create alternative versions of reality for the new, liberated Chile, Armand and I felt it was important to grasp the ideological magic that lurked in those oh-so-popular comics. After all, you can’t substitute for something if you don’t even know how it works.

Our goal was to defeat our capitalist adversary not with bullets but with ideas, images, and emotions of our own. So, the two of us set out to interpret hundreds of Donald Duck historietas to try to grasp just what made them so damn successful. In mid-1971, less than a year after Allende’s election victory and after 10 feverish days of collaboration, he and I felt we had grasped the way Walt’s supposedly harmless ducks and mice had subtly shaped the thinking of Chileans.

In the end, in a kind of frenzy, we wrote what John Berger (one of the great art critics of the twentieth century) would term “a handbook of decolonization,” a vision of what imperial America was selling the world as natural, everlasting, and presumably unalterable by anyone, including our President Allende. We did our best to lay out how Walt (and his workers) viewed family and sex, work and criminality, society and failure, and above all how his ducks and mice trapped Third World peoples in an exotic world of underdevelopment from which they could only emerge by eternally handing over their natural resources to foreigners and agreeing to imitate the American way of life.

Above all, of course, since the values embedded in Disney comics were wildly individualistic and competitive, they proved to be paeans to unbridled consumerism — the absolute opposite, you won’t be surprised to learn, of the communal vision of Allende and his followers as they tried to build a country where solidarity and the common good would be paramount.

The Empire Strikes Back!

Miraculously enough, our book hit a raw nerve in Chilean society. In a country where everything was being questioned by insurgent, upstart masses, including power and property relations, here were two lunatics stating that nothing was sacred  — not even children’s comics! Nobody, we insisted, could truly claim to be innocent or untainted, certainly not Uncle Walt and his crew. To build a different world, Chileans would have to dramatically question who we thought we were and how we dreamt about one another and our future, while exploring the sources of our deepest desires.

If our call for transgression had been written in academic prose destined for obscure scholarly journals, we would surely have been ignored. But the style we chose for Para Leer al Pato Donald was as insolent, raucous, and carnivalesque as the Chilean revolution itself. We tried to write so that any mildly literate person would be able to understand us.

Still, don’t imagine for a second that we weren’t surprised when the reaction to our book proved explosive. Assaults in the opposition press and media were to be expected, but assaults on my family and me were another matter. I was almost run over by a furious driver, screaming “Leave the Duck alone!” Our house was pelted with stones, while Chileans outside it cheered Donald Duck. Ominous phone calls promised worse. By mid-1973, my wife Angélica, our young son Rodrigo, and I had moved — temporarily, we hoped — to my parents’ house, which was where the military coup of September 11th found us.

Salvador Allende died at the Presidential Palace that day, a death that foretold the death of democracy and of so many thousands of his followers. Among the victims of that military putsch were a number of books, including Para Leer Al Pato Donald, which I saw — on television, no less — being burnt by soldiers. A few days later, the editor of the book told me that its third printing had been dumped into the bay of Valparaíso by Navy personnel.

I had resisted, post-coup, going into exile, but the mistreatment of my book convinced me that, if I wanted to avoid being added to the inquisitorial pyre, I would have to seek the safety of some embassy until I could get permission to leave the country.

It was a sobering experience for the man who had brazenly barbecued the Duck to find himself huddling in a foreign embassy on the very day the corporation that had created those comics was celebrating its 50th anniversary. Consider that a sign of how completely Uncle Walt had won that battle, though he himself had, by then, been dead for seven years. Very much alive, however, were his buddies, those voracious fans of Disneyland — then-American President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, masterminds of the conspiracy that had destabilized and sabotaged the Allende revolution, which they saw as inimical to American global hegemony. Indeed, the coup had been carried out in the name of saving capitalism from hordes of unwashed, unruly revolutionaries, while punishing any country in the hemisphere whose leadership dared reject Washington’s influence.

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Nor would it take long before the dictatorship that replaced Allende began enthusiastically applying economic shock therapy to the country, accompanied by electric shocks to the genitals of anyone who dared protest the extreme form of capitalism that came to be known as neoliberalism. That deregulatory free-market style of capitalism with its whittling down of the welfare state would, in the years to come, dominate so many other countries as well.

Fifty years after the coup that destroyed Allende’s attempt to replace it with a socialism that would respect its adversaries and their rights, such a revolutionary change hardly seems achievable anymore, even in today’s left-wing regimes in Latin America. Instead, capitalism in its various Disneyesque forms remains dominant across the planet.

Nor should it be surprising that, in all these years, the corporation Walt Disney founded a century ago has grown ever more ascendant, becoming one of the planet’s major entertainment and media conglomerates (though it, too, now finds itself in a more difficult world). Admittedly, with that preeminence has come changes that even an obdurate critic like me must hail. How could I fail to admire the Disney corporation’s stances on racial equality and gay rights, or its opposition to Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. How could I not note the ways in which its films have come to recognize the culture and aspirations of countries and communities it caricatured in the comics I read in Chile so long ago? And yet, the smiling, friendly form of capitalism it now presents — the very fact that it doesn’t wish to shock or alienate its customers — may, in the end, prove even more dangerous to our ultimate well-being than was true half a century ago.

True, I would no longer write our book the way Armand and I did all those decades ago. Like any document forged in the heat of a revolutionary moment eager to dismantle an oppressive system, imbued with a messianic belief in our ability to change consciousness, and tending to imagine our readers as empty vessels into which ducks and mice (or something far better) could be poured, we lacked a certain subtlety. It was hard for us to imagine Chilean comic-book readers as human beings who could creatively appropriate images and stories fed to them and forge a new significance all their own.

And yet, our essay’s central message is still a buoyant, rebellious reminder that there could be other roads to a better world than those created by rampant capitalism.

Warnings from the Fish

Indeed, our probe of the inner workings of a system that preys on our desires while trying to turn us into endlessly consuming machines is particularly important on a planet imperiled by global warming in ways we couldn’t even imagine then.

Take a scene I came across as I scanned the book just this week. Huey, Dewey, and Louie rush into their house with a bucket. “Look, Unca Donald,” they say, in sheer delight, “at the strange fish we caught in the bay.” Donald grabs the specimen as dollar signs ignite around his head and responds: “Strange fish!… Money!… The aquarium buys strange fish.”

In 1971, we chose that bit of Disney to illustrate how its comics then eradicated history, sweat, and social class. “There is a great round of buying, selling, and consuming,” we wrote, “but to all appearances, none of the products involved has required any effort whatsoever to make. Nature is the great labor force, producing objects of human and social utility as if they were natural.”

What concerned us then was the way workers were being elided from history and their exploitation made to magically disappear. We certainly noted the existence of nature and its exploitation for profit, but reading that passage more than 50 years later what jumps out at me isn’t the dollarization of everything or how Donald instantly turns a fish into merchandise but another burning ecological question: Why is that fish in that bucket and not the sea? Why did the kids feel they could go to the bay, scoop out one of its inhabitants, and bring it home to show Unca Donald, a displacement of nature that Armand and I didn’t even think to highlight then?

Today, that environmental perspective, that sense of how we humans continue to despoil our planet in an ever more fossil-fuelized and dangerous fashion, is simply inescapable. It stares me in the face as we now eternally break heat records planetwide.

Perhaps that fictitious fish and its castoff fate from half a century ago resonate so deeply in me today because I recently included a similar creature in my new novel, The Suicide Museum. In it, Joseph Hortha, a billionaire (of which there are so many more than in 1971), snags a yellow-fin tuna off the coast of Santa Catalina, California, a bay like the one where those three young ducks netted their fish. But Hortha, already rich beyond imagining, doesn’t see dollar signs in his catch. When he guts that king of the sea, bits of plastic spill obscenely out of its innards, the very plastic that made his fortune. Visually, in other words, that tuna levels an instant accusation at him for polluting the oceans and this planet with his products.

To atone, he will eventually make delirious plans to build a gigantic “Suicide Museum,” meant to alert humanity to the dangerous abyss towards which we’re indeed heading. In other words, to halt our suicidal rush towards Anthropocene oblivion, we need to change our lifestyles drastically. “The only way to save ourselves is to undo civilization,” Hortha explains, “unfound our cities, question the paradigm of modernity that has dominated our existence for centuries.” He imagines “a Copernican swerve in how we interact with nature,” one in which we come to imagine ourselves not as nature’s masters or stewards, but once again as part of its patterns and rhythms.

And if just imagining a world without plastic is daunting, how much more difficult will it be to implement policies that effectively limit the way our lives are organized around a petro-universe now blistering the planet? You have to wonder (and Uncle Walt won’t help on this): Is there any chance of stunning the global upper and middle classes into abandoning their ingrained privileges, the conveniences that define all our harried existences?

Walt Disney and Salvador Allende Are Still Duking (or Do I mean Ducking?) It Out

On this increasingly desperate planet, I suspect the critique of Disney that Armand and I laid out so long ago still has a certain potency. The values symbolized in those now-ancient comic books continue to underwrite the social order (or do I mean disorder?) that’s moving us towards ultimate self-destruction globally.

Such a collective cataclysm won’t be averted unless we’re finally ready to deal with the most basic aspects of contemporary existence: unabashed competition, untrammeled consumerism, an extractive attitude towards the Earth (not to speak of a deeply militarized urge to kill one another), and a stupefying faith that a Tomorrowland filled with happiness is just a monorail ride away.

To put it bluntly, our species can’t afford another century of the principles fostered by the Disney emporium.

And what of Salvador Allende, dead this half-century that’s seen Uncle Walt’s values expand and invade every corner of our souls? What of his vision of a just society that seems so much farther away today, as would-be autocrats and hard-core authoritarians rise up everywhere in a world in which The Donald is anything but a duck?

President Allende rarely spoke of the environment in his speeches, but he did want us to live in a very different world. While he was no eco-prophet, he distinctly had something to say about the catastrophic predicament now facing us.

Today, we should value his life-long certainty, reiterated in that last stand in defense of democracy and dignity in Chile’s Presidential Palace 50 years ago, that history is made by unexceptional men and women who, when they dare imagine an alternative future, can accomplish exceptional things.

As the symbolic battle between Walt Disney and Salvador Allende for the hearts and minds of humanity continues, the last word doesn’t, in fact, belong to either of them, but to the rest of us. It’s we who must decide if there will even be generations, a century from now, to look back on our follies, no less thank us for subversively saving our planet for them.

Copyright 2023 Ariel Dorfman

Via Tomdispatch.com )

Amsterdam (Special to Informed Comment) – In 1910 a more than life-size white marble statue of the founder of genetics, Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884), was unveiled. It stood in the square outside the church of St Thomas’s abbey in the city of Brno, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and was known in German as Brünn. Between 1948 and 1993 Brno was part of Czechoslovakia, and it is now in the Czech Republic.

In the mid-nineteenth century the Augustinian friar Mendel had conducted his cross-breeding experiments with pea plants in the garden of the Brno abbey, and so paved the way for modern genetics. When I was studying biology at the University of Amsterdam in the 1950s, our professor of systematic botany and genetics Jacob Heimans never stopped mentioning the subject.

Mendel crossed plants containing pods of yellow peas with plants containing green ones. To his surprise, all the resulting peas were yellow, so it seemed as if the green colour had vanished. But when he then grew the yellow peas into plants and crossed their flowers with each other, the green colour reappeared, and always in the same proportions: a quarter of his new pea harvest was green, and the rest yellow! Mendel also discovered that properties could be inherited separately from each other. If he crossed wrinkled yellow peas with smooth green ones, he at first only obtained yellow offspring. But if he crossed those with each other, all kinds of combinations appeared: smooth yellow ones, wrinkled yellow ones, smooth green ones and wrinkled green ones, in fixed proportions that he could calculate in advance.

His observation that a property could cease to be visible but had not actually disappeared from the plants set him thinking. There was evidently something left in the plants that was responsible for a particular property, seed colour or shape. And thus he was the first person to discover what we now know as the carriers of heredity, or genes. He called the carriers of the property that prevailed over the other property dominant, and the carriers of the property that was dominated by the other property recessive. Mendel can thus be seen as the discoverer of genes – which, as we know now, consist of DNA. Yet even though he had carefully published his test results at the time, it would take until around 1900 for his discovery to break through to the scientific world.

We students were very fond of Professor Heimans and his fascinating, well-attended lectures. At one lecture he gave in spring 1955 he told us about the unveiling of the large statue of Mendel in 1910, outside the abbey garden where he had done his experiments. On the board he showed an enlarged photograph of the ceremony, and pointed out which celebrities had attended it – I still remember Erich von Tschermak, one of the three scientists who had independently rediscovered Mendel’s laws of heredity around 1900 (the others were Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns). But, Heimans continued with a sad voice, his face contorted with anger, now that the communists were in power in Czechoslovakia they had demolished the fine statue and smashed it into a thousand pieces….

He then explained how this had come about. After Czechoslovakia had joined the Eastern bloc in 1948, the government interfered in the work of the universities and in what was both studied and taught there. In the field of genetics this meant that only researchers who espoused the theories of the Soviet Russian biologist Trofim Lysenko were taken seriously – the rest were cast aside. Unlike Mendel and his successors, the now long-forgotten Lysenko believed that the hereditary properties of organisms could be permanently altered by the conditions they lived in. For example, if grains of corn were deep-frozen, plants grown from them would be more resistant to cold. This fitted in well with the Marxist view that people can be fundamentally altered by the conditions they live in; and it seemed a good way to help develop newly cultivated farmlands in Siberia.

In October 1955 I was one of a group of fifteen young people who went to Czechoslovakia with a Dutch youth organisation that offered trips to Eastern Bloc countries. There were two other biology students in the group, and at a meeting in someone’s home before we left each of us was asked to say which places we wanted to see while we were there. The three of us, who had attended Heimans’ lectures, brazenly announced that we wanted to see the statue of Gregor Mendel in Brno. To our surprise our request was granted, the visit was scheduled, and one fine autumn day we set off for Brno by bus.

Brno, 1955. Church of St Thomas’s abbey

The photographs we took there show that the statue was standing in the square outside the church of St Thomas’s abbey, and was still perfectly intact. But there was something odd about it – Mendel’s name was nowhere to be seen. Nor did the name of the square give any clue – the nameplate made no mention of Gregor Mendel. We must have noted down what it did say, but unfortunately I can no longer find any trace of the note. And we did not take a picture of it – in those days photographs were not yet so sharply focused that it would have occurred to us to photograph something that small from a distance.

Brno, October 1955. Anne-Ruth Wertheim looking at the statue of Gregor Mendel

The fact that the name Mendel was missing from the statue was quite something. What the Czechoslovaks saw was a dignified gent in a long robe with a short cape over his shoulders, but no-one could know that this was the famous friar and researcher who had done his experiments at this spot a century earlier. What everyone could see was that the man was gazing candidly at the world and his hands were resting on posts overgrown with creepers. And the Catholics among them must surely have recognised his clothing as a friar’s habit.

Brno, October 1955. Students looking at the statue of Gregor Mendel

There is every reason to assume that the decision to remove Mendel’s name had at least something to do with the fact that he was a Catholic friar – for communist regimes sought by fair means or foul to discourage their subjects from getting involved in religion. But in all likelihood the main reason was that Mendel’s importance had to be played down for the greater glory of Lysenko. And so we were witnesses to what can happen when politicians interfere in scientific disputes.

Brno, 1955. Us clinging to the fence round the church of St Thomas’s abbey

Now we had reached the square, we tried to get into St Thomas’s abbey garden, but this was not allowed. The photograph shows us clinging to the fence in the hope of getting a glimpse of it – but all we could see was a totally neglected patch of garden.

Back in Amsterdam the three of us went to see Professor Heimans and showed him the pictures we had taken. He was surprised and pleased to hear that the statue was still there. But he immediately began wondering about the source of his story that the statue had been destroyed.

And, he added with a serious look on his face, we also had to ask ourselves to what extent the Cold War atmosphere here in the West had allowed such a myth to start circulating and gain credence in the first place.

But, he ended with manifest relief, the omission of the illustrious Mendel’s name from the statue could most definitely be viewed as a kind of destruction.

We assumed that Heimans would henceforth include our information in his lectures – but we never bothered to find out. Much later we heard that the statue had been moved into the abbey garden soon after our visit. This made it even less visible to the general public, but its true identity had finally been restored. It is still there – and the object of admiration during the festivities marking the bicentenary of Mendel’s birth.

( RFE/RL ) – Vladimir Putin “has driven Russia into a trap” by invading Ukraine, the former Polish dissident Adam Michnik has said, predicting ultimate defeat for the Russian leader and a chance for much-needed liberal reforms afterward.

“In Russia, changes took place after wars were lost — after the Finnish war, the Japanese war, the Afghan war, and now Ukraine,” Michnik recently told RFE/RL’s Echo of the Caucasus in an interview.

Michnik, a leading intellectual of the Cold War era and longtime critic of Russian domination of Eastern Europe, is now, at age 75, the editor in chief of the liberal Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

Adam Michnik is a Polish historian and editor in chief of Gazeta Wyborcza. “We must say it loud and clear,” he says. “We are all Ukrainians now.”

In a column for the paper, Michnik placed the struggle of Ukrainians as just the latest chapter in the historical repression by the Soviet Union and Russia. “We must say it loud and clear,” he wrote. “We are all Ukrainians now.”

In his interview with RFE/RL, Michnik said Putin was likely deluded into thinking events during his latest invasion of Ukraine would largely mirror those in Crimea in February 2014, when Russian soldiers without insignia on their green uniforms seized control of Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula.

[Putin] did not think that there would be such a heroic response from the Ukrainian Army and Ukrainian society. It’s fantastic.”

“His hope that there would be a repeat of what happened in Crimea. The enthusiasm, as there was during Crimea, did not occur,” Michnik explained.

A month after illegally annexing Crimea in March 2014, Putin sent arms, funds, and other aid to separatists in southeastern Ukraine, sparking a conflict that has left at least 13,200 dead.

In his calculus to go to war, Putin was driven by a belief — held by many Russians — that Ukrainians aren’t a separate people, said Michnik.

“He thinks, as probably some of our common Russian friends do, that Ukraine is not Ukrainians, they are little Russians, one nation. This is a big mistake, not only for Putin but also for many absolutely honest and intelligent people in Russia,” he said.

Exiled Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky recently told CNN that Putin became “literally insane” when his invasion of Ukraine wasn’t met with a friendly reception from its citizens.

Putin also got the West’s response wrong, Michnik said, hoping what many have criticized as the hasty retreat from Afghanistan by the United States and its NATO allies was a sign of cracks among the allies.

“[Putin] thought the United States was dead after Kabul, that [Joe] Biden didn’t have a [Donald] Trump illusion, that Biden didn’t think like Trump did, that Putin was a benevolent genius. Biden is a calm, normal person who knows that [Putin] is a bandit, how to behave with a bandit,” said Michnik.

Putin also likely brushed off the capabilities of the Ukrainians, Michnik said, admitting he was himself among the initial skeptics.

“[Putin] did not think that there would be such a heroic response from the Ukrainian Army and Ukrainian society,” he said. “It’s fantastic. No one thought it would happen, and I didn’t think it would either. The Ukrainians told me that this would happen, but I did not believe them.”

Ukraine has estimated as of April 13 that 19,800 Russian soldiers have died since the beginning of the war, citing its own recovery of bodies and intercepted Russian communications. Russia has called the Ukrainian numbers inflated and only twice announced its own figures, a fraction of those tabulated by Kyiv.

The war with the Poles was not a war with the Poles — no, they were the white Poles…. When there was a winter war with Finland, they were white Finns. Now, not Ukrainians, but fascists, Nazis….”

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said on April 7 that the country had “significant losses of troops and it’s a huge tragedy for us” during an interview on Sky News, a rare official admission of the scale of the Russian losses.

What support Putin has among average Russians is difficult to gauge, said Michnik, amid worsening repression and the muzzling of any opposition media.

Ordinary Russians can face up to 15 years in prison for questioning or contradicting the Kremlin’s war narrative, with thousands detained so far by police nationwide for speaking out.

“I don’t believe Russians are 100 percent supportive of Putin; 200,000 Russians have gone abroad. In 1968, during the intervention in Czechoslovakia, seven people took to Red Square in Moscow. Today, 8,000 have already been arrested for taking to the streets with the slogan, ‘No To War,'” said Michnik, referring to estimates of how many Russians have left the country since the Russian invasion started on February 24.

Russia has adopted many Soviet tactics in defining those opposed to them, Michnik explained, with Ukrainians dehumanized as “just Nazis, fascists,” in a never-ending barrage on state-run media.

“Even during the time of the Bolsheviks, the war with the Poles was not a war with the Poles — no, they were the white Poles,” Michnik said, noting the term used by the Bolsheviks and later the Soviet authorities to designate “enemies” of its communist rule.

“When there was a winter war with Finland, they were white Finns. Now, not Ukrainians, but fascists, Nazis…. But if they tell you so in the morning, after dinner, in the evening, one day, another day, a third day, after all, you think there is something to it,” Michnik said.

“I remember it well, how in Poland in Soviet times there was anti-German propaganda that all Germans were Nazis. But not these Germans, not ours from East Germany — they were good Germans. Ukrainians from Luhansk and Donetsk who support the Kremlin’s policy are good, but they are not Ukrainians either. They are little Russians.”

Ultimately Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will end with defeat for Putin, Michnik said, and judging by previous Russian military defeats in the past, an opportunity for change may emerge.

“I am sure that Ukraine will become for Putin what Afghanistan became for [Leonid] Brezhnev,” Michnik said, referring to the former Soviet leader who ordered the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

That conflict would lead to the death of some 15,000 troops and 2 million Afghans before its end in 1989, hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now, Michnik holds out hope that a Russian defeat in Ukraine could be the spark to ignite democratic change in Russia.

“Russia made a bad choice. But we still have hope that it is still possible. I will not live to see it, but my son will live, [and] a new wave will come…”

With additional reporting by Tony Wesolowsky

Vadim Dubnov is a correspondent for RFE/RL’s Echo of the Caucasus, which broadcasts in Russian to Georgia.

Via RFE/RL

Copyright (c)2020 RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

I’d used that mailbox as my address on the last tax return I’d filed, eight years earlier. Presumably, the agent thought she’d be visiting my home when she appeared at the place where I rented a mailbox, which, as I would discover, was the agency’s usual first step in running down errant taxpayers. Hands shaking, I put a quarter in a pay phone and called my partner. “What’s going to happen to us?” I asked her.

Resisting War Taxes

I knew that the IRS wasn’t visiting me as part of an audit of my returns, since I hadn’t filed any for eight years. My partner and I were both informal tax resisters — she, ever since joining the pacifist Catholic Worker organization; and I, ever since I’d returned from Nicaragua in 1984. I’d spent six months traveling that country’s war zones as a volunteer with Witness for Peace. My work involved recording the testimony of people who had survived attacks by the “Contras,” the counterrevolutionary forces opposing the leftist Sandinista government then in power (after a popular uprising deposed the U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza). At the time, the Contras were being illegally supported by the administration of President Ronald Reagan.

With training and guidance from the CIA, they were using a military strategy based on terrorizing civilians in the Nicaraguan countryside. Their targets included newly built schools, clinics, roads, and phone lines — anything the revolutionary government had, in fact, achieved — along with the campesinos (the families of subsistence farmers) who used such things. Contra attacks very often involved torture: flaying people alive, severing body parts, cutting open the wombs of pregnant women. Nor were such acts mere aberrations. They were strategic choices made by a force backed and directed by the United States.

When I got back to the United States, I simply couldn’t imagine paying taxes to subsidize the murder of people in another country, some of whom I knew personally. I continued working, first as a bookkeeper, then at a feminist bookstore, and eventually at a foundation. But with each new employer, on my W-4 form I would claim that I expected to owe no taxes that year, so the IRS wouldn’t take money out of my paycheck. And I stopped filing tax returns.

Not paying taxes for unjust wars has a long history in this country. It goes back at least to Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay them to support the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). His act of resistance landed him in jail for a night and led him to write On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, dooming generations of high-school students to reading the ruminations of a somewhat self-satisfied tax resister. Almost a century later, labor leader and pacifist A.J. Muste revived Thoreau’s tradition, once even filing a copy of the Duty of Civil Disobedience in place of his Form 1040. After supporting textile factory workers in their famous 1919 strike in Lowell, Massachusetts, and some 20 years later helping form and run the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America (where my mother once worked as a labor organizer), Muste eventually came to serve on the board of the War Resisters League (WRL).

For almost a century now, WRL, along with the even older Fellowship of Reconciliation and other peace groups, have promoted antiwar tax resistance as a nonviolent means of confronting this country’s militarism. In recent years, both organizations have expanded their work beyond opposing imperial adventures overseas to stand against racist, militarized policing at home as well.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Each year, the WRL publishes a “pie chart” poster that explains “where your income tax money really goes.” In most years, more than half of it is allocated to what’s euphemistically called “defense.” This year’s poster, distinctly an outlier, indicates that pandemic-related spending boosted the non-military portion of the budget above the 50% mark for the first time in decades. Still, at $768 billion, we now have the largest Pentagon budget in history (and it’s soon to grow larger yet). That’s a nice reward for a military whose main achievements in this century are losing major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But doesn’t the war in Ukraine justify all those billions? Not if you consider that none of the billions spent in previous years stopped Russia from invading. As Lindsay Koshgarian argues at Newsweek, “Colossal military spending didn’t prevent the Russian invasion, and more money won’t stop it. The U.S. alone already spends 12 times more on its military than Russia. When combined with Europe’s biggest military spenders, the U.S. and its allies on the continent outspend Russia by at least 15 to 1. If more military spending were the answer, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“Defense” spending could, however, just as accurately be described as welfare for military contractors, because that’s where so much of the money eventually ends up. The top five weapons-making companies in 2021 were Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technology, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, and General Dynamics. Together, they reaped $198 billion in taxpayer funds last year alone. In 2020, the top 100 contractors took in $551 billion. Of course, we undoubtedly got some lovely toys for our money, but I’ve always found it difficult to live in — or eat — a drone. They’re certainly useful, however, for murdering a U.S. citizen in Yemen or so many civilians elsewhere in the Greater Middle East and Africa.

The Pentagon threatens the world with more than the direct violence of war. It’s also a significant factor driving climate change. The U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional consumer of oil. If it were a country, the Pentagon would rank 55th among the world’s carbon emitters.

Buy the Book

While the military budget increases yearly, federal spending that actually promotes human welfare has fallen over the last decade. In fact, such spending for the program most Americans think of when they hear the word “welfare” — Temporary Aid for Needy Families, or TANF — hasn’t changed much since 1996, the year the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (so-called welfare reform) took effect. In 1997, federal expenditures for TANF totaled about $16.6 billion. That figure has remained largely unchanged. However, according to the Congressional Research Service, since the program began, such expenditures have actually dropped 40% in value, thanks to inflation.

Unlike military outlays, spending for the actual welfare of Americans doesn’t increase over time. In fact, as a result of the austerity imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reports that “by 2021 non-defense funding (excluding veterans’ health care) was about 9% lower than it had been 11 years earlier after adjusting for inflation and population growth.” Note that Congress passed that austerity measure a mere three years after the subprime lending crisis exploded, initiating the Great Recession, whose reverberations still ring in our ears.

This isn’t necessarily how taxpayers want their money spent. In one recent poll, a majority of them, given the choice, said they would prioritize education, social insurance, and health care. A third would rather that their money not be spent on war at all. And almost 40% believed that the federal government simply doesn’t spend enough on social-welfare programs.

Death May Be Coming for Us All, But Taxes Are for the Little People

Pollsters don’t include corporations like Amazon, FedEx, and Nike in their surveys of taxpayers. Perhaps the reason is that those corporate behemoths often don’t pay a dollar in income tax. In 2020, in fact, 55 top U.S. companies paid no corporate income taxes whatsoever. Nor would the survey takers have polled billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Carl Icahn, all of whom also manage the neat trick of not paying any income tax at all some years.

In 2021, using “a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years,” ProPublica published a report on how much the rich really pay in taxes. The data show that, between 2014 and 2018, the richest Americans paid a measly “true tax” rate of 3.4% on the growth of their wealth over that period. The average American — you — typically pays 14% of his or her income each year in federal income tax. As ProPublica explains:

“America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell.”

So, if the rich avoid paying taxes by holding onto their assets instead of selling them, where do they get the money to live like the billionaires they are? The answer isn’t complicated: they borrow it.­ Using their wealth as collateral, they typically borrow millions of dollars to live on, using the interest on those loans to offset any income they might actually receive in a given year and so reducing their taxes even more.

While they do avoid paying taxes, I’m pretty sure those plutocrats aren’t tax resisters. They’re not using such dodges to avoid paying for U.S. military interventions around the world, which was why I stopped paying taxes for almost a decade. Through the Reagan administration and the first Bush presidency, with the Savings and Loan debacle and the first Gulf War, there was little the U.S. government was doing that I wanted to support.

These days, however, having lived through the “greed is good” decade, having watched a particularly bizarre version of American individualism reach its pinnacle in the presidency of billionaire Donald Trump, I think about taxes a bit differently. I still don’t want to pay for the organized global version of murder that is war, American-style, but I’ve also come to see that taxes are an important form of communal solidarity. Our taxes allow us, though the government, to do things together we can’t do as individuals — like generating electricity or making sure our food is clean and safe. In a more truly democratic society, people like me might feel better about paying taxes, since we’d be deciding more collectively how to spend our common wealth for the common good. We might even buy fewer drones.

Until that day comes, there are still many ways, as the War Resisters League makes clear, to resist paying war taxes, should you choose to do so. I eventually started filing my returns again and paid off eight years of taxes, penalties, and interest. It wasn’t the life decision I’m proudest of, but here’s what happened.

“Too Distraught“

The method I chose was, as I’ve said, not to file my tax returns, which, if your employer doesn’t withhold any taxes and send them to the feds, denies the federal government tax revenue from you. Mind you, for most of those years I wasn’t making much money. We’re talking about hundreds of dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost tax revenue. Over those years, I got just the occasional plaintive query from the IRS about whether I’d forgotten my taxes. But during the mid-1980s, the IRS upgraded its computers, improving its ability to capture income reported by employers and so enabling it to recreate the returns a taxpayer should have filed, but didn’t. And so, in 1992 an IRS agent visited my mailbox.

Only a month earlier, a friend, my partner, and I had bought a house together. So, when I saw that “Call me,” on the agent’s business card, I was terrified that my act of conscience was going to lose us our life savings. Trembling, I called the revenue agent and set up an appointment at the San Francisco federal building, a place I only knew as the site of many antiwar demonstrations I’d attended.

I remember the agent meeting us at the entrance to a room filled with work cubicles. I took a look at her and my gaydar went off. “Oh, my goodness,” I thought, “she’s a lesbian!” Maybe that would help somehow — not that I imagined for a second that my partner and I were going to get the “family discount” we sometimes received from LGBT cashiers.

The three of us settled into her cubicle. She told me that I would have to file returns from 1986 to 1991 (the IRS computers, it turned out, couldn’t reach back further than that) and also pay the missing taxes, penalties, and interest on all of it. With an only partially feigned quaver in my voice, I asked, “Are you going to take our house away?”

She raised herself from her chair just enough to scan the roomful of cubicles around us, then sat down again. Silently, she shook her head. Well, it may not have been the family discount, but it was good enough for me.

Then she asked why I hadn’t filed my taxes and, having already decided I was going to pay up, I didn’t explain anything about those Nicaraguan families our government had maimed or murdered. I didn’t say why I’d been unwilling or what I thought it meant to pay for this country’s wars in Central America or preparations for more wars to come. “I just kept putting it off,” I said, which was true enough, if not the whole truth.

Somehow, she bought that and asked me one final question, “By the way, what do you do for a living?”

“I’m an accountant,” I replied.

Her eyebrows flew up and she shook her head, but that was that.

Why did I give up so easily? There were a few reasons. The Contra war in Nicaragua had ended after the Sandinistas lost the national elections in 1990. Nicaraguans weren’t stupid. They grasped that, as long as the Sandinistas were in power, the U.S. would continue to embargo their exports and arm and train the Contras. And I’d made some changes in my own life. After decades of using part-time paid work to support my full-time activism, I’d taken a “grown-up” job to help pay my ailing and impoverished mother’s rent, once I convinced her to move from subsidized housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to San Francisco. And, of course, I’d just made a fundamental investment of my own in the status quo. I’d bought a house. Even had I been willing to lose it, I couldn’t ask my co-owners to suffer for my conscience.

But in the end, I also found I just didn’t have the courage to defy the government of the world’s most powerful country.

As it happened, I wasn’t the only person in the Bay Area to get a visit from a revenue agent that year. The IRS, it turned out, was running a pilot program to see whether they could capture more unpaid taxes by diverting funds from auditing to directly pursuing non-filers like me. Several resisters I knew were caught in their net, including my friend T.J.

An agent came to T.J.’s house and sat at his kitchen table. Unlike “my” agent, T.J.’s not only asked him why he hadn’t filed his returns, but read from a list of possible reasons: “Did you have a drug or alcohol problem? Were you ill? Did you have trouble filling out the forms?”

“Don’t you have any political reasons on your list?” T.J. asked.

The agent looked doubtful. “Political? Well, there’s ‘too distraught.’”

“That’s it,” said T.J. “Put down ‘too distraught.’”

T.J. died years ago, but I remember him every tax season when I again have to reckon with just how deeply implicated all of us are in this country’s military death machine, whether we pay income taxes or not. Still, so many of us keep on keeping on, knowing we must never become too distraught to find new ways to oppose military aggression anywhere in the world, including, of course, Ukraine, while affirming life as best we can.

Copyright 2022 Rebecca Gordon

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com) – A growing chorus of pundits and policymakers has suggested that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the beginning of a new Cold War. If so, that means trillions of additional dollars for the Pentagon in the years to come coupled with a more aggressive military posture in every corner of the world.

Before this country succumbs to calls for a return to Cold War-style Pentagon spending, it’s important to note that the United States is already spending substantially more than it did at the height of the Korean and Vietnam Wars or, in fact, any other moment in that first Cold War. Even before the invasion of Ukraine began, the Biden administration’s proposed Pentagon budget (as well as related work like nuclear-warhead development at the Department of Energy) was already guaranteed to soar even higher than that, perhaps to $800 billion or more for 2023.

Here’s the irony: going back to Cold War levels of Pentagon funding would mean reducing, not increasing spending. Of course, that’s anything but what the advocates of such military outlays had in mind, even before the present crisis.

Some supporters of higher Pentagon spending have, in fact, been promoting figures as awe inspiring as they are absurd. Rich Lowry, the editor of the conservative National Review, is advocating a trillion-dollar military budget, while Matthew Kroenig of the Atlantic Council called for the United States to prepare to win simultaneous wars against Russia and China. He even suggested that Congress “could go so far as to double its defense spending” without straining our resources. That would translate into a proposed annual defense budget of perhaps $1.6 trillion. Neither of those astronomical figures is likely to be implemented soon, but that they’re being talked about at all is indicative of where the Washington debate on Pentagon spending is heading in the wake of the Ukraine disaster.

Ex-government officials are pressing for similarly staggering military budgets. As former Reagan-era State Department official and Iran-Contra operative Elliott Abrams argued in a recent Foreign Affairs piece titled “The New Cold War”: “It should be crystal clear now that a larger percentage of GDP [gross domestic product] will need to be spent on defense.” Similarly, in a Washington Post op-ed, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates insisted that “we need a larger, more advanced military in every branch, taking full advantage of new technologies to fight in new ways.” No matter that the U.S. already outspends China by a three-to-one margin and Russia by 10-to-one.

Truth be told, current levels of Pentagon spending could easily accommodate even a robust program of arming Ukraine as well as a shift of yet more U.S. troops to Eastern Europe. However, as hawkish voices exploit the Russian invasion to justify higher military budgets, don’t expect that sort of information to get much traction. At least for now, cries for more are going to drown out realistic views on the subject.

Beyond the danger of breaking the budget and siphoning off resources urgently needed to address pressing challenges like pandemics, climate change, and racial and economic injustice, a new Cold War could have devastating consequences. Under such a rubric, the U.S. would undoubtedly launch yet more military initiatives, while embracing unsavory allies in the name of fending off Russian and Chinese influence.

The first Cold War, of course, reached far beyond Europe, as Washington promoted right-wing authoritarian regimes and insurgencies globally at the cost of millions of lives. Such brutal military misadventures included Washington’s role in coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile; the war in Vietnam; and support for repressive governments and proxy forces in Afghanistan, Angola, Central America, and Indonesia. All of those were justified by exaggerated — even at times fabricated — charges of Soviet involvement in such countries and the supposed need to defend “the free world,” a Cold War term President Biden all-too-ominously revived in his recent State of the Union address (assumedly, yet another sign of things to come).

Indeed, his framing of the current global struggle as one between “democracies and autocracies” has a distinctly Cold War ring to it and, like the term “free world,” it’s riddled with contradictions. After all, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates to the Philippines, all too many autocracies and repressive regimes already receive ample amounts of U.S. weaponry and military training — no matter that they continue to pursue reckless wars or systematically violate the human rights of their own people. Washington’s support is always premised on the role such regimes supposedly play in fighting against or containing the threats of the moment, whether Iran, China, Russia, or some other country.

Count on one thing: the heightened rhetoric about Russia and China seeking to undermine American influence will only reinforce Washington’s support for repressive regimes. The consequences of that could, in turn, prove to be potentially disastrous.

Before Washington embarks on a new Cold War, it’s time to remind ourselves of the global consequences of the last one.

Cold War I: The Coups

Dwight D. Eisenhower is often praised as the president who ended the Korean War and spoke out against the military-industrial complex. However, he also sowed the seeds of instability and repression globally by overseeing the launching of coups against nations allegedly moving towards communism or even simply building closer relations with the Soviet Union.

In 1953, with Eisenhower’s approval, the CIA instigated a coup that led to the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeqh. In a now-declassified document, the CIA cited the Cold War and the risks of leaving Iran “open to Soviet aggression” as rationales for their actions. The coup installed Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran, initiating 26 years of repressive rule that set the stage for the 1979 Iranian revolution that would bring Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.

In 1954, the Eisenhower administration launched a coup that overthrew the Guatemalan government of President Jacobo Arbenz. His “crime”: attempting to redistribute to poor peasants some of the lands owned by major landlords, including the U.S.-based United Fruit Company. Arbenz’s internal reforms were falsely labeled communism-in-the-making and a case of Soviet influence creeping into the Western Hemisphere. Of course, no one in the Eisenhower administration made mention of the close ties between the United Fruit Company and both CIA Director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Such U.S. intervention in Guatemala would prove devastating with the four decades that followed consumed by a brutal civil war in which up to 200,000 people died.

In 1973, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger followed Eisenhower’s playbook by fomenting a coup that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende, installing the vicious dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. That coup was accomplished in part through economic warfare — “making the economy scream,” as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger put it — and partly thanks to CIA-backed bribes and assassinations meant to bolster right-wing factions there. Kissinger would justify the coup, which led to the torture, imprisonment, and death of tens of thousands of Chileans, this way: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

Vietnam and Its Legacy

The most devastating Cold War example of a war justified on anti-communist grounds was certainly the disastrous U.S. intervention in Vietnam. It would lead to the deployment there of more than half a million American troops, the dropping of a greater tonnage of bombs than the U.S. used in World War II, the defoliation of large parts of the Vietnamese countryside, the massacre of villagers in My Lai and numerous other villages, the deaths of 58,000 U.S. troops and up to 2 million Vietnamese civilians — all while Washington systematically lied to the American public about the war’s “progress.”

U.S. involvement in Vietnam began in earnest during the administrations of Presidents Harry Truman and Eisenhower, when Washington bankrolled the French colonial effort there to subdue an independence movement. After a catastrophic French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the U.S. took over the fight, first with covert operations and then counterinsurgency efforts championed by the administration of John F. Kennedy. Finally, under President Lyndon Johnson Washington launched an all-out invasion and bombing campaign.

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In addition to being an international crime writ large, in what became a Cold War tradition for Washington, the conflict in Vietnam would prove to be profoundly anti-democratic. There’s no question that independence leader Ho Chi Minh would have won the nationwide election called for by the 1954 Geneva Accords that followed the French defeat. Instead, the Eisenhower administration, gripped by what was then called the “domino theory” — the idea that the victory of communism anywhere would lead other countries to fall like so many dominos to the influence of the Soviet Union — sustained an undemocratic right-wing regime in South Vietnam.

That distant war would, in fact, spark a growing antiwar movement in this country and lead to what became known as the “Vietnam Syndrome,” a public resistance to military intervention globally. While that meant an ever greater reliance on the CIA, it also helped keep the U.S. out of full-scale boots-on-the-ground conflicts until the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Instead, the post-Vietnam “way of war” would be marked by a series of U.S.-backed proxy conflicts abroad and the widespread arming of repressive regimes.

The defeat in Vietnam helped spawn what was called the Nixon Doctrine, which eschewed large-scale intervention in favor of the arming of American surrogates like the Shah of Iran and the Suharto regime in Indonesia. Those two autocrats typically repressed their own citizens, while trying to extinguish people’s movements in their regions. In the case of Indonesia, Suharto oversaw a brutal war in East Timor, greenlighted and supported financially and with weaponry by the Nixon administration.

“Freedom Fighters”

Once Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1981, his administration began to push support for groups he infamously called “freedom fighters.” Those ranged from extremist mujahideen fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan to Jonas Savimbi’s forces in Angola to the Nicaraguan Contras. The U.S. funding and arming of such groups would have devastating consequences in those countries, setting the stage for the rise of a new generation of corrupt regimes, while arming and training individuals who would become members of al-Qaeda.

The Contras were an armed right-wing rebel movement cobbled together, funded, and supplied by the CIA. Americas Watch accused them of rape, torture, and the execution of civilians. In 1984, Congress prohibited the Reagan administration from funding them, thanks to the Boland amendment (named for Massachusetts Democratic Representative Edward Boland). In response, administration officials sought a work-around. In the end, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a Marine and member of the National Security Council, would devise a scheme to supply arms to Iran, while funneling excess profits from the sales of that weaponry to the Contras. The episode became known as the Iran-Contra scandal and demonstrated the lengths to which zealous Cold Warriors would go to support even the worst actors as long as they were on the “right side” (in every sense) of the Cold War struggle.

Chief among this country’s blunders of that previous Cold War era was its response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a policy that still haunts America today. Concerns about that invasion led the administration of President Jimmy Carter to step up weapons transfers through a covert arms pipeline to a loose network of oppositional fighters known as the mujahideen. President Reagan doubled down on such support, even meeting with the leaders of mujahideen groups in the Oval Office in 1983. That relationship would, of course, backfire disastrously as Afghanistan descended into a civil war after the Soviet Union withdrew. Some of those Reagan had praised as “freedom fighters” helped form al-Qaeda and later the Taliban. The U.S. by no means created the mujahideen in Afghanistan, but it does bear genuine responsibility for everything that followed in that country.

As the Biden administration moves to operationalize its policy of democracy versus autocracy, it should take a close look at the Cold War policy of attempting to expand the boundaries of the “free world.” A study by political scientists Alexander Downes and Jonathon Monten found that, of 28 cases of American regime change, only three would prove successful in building a lasting democracy. Instead, most of the Cold War policies outlined above, even though carried out under the rubric of promoting “freedom” in “the free world,” would undermine democracy in a disastrous fashion.

A New Cold War?

Cold War II, if it comes to pass, is unlikely to simply follow the pattern of Cold War I either in Europe or other parts of the world. Still, the damage done by the “good versus evil” worldview that animated Washington’s policies during the Cold War years should be a cautionary tale. The risk is high that the emerging era could be marked by persistent U.S. intervention or interference in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the name of staving off Russian and Chinese influence in a world where Washington’s disastrous war on terrorism has never quite ended.

The United States already has more than 200,000 troops stationed abroad, 750 military bases scattered on every continent except Antarctica, and continuing counterterrorism operations in 85 countries. The end of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and the dramatic scaling back of American operations in Iraq and Syria should have marked the beginning of a sharp reduction in the U.S. military presence in the Middle East and elsewhere. Washington’s reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine may now stand in the way of just such a much-needed military retrenchment.

The “us versus them” rhetoric and global military maneuvering likely to play out in the years to come threaten to divert attention and resources from the biggest risks to humanity, including the existential threat posed by climate change. It also may divert attention from a country — ours — that is threatening to come apart at the seams. To choose this moment to launch a new Cold War should be considered folly of the first order, not to speak of an inability to learn from history.

Copyright 2022 William D. Hartung, Nick Cleveland-Stout, and Taylor Giorno

Nick Cleveland-Stout is a researcher at the Quincy Institute.

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Taylor Giorno

Taylor Giorno is a researcher at the Quincy Institute.

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William D. Hartung

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and the author most recently of the Quincy Institute Issue Brief “Pathways to Pentagon Spending Reductions: Removing the Obstacles.” His most recent book is Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military Industrial Complex.

Via Tomdispatch.com

America’s war in Vietnam was waged during the Cold War in the context of what was then known as the domino theory and the idea of “containing” communism. Iraq and Afghanistan were part of the Global War on Terror, a post-Cold War event in which “radical Islamic terrorism” became the substitute for communism. Even so, those wars should be treated as a single strand of history, a 60-year war, if you will, for one reason alone: the explanatory power of such a concept.

For me, because of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation in January 1961, that year is the obvious starting point for what retired Army colonel and historian Andrew Bacevich recently termed America’s Very Long War (VLW). In that televised speech, Ike warned of the emergence of a military-industrial complex of immense strength that could someday threaten American democracy itself. I’ve chosen 2021 as the VLW’s terminus point because of the disastrous end of this country’s Afghan War, which even in its last years cost $45 billion annually to prosecute, and because of one curious reality that goes with it. In the wake of the crashing and burning of that 20-year war effort, the Pentagon budget leaped even higher with the support of almost every congressional representative of both parties as Washington’s armed attention turned to China and Russia.

At the end of two decades of globally disastrous war-making, that funding increase should tell us just how right Eisenhower was about the perils of the military-industrial complex. By failing to heed him all these years, democracy may indeed be in the process of meeting its demise.

The Prosperity of Losing Wars

Several things define America’s disastrous 60-year war. These would include profligacy and ferocity in the use of weaponry against peoples who could not respond in kind; enormous profiteering by the military-industrial complex; incessant lying by the U.S. government (the evidence in the Pentagon Papers for Vietnam, the missing WMD for the invasion of Iraq, and the recent Afghan War papers); accountability-free defeats, with prominent government or military officials essentially never held responsible; and the consistent practice of a militarized Keynesianism that provided jobs and wealth to a relative few at the expense of a great many. In sum, America’s 60-year war has featured conspicuous destruction globally, even as wartime production in the U.S. failed to better the lives of the working and middle classes as a whole.

Let’s take a closer look. Militarily speaking, throwing almost everything the U.S. military had (nuclear arms excepted) at opponents who had next to nothing should be considered the defining feature of the VLW. During those six decades of war-making, the U.S. military raged with white hot anger against enemies who refused to submit to its ever more powerful, technologically advanced, and destructive toys.

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I’ve studied and written about the Vietnam War and yet I continue to be astounded by the sheer range of weaponry dropped on the peoples of Southeast Asia in those years — from conventional bombs and napalm to defoliants like Agent Orange that still cause deaths almost half a century after our troops finally bugged out of there. Along with all that ordnance left behind, Vietnam was a testing ground for technologies of every sort, including the infamous electronic barrier that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sought to establish to interdict the Ho Chi Minh trail.

When it came to my old service, the Air Force, Vietnam became a proving ground for the notion that airpower, using megatons of bombs, could win a war. Just about every aircraft in the inventory then was thrown at America’s alleged enemies, including bombers built for strategic nuclear attacks like the B-52 Stratofortress. The result, of course, was staggeringly widespread devastation and loss of life at considerable cost to economic fairness and social equity in this country (not to mention our humanity). Still, the companies producing all the bombs, napalm, defoliants, sensors, airplanes, and other killer products did well indeed in those years.

In terms of sheer bomb tonnage and the like, America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were more restrained, mainly thanks to the post-Vietnam development of so-called smart weapons. Nonetheless, the sort of destruction that rained down on Southeast Asia was largely repeated in the war on terror, similarly targeting lightly armed guerrilla groups and helpless civilian populations. And once again, expensive strategic bombers like the B-1, developed at a staggering cost to penetrate sophisticated Soviet air defenses in a nuclear war, were dispatched against bands of guerrillas operating in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Depleted uranium shells, white phosphorus, cluster munitions, as well as other toxic munitions, were used repeatedly. Again, short of nuclear weapons, just about every weapon that could be thrown at Iraqi soldiers, al-Qaeda or ISIS insurgents, or Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, would be used, including those venerable B-52s and, in one case, what was known as the MOAB, or mother of all bombs. And again, despite all the death and destruction, the U.S. military would lose both wars (one functionally in Iraq and the other all too publicly in Afghanistan), even as so many in and out of that military would profit and prosper from the effort.

What kind of prosperity are we talking about? The Vietnam War cycled through an estimated $1 trillion in American wealth, the Afghan and Iraq Wars possibly more than $8 trillion (when all the bills come due from the War on Terror). Yet, despite such costly defeats, or perhaps because of them, Pentagon spending is expected to exceed $7.3 trillion over the next decade. Never in the field of human conflict has so much money been gobbled up by so few at the expense of so many.

Throughout those 60 years of the VLW, the military-industrial complex has conspicuously consumed trillions of taxpayer dollars, while the U.S. military has rained destruction around the globe. Worse yet, those wars were generally waged with strong bipartisan support in Congress and at least not actively resisted by a significant “silent majority” of Americans. In the process, they have given rise to new forms of authoritarianism and militarism, the very opposite of representative democracy.

Paradoxically, even as “the world’s greatest military” lost those wars, its influence continued to grow in this country, except for a brief dip in the aftermath of Vietnam. It’s as if a gambler had gone on a 60-year losing binge, only to find himself applauded as a winner.

Constant war-making and a militarized Keynesianism created certain kinds of high-paying jobs (though not faintly as many as peaceful economic endeavors would have). Wars and constant preparations for the same also drove deficit spending since few in Congress wanted to pay for them via tax hikes. As a result, in all those years, as bombs and missiles rained down, wealth continued to flow up to ever more gigantic corporations like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, places all too ready to hire retired generals to fill their boards.

And here’s another reality: very little of that wealth ever actually trickled down to workers unless they happened to be employed by those weapons makers, which — to steal the names of two of this country’s Hellfire missile-armed drones — have become this society’s predators and reapers. If a pithy slogan were needed here, you might call these the Build Back Better by Bombing years, which, of course, moves us squarely into Orwellian territory.

Learning from Orwell and Ike

Speaking of George Orwell, America’s 60-Year War, a losing proposition for the many, proved a distinctly winning one for the few and that wasn’t an accident either. In his book within a book in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell wrote all-too-accurately of permanent war as a calculated way of consuming the products of modern capitalism without generating a higher standard of living for its workers. That, of course, is the definition of a win-win situation for the owners. In his words:

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed [by the workers].”

War, as Orwell saw it, was a way of making huge sums of money for a few at the expense of the many, who would be left in a state where they simply couldn’t fight back or take power. Ever. Think of such war production and war-making as a legalized form of theft, as Ike recognized in 1953 in his “cross of iron” speech against militarism. The production of weaponry, he declared eight years before he named “the military-industrial complex,” constituted theft from those seeking a better education, affordable health care, safer roads, or indeed any of the fruits of a healthy democracy attuned to the needs of its workers. The problem, as Orwell recognized, was that smarter, healthier workers with greater freedom of choice would be less likely to endure such oppression and exploitation.

And war, as he knew, was also a way to stimulate the economy without stimulating hopes and dreams, a way to create wealth for the few while destroying it for the many. Domestically, the Vietnam War crippled Lyndon Johnson’s plans for the Great Society. The high cost of the failed war on terror and of Pentagon budgets that continue to rise today regardless of results are now cited as arguments against Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal arguably would have never been funded if today’s vast military-industrial complex, or even the one in Ike’s day, had existed in the 1930s.

As political theorist Crane Brinton noted in The Anatomy of Revolution, a healthy and growing middle class, equal parts optimistic and opportunistic, is likely to be open to progressive, even revolutionary ideas. But a stagnant, shrinking, or slipping middle class is likely to prove politically reactionary as pessimism replaces optimism and protectionism replaces opportunity. In this sense, the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House was anything but a mystery and the possibility of an autocratic future no less so.

All those trillions of dollars consumed in wasteful wars have helped foster a creeping pessimism in Americans. A sign of it is the near-total absence of the very idea of peace as a shared possibility for our country. Most Americans simply take it for granted that war or threats of war, having defined our immediate past, will define our future as well. As a result, soaring military budgets are seen not as aberrations, nor even as burdensome, but as unavoidable, even desirable — a sign of national seriousness and global martial superiority.

You’re Going to Have It Tough at the End

It should be mind-blowing that, despite the wealth being created (and often destroyed) by the United States and impressive gains in worker productivity, the standard of living for workers hasn’t increased significantly since the early 1970s. One thing is certain: it hasn’t happened by accident.

For those who profit most from it, America’s 60-Year War has indeed been a resounding success, even if also a colossal failure when it comes to worker prosperity or democracy. This really shouldn’t surprise us. As former President James Madison warned Americans so long ago, no nation can protect its freedoms amid constant warfare. Democracies don’t die in darkness; they die in and from war. In case you hadn’t noticed (and I know you have), evidence of the approaching death of American democracy is all around us. It’s why so many of us are profoundly uneasy. We are, after all, living in a strange new world, worse than that of our parents and grandparents, one whose horizons continue to contract while hope contracts with them.

I’m amazed when I realize that, before his death in 2003, my father predicted this. He was born in 1917, survived the Great Depression by joining Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, and worked in factories at night for low pay before being drafted into the Army in World War II. After the war, he would live a modest middle-class life as a firefighter, a union job with decent pay and benefits. Here was the way my dad put it to me: he’d had it tough at the beginning of his life, but easy at the end, while I’d had it easy at the beginning, but I’d have it tough at the end.

He sensed, I think, that the American dream was being betrayed, not by workers like himself, but by corporate elites increasingly consumed by an ever more destructive form of greed. Events have proven him all too on target, as America has come to be defined by a greed-war for which no armistice, let alone an end, is promised. In twenty-first-century America, war and the endless preparations for it simply go on and on. Consider it beyond irony that, as this country’s corporate, political, and military champions claim they wage war to spread democracy, it withers at home.

And here’s what worries me most of all: America’s very long war of destruction against relatively weak countries and peoples may be over, or at least reduced to the odd moment of hostilities, but America’s leaders, no matter the party, now seem to favor a new cold war against China and now Russia. Incredibly, the old Cold War produced a win that was so sweet, yet so fleeting, that it seems to require a massive do-over.

Promoting war may have worked well for the military-industrial complex when the enemy was thousands of miles away with no capacity for hitting “the homeland,” but China and Russia do have that capacity. If a war with China or Russia (or both) comes to pass, it won’t be a long one. And count on one thing: America’s leaders, corporate, military, and political, won’t be able to shrug off the losses by looking at positive balance sheets and profit margins at weapons factories.

Copyright 2022 William J. Astore

Via Tomdispatch.com

But, in history, we cannot reach satisfactory conclusions based on ‘ifs‘. We have to consider only the facts and the events that took place.

Ray Takeyh, who keeps harping on the ill-founded notion that Dr. Mossadegh was not democratically elected– most recently in a column in the arch-conservative Commentary — continues to reiterate that statement based on incorrect assumptions and lacking any documents. In fact, in his recent article, filled with much disinformation and misinformation, every other line can be questioned. His goal, in pushing this view, is to show that Mossadegh’s government was not democratic or democratically elected and thus, when foreign powers acted against it, they were right to do so.

First, when we talk about ‘democratically elected’ what do we mean? How does a parliamentary system work? Is the PM elected by the Parliament like in Great Britain? The answer is YES.

Which country do we have in recent modern history whose government was totally democratically elected? Not many. Even if we look at the U.S. we have doubts as many of our citizens are prevented from voting. In Iran of 1950’s, half of the population, that is women, were not even allowed to vote until much later (although Mossadegh was preparing a bill for their enfranchisement).

On this subject, Maziar Behrooz, associate professor at San Francisco University, who has researched and written both about the Tudeh Party and the Coup, says, “If one reads and understands Iran’s 1906-1907 constitution, it becomes clear that under Iran’s parliamentary system, members of the Majles (parliament) were elected by popular vote (in 1951, by male suffrage). The Majles would then vote for one of its members as Prime Minister and the person thus elected would be rubber-stamped by the Shah (issuing a royal decree). This latter act would be a ceremonial act under normal constitutional procedures. Hence, to say that Dr. Mosaddegh was not elected democratically is incorrect and shows the author’s lack of knowledge of constitutional procedures during that period.”

Mossadegh was elected by the majority of the Majles, the parliament of Iran, which was comprised of his supporters as well as those who were opposed to him. Some of its members were corrupt and had received British financial support. As professor Mark Gasiorowski, a scholar of this period and author of an important book on the topic, says:

“Takeyh’s argument is that Dr. Mossadegh was appointed by the Shah, rather than elected.”

Dr. Ali Gheissari, in his well-documented piece, The U.S. Coup of 1953 in Iran, Sixty Years On, published in the journal of The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review, dated September 2013, writes, “Technically the Shah no longer had the constitucional power to dismiss the premier without the approval or the request of the parliament (the Majles). Mosaddeq, on the other hand, had already obtained considerable emergency powers from the parliament in the previous year in order to strengthen his position. He could bypass the parliament and legislate by decree, and he could limit the powers of the Shah.”

Mossadegh was elected repeatedly in his district, always gaining the highest number of votes, which Takeyh fails to mention.

The elections for parliament in this era generally were not very democratic, with wealthy landowners, the Royal Court and other powerful entities and figures, as well as the British embassy and perhaps the Soviets, using various means – presumably very extensively -to get their preferred candidates elected. Also, women (50% of the population) were not allowed to vote. All of this certainly occurred in the 1952 parliamentary election — the only one that occurred when Mossadegh was in power.

Dr Abrahamian, distinguished professor of Iranian history and the author of many important books says: “I have spelled this issue out in my new book (Oil Crisis in Iran) on US documents and on the Mossadeq period. The chapter on parliamentary politics tries to spell out the shah’s limited powers in the constitution and that it was the prerogative of the majles to elect the Prime Minister–the shah’s authority was supposed to be purely a formality. So Mossadeq was legally elected premier. Takeyh, I suspect, is accepting Reza Shah’s interpretation of the constitution–but then Reza Shah could choose his prime minister because he could dictate to the majles on who to elect. The fundamental laws of 1906 are quite clear: all the ministers are elected by the majles and responsible only to the majles.”

Despite many interferences, Iran in the Mossadegh era, experienced some of its most democratic years: the press was free, though manipulated by the above-mentioned forces as well as the CIA (in a televised interview, the CIA operative Richard Cottam stated, “I would write a piece in the evening and the next day it would be printed (translated) in one of the Teheran papers that we controlled”).

Not only the press, but political parties (except for the Tudeh) and civil society groups were very free; demonstrations and rallies occurred frequently, with little obstruction; and there was little or no repression or unlawful activity by the government. Mossadegh, who was against violence by any means even to save his government, never suppressed dissent as Mr. Takieh wrongly states.

“Despite Iran not being fully democratic, yet it was considerably more democratic than most other countries in the region at the time, and much more democratic than it ever was either before or after Mossadegh’s premiership.” (Gasiorowski).

Continuing with Gasiorowski, let’s not forget that black Americans were largely prevented from voting at this time and severely harassed in various other ways, including lynching, so the US could hardly be called fully democratic.

Dr. Mossadegh was elected despite it all — with the support of many Iranians and despite the objections and interference of monarchists, the Tudeh party, the clerics, and the rest.

“The CIA begrudgingly con-ceded that despite increasing parliamentary opposition, Mossadeq had continued to receive votes of confidence mainly because of his apt handling of the oil crisis.” Memorandum from John Waller (CIA) to Roosevelt, FRUS, in the book, The Oil Crisis: From Nationalism to the Coup d’Etat, Ervand Abrahamian, Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Dr. Mossadegh’s government lasted less than twenty-eight months. Financial and political pressure from within and without was placed on his government. He was portrayed as being pro-Soviet, a convenient lie that was instilled by the British and later the Americans. Although George McGhee later wrote: “I do not believe that Mossadeq formed an alliance of his own with the Soviet Union. Mossadeq was in my view, first and foremost a loyal Iranian.”

Mossadegh was a nationalist who saw that the saviour of his nation would be the nationalization of its oil industry. However, the British considered this act to be endangering their interests, political and financial. The British would not even accept the 50/50 proposal, as had been offered by the Americans to Saudi Arabia.

On this issue, George McGhee, the then representative of Harry Truman in the oil negotiations, writes that with great disappointment he went to the Shoreham Hotel to give the bad news to Dr. Mossadegh. “You’ve come here to send me home” said Mossadegh. “Yes,” I said. “I am sorry to have to tell you that we can’t bridge the gap between you and the British. It’s a great disappointment to us as it must be to you. It was a moment I will never forget. He accepted the result quietly, with no recriminations.” McGhee also writes that Eden had persuaded the Administration not to continue the talks with the Iranian delegation and to send Mossadegh back to Iran. (Envoy to the Middle World, George McGhee)

It was the Cold War and the Americans finally went along with the British meme that if Iran nationalized its oil, and if Mossadegh’s government stayed on, the Soviets would take over. The British were scared that Iran’s example would lead to other countries in their quest for the control of their sources of natural wealth. Egypt was a clear example. Mossadegh was eulogized in Cairo when he set foot there. He had become the hero of the region. The British saw signs they did not like.

Later, President Nasser, talking about the Suez nationalization, would say: “I went to pull the tail of the British lion. When I got there, I saw that Dr. Mossadegh had already cut it off.”

The United States, a close ally, finally succumbed to the British demands, promoting the bogey of the fear of communism, but with its self-interest in mind. In addition, unlike the democratic administration of Truman which had tried to find a solution to the oil question, Eisenhower was persuaded by the Dulles brothers to go along with the British plans for a coup d’état. In fact, when Mossadegh’s government was under immense financial pressure due to British sanctions, he had asked the American government for help. Truman had been in favor but then a Republican administration came to power in Washington.

The British foreign office advised the Americans not to assist Mossadegh’s government economically. An orchestrated effort was in place to bring his government down. Only a few days after the Coup did the foreign office send a communique to the State Department that now they could give the Zahedi government full-fledged help, and money flowed to Iran, personally enriching some of the coup perpetrators.

Mr. Takeyh wishes to rewrite history. He has done so in a number of articles written on this very subject. But there is never new information on his part. It is a repeat of the old, revisionist conjectures. If there has been libel, as charged by Takeyh, it is Mr. Takeyh himself who has libelled Iran. Mr. Takeyh should not try to distort history as we cannot deny facts. The British MI6 and the American CIA toppled the democratic government of Dr. Mossadegh for financial and political reasons. Through the years, the facts have been given to us in black on white, through government publications, and various archives, although the British have attempted to withhold much on their part. But the work of major scholars, Iranians, and Americans, testify to this truth.

The truth is Mr. Takeyh, even with his latest revisionist article, cannot escape real history.

—

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CNN: “CIA involvement in 1953 Iranian coup”