Damn those Russians! Don’t they understand that messing in other countries’ elections is our intellectual property! Don’t they appreciate that we supported and funded Boris N. Yeltsin, their first President, after the breakup of the old Soviet Union in 1991? What makes them think they can mess around and support Trump and get away with it? They are mere neophytes when it comes to messing up other countries elections.
Uncle Sam has far more experience propping up leadership around the world. Alphabetically, here is America’s resume: Albania 1919; Brazil 1962; British Guiana 1961; Bulgaria 1990; Chile 1964; Ecuador 1960; Guatemala 1963; Haiti 1988-1992; Indonesia 1955; Italy 1947-8; Jamaica 1972; Laos 1958-61; Lebanon 1952; Nicaragua 1984; Uruguay 1972; Vietnam 1955-56.
For specific details, read Killing Hope: U. S. Military and C. I. A. Interventions since World War II by William Blum. Written in 1995, it is missing many more recent “interventions,” such as Bolivia and the attempted coup against Evo Moralis, and the troubles stirred up against the Sandinistas–which I heard about from Comandante Dora Maria Tellez, who at the time was not supporting Daniel Ortega.
I went to Nicaragua to interview Comandante Tellez, because President George W. Bush’s State Department denied her a visa to enter the U. S. to accept the appointment as Visiting Professor in Latin American Studies, at the Harvard Divinity School.
One hundred-twenty-two professors signed a statement saying, “The accusations made by the State Department against Dora Maria Tellez…amount to political persecution of those who have engaged in overthrowing the atrocious dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua.… This regime was almost universally viewed as criminal and inhumane, and yet it was financially and militarily supported by the United States…. In reference to dictatorships, just as the State Department cannot affirm that the activities of Nelson Mandela against the atrocious dictatorship of apartheid in South Africa were terrorist activities, neither can [the State Department] affirm that Dora Marie’s activities against the atrocious Somoza dictatorship were terrorist” (source Wikipedia.)
Dora showed me the letter of denial she received. To understand this, you have to know that it was the U. S. that brought the Somozas to power in the first place. Using our “Monroe Doctrine” and gunboat diplomacy, countries in the region became known as “banana republics.” Our foreign policy then was one of protecting corporate interests (and their wealthy owners) and calling it “American interest.”
Our C. I. A. had messed in so many elections and assassinations of foreign leaders, that President Jimmy Carter and Congress passed a law to end this practice. By this time the C. I. A. had made 30 unsuccessful attempts to kill Fidel Castro. Perhaps they passed the law to end their embarrassment. However, President Ronald Reagan with Congressional approval created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983. It operated under the United States Aide for International Development (USAID) and is mostly funded by Congress. It is operating in a fashion that most citizens of the United States would consider “undemocratic.” Since its inception, it has been, and still is, our Government’s vehicle for influencing or rigging other Countries’ elections.
Right Web (rightweb.irc-online.org) profiles militarists and their efforts to influence U. S. foreign policy. The site quotes writer Jonah Gindin and Kirsten Weld’s remarks from January/February 2007 NACLA Report on the Americas. “Since [1983], the NED and other democracy promoting governmental and nongovernmental institutions have intervened successfully on behalf of ‘democracy’’–actually a very particular form of low-intensity democracy, chained to pro-market economies–in countries from Nicaragua to the Philippines, Ukraine to Haiti, overturning unfriendly ‘authoritarian’ governments (many of which the United States had previously supported) and replacing them with handpicked pro-market allies.”
“Alan Weinstein is a member of the U. S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a working group known as The Democracy Group. It first proposed the formation of a quasi-governmental group, to channel U. S. political aid. Weinstein served as NED’s acting President during its first year. Talking about the role of NED, Weinstein told the Washington Post in 1999 that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the C. I. A.”
Again from Right Web, “…Rep. Ron Paul, a Republican from Texas, lambasted NED in an October 2003 op-ed. He argued, “The misnamed National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is nothing more than a costly program that takes U. S. taxpayer funds, to promote favored politicians and political parties abroad. What the NED does in foreign countries, through its recipient organizations the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI), would be rightly illegal in the United States. The NED injects ‘soft money’ into the domestic elections of foreign countries in favor of one party or the other.”
Paul continued, “Imagine what a couple of hundred thousand dollars will do, to assist a politician or political party in a relatively poor country abroad. It is positively Orwellian to call U. S. manipulation of foreign elections ‘promoting democracy.’ How would Americans feel if the Chinese arrived with millions of dollars to support certain candidates deemed friendly to China? Would this be viewed as a democratic development?”
It is too bad that people were not paying closer attention to Congressman Ron Paul. Perhaps if we do not want foreign entities interfering in our elections, we should sponsor a treaty, banning all foreign interference (including our own) in foreign elections.
Or, as the Russians might say, “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”