U.S. officials keep empowering revolutionaries who massacre their own citizens

Eliyahu Tulshinski

January 13, 2024

Americans are a uniquely generous nation, but sometimes staying out of a foreign conflict is in the best interests of those at home and abroad.

Americans always ready to help the underdog

Historian Ed Ayers was once asked “how long rooting for the underdog has been part of American history.” He responded that it has, essentially, been the case since the nation began:

Well, I think ever since 13 scrappy Colonies went up against the largest empire in the modern world.

Sometimes the underdog takes the form of a sports team or a citizen fighting an illness. Other times, it's an oppressed group, possibly in a faraway land. The further away a conflicted land lies, though, the less informed Americans may be about the political “saviors” they're rallying behind to protect an “oppressed” underdog population.

Bad endings

Revolutionaries have taken advantage of the lack of first-hand knowledge Americans have about distant lands in order to garner their support for regime changes that have actually worsened conditions for the groups Americans were told would be “liberated.”

South Africa

The U.S. supported the rise to power of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, despite their notorious death by “necklacing" campaign against the nation's Black population.

Iran

The pro-West Shah of Iran commented, “You cannot imagine the pressure the Americans [during the Carter administration] were putting on me, and in the end it became an order” to resign during communist-inspired protests.

The pro-Soviet government that replaced the Shah held 66 Americans hostage for over a year, killed 30,000 political prisoners in just one of its massacres, tortured thousands more, and spread terrorism throughout the world.

The effects of the disastrous foreign policy that replaced the Shah with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini continue to be felt to this day: Amnesty International reports widespread torture of Iranians, “including beatings, floggings, electric shocks, stress positions, mock executions, waterboarding, sexual violence, forced administration of chemical substances, and deprivation of medical care” following “baseless national security charges” and torture-tainted “confessions.”

China

George Marshall was promoted to Secretary of State after he pressured the pro-West leader of China, Chiang Kai-shek, to allow communist insurgents into his government (while Marshall's weapons embargo on Kai-shek led to the dumping of weapons earmarked for his defense forces into the Indian Ocean). The policy that brought Mao Tse-tung to power allowed him to kill between 38 million and 77 million of his own people.

The murdered may have been the lucky ones, as Chairman Mao led the torture, rape, and even cannibalism of countless others.

Egypt

Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who worked to keep the anti-West Muslim Brotherhood out of power, was told by Barack Obama to resign during protests led in part by that very group. One of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi, then came to power.

Morsi's administration marked the first time that Christians were reportedly crucified in Egypt since the first century:

[S]ome of the Muslim Brotherhood operatives have “crucified those opposing Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi naked on trees in front of the presidential palace while abusing others.”

The abuse of Egyptian citizens was so extreme that the military stepped in to arrest Morsi for the murder and torture of Egyptian citizens. Morsi was also charged with committing "the biggest case of conspiracy [espionage] in the history of Egypt."

Mainstream Media

Legacy media, rather than exposing U.S. officials whose policies led to the deaths and murders of citizens of South Africa, Iran, China, and Egypt, has, for the most part, avoided covering both the atrocities and the policies that led to them. After naming Morsi “the Most Important Man in the Middle East” as he took control of Egypt, Time decided that Morsi didn't merit the same coverage when his torture and murder policies were revealed.

Entertainment industry

Media support for would-be dictators has not been limited to news sources. Entertainers have played a large role as well.

Cuba

The industry actually went to a gathering of revolutionary guerillas to bring the supposedly soft side of Fidel Castro into the living rooms of Americans as Fidel Castro's rebel forces were moving towards that nation's capital:

At 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, January 11, 1959, some 50 million viewers tuned their television sets to “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the trendsetting variety revue that had introduced them to Elvis Presley a few years earlier . . .

With his first breath, Sullivan assures CBS viewers that they are about to meet “a wonderful group of revolutionary youngsters,” as if they are the latest pop music sensation. Despite their unwashed appearance, Fidel’s followers are a far cry from the godless Communists depicted by the Cuban military’s propaganda machine, he adds; in fact, they are all wearing Catholic medals and some are even piously carrying copies of the Bible. But Sullivan is most interested in Fidel himself. . . . U.S. magazines openly described Fidel as a new Robin Hood, with Celia as his Maid Marian, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. . . .

Fidel laughs. “. . . You can be sure that Batista . . . will be the last dictator of Cuba.”

In 1959, Sullivan saw no reason to argue.

The lovefest now proceeds to its crescendo. “The people of the United States, they have great admiration for you and your men,” the host advises Fidel. “Because you are in the real American tradition—of a George Washington—of any band who started off with a small body [of men] and fought against a great nation and won.” Fidel takes the compliment in stride; after all, the U.S. press had been idolizing him for nearly two years as a citizen-soldier in the very spirit of 1776. [Emphases added].

Castro then brought so much torture and death upon the nation that tens of thousands of citizens were willing to die in attempts to flee the island prison.

[Cuba Archive] Project Vice President Armando Lago, a Harvard-trained economist, has spent years studying the cost of the revolution and he estimates that almost 78,000 innocents may have died trying to flee the dictatorship. . . .

some 5,600 Cubans have died in front of firing squads and another 1,200 in “extrajudicial assassinations.”

South Africa

Bono, of the U2 band, is particularly known for demanding that his fans adopt his political views. Bono even admonishes his fans if they do not pay sufficient attention to his political commentaries, once calling out in frustration at the lack of attention of the audience to his call for support for Desmond Tutu, a supporter of ANC leader and life-long communist Nelson Mandela:

Am I bugging you? Don't mean to bug you. . . . OK Edge, play the blues.

Myanmar/Burma

Bono had a long history of persuading fans of his music to support the political career of Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been under house arrest in Myanmar (formerly Burma).

Barack Obama likewise supported Suu Kyi, refusing to lift sanctions on Myanmar until she came to power. She was even awarded a Congressional Gold Medal while under house arrest.

Eventually, Suu Kyi was released from confinement and did become the leader of Myanmar in April 2016. Just four months later, her nation's military began murdering Muslim Rohingya people in Myanmar's Rakhine State, killing some 25,000 Rohingya and gang-raping and burning thousands of others. More than 700,000 were forced to flee to Bangladesh.

Regret?

With far less fanfare than in his concerts supporting Suu Kyi, Bono backtracked on his once unconditional support of Suu Kyi in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine:

The singer - who championed Suu Kyi in the 2000 U2 song Walk On, with fans encouraged to wear masks of the then opposition leader when the band played it live - said he felt "nauseated" by images of the bloodshed and refugee crisis.

"I have genuinely felt ill, because I can't quite believe what the evidence all points to. But there is ethnic cleansing," he told Rolling Stone magazine in its latest issue.

"It really is happening, and she has to step down because she knows it's happening," Bono said.

Pressed on his remarks in the interview conducted by Rolling Stone's founder, Jann Wenner, Bono said: "She should, at the very least, be speaking out more. And if people don't listen, then resign."

That may be more than most politicians have offered in the way of regret for supporting revolutionaries who went on to massacre their citizens.

To this day, politicians contend there was no way to predict that Fidel Castro, for example, would turn Cuba into a communist prison. Negating this claim, the John Birch Society notes that its founder, Robert Welch, publicized the fact that Castro was a communist before he took power.

Three months prior to Castro seizing control of Cuba, private citizen Robert Welch published the truth about the Cuban revolutionary in his small American Opinion magazine. He stated in September 1958, “Now the evidence from Castro’s whole past that he is a Communist agent carrying out Communist orders and plans is overwhelming.”

Wars of national liberation

Welch had no trouble identifying the political leanings of Castro. Here's one clue, the Society offered, from 11 years before his revolution succeeded:

On April 9, 1948, 21-year-old Fidel Castro took part in a bloody communist uprising in Bogota, Colombia. While shouting over a seized radio station, “This is a Communist revolution,” he and his marauding comrades proceeded to murder hundreds while setting fires that claimed many more lives. Arrested and charged with murder, he boasted, “I did a good work today; I killed a priest.” But the Colombian authorities merely sent him out of their country. [Emphases added].

Welch and his John Birch Society were able to predict other such “bad endings,” though, even with less clear evidence, because Marxist wars of national liberation, in which the people to be “liberated” are instead massacred, follow a general pattern.

A detailed description of the seven-step process of Marxist wars of national liberation, beginning with the choice of an “oppressed class” to carry out their revolution, will be covered in the next installment of our series on revolutionaries, allowing citizens to recognize a fake liberation and oppose U.S. involvement.