7 Fascist Regimes Enthusiastically Supported by America (the exceptional)

[Karmadillo]

And just because we put some of these governments into power by encouraging and aiding coups, don't start thinking we had anything to do with the coup in Ukraine.

http://www.alternet.org/world/7-fascist-regimes-enthusiastically-supported-america

7 Fascist Regimes Enthusiastically Supported by America
The U.S. treated Cuba as an enemy while backing deeply oppressive Latin American regimes.

<edit>

Below are seven of the worst fascist regimes in Latin America that the U.S. enthusiastically supported.

1. Chile: Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s Military Junta, 1973-1990

In 1970, socialist Salvador Allende was democratically elected president of Chile as the leader of the Unidad Popular (a coalition of leftist parties). Allende had been in office for three years when far-right forces in the Chilean military staged an armed insurrection with the help and encouragement of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Richard Nixon Administration (Allende, who evidently committed suicide by shooting himself, was found dead in the presidential palace in Santiago on September 11, 1973). A U.S.-backed military dictatorship under Gen. Augusto Pinochet (a fascist greatly influenced by Spain’s Gen. Francisco Franco and Italy’s Benito “Il Duce” Mussolini) came to power, and thousands of Allende supporters were killed and tortured during Pinochet’s reign of terror. Not until 1990, after 17 years of fascist rule, was democracy restored in Chile.

2. Guatemala’s Military Dictatorships

For decades, the U.S. supported harsh military dictatorships in Guatemala, and its reasons for doing so can be summed up in three words: United Fruit Company. The UFC, a huge American corporation, made considerable profits from fruit plantations in various Latin American countries, including Guatemala—and when Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz (who won by a landslide in Guatemala’s 1951 election) pushed a program of agrarian reform, the UFC lost some of the uncultivated land it had in that country. Árbenz was popular among indigenous Mayans but very unpopular with the UFC, which lobbied the U.S. government to remove him from power. The UFC got its way: in a coup orchestrated by the U.S. State Department and the CIA, Árbenz’ democratically elected government was overthrown in 1954 and replaced by the repressive military dictatorship of Col. Carlos Castillo Armas. And the U.S.-backed military regimes that followed Armas’ assassination in 1957 proved to be even worse. Tens of thousands of Guatemalans were slaughtered by fascist military forces and far-right death squads in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

more...

[hifiguy]

1. The American embrace of fascism overseas is the rule.

Mussolini and the Austrian Corporal were the exceptions.

[Octafish]

2. 7. Paraguay: The Alfredo Stroessner Regime, 1954-1989

Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, who was in power from 1954-1989, was a strident anti-communist—and that was enough for the U.S., which pumped millions of dollars into his regime in the 1950s and 1960s and had a close relationship with the Paraguayan military for many years. Torture, kidnappings and other human rights abuses were common under the Stroessner regime, which authorized Pastor Milciades Coronel (who oversaw Stroessner’s secret police) to commit numerous atrocities. In 1975, Stroessner even listened on the phone while Miguel Soler, head of the Paraguayan Communist Party, was being dismembered with a chainsaw by Coronel’s policía secreta.

Things changed for a brief time with the election of the first democratically elected president in 2008: Paraguay? Why not?

Then, no. The old order is back. But, Rev Moon and the Bush family holdings remain.

[Comrade Grumpy]

3. Hell, this list doesn't even get us out of the Western Hemisphere.

If we went worldwide, this list could get unmanageably lengthy.

[Fred Sanders]

6. Short list, true, but it is just Top Seven.

[Fred Sanders]

4. #8 Saudi Arabia #9 Qatar #10 Ukraine (Poroshenko era) #11 Egypt etc. Iran once, Iraq, once...

[Nuclear Unicorn]

5. Well, lately we've read here that we should have made friends with Saddam.

[Karmadillo]

8. We did make friends with Saddam.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1412.htm

How The United States Illegally Armed Saddam Hussein

With Iraqi President Saddam Hussein insisting that Iraq no longer has weapons of mass destruction we are going to spend the rest of the hour looking at how the United States helped illegally arm Iraq in the 1980s.

It was a scandal that took on Tom Clancy-like proportions: It involved a president, George Bush the First; future Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; the current FBI head Robert Mueller and, in a minor role, even Henry Kissinger.

Over 10 years ago a reporter for the Financial Times named Alan Friedman uncovered the shocking story. He revealed that:

*President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker had committed billions of taxpayer dollars to assist Saddam Hussein.
*Bush and Baker allowed the export of U.S. technology that would directly help Baghdad build a massive arsenal of chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. The arms were given to help Iraq fight Iran.
*The CIA helped orchestrated illegal arms deals that involved Pinochet supporters in Chile, the apartheid regime in South Africa as well as most of the major NATO allies in Europe.

All of this was to prop up a man that President Bush and later his son would compare to Hitler.

more...

[Nuclear Unicorn]

10. Yes. I know but many here at DU would be content in making an ally of Saddam against ISIS

[pampango]

13. And more recently - Assad, Qaddafi, al-Sisi. One would hope that the 20-year gap

from the US-supported regimes listed in the OP are an indication of a different direction. Supporting dictators out of fear of "the worse of two evils" such as communists or terrorists is a policy that belongs to the Reagan/Bush (and earlier) years.

[cheapdate]

7. In Achieving Our Country (1997), Richard Rorty gave this advice:

"National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement. Too much national pride can produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive self-respect can produce arrogance. But just as too little self-respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely.

...

"Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of. They must tell inspiring stories about episodes and figures in the nation's past -- episodes and figures to which the country should remain true. Nations rely on artists and intellectuals to create images of, and to tell stories about, the national past. Competition for political leadership is in part a competition between differing stories about a nation's self-identity, and between differing symbols of it's greatness."

I think Rorty has captured a real truth.

"Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of."

Criticism and protest are essential for positive change. But unrelenting cynicism is tiresome.

[Agony]

9. It's our Divine Right, called National Security Interests...

Get used to it world, we will do whatever the hell we want…

and we still are…

Agony

[MisterP]

11. now in handy trading-card form!

http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/fdtcards/Cards_Index.html

[Karmadillo]

15. Thank you for posting that link. Excellent summaries.

[Ramses]

12. This post is eye opening

and should be required reading about the true nature and true history of the violent US government supporting right wing dictatorships for decades.
Should be taught in high schools around the nation. I wonder if this could be put on cheap thumb drives or CD's and distributed in cities and at protests fighting against this very thing.

[Scuba]

14. +1

[Karmadillo]

16. Great idea.

[woo me with science]

17. K&R