The motives of the US national security state can be revealed in part by noting whom it supports and whom it attacks. By the “US national security state” I mean the Executive Office of the White House, the National Security Council (NSC), National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and other such units that are engaged in surveillance, suppression, covert action, and forceful interventions abroad and at home. Also included are the various monitoring committees set up by the NSC, composed of top players from the Department of State and Department of Defense (the Pentagon), the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the White House.
The efforts of these highly placed government bodies are supplemented by ostensibly nongovernmental groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Conference, the Bohemian Grove, and other formal and informal elite groups populated by political leaders, policy specialists, bankers, CEOs, big investors, leading publicists, and a sprinkling of academic acolytes. The Americans among them are the individuals who inhabit the upper circles of US power, who become the secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury, Commerce, and heads of the CIA and the National Security Council, in that revolving door between Washington and Wall Street.1
These US leaders have consistently supported rightist régimes and organizations and opposed leftist ones. The terms right and left are frequently bandied about but seldom specifically defined by policymakers or media commentators—and with good reason. The power of a label is in its being left undefined, allowing it to have an abstracted built-in demonizing impact that precludes rational examination of its political content. To explicate the actual political-economic content of leftist governments and movements is to reveal their egalitarian and usually democratic goals, making it much harder to demonize them.
The Left, as I would define it, encompasses those individuals, organizations, and governments that advocate egalitarian, redistributive policies and human services benefiting the common people and infringing upon the privileged interests of the wealthy propertied classes.
The Right also is involved in redistributive politics, but the distribution goes the other way, in an upward direction advancing the privileges of private capital and the wealthy few. Rightist governments and groups, including fascist ones, are dedicated to using the labor, markets, and natural resources of countries as so much fodder for the enrichment of the owning classes. In almost every country including our own, rightist groups, parties, or governments advocate privatization and deregulation of the economy, along with tax and spending programs, wage and investment practices, and methods of police and military control that primarily benefit those who receive the bulk of their income from investments and property, at the expense of those who live off wages, salaries, fees, and pensions. That is what usually distinguishes the Right from the Left.
In just about each instance, rightist forces abroad are deemed by US opinion makers to be “friendly to the West,” a coded term for “pro–free market” and “pro-capitalist.” Conversely, leftist ones are labeled as hostile, “antidemocratic,” “anti-American,” and “anti-West,” when in fact they are anti–corporate capital and against the privileges of the super rich.
While claiming to be motivated by a dedication to human rights and democracy, US leaders have supported some of the most notorious right-wing autocracies in history—régimes that have pursued policies favoring wealthy transnational corporations at the expense of local producers and working people; régimes that have tortured, killed, or otherwise maltreated large numbers of their more resistant citizens, as in (at one time or another) Chad, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, the Philippines, Chile (under Pinochet), Cuba (under Batista), Congo/Zaire (under Mobutu), Nicaragua (under Somoza), Iran (under the Shah), Iraq (under Saddam Hussein until 1990), Morocco (under King Hassan), and Portugal (under Salazar), to offer an incomplete listing.
US imperialists have assisted counterrevolutionary insurgencies that have perpetrated brutal bloodletting against civilian populations; for example, Unita in Angola, Renamo in Mozambique, the contras in Nicaragua, the Khmer Rouge (during the 1980s) in Cambodia, the mujahedeen and then the Taliban in Afghanistan (in the 1980s and 1990s against a Soviet-supported reformist government), and (in 1999–2000) the drug-dealing Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army in Yugoslavia (originally deemed a terrorist organization by the US State Department). All this is a matter of public record, although it is seldom if ever reported in the US media.
Support for rightists extends to Nazism itself. After World War II, US leaders and their western capitalist allies did little to eradicate fascism from Europe, except for putting some of the top Nazi leaders on trial at Nuremberg. In short time, many former Nazis and their active collaborators were back in the saddle in Germany.2 Hundreds of Nazi war criminals found a haven in the United States, either living in comfortable anonymity or employed by US intelligence agencies during the Cold War.3
In France, too, very few Vichy collaborators were purged. “No one of any rank was seriously punished for his or her role in the roundup and deportation of Jews to Nazi camps.”4 US military authorities also restored fascist collaborators to power in various Far East nations. In South Korea, for instance, police trained by the fascist Japanese occupation force were used immediately after the war to suppress left democratic forces. The South Korean Army was commanded by officers who had served (proudly) in the Imperial Japanese Army, some of whom had been guilty of horrid war crimes in the Philippines and China.5
In Italy, within a year after the war, almost all Italian fascists were released from prison while hundreds of communists and other leftist partisans who had been valiantly fighting the Nazi occupation were incarcerated. Allied authorities initiated most of these measures.6 From 1945 to 1975, US government agencies gave an estimated $75 million to right-wing organizations in Italy, including some with close ties to the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI).