When trying to determine the intentions of policymakers, we should look not only at whom they support but whom they attack. US rulers have targeted just about all leftist governments, parties, leaders, political movements, and popular insurgencies—that is, any political entity that attempts to initiate equitable reforms, egalitarian programs for the common people, restraints on corporate capital, and self-development for their own countries.
Consider once more the parliamentary social democracies in Italy and Western Europe. From 1969 to 1974, high-ranking elements in Italian military and civilian intelligence agencies, along with various secret and highly placed neofascist groups, embarked upon a campaign of terror and sabotage known as the “strategy of tension,” involving a series of kidnappings, assassinations, and bombings (i stragi), including the explosion that massacred eighty-five people and wounded some two hundred in the Bologna train station in August 1980. Fueled by international security agencies including the CIA, the terrorism was directed against the growing popularity of the democratic parliamentary left. The objective was to “combat by any means necessary the electoral gains of the Italian Communist Party” and create enough terror to destabilize the multiparty social democracy and replace it with an authoritarian “presidential republic,” or in any case “a stronger and more stable executive.” Deeply implicated in this terrorist campaign, the CIA refused to cooperate with an Italian parliamentary commission investigating i stragi in 1995.7
In the 1980s, scores of leftists were murdered in Germany, Belgium, and elsewhere in Western Europe by extreme rightists in the service of state security agencies. As with the “strategy of tension” in Italy, the US corporate-owned media largely ignored these acts of right-wing terrorism—while giving prominent play to tiny and far less effective left terrorist grouplets found in Italy and West Germany.
In Italy, as long as the Communist Party retained imposing strength in parliament and within the labor unions, US policymakers worked with centrist alternatives such as the Christian Democrats and the anticommunist Italian Socialist Party. With communism in decline by the 1990s, US leaders began to lend more open encouragement to extreme rightist forces. In 1994 and again in 2001, national elections were won by the National Alliance, a coalition of neofascists, ultraconservatives, and northern separatists headed by ultra-rightist media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi.
The National Alliance played on resentments regarding unemployment, taxes, and immigration. It attempted to convince people that government was the enemy—especially its social service sector (as do reactionary elements in the Republican Party in the United States), all the while preaching the virtues of the free market, and pursuing tax and spending measures that redistributed income upward. US leaders and mainstream media have had not a harsh word to say about these Italian crypto-fascists.
The methods of domination employed by the US imperium to subvert and defeat reformist and leftist governments are as varied and ruthless as the opportunities of intervention may allow. Here is an incomplete listing: