Американская военная машина. Глубинная политика, глобальная связь ЦРУ с наркотиками и путь в Афганистан - Питер Дейл Скотт

Многие авторы решили решить этот вопрос, предложив американскому правительству и его так называемой демократической системе не три, а два "ура". Сам я, несмотря на все, что я написал в этой книге, хотел бы в заключение предложить хотя бы одно.

Два других аплодисмента я предлагаю американскому народу. Правда, постепенное укрепление демократии в этой стране привело к появлению не только нелепых кандидатов, но и вредных причин, разжигающих ненависть. Тем не менее, одно аплодисменты американскому народу в целом за его общую гуманность и невосприимчивость к джингоизму.

Другой аплодисмент - тем миролюбивым американцам, которые в разгар холодной войны подарили нам яркие примеры того, как можно существенно изменить общество путем ненасильственного убеждения снизу. Я имею в виду, прежде всего, движение за гражданские права, которое положило конец открытому узаконенному расизму в этой стране и помогло вдохновить другие подобные движения, некоторые успешные, а некоторые пока безуспешные, по всему миру. Но мы можем добавить сюда и антивоенное движение - первый в истории пример, когда мобилизованное общественное мнение смогло ускорить окончание невыигрышной войны.

Более века земля и народ Америки давали надежду и вдохновение народам других стран, стремящимся к свободе. Так может быть и впредь - но только в том случае, если мобилизованная американская общественность сможет вернуть правильные приоритеты в свою разрушенную политическую систему, развращенную наркотиками и войной.

Примечания

Introduction

1. He attached great importance to the fact that, while much of the steel door was burned away, the wooden floor of the car was barely charred.

2. I narrated this recovered memory first in my poem Coming to Jakarta (New York: New Directions, 1989), 147–48, and then a second time a decade later in Minding the Darkness (New York: New Directions, 2000), 138.

3. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Traffic (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2003), xii, quoting Scott, Coming to Jakarta, 147–48. I believe that when I first checked with McCoy about this in 1990, his memory ended with our descending the stairs from the veteran’s home “to see something.”

4. David E. Kaplan, “Spying on the San Diego Street Journal (and other Americans),” U.S. News & World Report, January 9, 2006, http://www.todaysalternativenews

.com/index.php?event=link,150&values%5B0%5D=&values%5B1%5D=2668: “Among the Street Journal’s reporters was a young Lowell Bergman, whose later exploits as a 60 Minutes TV producer would be portrayed by Al Pacino in the movie The Insider. ‘We were targets along with a lot of other people,’ recalls Bergman. ‘By 1971 we’d all left town.’”

5. George O’Toole, The Private Sector (New York: Norton, 1978), 145, quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 269. America in the 1960s and 1970s was engulfed in mass violence. The government’s resort to it in proxy operations was not wholly gratuitous; like many of the groups it targeted, it sincerely believed that revolution here was imminent or had already begun. But the two incidents I have just described, against nonviolent antiwar groups, must be described as surplus violence, inviting and perhaps even designed to provoke a violent response. At some point, elements of the antiwar Students for a Democratic Society did eventually—as the so-called Weathermen—resort to bombs themselves. A full history of the antiwar movement will have to assess the extent to which gratuitous government violence was a factor in leading to the Weathermen’s formation.

6. “Those investigating American Indian history and U.S. history more generally have failed to reckon with the violence upon which the continent was built” (Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006], 3).

7. Graham Adams, Age of Industrial Violence 1910–1915: The Activities and Findings of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971).

8. Scott, Minding the Darkness, 137.

9. I suspect in fact that most readers will be tempted to reject and forget my anecdote of the bombed car door as something that simply “doesn’t compute” with their own observations of America.

10. Although this is a topic too broad for this book, I would suggest that three sorts of deep events, most of them still hotly debated, date further back in U.S. history than those associated with the postwar global dug connection: 1) provocations and/or deceptions leading to war, such as the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania in 1915, which was instrumental in bringing America into World War I; 2) intrigues inducing policy change, as when a Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886) was converted (by a court reporter who happened to be a former railroad president) into a “ruling” that corporations are persons protected by the Fourteenth Amendment (see Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights [New York: Rodale Books, 2002]); and 3) plots for leadership change, such as the alleged murder by arsenic of President Zachary Taylor in 1850 (see Michael Parenti, History as Mystery [San Francisco: City Light Books, 1999], 304), the Lincoln assassination, or General Smedley Butler and the so-called Business Plot of 1935.

11. E.g., New York Times, June 6, 1971; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 286–87.

12. Among the CIA veterans interviewed by McCoy at this time were Edward Lansdale (June 17, 1971, Alexandria, Virginia), Lucien Conein (June 18, 1971, McLean, Virginia), Bernard Yoh (June 15, 1971, Washington, D.C.), and William Young (September 8 and 14, 1971, Chiangmai).

13. Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1977), 46–49; Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 179.

14. J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 42, 71.

15. Naomi Klein, in her otherwise shrewd analysis, oversimplifies when she calls the murder “Pinochet’s most outrageous and defiant crime