[vulikox]

Ooops. Forgot to mention that Trujillo served time for rape before his rise to power. That was known to the US forces in the 1920's, but didn't stop them backing him.

[oplapofffe]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp
Ooops. Forgot to mention that Trujillo served time for rape before his rise to power. That was known to the US forces in the 1920's, but didn't stop them backing him.
as a minor officer in the Nat Guard, which presumably they didnt have loads of officers for.

What evidence is there that he was"considered an ideal candidate"

what exactly is the source for the above?

[RooldpalApata]

Trujillo had a nickname of "bottle cap" because he collected them as a small child. He disliked the nickname, so he banned the word and removed it from all the dictionaries on the island.

Trujillo was corrupted before rising to power: He was found guilty of rape in 1920.

[VewCoorkPow]

Supporting Pol Pot's psychotic regime at the UN was a particular low point.

[WXQMQFIr]

Originally posted by molly bloom
Trade unions were all well and good in Poland, but not for the likes of staff at G.C.H.Q. .... Although one might expect spies to have their primary allegience to the state that employs them rather than to a collective bargaining agency, her contempt for trade unions in Britain compared to her admiration for them in other states always seemed to me an extraordinary contradiction.

[GfBTWMmV]

Originally posted by Saras
I'd say Stalin wins hands down. Not that the alternative was better... Don't forget, the just-defeated Japanese Imperial Army was used to 'keep order' in French Indo China post-WWII.

Vanity and pride of the French could not allow defeat. Upon release from imprisonment, the French subsequently rearmed Japanese troops and along with German and other mercenaries proceeded to retake the entire Indochina area. http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita...t/1995/ADS.htm

[Blahhhshsh]

Originally posted by Sandman
Supporting Pol Pot's psychotic regime at the UN was a particular low point. QFT

[Npbfamgt]

Pardon, but was solidarnosk organizing a state intell HQ? ISTR they were organizing a shipyard and similar heavy industry, the kinds of places that had routinely been unionized in UK, and even in the eevil capitalist US. Also, IIUC, Thatcher fired people. Is that what the Polish govt did? I thought they arrested people.

[wp6Eg2Fm]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp


Because I'm a Westerner and it appeals to my satirical instincts. A similar thread for the Eastern Bloc wouldn't appeal to me so much as there's less potential for irony/satire in showing dictators suppporting other dictators. And to me, that merely shows the limitiations of the satirical approach. FDR and Ike supporting Darlan, thats funny. Right? FDR supporting Darlan, cause it might help to stop the gas chambers a little earlier, thats not so funny. But to ignore the latter in discussing FDRs and Ikes approach to Darlan, is to remove the context that is necessary for fairly judging FDR and Ike.

[OEMCHEAPSOFTDOWNLOAD]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Well, most of our stands WERE hypocritcal. As we were talking about democracy and freedom (rather than our rhetoric being solely for capitalism) and then backing folks like Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, etc... the rhetoric tended to be contradicted.

Oh, and speaking of which, let me nominate the Shah of Iran... whose dictatorial regime led to a resurgence in Islamic fundamentalism, culminating in the Ayatollah Khomeni's rule of Iran.
Pinochet achieved his coup on his own, though we signaled we would accept the coup. The initial coup was bloody, but the regime was more moderate afterwards, and ultimately left power peacefully, with only a minor push from us.


Iran under the Shah varied over time in its internal functioning, and had elected parliaments at various times. It was no model of western civil liberties, but it was hardly the totalitarian state it is sometimes implied to be. (I agree that not distancing from it earlier was a strategic mistake)

[Retapleapse]

The western leader who first embraced Stalin as an ally was Winston Churchill. Does that imply that WC was insincere in his long opposition to Bolshevism? That he was a neutralist socialist in disguise, who used anti-Bolshevik rhetoric purely to manipulate? Or that he was a pragmatist, who put preserving freedom and capitalism in Britain, which was immediately threatend by Germany far more than by the USSR, ahead of preserving freedom and capitalism in Lithuania?

Now maybe the US was not as threatened during the cold war as UK was during the 1941. There is reasonable debate about that, as well as about the extent of the threat to the UK in 1941. There is also almost certainly a difference between the threat we see, with 20/20 hindsight, and the threat as perceived at the time.

[PemiaGefe]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp



Because I'm a Westerner and it appeals to my satirical instincts. A similar thread for the Eastern Bloc wouldn't appeal to me so much as there's less potential for irony/satire in showing dictators suppporting other dictators.

Still, feel free to start a balancing thread.




Considered him an ally, and for the purposes of this thread that's good enough Here's "Time" from 1960.

<a href="http://br / br / a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,826562,00.html?promoid=googlep" target="_blank"http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...romoid=googlep/a" target="_blank">http://

[agiopwer]

A bit like Saddam Hussein really... When did Sadam have a stable period where dozens of thousands of peple at least were not dieing as a direct result of him every year?

[actifadepette]

Do you have a year in mind?

[nd90t3sf]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


And to me, that merely shows the limitiations of the satirical approach. FDR and Ike supporting Darlan, thats funny. Right? FDR supporting Darlan, cause it might help to stop the gas chambers a little earlier, thats not so funny. But to ignore the latter in discussing FDRs and Ikes approach to Darlan, is to remove the context that is necessary for fairly judging FDR and Ike.
It's for precisely that reason that I didn't start with someone like Stalin. Think of the equation for qualification as thus-

Monstrousness of regime x pointlessness of supporting them

It wasn't particularly embarrassing to ally with Stalin. Needs must when the devil drives. But Trujillo?

[HcMkOKiz]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp



"He may be a son-of-a-*****, but he is our son-of-a-*****." - Cordell Hull, US Secretary of State (1933-1944).

That's the famous one, though it's often mistakenly attributed to FDR speaking of Somoza.

Plus, of course, the fact that there was heavy US support for his installation. And Trujillo's declaration of war in support of US interests during WW2.
Ok, thanks for the quote.

I wonder how deeply embarrassed Hull really was, though. Its not like US foreing policy pre-1940 was Wilsonian (despite Hulls past) To some extent the underlying assumption of this thread, or at least of many posts, is that the US said "we are for democracy and freedom everywhere" and then failed to live up to it. But in fact US for policy from the death of Wilson to the ascendance of Clinton was either isolationist or explicitly realist more often than it was self-consciously Wilsonian. It was often A. We really dont care about the rest of the planet or B. We care about threats to OUR freedom or C. We care about threats to our freedom, or to those of our allies who are already free. It was rarely "We are going to bring freedom to everyone" And in those periods when it was, like under JFK or Carter, there often were some real attempts to pressure at least some of our own allies in a democratic direction (note the Time article about our unworthy ally)

Probably the most "hypocritical" period would be under the Eisenhower admin, when there was still a fair amount of wilsonian rhetoric covering a very unWilsonian for policy.

As for Dom Rep declaring war on Germany, so what. Lots of folks did that - by the end of the war almost everyone who wanted in on the UN did that. They werent all US allies in a serious sense.

[Tilmbeinymn]

Originally posted by lord of the mark

Probably the most "hypocritical" period would be under the Eisenhower admin, when there was still a fair amount of wilsonian rhetoric covering a very unWilsonian for policy.
Curiously enough, the Eisenhower administration was the first one to take a tough stance against Trujillo.


As for Dom Rep declaring war on Germany, so what. Lots of folks did that - by the end of the war almost everyone who wanted in on the UN did that. They werent all US allies in a serious sense. The Dominican Republic declared war on the Axis on December 8th 1941.

[lesso73]

lol, yeah Diem was a noob, but so were all the west's puppets in South Vietnam

[_tppga_]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


I dont know what we were "meant to be" and by whom. By ourselves, by the words of our politicians, by our religious leaders- we were apparently meant to be morally superior to the godless atheistic hordes in the Cold War and we were certainly meant to be morally superior to the Nazis and Axis in WWII.

I think you're being quite disingenuous.

Take your own country- 'one nation UNDER GOD' since 1954.

As opposed to which nations, one might ask ?

[pharweqto]

Originally posted by lord of the mark

Pinochet achieved his coup on his own, Err, shurely shome mishtake ?

The ball started rolling with the 1970 election of Salvador Allende as the president of Chile. Allende immediately took steps to socialize the country's economy, taking business ownership away from several large U.S. corporations and handing them over to local workers. Kissinger and President Nixon, hardly amused by a country in the Western Hemisphere "going communist," gave the nod to the CIA to stage a military coup, resulting in the kidnapping and (possibly mistaken) murder of Chilean chief of staff Rene Schneider. By 1973, under pressure from militant groups on the right and left, and buckling under a U.S. embargo, the Allende government was overthrown by Gen. Pinochet's forces. Allende was killed in a firefight. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...VGVQ5DN7N1.DTL

I believe (although I can't find the exact figures at the moment- in excess of $8 million ) that the amount of funding spent on the coup in Chile exceeded that for the Nixon election campaign.

Which begs the question, why was the U.S.A. spending more money to destabilise a democratically elected foreign government than the presidential candidate of the Republican Party was spending on his election campaign ?

The initial coup was bloody, but the regime was more moderate afterwards Yes, it 'moderately' disappeared dissidents and intellectuals, 'moderately' had women raped by dogs, and 'moderately' took people for one way journeys to city dumps- the helicopter trips over the Pacific tended to be one way too- apparently the abdomen of the victim would be slit open so that the body would sink... what an eye for detail crypto-fascists have.


Led by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Condor was a highly organized anti-terrorist, anti-communist military intelligence operation carried out by six "Southern Cone" countries (Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil), roughly between 1973 and 1980. During that time, anywhere from 15, 000 to 30,000 people were tortured or murdered by the group, all in the name of keeping communist forces from gaining a foothold in South America -- and keeping corrupt military dictatorships in power Well, who can be bothered keeping accounts of all the names and addresses of those pesky students and long-haired types ? Some of them were probably even Communists.

ultimately left power peacefully So that's all right then. Pity for these folks:

Declassified U.S. embassy documents reveal that U.S. officials were well aware of the executions and tortures by the junta, and were concerned about the difficult "public relations situation." If you didn't laugh, you'd go mad.