• PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPM
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    7 days ago

    ‘Funny’ enough, the US backed or was amicable towards several authoritarian socialist polities, so long as they were anti-Soviet, including Yugoslavia, Somalia, and an on-again off-again relationship with the Arab Ba’athist states.

    Realpolitik > ideology for the Western Bloc, it would seem.

    • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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      7 days ago

      I was just coming here to say that lol. We were fine with violent communist dictatorships when it served our interest, just ask good old Uncle Joe.

      Edit: And, of course, any functioning government at all but definitely a big one like the US is always a coalition of different interests, ideologies, and competing goals. The ratio of US motivation that’s pure anti-communist ideology is never zero but it also was rarely 100%. There were people in US intelligence who worked with Ho Chi Minh before the war started and were pissed and heartbroken when we ignored all his impassioned letters about the rights of small nations to self-determination and started carpet bombing.

      • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPM
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        7 days ago

        Me watching the US post-WW2 be dragged into colonial nonsense by the French and British erasing our genuine anti-colonial efforts and slowly solidifying a gruesome neocolonial culture in our institutions and foreign policy

        I mean, not to erase our actual colonial past, or that our position in Latin America was always much less anti-colonial.

        • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPM
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          6 days ago

          There’s no guarantee that the US would’ve been supportive under another leader, but considering that Wilson went out of his way to antagonize non-white petitioners in the conferences after WW1, including the powerful and allied Japanese Empire, I imagine that we can add at least a few more pineapples shoved up Wilson’s ass in hell for that.

          • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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            6 days ago

            I imagine that we can add at least a few more pineapples shoved up Wilson’s ass in hell for that.

            capitol idea, huzzah.

  • Fleur_@aussie.zone
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    7 days ago

    Or democratic “allies” who elect a left wing leader that has some issues with American foreign policy and is comfortable ending military base leases

        • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPM
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          6 days ago

          Uh, that seems a dubious assertion considering from my understanding of the events, assuming you’re discussing the 1975 Constitutional Crisis.

          • Fleur_@aussie.zone
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            6 days ago

            “Gough Whitlam, Prime Minister of Australia (between 1972 and 1975), considered closing the base. Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer who had helped set up the facility, said that this consideration “caused apoplexy in the White House, [and] a kind of Chile [coup] was set in motion”, with the CIA and MI6 working together to get rid of the Prime Minister.”

            From the Pine gap Wikipedia article, the whole article is a pretty good read.

            • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPM
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              6 days ago

              … Victor Marchetti had been retired from the CIA for over half a decade by then, and was a peddler of numerous conspiracy theories.

              • Fleur_@aussie.zone
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                6 days ago

                “US diplomatic cables published last year by WikiLeaks disclose the names of leading figures in both main parties, including a future prime minister and foreign minister, as Washington’s informants during the Whitlam years.”

                From the guardian article.

                Is there anything definitive? not really,

                Have either the US or the UK officially admitted anything? no of course not.

                For me there’s enough to draw a conclusion. US and UK both have foreign policy records of ousting foreign governments for more closely aligned alternatives.

                • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPM
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                  6 days ago

                  From the guardian article.

                  I’m surprised that they let John fucking Pilger write for the Guardian, though I guess this was before the Trump years. Nothing in it is anything but conspiracy dreck.

                  The US has enough sins in its history that you don’t need to fucking make more up.

  • marcos@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Eh… They have their enemies and their not-enemies.

    It just so happens that the largest enemy used that “communist” label to describe themselves, and made a great deal about pushing it into their not-enemies too. It’s not like they were using that word with any real meaning attached.

    • Shareni@programming.dev
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      7 days ago

      No, they have victims, accomplices, and future victims. Everything else is an excuse for neocolonialism.