Americans are taught that the U.S. is a paragon of peaceful prosperity, one that the rest of the world looks upon with either admiration or jealous hatred. With this, Americans are told that the villain of wondrous American capitalist liberty’s superhero is communism and socialism.
However, if we remove the veil placed over our eyes by years of militant pro-American packaging, which posits a firmly diplomatic America fighting against the evils of socialism, it becomes obvious that this version of events is simply a lie.
We must instead recognize the United States for what it is: an empire hell-bent on the expansion of its power. And it’s one that uses aggressive, terroristic tactics, particularly against socialism, to ensure that its global economic reign continues.
To clarify, true communism has never actually occurred. In Marxist theory, communism is a faraway end goal in which there is complete public ownership of the means of production worldwide. Socialism is theoretically understood as the transitional period to this state, undertaken by individual countries that instate policies that ensure that workers contributing their labor to the economy have collective ownership of the means of production, rather than boards of investors hoarding wealth generated by workers’ labor. Therefore, the terms are often used interchangeably in common parlance (and will be in this article).
But this isn’t the case: The U.S. isn’t anti-communist out of principle. The U.S. is against socialism because it threatens its standing as a world economic superpower.
But really, have you ever wondered why America is so direly opposed to the spread of socialism? When I was in school, we were taught that it was because of the U.S.’s loving commitment to freedom and equality, and that socialism was self-evidently the most fearsome system ever conceived by man. We were taught that socialism was the antithesis of freedom, and that it ran counter to the greatest liberty of all: free-range American capitalism.
But this isn’t the case: The U.S. isn’t anti-communist out of principle. The U.S. is against socialism because it threatens its standing as a world economic superpower.
The U.S. has often been a violent, belligerent actor on the world stage, contrary to the view that it sells the American people. The U.S.’s violent retention of power is not executed through traditional colonialism or a Roman-style army. Instead, the U.S. has historically overthrown the governments of developing nations in the Global South, especially those with leftist governments. These are places that the American public is instructed to view as failed states, ones gripped by a fearsome ideology solely focused on the hatred of American freedom. Therefore, Americans frequently are unable to see the problem and, concurrently, just how drastically they are misled about their country’s place in international relations.
America can’t be the arbiter of the world’s wealth if the wealth is redistributed. It cannot exploit other nations’ resources if these nations exist outside of the global game of capitalism by investing in and distributing its goods among its own people. This turn of events would be disastrous for the U.S., whose power is founded on the exploitation of other nations’ lower positions in the world’s economic hierarchy. The U.S. relies on raw resources such as oil, gas and crops from developing nations, and leverages these resources to fuel the U.S.’s far more expansive and lucrative economic sectors.
The resistance against America in the Middle East is, simply put, America’s doing.
For starters, the U.S.’s strategy of destabilizing countries that institute socialist reforms can be seen in the case of several nations in the Middle East. The violence in the region is frequently explained to Americans as solely the result of local unrest and “radical Islamism.” President George W. Bush notably declared during his presidency, in which he waged the infamous Iraq War for “weapons of mass destruction” that were never found, saying that the region is rife with terrorists who baselessly “hate our freedom.” But this blanket explanation for the recent history of violence in the Middle East is a lazily conceived lie.
The resistance against America in the Middle East is, simply put, America’s doing. Throughout the late 20th century, the CIA backed coups in Syria to overthrow democratically elected leaders in order to prevent the nationalization of their oil, which would have threatened U.S. economic interests. In the early 2000s, the bloody Iraq War began, waged by the U.S. in a ruinous eight-year search in order to find “weapons of mass destruction.” Many critics understand this to be a flimsy cover for the goal of securing, again, U.S. oil interests.
In addition to the Middle East, the U.S. has forced its way into the affairs of nearly every corner of Latin America. This was also done during roughly the same time as the coups in the Middle East, as a result of the U.S.’s mission to “fight communism.”
In Guatemala in 1954, the U.S. staged a coup to overthrow President Jacobo Árbenz, a democratically elected leader who defied U.S. pressure by unveiling a campaign to redistribute land to the country’s impoverished, resisting the exploitation of the United Fruit Company, an American corporation; decades of violent civil war were precipitated by this action.
America supported the overthrow of a leftist government in Brazil in 1964, fearing its potential alignment with Cuba and the creation of a socialist alliance in the Americas, and backed the 21-year brutal dictatorship that came after. In Chile in 1973, the U.S. partnered with the violent opposition to democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende, due in large part to his pledge to nationalize the copper industry, which would have dealt a blow to U.S. companies in the country; after, they installed the oppressive, decades-long regime of President Augusto Pinochet.
One of the most widely recognized examples of the U.S.’s attempts to prevent the success of a socialist nation is its decades of diligent interference in Cuba. American actions in the country began long before socialism came to the island, when Cuba was placed under American military occupation as a result of concessions made to the U.S. in the Spanish-American War. The U.S. later had a hand in the formation of the Cuban constitution, pressuring for an amendment to allow for the creation of an American military base on the island, which was then established in Guantanamo Bay.
When former President Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, the U.S. began a campaign to hamper the island’s attempt at a socialist economy that continues to this day. There was the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, in which U.S. forces aiming to overthrow Cuba’s socialist government slinked away in defeat after less than three full days of fighting. The next year, Operation Mongoose commenced, a multi-faceted, multi-year covert operation by the CIA, in which U.S. forces waged hundreds of assaults on Cuban soil and assassination attempts on Castro.
These sanctions stayed in place until President Barack Obama sought to open up relations between the U.S. and Cuba, an attempt that was knocked down by the reversal in diplomatic relations by the Trump administration.
But far more successful than giving poison cigars to Castro were the U.S.’s embargoes on Cuba. When Cuba nationalized various businesses, including oil refineries, distilleries and sugar mills, Eisenhower placed some of the first major embargoes on the country, dealing a massive blow to Cuba’s economy at the time. President John F. Kennedy expanded the embargoes, banning all trade and financial transactions with Cuba under the Trading with the Enemy Act. President Lyndon B. Johnson extended this even further by pressuring other nations to cut off trade with Cuba. Several presidents somewhat softened these sanctions, until President Ronald Reagan placed new restrictions — including bans on trade between Cuba and U.S. companies worldwide — in retaliation for Cuba’s support of revolutionary movements elsewhere in Latin America.
American embargoes have long strangled Cuba. They have been condemned by the United Nations since 1992, and are widely blamed for the decades of economic hardship and numerous humanitarian crises, including health crises and the fallout from widespread blackouts experienced on the island.
These sanctions stayed in place until President Barack Obama sought to open up relations between the U.S. and Cuba, an attempt that was knocked down by the reversal in diplomatic relations by the Trump administration. Trump has recently said that he would make for “a new dawn for Cuba.” Now, Cuba is experiencing nationwide blackouts largely on account of the energy blockade on the country, causing hospitals to lose power mid-operation, food distribution and public transport to be shut down, and water systems to stop flowing.
Despite its history of incursion into the nation, the U.S. nonetheless chooses to fervently point to Cuba as an example of the inevitable failure of socialism, rather than the years of its dedicated action with the aim to cause this very economic ruin that it simply pins on Cuba’s socialist government. In this, it repeats the steps of the same playbook it’s used on a laundry list of other socialist nations.
We are led to think that communism is something that the U.S. gallantly fights against, because America loves democratic liberty. This isn’t the case.
If the U.S. is able to strangle any country that seeks to withdraw from America’s economic clutches and institutes socialist reforms for its people, then America’s place as the world’s hegemonic economic power is maintained.
Though, despite the crushing power the U.S. has displayed in its international actions for decades, its strength still relies on a vital source: the ignorance and apathy of the people. The first step in struggling against America’s years of international terror is seeing the country’s international actions for what they are, and caring about the violence that has been and continues to be inflicted on the rest of the globe.