MCViewPoint

by Jacob G. Hornberger

Martin Luther King pointed out that the U.S. government is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” While King’s memory has been honored with accolades, monuments, street names, and the like, I can’t help but wonder how many Americans have truly pondered his astute and discomforting observation about the U.S. government. After all, it seems to me that to be living under a government that is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” is not something to be proud of or pleased with.

Today many Chileans might well be pondering King’s statement. That’s because today — 9/11 — is the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Chilean coup that the U.S. government inspired and encouraged. It was a coup that left thousands of innocent people dead, including the democratically elected president of the country, Salvador Allende, two American citizens — Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi — and some 3,000 other innocent people. It also resulted in the brutal torture or rape of tens of thousands of other innocent people. That was followed by 17 years of one of the world’s most brutal and tyrannical military dictatorships, not to mention the infamous secret international kidnapping, torture, and assassination ring called Operation Condor, which included the national-security establishments of the U.S., Chile, other rightwing Latin American military dictatorships. 

Of course, in the eyes of Pinochet, the Pentagon, and the CIA, the victims of all this violence were not innocent at all. In their eyes, they were nothing more than vermin, no different from the “gooks” that the Pentagon and the CIA were killing in Vietnam. Keep in mind that this was 1973, when the U.S. national-security establishment was losing its brutal war in Vietnam. 

What did that war have to do with the horrific violence inflicted by Pinochet’s goons against people in Chile? 

Everything!

You see, in the eyes of the U.S. national-security establishment, there was a worldwide communist conspiracy to take over the United States and the world that was supposedly based in Moscow, Russia. Yes, that Russia — the Russia for whom a deep hatred has been inculcated into every American today, just as it was during the Cold War.

In fact, it’s rather ironic that whenever someone condemns the U.S. national-security establishment for its assassination of President Kennedy, he is smeared as a “conspiracy theorist.” Yet, what could be more ridiculous than the notion of an international communist conspiracy to take over the world that was supposedly based in Moscow, Russia?

John Kennedy understood how ludicrous this conspiracy theory was. That’s was why he told his wife Jackie on the morning of his assassination that they were heading into “nut country” later that day. He was referring to an advertisement in the Dallas Morning News that perfectly reflected the mindset of the Pentagon and the CIA, including the accusation that JFK had “scrapped the Monroe Doctrine for the ‘Spirit of Moscow.’”

What Kennedy should have told Jackie is that it wasn’t just rightwing Dallas that was “nut country.” It was also the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA that were “nut country.”

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