Counter-Currents
2,449 words
He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch. — Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Takes one to know one,” as the old saw goes. FDR’s “our son of a bitch” reference, which some say is apocryphal, was to Anastasio Somoza García, the President of Nicaragua from 1937 to 1956.
Apocryphal or not, the choice of words was most apropos. Anastasio looks like a Hollywood film version of a Sheriff from a town in 1950s Alabama who makes the local negroes suffer if they get too uppity.
Anastasio Somoza García
Somoza’s election to the presidency in 1937 was by a slim margin of 107,201 votes to 100, whereupon “Tacho” — his popular moniker — used his “acquisitions” skills to turn the country into his exclusively family-run business. He became the largest landowner in Nicaragua and made himself Director of the Pacific Railroad, which he used to subsidize the operations of what became his personal financial empire.
He was indeed, a “son of a bitch,” and, as FDR would put not too fine a point on it, he was ours — ours as in one of the longer-serving American satraps in the western hemisphere, achieved by making himself useful to Yankee business interests. He was educated in the United States and spoke perfect English. Prior to his ascension to the presidency, “[a]t the urging of the U.S. Ambassador Matthew E. Hanna, Somoza García was appointed as director of the National Guard,” a constabulary force put in place by the US Marine Corps, which was occupying Nicaragua at the time, suggesting that semper fidelis be followed by a question mark.
But what, you might wonder, eventually happens to the SOBs such as Somoza that the American government installs hither and yon, in countries that most Americans know nothing about and shouldn’t have to care about — Vietnam, for example, or Ukraine?
The long-term futures of American-installed puppets often turn out to be grim. You see, Patron Uncle Sam is a rather fickle business partner. His partnerships are formed on a strictly “What have you done for me lately?” basis. The puppets, you might say, are a highly disposable commodity. Many of them don’t seem to grasp just how far down this downside can take them — down as in on display as a bullet-ridden corpse.
A slain Ngo Dinh Diệm.
When it’s clear skies for Uncle Sam, it’s “we.” When the dark clouds roll in, it’s “at the sound of the tone, you’re on your own, amigo.”
Below is a select list of “our sons of a bitches,” the chief knuckle-crushers and bribe-takers Uncle Sam put in places perceived to be geopolitically important. Their careers ended ignominiously, most of them with “a little help from their (American) friends.”
Anastasio Somoza García: assassinated, 1956.
Fulgencio Batista, President of Cuba: exiled, 1959
Batista with US Army Chief of Staff Malin Craig in Washington, DC at the Armistice Day parade, 1938.
Syngman Rhee, President of South Korea: exiled, 1960.
Rhee and General Douglas MacArthur at the ceremony inaugurating the government of the Republic of Korea.
Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, or “El jefe,” President of the Dominican Republic: assassinated, 1961.
Ngô Đình Diệm, President of the Republic of South Vietnam: assassinated, 1963.
Diệm with President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza Debayle (son of Somoza Garcia, who took over the “family business” on the death of his father): exiled in 1979, and assassinated in 1981.
Somoza’s death car in Asunción, Paraguay.
As you can see, not one of them died peacefully in his own country; four of them were murdered by their own people.
Several of these exits from power merit additional commentary. The assassinations of both Trujillo and Diệm were carried out by locals sponsored by US operatives with the imprimatur of the American President. When Diệm suddenly fell from favor, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. got the green light from his bosses in DC, US personnel stepped aside, and General Dương Văn Minh had Diệm killed — along with his brother for good measure. President Kennedy felt quite bad about it.
The hit on Trujillo occurred as a result of CIA planning:
John F. Kennedy, who became president of the United States in January 1961, continued the CIA’s covert effort to oust Trujillo [initiated by President Eisenhower]. Before the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, the Kennedy administration covertly sent machine guns, pistols, and carbines to the dissidents in the Dominican Republic.
[Dominican Republic Consul] General Henry Dearborn received a cable, personally approved by President Kennedy, which he read to say: “We don’t care if the Dominicans assassinate Trujillo, that is all right. But we don’t want anything to pin this on us.”
At the last minute, JFK got cold feet about giving the assassination order, as he had when he vetoed air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion, leaving the US-sponsored invaders stranded on Castro’s beaches. They were very quickly on their own, with predictable consequences.
It was, however, too late for Trujillo. A hit squad of local Dominicans set up an ambush. Trujillo was on his way from Santo Domingo to San Cristobal, where he kept his regular mistress. Four shooters took El Jefe and his driver out of this world with a sawed-off shotgun, pistols, and a couple of semi-automatic rifles. The assassination was captured rivetingly in a historical novel, La fiesta del chivo (Feast of the Goat) by the great Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa.
Rafael Trujillo’s death car.
Syngman Rhee, the President of South Korea, was more fortunate. Both his ascent to power and his departure were signature pieces of post-war US “intelligence” cloak-and-dagger shenanigans.
After Japan surrendered unconditionally to the US in 1945, Rhee was tapped by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, to run the new East Asian US satrapy called the Republic of South Korea. Rhee brandished a Master’s from Harvard and a doctorate from Princeton. He lived like a Pasha in Washington, DC during the Second World War, a good indication that he was a guy who could be bought. He was also well-known to the US government and a staunch anti-Communist, which at that time was actually considered by most Americans to be a good thing.
It didn’t seem to matter to the post-war schemers in the intelligence community, however, that he was corrupt beyond normal standards, which is saying something considering how low they themselves were. Even the State Department didn’t want anything to do with him, but OSS operative Preston Goodfellow finagled a passport for Rhee that allowed him to fly to Korea and meet secretly with General Douglas MacArthur. Mac’s thumbs went up, and Rhee was duly installed in Seoul, US puppet style. Why? Because our betters wanted “our democracy” replicated worldwide in both form (pretended legality) and substance (grifting and corruption). He was the perfect choice. It was rumored that the passport deal which had helped to get him installed was a quid pro quo with Goodfellow for him to get concessions for commercial operations he was setting up on the Korean peninsula.
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Rhee reigned there as you might predict for a man with well-established credentials in corruption who was hand-picked by nameless, unaccountable spies. His performance surpassed all expectations. He ruled until he had screwed things up so badly with his fellow Koreans in that wonderful “democracy” we’d installed him in that in 1960, the CIA dropped in, snatched him, and flew him out of the country, depositing him alive and kicking in Hawaii. The CIA giveth; the CIA taketh away. Blessed be the name of . . . At least he didn’t end up shot full of holes like Trujillo.
That brings us to the current US puppet of the hour, former thespian and innovative pianist Volodymyr Zelensky. One can’t help but wonder where Zelensky’s thoughts might wander after a busy Potemkin village day of entertaining the “good will ambassadors” who make the private-jet trek from Hollywood. The likes of Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, and the usual clueless suspects do their shtick, mugging it up as fodder for the “evil Putin” stories put out by the mainstream media.
Should Zelensky pause and contemplate the fate of so many post-war American yes-men? If so, should he be a little worried about the direction his current gig as Winston Churchill redux is headed?
Last December, our utterly feckless federal lawmakers gave a wildly insane standing ovation (two minutes long) in a joint session of Congress to this Jewish B-list comedian in a soldier’s costume. He’d just flown in and dropped by to ask the buffoons in the audience for more American tax dollars. Very few seemed inclined to ask: Isn’t $100 billion enough to defend your beacon of freedom and democracy against yet another Hitler? Should we be thinking about what “freedom and democracy” is turning into here at home?
[Ukrainian] National Security and Defence Council boss Oleksiy Danilov … described the Russian president as ‘Hitler’s twin’ [looking quite spry at the age of 133]. Speaking ahead of the first anniversary of the invasion, Danilov said: “Our tanks will be on Red Square and that will be justice.”
Defending freedom and democracy, and a vanquished Putin in the doc for war crimes. One Nuremburg was not enough, nor did it quite make the world “safe for democracy.” That’s Biden and Pelosi’s cover story, those lovable octogenarians who in their flirtations with Alzheimer’s resemble the smiling “greeters” you blow past going into a Walmart store: paid decorations, reciting their prepared lines. As a prima facie case for early frontotemporal dementia onset:
Join live as @ZelenskyyUa delivers an inspiring message of unity, resilience and determination tonight in an Address to a Joint Meeting of Congress.
The fight for Ukraine is the fight for democracy itself. https://t.co/3o6Otqhdrf
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) December 22, 2022
Meanwhile, in the real world, all those billions not spent on anything of benefit to American citizens is flowing into one of the most corrupt countries on the planet and, after the defense contractors get their cut, going who knows where.
As Andrew Joyce has written at The Occidental Observer:
Speaking in general terms, of course, Ukraine is an extremely corrupt country, with the culture of fraud and graft stemming in large part from the Soviet legacy and saturating all levels of society. Crooks of all ethnic backgrounds are ubiquitous in the nation. Bribery is systematic, where it’s accepted as a basic fact of life by ordinary citizens and extends even to such mundane tasks as vehicle inspection. As well as infesting politics, bribery and other forms of corruption remain endemic in the police force, higher education, health care, and the justice system, with the result that Ukraine ranks alongside some of the worst African nations in Transparency International’s assessment of corruption perception.
When your peers in the corruption game are Africans, there’s not much lower to reach. One place that money is likely going is to Zelensky and his friends. If you can’t trust an anti-corruption politician whose chief patron is the country’s most corrupt oligarch, who can you trust?
Again, Andrew Joyce:
Zelensky’s 2019 campaign was dogged by doubts over his authenticity given his close association with [Ihor] Kolomoisky. Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs astutely observed that, even if Zelensky was earnest in his claims to oppose the corrupt, “he cannot govern without systema [the oligarchic structure] and will bow to its interests.”
Besides providing financial support during Ukraine’s 2019 election, Kolomoisky supplied Zelensky with cars, and the bulletproof Mercedes Zelensky used on the campaign trail was owned by Kolomoisky associate Timur Mindich — who is on the board of trustees of the Jewish Community of Dnipropetrovsk, a body of which Kolomoisky was president.
Kolomoisky, as Joyce describes,
also holds Israeli and Cypriot citizenship, [and] is probably one of the worst thieves to ever walk the earth, and there has been no greater parasite feeding on Ukrainians. Once named by the Center for Corruption and Organized Crime Research (OCCRP) as being in the top four most corrupt individuals on the planet, Kolomoisky used his ownership of PrivatBank to defraud customers of around $5.5 billion in deposits, which amounted to 40% of all private deposits in Ukraine.
Zelensky is the boss-fox in the chicken coup called Ukraine, and with respect to his future, it is safe to wager that he is smart enough to understand that Ukrainian “tanks on Red Square” followed by Nuremburg II is a neocon fiction invented by US State Department rouges like Victoria Nuland and peddled by America’s Pravda media outlets.
“Biden Just Destroyed Putin’s Last Hope: The president’s visit to Ukraine was a gut punch to the Russian leader,” according to Eliot A. Cohen in The Atlantic. It is also safe to assume that when Zelensky’s usefulness to the regime fails as a prop in its quest to topple Putin and turn the carcass of a defeated Russia over to Western hedge-fund hyenas like Bill Browder, who are perched to descend and hoover up assets that belong to the Russian people, he will quickly need to disappear.
Zelensky is also cunning enough to plan an exit that does not leave him looking like Ngô Đình Diệm after the South Vietnamese generals were done with him. He has, you might say, laid up provisions for a quick exit and comfortable retirement once his American sponsors have to contend with yet another monumental debacle of their creation. Details of Zelensky’s financial planning efforts have been released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, detailed in the Pandora Papers that were shared with the Guardian: “Revealed: ‘anti-oligarch’ Ukrainian president’s offshore connections: Volodymyr Zelenskiy has railed against politicians hiding wealth offshore but failed to disclose links to BVI firm.”
The Guardian article also provides extensive coverage of Zelensky’s offshore investments:
The [Pandora] files reveal Zelenskiy participated in a sprawling network of offshore companies, co-owned with his longtime friends and TV business partners. They include Serhiy Shefir, who produced Zelensky’s hit shows, and Shefir’s older brother, Borys, who wrote the scripts.
Zelensky is financially well-prepared. Think of this comedian as a kind of Alfred E. Newman character from Mad Magazine.
When the going gets tough (for him), he will think fondly of Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy, hit the presidential seat’s ejection button, and have some prime real estate ready for a soft landing.
Zelensky’s clownish performance on the world stage and the massive corruption and complicity of the American presidency and Congress in this catastrophic war makes the corruption and maleficence surrounding our SOBs from the earlier decades seem almost forgivable by comparison.
When the Russo-Ukrainian War ends, Zelensky will be yukking it up somewhere — London, Tel Aviv, Miami — appreciative of American politicians’ greed and stupidity while giving little thought to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers slaughtered in this neocon-engineered war.
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4 comments
Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy has two special reasons to think he will be safe. The first, obviously, is ethnic.
The second is President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., under whom President Ashraf Ghani was allowed to flee Afghanistan with his loot. As long as Joe Biden is still in the White House when it’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s turn to take the money and run, the reasonable expectation is that he will be safe.
Excellent article.
One might add that Chiang was scuttled, with the often-used tactic of a sudden embargo on weapons. Batista had the same treatment, and Admiral Kolchack did not even receive the weapons for which he had paid, while having to contend with the animosity and interference of his U.S. ‘friends’. Pinochet wondered whether the CIA was targeting him. The Shah considered the USA to have removed him. (Pahlavi, The Shah’s Story, 214).
On Cuba a good source is: Mario Lazo, Dagger in the Heart – American Policy Failures in Cuba (NY: Twin Circle, 1970); on Nicaragua, Jack Cox, Nicaragua Betrayed (Belmont, Mass.: Western Islands, 1980).
Will this be different than the rest because of who’s running the show? Like those that continue to say socialism will be perfect if only the right geniuses get the power. Zelensky certainly knows how to work a crowd. Even a soft landing wouldn’t protect him from the infinite reach of a dissatisfied Putin or CIA for that matter. Hell Khadafi was slaughtered despite his cooperation with us. Saddam was brutalized as we watched. Being a friend of Uncle Sam is not a prescription for a long retirement.
“current US puppet of the hour, former thespian and innovative pianist Volodymyr Zelensky”
Zelensky is a lawyer by training. He is qualified for the job. He was elected with 70% of the votes, on a peace platform. It’s not (entirely) his fault that he couldn’t implement his campaign promises.
“Zelensky is the boss-fox in the chicken coup called Ukraine”
Here’s the truth about corruption in Ukraine, and Eastern Europe in general.
First of all, there is a fundamental difference between the West and Eastern Europe. In the West the oligarchy appoints the politicians. In Eastern Europe it’s the other way around: politicians appoint the oligarchs, usually their loyal friends or family.
Orbán’s daughters swagger around in $100,000 outfits — but who cares or even knows about the outfits of the daughters of US “defense” contractors?
Corruption charges, while usually true, are tools used to rile up naive populations — and especially the high IQ urban proles who can’t see anything deeper than the light-reflecting surface of things.
Secondly, many countries in Eastern Europe have a social organizing model that is very different from the West. These were feudal or semi-feudal peasant societies up to the 1960s. The political systems of Russia, Ukraine and Hungary are still fine examples of steppe warlordism.
These social organizing models are at the very core of Eastern European resistance against globalism and degeneracy. You can’t approve Eastern European preference for normality, and disapprove the social and political structures that make it possible.
Frankly, anyone who believes he can do a better job of running Ukraine or Russia (or Hungary) than the current leadership is seriously deluding himself. Social organizing models are rooted in biology. We aren’t Swedes. If we were Swedes, we would have little corruption in politics, and pockets of Somalia in our cities and trans propaganda at school.
The problem of Eastern Europe is that our social and political organizing models are not good fits for Western style modernity. But as we’ve seen in the last decade, Western political and social models are also not good fits for Western style modernity. Everybody is busy trying to figure out how to make these things work — the ability to provide Western style material comforts and personal freedoms combined with preserving ourselves, our heritage and having normal, non-confused children. It’s a big experiment for the entire white race, and everyone has homework to do.
Corruption is a problem in Eastern Europe, but it’s our problem. “Corruption!!!” is a neocon, imperialist political product that the usual suspects are trying to sell to you and unsuspecting Eastern Europeans to justify the next color revolution, war, or whatever is on the agenda at the moment. Don’t subscribe to it.
Zelensky risks his life and the life of his family. If he has a villa and some money stacked away in the West, and he pays his loyal friends as opposed to his enemies, you should know that every sane, intelligent person in Eastern Europe thinks that it’s OK, or at least no big deal. There are many good reasons to dislike him or even depose him, but this is not one of them.
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