CIA

In 1965, three different things happened which should be of interest to citizens of the world. 

• Beginning in October, the Indonesian army launched a mass murder campaign that in around half a year killed over a million people in Indonesia. That is a faster rate of killing than Jews were killed in the Holocaust. The wave of repression brought the dictator Suharto to power with extensive CIA and United States help by 1967, and he ruled the country for 31 years until 1998 while being described as "the most corrupt leader in modern history." Throughout the massacre of 1965-66, the United States provided the integral framework. As early as 1958, the CIA was planning to bring about the fall of the former government, and subsequently the U.S. military establishment trained over 1,200 Indonesian army officers and pumped up their military machine with weapons and funding. Before Suharto and the army launched the massacre, the CIA provided him the communications equipment to run a falsified national and international propaganda campaign spreading his lies, which provided the justification for the mass murder the whole time. Despite lying about it for decades, the U.S. government had detailed knowledge of the killings from the very beginning and supported the Indonesian campaign throughout. The U.S. Embassy in Indonesia supplied lists of thousands of names to the death squads for them to hunt and kill. A report from the CIA itself in 1968 described the Indonesian massacre as "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s."
• In March 1965, the landing of thousands of Marines in South Vietnam initiated the beginning of the American ground war in Vietnam. By the end of the year, the United States had around 200,000 troops in the country. The next ten years of war were one of the worst periods in a time and place in the post-World War II era and the whole Vietnam War eventually killed around 2 to 3 million people total. The extensive horrors of the Vietnam War and United States actions there have been extensively covered and are too horrible to recount in detail again. A less-known aspect of the war was its spread into Cambodia. From 1970 to 1973, the United States intervened in the Cambodian Civil War with a massive bombing campaign, dropping 500,000 tons of bombs that covered nearly every square mile of land in large areas of the country. Tons of unexploded bombs and land mines still blanket the country hidden in the soil to this day and since 1979 at least 19,000 people have been killed in Cambodia by unexploded ordnance. This entire operation was ultimately fruitless for U.S. aims, as the Communist Khmer Rouge surged to power in 1975, and the American involvement arguably spurred their success along by functioning as prime recruiting material that ushered in a wave of guerrillas. (In addition, a U.S. backed coup of the government in 1970 potentially also aided in this process by adding the deposed Prince Norodom Sihanouk to the powerful forces calling on the people to join the Khmer Rouge in the jungle) Promptly upon taking power, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot (with over $1 billion in support from Mao's China) conducted one of the worst genocides in history, in an insane mass murder campaign from 1975-1979 that killed around 1.5 to 2 million people, or around 25% of Cambodia's population. And yet, who was it who overthrew the Khmer Rouge and ended the Cambodian genocide? Not the United States: it was little Communist Vietnam, who had just been pummeled into oblivion by 20 years of war. They took down the Khmer Rouge and ended the genocide in just 17 days, for which the United States rewarded Vietnam with economic sanctions. The Khmer Rouge retreated into the mountains, and the United States spent the next decade, together with China, covertly funneling millions of dollars to the Khmer Rouge's new coalition. The entire time the United States continued to vote for the Khmer Rouge's coalition to retain Cambodia's United Nations seat, all the way until 1993. Meanwhile, the U.S. hounded Vietnam with sanctions after sanctions that starved the country of desperately needed food and supplies from power plant parts to malaria medicine. On the situation of continued U.S. support for the Khmer Rouge, the Baltimore Sun reported on March 20, 1991 that "There seems to be about a 50-50 chance that the Khmer Rouge will take over Cambodia again within the next year or so--with help from President Bush and other Americans still fighting the Vietnam War." Thankfully, the Khmer Rouge never did, despite our efforts. On the years of support for the Pol Pot genocidists, that article in the Baltimore Sun concluded thus:"The Bush administration had denied every bit of this until February 24. On that day, the day the land war began in Kuwait and Iraq, the White House, in a written submission to Congress, acknowledged "reports" that the Non-Communist Resistance and the Khmer Rouge were in fact working and fighting together. There was not much time on television that night to report confirmation that American taxpayers are subsidizing the worst killers of the 20th century. But that is exactly what we are doing."
• On November 24, 1965, Joseph Mobutu took power over the Democratic Republic of the Congo in a U.S. backed coup and ruled the country for the next 32 years in a brutal regime that is seen as one of the worst dictatorships in African history. A first coup in 1960 directly after independence had overthrown the newly elected democratic government under Patrice Lumumba because he was not seen as pliable enough to the West, a chaotic situation which brought Mobutu into quasi-control of the government. This regime executed Lumumba in 1961 and the next few years saw it buttressed by extensive U.S. support including widespread vote-buying, funding, and American planes flown by CIA pilots. The second coup in 1965 fully installed Mobutu into power and the next decades saw strong U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic support for the dictatorship all while it ruled through rampant murder, torture, and rape, while Mobutu stole between $4 billion and $15 billion from the country. The director of the Harvard Human Rights program described Mobutu in this way: "Mobutu is a master of terror and of using it on a grand scale. I don't think anywhere else in Africa has there been a longstanding dictator so rapacious and destructive." Mobutu was widely known as the symbol of extravagance, kleptocracy, and nepotism, from the supersonic Concorde he would charter to fly to expensive shopping trips to Paris to his "Versailles of the Jungle" palace in Gbadolite. All the while, the United States backed his government with over $1 billion in aid as Mobutu befriended American presidents from Nixon to Reagan to H.W. Bush, and American luminaries such as the televangelist Pat Robertson.

All of these things flowed out of one year, 1965. And this is just a tiny tiny sliver of United States crimes around the world in the 20th century.

Lest anyone think that all of this stuff is in the past, take the war in Afghanistan. The 20-year war that ended just last year was exactly as disgusting and evil as all of this, if not more so. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which I believe there to be extremely compelling evidence that the United States government helped to orchestrate and coordinate, if the intention was to punish the foreign sovereign state most directly responsible for the attacks, then the United States would have taken action against or invaded Saudi Arabia. It has been extensively demonstrated how deeply the government of Saudi Arabia was involved in the 9/11 attacks. However, the United States has spent the next twenty years being the biggest friend in the world of Saudi Arabia and giving them billions of dollars in aid and weapons. Instead, the United States promptly launched the invasion of Afghanistan, despite the fact that ironically Uzbek Taliban agents themselves were among the countless people around the world who took it upon themselves to warn the U.S. government of the imminent Al-Qaeda threat, which the Bush administration entirely ignored. Subsequently, it was decided that all of Afghanistan would feel the punishment and wrath of the American empire to chase Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, in a war that was I feel was clearly predicated on spurious pretexts which included a lot of other reasons. (I think that attacking Afghanistan and Iraq and launching the American military machine full force into the Middle East was the plan the entire time, and the reason why the U.S. government helped coordinate and enable the execution of the 9/11 attacks in the first place, but I am just trying to stick to publicly-accepted facts in all of this.) Regardless of the reasons for the invasion, the war in Afghanistan inarguably quickly came to involve a lot of other things, including the renewed attempt to build a massive oil pipeline through the former Soviet territories of Central Asia (an effort that had involved a partnership and agreement with the Taliban since 1996, with Taliban officials repeatedly negoitating with American oil executives in Texas, with whistleblowers claiming that the American oil companies helped fund and propel the Taliban's rise to power in the first place, an agreement that only fell apart after the embassy bombings in 1998). 

Beyond the murky origins of the war, the conduct of the war and the actions and consequences of the U.S. war in Afghanistan were utterly despicable. I will not attempt to offer a comprehensive overview of the war and its horrors here, I am just sticking to particular points of interest. Afghanistan is a huge mess over the last 40 years and our activity there since 1979 has been beyond sordid. This is just an attempt to open the curtain on the evil under the surface. I don't feel like putting in the effort to fully cover all of this right now, but just do a quick summary. 

In 2000, the Taliban banned opium poppy cultivation and in less than a year had nearly totally eradicated the crop from the country, despite having been the heroin capital of the world since the beginnings of the Soviet-Afghan War. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was fronted by the CIA, the first time in American history that the CIA had openly done so. Before a single bullet was fired or a bomb was dropped, the CIA secretly inserted several CIA agents carrying with them 3 cardboard boxes filled with $3 million in $100 bills. They spread this among the same kind of warlords we had run heroin with back in the 1980s (American trucks would come across the Pakistan border loaded with weapons, and go back to the American center of operations loaded with heroin: the United States was an integral part of Afghanistan becoming the heroin capital of the world in the first place) and began to build the coalition of gangsters that would form our power base in the country for the next 20 years. After the Taliban ban on poppy production, the heroin kings were the perfect disgruntled friends to use to try to overthrow the government. Within two months, the U.S. achieved victory with the fall of the Taliban regime, and for the next 20 years the United States ruled most of Afghan territory under these warlords in a terrible state. Poppy production quickly shot back up to levels never even seen before in Afghanistan and flourished all the while under American rule, soon turning the country back into the heroin capital of the world and within a few years reaching the point of providing over 90% of the world's heroin, a situation that has stayed the same ever since. Hamid Karzai, our puppet leader of the country from 2001 to 2014, was extensively alleged to be involved in the heroin trade and his brother was known to be. Essentially, our Afghanistan was a country of gangsters who we allowed to do whatever they wanted in order to try to maintain our artificial power over the country. This included openly allowing mass sexual abuse of boys throughout the country. Once again, the Taliban had banned this ancient practice known as bachi baza, and indeed this was one of the main motivators that brought the Taliban movement together and propelled them to power in the first place. As a brutally repressive regime, the Taliban enforced these laws with the death penalty. The American regime promptly took away the death penalty but also took away any actual enforcement. Bachi baza exploded and flourished under our power and the U.S. military policy was literally to do nothing about it so as not to risk losing the support of the child-raping commanders we were backing up with endless money and weapons. These warlords brazenly practiced bachi baza on U.S. military bases across Afghanistan and in wide-open view of the Americans, and the U.S. response was to keep a complete code of silence about it and to discharge the few military members who dared take action to try to stop it.

Through all of this, the war in Afghanistan killed around 200,000 people and utterly decimated the country further, after the 20 years of war preceding it that had already destroyed Afghanistan. The U.S. left one of the poorest countries in the world in a collapsing situation that is on the way to total disaster. In January 2022, the United Nations reported that about 60% of Afghanistan suffers from acute hunger, almost 24 million people, with about 8.7 million people in famine. They stated that soon 97 percent of Afghanistan would be below the poverty line. Then, just a few weeks ago, the United States stole billions of dollars from Afghanistan's central bank reserves, in probably the biggest bank robbery in world history.

Through much of this time, the U.S. was also fighting the war in Iraq, a war which was infinitely more brazen, despicable, and atrocious than the war in Afghanistan, a war initiated by an illegal pre-emptive strike based upon an international propaganda campaign of lies, which killed around 800,000 to 1.3 million people and saw its operating principle being theft and grift. And the United States is still involved in Iraq, having never actually left since the first invasion in 1990. Meanwhile, the Yemeni Civil War has been going on since 2014, which has killed over 100,000 people directly, with the U.S. backed Saudi bombing campaign slamming in a humanitarian crisis that has seen at least 85,000 people die of starvation with 13 million Yemenis on the brink.

Yet, the war in Yemen is almost entirely invisible on American television. At least the last 15 years of the war in Afghanistan barely saw any coverage in America to the point most everyone forgot it was happening and no one really had any clue what was going on. In the midst of a war that had lasted 15 years at that point, I remember one main question about Afghanistan posed in the Democratic primary debates in just one of the debates between Hilary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and the answers took all of one or two minutes. And I noted at the time that that was the only time that I was aware of that Afghanistan was really discussed and it was probably barely discussed otherwise. It most certainly was not anything approaching one of the top 20 or 30 campaign issues. And this was the party that is supposed to be more on the side of ending wars. The U.S. president just signed an executive order literally stealing billions of dollars from one of the poorest countries in the world, Afghanistan is now seeing a mass rise in people selling their organs in order to feed their children, the Washington Post literally reported it with the headline "The United States is Stealing Afghanistan's Money," and everybody barely blinked an eye.

With everything like this, along with the countless other tidal waves of crimes the United States and the CIA have committed all around the world in the last hundred years, I deeply desire this stuff to be more way way more openly known and understood. Without that, things have often felt utterly dystopian for me in the years since I started learning about any of this, and I tend to mostly put it to the back of my mind in order to just be happy and keep living my own life. But you could see how it becomes especially frustrating at a time when everybody is acting like America is a good guy.

Russia is invading Ukraine, and being complete villains and bad-guys, which is completely in character too. But it is absolutely essential for people to see that that in no way makes the United States a good guy in all of this. It is very possible for two countries to be thugs, just as it is possible for both the Bloods and the Crips to be villains. Despite their competing unending propaganda offensives going back to the Bolshevik Revolution, it has always been possible for both the United States and the Soviet Union to be mass international criminals, and the same for the U.S. and Russia now. The two things are not mutually exclusive. The United States of America and the Russian Republic are both huge empires built on centuries of murder and evil, and they will both continue to act like big bullies for their own power and money in the way that big empires do and always have. I just wish people knew the truth about America much more. Learning about the history is essential to understanding all of this, seeing where we come from so we can better understand both our past and our present. The world is incredibly complex, and there is a lot of good and a lot of evil. I am a fan of no country and no government, and I feel we should all be. Instead, I am a fan of humanity and all life on Earth, and of goodness wherever it can be found. That is why as a citizen of the United States, I have a particular problem with the past and present of the United States of America. And it has felt for years like I'm bursting when I think about all of the terrible things the U.S. and the C.I.A. have done that most people know almost nothing about, that our government and system has kept hidden and ignored from us while most everyone around me in our society largely thinks of America as a force for good in the way that I used to. It is extremely hard to take and try to stay calm about on a chronic basis and has been for me for years, while I deeply dream about a way to tell everybody about all of this so they know and care. And it is an integral part of everything really making me feel like I'm living in a different world from everybody else, besides my family. So it gets especially frustrating at a time like this and harder to just put it at the back of my mind like I normally do. 

But as always, I will just keep living in my own little world and trying to be happy as much as possible, and try to block all of this out. And I will just keep trying to be as grateful as I can be for everything I have to be grateful for, and the incredible life I have been granted. I love this world and all of the amazing things about it, I just wish for there to be way less suffering. But I really can't say all that much about it myself, because I barely do anything to help the world and I just like sticking to myself. For me, I just try to be as good as I can be to my surrounding environment and the things that I come upon, while doing my own thing and living life quietly in my comfort zone like I want to. So I will just keep living and trying to be happy.

Above all, I do really love learning about history, and for some reason this kind of CIA history is my favorite of all. Haha maybe that says something about me.