shag
At 02:39 PM 1/7/2010, Dennis Claxton wrote:
> From William Blum's Anti-Empire Report
>
>http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer77.html
>
>The Anti-Empire Report
>
>January 6th, 2010
>by William Blum
>www.killinghope.org
>
>The American elite
>
>
>Lincoln Gordon died a few weeks ago at the age of 96. He had graduated
>summa cum laude from Harvard at the age of 19, received a doctorate from
>Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, published his first book at 22, with dozens
>more to follow on government, economics, and foreign policy in Europe and
>Latin America. He joined the Harvard faculty at 23. Dr. Gordon was an
>executive on the War Production Board during World War II, a top
>administrator of Marshall Plan programs in postwar Europe, ambassador to
>Brazil, held other high positions at the State Department and the White
>House, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars,
>economist at the Brookings Institution, president of Johns Hopkins
>University. President Lyndon B. Johnson praised Gordon's diplomatic
>service as "a rare combination of experience, idealism and practical judgment".
>
>You get the picture? Boy wonder, intellectual shining light, distinguished
>leader of men, outstanding American patriot.
>
>Abraham Lincoln Gordon was also Washington's on-site, and very active,
>director in Brazil of the military coup in 1964 which overthrew the
>moderately leftist government of João Goulart and condemned the people of
>Brazil to more than 20 years of an unspeakably brutal dictatorship.
>Human-rights campaigners have long maintained that Brazil's military
>regime originated the idea of the desaparecidos, "the disappeared", and
>exported torture methods across Latin America. In 2007, the Brazilian
>government published a 500-page book, "The Right to Memory and the Truth",
>which outlines the systematic torture, rape and disappearance of nearly
>500 left-wing activists, and includes photos of corpses and torture
>victims. Currently, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is
>proposing a commission to investigate allegations of torture by the
>military during the 1964-1985 dictatorship. (When will the United States
>create a commission to investigate its own torture?)
>
>In a cable to Washington after the coup, Gordon stated in a remark that
>might have had difficulty getting past the lips of even John Foster Dulles
> that without the coup there could have been a "total loss to the West of
>all South American Republics". (It was actually the beginning of a series
>of fascistic anti-communist coups that trapped the southern half of South
>America in a decades-long nightmare, culminating in "Operation Condor", in
>which the various dictatorships, aided by the CIA, cooperated in hunting
>down and killing leftists.)
>
>Gordon later testified at a congressional hearing and while denying
>completely any connection to the coup in Brazil he stated that the coup
>was "the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century."
>
>Listen to a phone conversation between President Johnson and Thomas Mann,
>Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, April 3, 1964,
>two days after the coup:
>
>MANN: I hope you're as happy about Brazil as I am.
>
>LBJ: I am.
>
>MANN: I think that's the most important thing that's happened in the
>hemisphere in three years.
>
>LBJ: I hope they give us some credit instead of hell.1
>
>So the next time you're faced with a boy wonder from Harvard, try to keep
>your adulation in check no matter what office the man attains, even oh,
>just choosing a position at random the presidency of the United States.
>Keep your eyes focused not on these "liberal" ... "best and brightest" who
>come and go, but on US foreign policy which remains the same decade after
>decade. There are dozens of Brazils and Lincoln Gordons in America's past.
>In its present. In its future. They're the diplomatic equivalent of the
>guys who ran Enron, AIG and Goldman Sachs.
>
>Of course, not all of our foreign policy officials are like that. Some are
>worse.
>
>And remember the words of convicted spy Alger Hiss: Prison was "a good
>corrective to three years at Harvard."
>
>
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