Cartwright argued that many of the slaves suffered from a form of mental illness, which he called drapetomania , diagnosed as the uncontrollable urge to escape from slavery. In the second half of the 20th-century, this illness, in the Third World, has usually been called communism .

Perhaps the most deeply ingrained reflex of knee-jerk anti- communism is the belief that the Soviet Union (or Cuba or Vietnam, etc., acting as Moscows surrogate] is a clandestine force lurking behind the facade of self-determination, stirring up the hydra of revolution, or just plain trouble, here, there, and everywhere; yet another incarnation, although on a far grander scale, of the proverbial outside agitator , he who has made his appearance regularly throughout history ... King George blamed the French for inciting the American colonies to revolt ... disillusioned American farmers and veterans protesting their onerous economic circumstances after the revolution (Shays Rebellion) were branded as British agents out to wreck the new republic ... labor strikes in late-19th-century America were blamed on anarchists and foreigners , during the First World War on German agents , after the war on Bolsheviks .

And in the 1960s, said the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, J. Edgar Hoover helped spread the view among the police ranks that any kind of mass protest is due to a conspiracy promulgated by agitators, often Communists, who misdirect otherwise contented people. 19

The last is the key phrase, one which encapsulates the conspiracy mentality of those in power-the idea that no people, except those living under the enemy, could be so miserable and discontent as to need recourse to revolution or even mass protest; that it is only the agitation of the outsider which misdirects them along this path.

Accordingly, if Ronald Reagan were to concede that the masses of El Salvador have every good reason to rise up against their god-awful existence, it would bring into question his accusation, and the rationale for US intervention, that it is principally (only?) the Soviet Union and its Cuban and Nicaraguan allies who instigate the Salvadoreans: that seemingly magical power of communists everywhere who, with a twist of their red wrist, can transform peaceful, happy people into furious guerrillas. The CIA knows how difficult a feat this is. The Agency, as we shall see, tried to spark mass revolt in China, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Albania, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe with a singular lack of success. The Agencys scribes have laid the blame for these failures on the closed nature of the societies involved. But in non-communist countries, the CIA has had to resort to military coups or extra-legal chicanery to get its people into power. It has never been able to light the fire of popular revolution.

For Washington to concede merit and virtue to a particular Third World insurgency would, moreover, raise the question: Why does not the United States, if it must intervene, take the side of the rebels? Not only might this better serve the cause of human rights and justice, but it would shut out the Russians from their alleged role. What better way to frustrate the International Communist Conspiracy? But this is a question that dares not speak its name in the Oval Office, a question that is relevant to many of the cases in this book.

Instead, the United States remains committed to its all - too- familiar policy of establishing and/or supporting the most vile tyrannies in the world, whose outrages against their own people confront us daily in the pages of our newspapers: brutal massacres; systematic, sophisticated torture; public whippings; soldiers and police firing into crowds; government supported death squads; tens of thousands of disappeared persons; extreme economic deprivation ... a way of life that is virtually a monopoly held by Americas allies, from Guatemala, Chile and El Salvador to Turkey, Pakistan and

Indonesia, all members in good standing of the Holy War Against Communism, all members of The Free World , that region of which we hear so much and see so little.

The restrictions on civil liberties found in the communist bloc, as severe as they are, pale by comparison to the cottage- industry Auschwitzes of The Free World , and, except in that curious mental landscape inhabited by The Compleat Anti- Communist, can have little or nothing to do with the sundry American interventions supposedly in the cause of a higher good.

It is interesting to note that as commonplace as it is for American leaders to speak of freedom and democracy while supporting dictatorships, so do Russian leaders speak of wars of liberation, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism while doing extremely little to actually further these causes, American propaganda notwithstanding. The Soviets like to be thought of as champions of the Third World, but they have stood by doing little more than going tsk, tsk as progressive movements and governments, even Communist Parties, in Greece, Guatemala, British Guiana, Chile, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere have gone to the wall with American complicity.

During the early 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency instigated several military incursions into Communist China. In 1960, CIA planes, without any provocation, bombed the sovereign nation of Guatemala. In 1973, the Agency encouraged a bloody revolt against the government of Iraq. In the American mass media at the time, and therefore in the American mind, these events did not happen.

We didnt know what was happening , became a cliche used to ridicule those Germans who claimed ignorance of the events which took place under the Nazis. Yet, was their stock answer as far-fetched as wed like to think? It is sobering to reflect that in our era of instant world-wide communications, the United States has, on many occasions, been able to mount a large- or small-scale military operation or undertake another, equally blatant, form of intervention without the American public being aware of it until years later, if ever. Often the only report of the event or of US involvement was a passing reference to the fact that a communist government had made certain charges-just the kind of news the American public has been well conditioned to dismiss out of hand, and the press not to follow up; as the German people were taught that reports from abroad of Nazi wrong-doings were no more than communist propaganda.

With few exceptions, the interventions never made the headlines or the evening TV news. With some, bits and pieces of the stories have popped up here and there, but rarely brought together to form a cohesive and enlightening whole; the fragments usually appear long after the fact, quietly buried within other stories, just as quietly forgotten, bursting into the foreground only when extraordinary circumstances have compelled it, such as the Iranians holding US embassy personnel and other Americans hostage in Teheran in 1979, which produced a rash of articles on the role played by the United States in the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953. It was as if editors had been spurred into thinking: Hey, just what did we do in Iran to make ail those people hate us so?

There have been a lot of Irans in Americas recent past, but in the absence of the New York Daily News or the Los Angeles Times conspicuously grabbing the leader by the collar and pressing against his face the full implication of the deed ... in the absence of NBC putting it all into teal pictures of real people on the receiving end ... in such absence the incidents become non-events for the large majority of Americans, and they can honestly say We didnt know what was happening.

Former Chinese Premier Chou En-lai once observed: One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.

Its probably even worse than he realized. During the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, a Japanese journalist, Atsuo Kaneko of the Japanese Kyoto News Service, spent several hours interviewing people temporarily housed at a hockey rink-mostly children, pregnant women and young mothers. He discovered that none of them had heard of Hiroshima. Mention of the name drew a blank.20

And in 1982, a judge in Oakland, California said he was appalled when some 50 prospective jurors for a death-penalty murder trial were questioned and none of them knew who Hitler was .21

To the foreign policy oligarchy in Washington, it is more than delightful. It is sine qua non.

So obscured is the comprehensive record of American interventions that when, in 1975, the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress was asked to undertake a study of covert activities of the CIA to date, it was able to come up with but a very minor portion of the overseas incidents presented in this book for the same period.22

For all of this information that has made its way into popular consciousness, or into school texts, encyclopedias, or other standard reference works, there might as well exist strict censorship in the United States.

The reader is invited to look through the relevant sections of the three principal American encyclopedias, Americana, Britannica, and Colliers. The image of encyclopedias as the final repository of objective knowledge takes a beating. What is tantamount to a non-recognition of American interventions may very well be due to these esteemed works employing a criterion similar to that of Washington officials as reflected in the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times summarized this highly interesting phenomenon thusly:

Clandestine warfare against North Vietnam, for example, is not seen ... as violating the Geneva Accords of 1954, which ended the French Indochina War, or as conflicting with the public policy pronouncements of the various administrations. Clandestine warfare, because it is covert, does not exist as far as treaties and public posture are concerned. Further, secret commitments to other nations are not sensed as infringing on the treaty-making powers of the Senate, because they are not publicly acknowledged.23

The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not, so much official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, as it is woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed. The editors of Readers Digest and U.S. News and World Report do not need to meet covertly with the representative from NBC in an FBI safe-house to plan next months stories and programs; for the simple truth is that these individuals would not have reached the positions they occupy if they themselves had not all been guided through the same tunnel of camouflaged history and emerged with the same selective memory and conventional wisdom.

The upheaval in China is a revolution which, if we analyze it, we will see is prompted by the same things that prompted the British, French and American revolutions. 24 A cosmopolitan and generous sentiment of Dean Rusk, then Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, later Secretary of State. At precisely the same time as