Guinastasia:
Even if said dictatorship is brutal and cruel, and the other is not? Look at what went on in Guatemala in the 1950s? (BTW, the overthrow of the Arbenz government had jackshit to do with it being a “communist” government. Allen Dulles was on the board of the United Fruit Company, and his brother just HAPPENED to be John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State for Ike. You might want to do some research on the UFC, btw.)
I know about the UFC, the family Dulles, and the Guatemala coup.
And let’s not get into our support of the Somoza dynasty, the military thugs in El Salvador, the Shah of Iran, etc. (Why the HELL do you think the communists were able to get such support from the people in the first place? They probably figured, “hey, can’t be any worse than the alternative!”)
That’s sort of my underlying point. You can’t criticize Nixon for his actions in Latin America without looking at general US policy in Latin America. The Nixon administration was no worse than any other American administration in terms of its Latin American policy.
Happened during the Johnson administration, was covered up during the Johnson administration.
“Everybody else did it” is no excuse. Kissinger still deserves to hang.
“No Worse than Nixon!” Now, there’s a glowing recommendation! How proud we can be! No wonder we are beloved of the nations!
Me, too!
There is almost a Yin/Yang clarity in the difference between the two men [Nixon and McGovern], a contrast so stark that it would be hard to find any two better models in the national politics arena for the legendary duality – the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts – that almost everybody except Americans has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character. This was not what Nixon had in mind when he said, last August, that the 1972 presidential election would offer voters “the clearest choice of this century,” but on a level he will never understand he was probably right . . . and it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to despise. Our Barbie doll president, with his Barbie doll wife and his box-full of Barbie doll children is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts, on nights when the moon comes too close . …
At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and the head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn . . . pauses briefly to strangle the Chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness . . . towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, and trying desperately to remember which one of those four hundred identical balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell’s apartment . . .
– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
