It is not that the celebrants were unaware of how the US victory was achieved. Rather, there was unconcealed joy at the grand success in subverting democracy. Time magazine, for example, was quite frank about the means employed to bring about the latest of the "happy series of democratic surprises" as "democracy burst forth" in Nicaragua. The method was to "wreck the economy and prosecute a long and deadly proxy war until the exhausted natives overthrow the unwanted government themselves," with a cost to us that is "minimal," leaving the victim "with wrecked bridges, sabotaged power stations, and ruined farms," and thus providing the U.S. candidate with "a winning issue": ending the "impoverishment of the people of Nicaragua." To appreciate the character of the political culture, it is only necessary to imagine the same story appearing in Stalinist Russia with a few names changed, an intellectual exercise far beyond the capacity of Western commissars.³⁵

The frankness is refreshing, and reveals with exactitude just what is meant by the "Americans United in Joy" who proclaim their dedication to "democracy."

Washington has employed similar methods to bring "democracy" to Angola; here too the country has been devastated, with a death toll reaching hundreds of thousands. From 1975, Angola was under attack by South Africa and the terrorist forces of Jonas Savimbi's UNITA, operating from Namibia and then Zaire with US support. Virtually alone, the US refused to recognize the MPLA government and subjected it to economic warfare. South Africa finally withdrew after a military defeat by the Cuban forces that had resisted its aggression since 1975, and a peace agreement was signed (May 1991) calling for elections. As in Central America, the US moved at once to subvert it, continuing its support for UNITA terror. The results are described by South African journalist Phillip van Niekerk: peasants "don't like UNITA," "But most of the people are afraid that if UNITA loses the elections, the war will go on" (quoting a Dutch development worker in the countryside).

People who are "aware of the atrocities committed by UNITA" may be "appalled" at the prospects, van Niekerk continues, but continuation of the war is more than the population can bear. The ruling MPLA "sacrificed a generation to repel the years of South African aggression and US-funded destabilization by Unita," Victoria Brittain writes. It lost any early credibility; what it might have done without the US-South African attack is anyone's guess. A "new wave of white settlers" is "re-colonizing" Angola, van Niekerk reports, now Afrikaners, later perhaps Portuguese returning to reclaim their lands. "The only optimism," Brittain concludes, "comes from the South African businessmen who occupy the lobbies of the newly refurbished hotels" in Luanda, where cynics say that "If Unita wins they'll have the country handed to them on a plate, if the MPLA wins they'll still have the country, for a handful of rands."³⁶

It is, again, only natural that at the dissident extreme, Anthony Lewis should laud the "consistent American policy" from the 1970s "to help negotiate an end to the brutal civil war" in Angola, and the successful pursuit by the Bush Administration of "a peaceful policy" aiming at "a political solution in Nicaragua."³⁷

The traditional attitude toward democracy was reiterated by a Latin America Strategy Development Workshop at the Pentagon in September 1990. It concluded that current relations with the Mexican dictatorship are "extraordinarily positive," untroubled by stolen elections, death squads, endemic torture, scandalous treatment of workers and peasants, and so forth. But "a `democracy opening' in Mexico could test the special relationship by bringing into office a government more interested in challenging the U.S. on economic and nationalist grounds," the fundamental concern over many years.³⁸

Each year, the White House sends to Congress a report explaining that the military threat we face requires vast expenditures -- which, accidentally, sustain high-tech industry at home and repression abroad. The first post-Cold War edition was in March 1990. The Russians having disappeared from the scene, the report at last recognized frankly that the enemy is the Third World. US military power must target the Third World, it concluded, primarily the Middle East, where the "threats to our interests...could not be laid at the Kremlin's door," a fact that can now be acknowledged, the Soviet pretext having disappeared. For the same reason, the threat now becomes "the growing technological sophistication of Third World conflicts." The US must therefore strengthen its "defense industrial base," with incentives "to invest in new facilities and equipment as well as in research and development," and develop further forward basing and counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict capacities.³⁹

In brief, the prime concerns continue to be power within the rich men's club, control of the service areas, and state-organized public subsidy for advanced industry at home. Democracy must be opposed with vigor, except in the PC sense of unhampered business rule. Human rights retain their usual irrelevance. Policies remain stable, adapted to new contingencies, with parallel adjustments by the cultural managers. The points are so glaringly obvious, and made with such manic consistency, that it takes real talent to miss them.

³⁵ DD, 141f., ch. 10. See COT, NI, DD, for an ongoing record of subversion of the peace process and media complicity. See Robinson, Faustian Bargain, on US subversion of the election itself.

³⁶ Van Niekerk, G&M, Jan. 25, 29, 1992. Britain, Guardian (London), March 30; Guardian Weekly, April 5, 1992. See George Wright, Z magazine, May/June, 1992, for background.

³⁷ Lewis, NYT, Aug. 24, 1992.

³⁸ Latin America Strategy Development Workshop, Sept. 26 & 27, 1990, minutes, 3.

³⁹ DD, 29-30, for further detail.