Supplying repression

Description

From the Foreword: A strong democratic mandate has rarely been deemed necessary by the power-wielders in Washington. It is enough if the public shuts up, minds its own consumerist business, and leaves the tactics of imperial defense where it belongs-namely, in the professional hands of leaders and bureaucrats. And so, whether popular or not, we can expect these interventionary policies of support for repression to go on, at least until effectively opposed by a strong social movement in this country. One of the vital tools of active opposition is persuasive information. Contrary to liberal illusion, formal freedoms do not assure the quality of information and analysis needed for an alert citizenry. Media bias, secrecy, special-interest lobbying, and the black arts of "disinformation" are a formidable array of obstacles. For these reasons it requires ingenuity, perseverance, and a clarity of will to gather and present information in a manner that is at once compelling and mobilizing. Michael Klare has been a pioneer researcher at the information frontier of the imperial/war system for years indicating the viability and relevance of such an enterprise even in our kind of "closed society." This volume, written in collaboration with Cynthia Arnson, updates and extends his valuable study of U.S. support for authoritarian governments. Their analysis enables us to get beyond slogans and to grasp the organic links between training, repressive tactics, and the anguish of torture victims. This portrayal makes it unmistakably clear that the United States is and has been all along a knowing senior partner of repression on a global scale. And, indeed, the new emerging Reagan foreign policy based on an all-oceans American-led alliance of right-wing governments boldly acknowledges our dependence on these repressive regimes and their dependence on us for the latest "off-the-shelf" knowhow and hardware. More fully and convincingly than anywhere else, Klare and Arnson, with dispassionate precision and attention to detail, depict the profiles of this distinctively American Gulag. Let us hope that our response as readers will be less dispassionate, that we will begin to insist that our government stay out of the repression trade. Without such an insistence we will find ourselves as citizens indicted as co-conspirators in this central imperial effort to crush the struggles of Third World peoples to control their own social, political, and cultural destiny.

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