Political prisoners in Indonesia during the country’s Cold War-era CIA-installed dictatorship
The new cold war—which can more specifically be called the U.S. hybrid asymmetrical war waged against China—poses dire implications for the world’s formerly colonized peoples. Implications so undeniably horrendous, and so apparent just a few years into the current paradigm of U.S.-China tensions, that even generally neoconservative-adjecet publications like The Atlantic are beginning to warn about them. Last week, The Atlantic’s Vincent Bevins wrote:
Western voices have begun to characterize the U.S.-China rivalry as a new cold war, with the more hawkish among them demanding that Washington and its allies confront Beijing. Too often, these conversations evaluate this potential conflict and its consequences as if they will only concern people in the U.S. and China. How much damage—economic or military—would the two powers tolerate? How much might each suffer? Who would win? These questions are insufficient. If a new cold war is anything like the last one, it will not principally be American or Chinese citizens who suffer. During the confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, huge numbers of people were reduced to collateral damage, far away from famous First World flashpoints such as Berlin, their deaths seen as acceptable, if not celebrated. One of the most important lessons from that conflict should be that it was primarily innocent people—mostly in poor, developing countries—that paid the price. Our media paid little attention to them, and our governments wrote off their deaths as part of what is now called “great power competition.”
The worst of these Cold War consequences for those within the Global South were the dictatorships Washington installed in Indonesia, Argentina, and numerous other places in order to contain Soviet influence and prevent the spread of communism. In Indonesia, at least 500,000 and more likely 1 million were killed in the purge that the CIA’s puppet military dictatorship carried out. The purge was directed not just at confirmed Communist Party members, but at all suspected leftists. And against disfavored groups like ethnic Chinese, whose targeting during that facet of the last cold war served as an ominous foreshadowing to the current one.
Against the hundreds of thousands who were arbitrarily imprisoned during the purge and its following years, torture methods like electrical shocks and rape were regularly carried out. Following this model in state terror, called the “Jakarta method,” Latin American dictatorshlike Argentina’s junta, Pinochet’s Chile, and Brazil’s military regime killed up to 80,000 and imprisoned 400,000. The torture stories that came out of these regimes were as bad or worse than the ones from Indonesia.
So far, the new cold war hasn’t resembled the last one to the extent that Washington has installed genocidal anti-communist military dictatorships with China as the primary motivation for this. But it has already had great human costs in the Global South, and the framework for a new wave of such coups gets more thoroughly defined every day.
In 2019, the U.S. carried out a coup in Bolivia that resulted in the new ruling junta perpetrating genocidal repression against the indigenous population. This sabotage of democracy wasn’t mainly perpetrated with China in mind, but it did momentarily keep Bolivia from joining the Chinese bloc. And last month, the U.S. orchestrated a coup in Guinea, one that was primarily motivated by a desire to halt the country’s involvement in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
We’ll see if the newly sworn in coup leader carries out atrocities, but his U.S.-installed CIA puppet government is already depriving the country of the Chinese infrastructure projects that could otherwise help provide increasingly needed stability.
More sinister cold war-related machinations are at play in Latin America. The Bolivia coup has been reversed, but Latin America brims with the beginnings of an Operation Condor 2.0 that the war on China makes all the more prominent. With great-power competition as its primary motive, Washington has been militarizing Latin America in recent years, having SOUTHCOM partner with leaders like Bolsonaro in building up arms. This has boosted these regimes at a time when they’re intensifying their repressive and genocidal actions; Colombia has perpetrated world-shocking police brutality, death squad murders, and disappearances in response to this year’s anti-austerity protests, while Bolsonaro has committed genocide against indigenous tribes through destroying Native homelands for the sake of corporate extractivism.
These governments aren’t dictatorships, in that they have elections and lack autocratic rule. But they’ve proven to be horrifically brutal settler-colonial apparatuses. And Bolsonaro, who’s played into Washington’s anti-Chinese agenda by refusing to distribute China’s Covid-19 vaccine, came to power due to the 2016 U.S. coup that paved the way for his far-right camp to prevail in the 2018 election. If Bolsonaro succeeds in the 2022 election coup that he’s campaigning towards, he’ll restore the past era of Brazilian military dictatorship that he admires. Bolsonaro’s militarization of his cabinet by appointing exceptional numbers of ex-military personnel further shows the peril that Brazil’s fragile bourgeois “democracy” is in. Should this “democracy” break under Bolsonaro’s fascism, Washington won’t complain any more than it did last time.
The human cost of Brazil’s partially cold war-driven fascist nightmare, wherein the country with some of the highest Covid death rates has been deprived of a superior vaccine and colonial genocide is intensifying, is a different version of the humanitarian crises Washington’s war on China has created for other regions. Due to Washington’s drive to sabotage the BRI, all of the horn of Africa has become subject to a paradigm of perpetual destabilization, facilitated by U.S. meddling. It’s gotten the worst in Ethiopia, which is experiencing the world’s largest starvation crisis—a crisis almost entirely manmade.
It’s been created by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the terrorist organization that invaded during last year’s harvest season, has sabotaged supply chains as an insurgency strategy, and has been caught hoarding food aid. The TPLF is a proxy force of Washington, which seeks to destabilize Ethiopia and Eritrea so that these countries can no longer pursue BRI projects.
This is the extremity of the costs that the imperialists are willing to force upon the Global South so that they can score geopolitical points against China. They’re doing the same thing in Afghanistan, where Washington has been utilizing cruel sanctions and activating its terrorist proxy forces to try to keep the starving country in chaos—all so that China can’t build BRI projects there. They’re doing it in Myanmar, where Washington has been inflaming inorganic factions of violent rebellion that threaten to turn the country into a Libya-esque failed state—all to stop the BRI projects that the military regime is implementing.
Watch out for even darker things to come out of this new cold war. The wave of anti-Asian hate crimes within the core imperialist countries is just one of the many consequences of the geopolitical tensions Washington has created. Tensions which are perpetuated by people’s willingness to believe the narratives the imperialists put forth about China, whether the “Wuhan lab leak” claim, the misleading media accounts of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, or any other piece of Sinophobia.
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