[OPE] CIA's Analysis of The Soviet Union

Well, secret services may be a necessary evil up to a point, but little of scientific merit can be learnt from them, because they are professional liars, who will re-arrange and rewrite information any way at all, to suit the purpose of the moment. Any means at all, may be used to deceive people defined as the enemy. To ask a spy to tell the truth, is stupid, because you are not going to get it.

We saw this clearly in the lead-up to war against Iraq and Afghanistan - it was all a pack of lies, a fraud, and the politicians were also talking a pack of lies. I suppose a complication at the time was that actually the CIA wasn't really in favour of the neoconservative war plans. Behind the scenes, one pack of lies competed with another.

If you made ten thousand analyses and forecasts of the Soviet Union across fifty years, then retrospectively you can pick out a handful of analyses which seem to stand up rather well in the light of historical experience. But it doesn't tell you anything about the vast majority of reports which turned out to be totally mistaken. The most striking thing about Sovietologists is how badly wrong a lot of their analyses and forecasts were - and how could they be accurate, when they were strongly influenced by ideological hate campaigns.

So anyway I don't think CIA documents can provide "a comprehensive understanding of the economic history and the ideas at stake". All you can really say is, that they show where the priorities of the US government were at the time, and that the CIA also funded bona fide research about the Soviet Union, which may have some merit. I use the CIA world factbook sometimes for quick statistical calculations, they are better now at updating it than they used to be https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

When I lived in New Zealand, the local labour historian Herbert ("Bert") O. Roth used to write reference articles on New Zealand for the Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, a CIA-sponsored publication of the Hoover Institution. Mr Roth got a lot of flak for that from leftists, but his argument was that people were better off with accurate and truthful information. Anyway, there were only a few hundred Marxists in New Zealand who got rather few votes in elections, so they were hardly a threat.

The trouble with the CIA I think is that we're not simply talking about an agency which aims to safeguard national security and provides defence intelligence, in line with a code of ethics, but an organisation which has used any method at all, to topple foreign politicians and foreign governments not to the liking of Washington or the American multinational corporations, with the use of:

- bribes, theft, murders, torture, gangsterism and assassinations,
- clandestine and criminal business operations,
- disinformation campaigns, misrepresentations, smears, threats and blackmail
- infiltration of political parties, mass media and universities,
- the organisation of fake protests, riots, and unrest, etc.

So we are talking about a very violent, corrupt and murderous American organisation, which constantly violates basic principles of international law and international justice, for the purpose of advancing vaguely defined "American interests" in the world. The American taxpayer literally finances his federal government by an unknown amount, to overthrow foreign governments, assassinate foreign leaders, and pursue genocidal wars.

The really scary part is, when you read historical accounts about "who they thought the enemy really was". Americans have totally weird theories about other countries, and this often leads to American-organised murder campaigns against the very people that could help them.

Suppose that the CIA had not helped Saddam Hussein to power and provided him with weapons and military training, and suppose that the CIA had not engineered the 1953 coup against Mossadeq in Iran and facilitated the Shah's military might and torture chambers. Would there have been the kinds of problems in those countries that there have been? Would there indeed have been an Iran-Iraq war?

The largest chunk of problems there are in international relations, result from "illegal and unasked-for foreign interference in the internal affairs of other countries" which substitutes for mutually negotiated assistance respecting the wishes of the local population. That's among the most important reasons why you should be against imperialism. And if anything should be clear, it is that imperialist thought is never objective because it assumes that the rest of the world should conform to the home country.

PS - there an interesting book now by Stephen Kinzer called "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq" documenting the political subversion of Americans in the world, across the last century or so http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211943694&sr=1-1

Jurriaan

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Received on Sun Apr 19 13:52:29 2009