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In light of the ‘mission statement’ I created when I started this blog April 2009, a statement that flew off the tips of my fingers onto my computer nearly without any conscious thought of my own, I am going to pursue my current pathway through my reading of America’s Sacred Calling: Building a New Spiritual Reality (2010) by John Fitzgerald Medina., no matter how uncomfortable my travels through this information are making me.  After all, some part of me knew when I began this blog that sooner or later the GLOBAL picture was going to begin appearing here:

The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing of traumas so that we don’t pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.

I realize that probably only a handful of this blog’s readers will want to follow along this pathway I am presenting in this series of posts.  I cannot, however, honor my own blog intentions without considering these pertinent facts.  Trying as I did to find some ‘reason’ for the fact that of the 24 richest nations on earth, America has the widest gap between our rich and poor that is directly hurting the well-being of ever increasing numbers of our nation’s children – I could not locate the ‘reason’ without consulting some outside source of information that I believe I can trust.  Medina’s book is that source.

Medina writes:

Overthrowing Democracy in the Name of Capitalism

“Especially during the Cold War period (1946-1989), the United States financed and sometimes installed numerous dictatorships in the Third World.  The…Baha’I publication, Century of Light, explains that the West (the United States and its allies) used development aid to influence governments during the Cold War, but “wherever” this “failed to retain the loyalties of recipient populations” the West resorted “to the encouragement and arming of a wide variety of authoritarian regimes.”  This publication [available for free download by clicking on its title] further states that such political and economic manipulations contributed to “gross violations of human rights” and led to “the rise of opportunistic elites who saw in the suffering of their countries only openings for self-enrichment.”

“An almost endless stream of documentation now exists that affirms the accuracy of the statements quoted above from Century of Light.  For instance, John Stockwell, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer and author of The Praetorian Guard:  The U.S. Role in the New World Order, does a masterful and courageous job of documenting the almost unimaginable horrors and atrocities that were committed by various U.S. sponsored dictatorships during the twentieth century.  As a CIA officer, Stockwell helped to manage “secret wars” in Africa and Southeast Asia.  Stockwell points out that, over many decades, the United States designed a worldwide military system of control to protect capitalist interests throughout the globe:

“With a brief interruption during World War II, the creation of military oligarchies [government by the few] became a standard U.S. policy of control.  We set up schools and eventually trained tens of thousands of military and police officers in countries all over Latin and Central America, in Africa…and in Asia.  We…armed them…and created a military fraternity of people in power in these countries who were more closely identified with our own military, and hence, U.S. national interests and capitalist values, than they were with the people of their own countries.  [see:  The Praetorian Guard:  The U.S. Role in the New World Order, page 61]”

“Utilizing its international military fraternity, the U.S. government has sponsored coups in a variety of countries throughout the globe.  Indeed, in 1954, the Unites States sponsored a coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala.  The coup occurred at the urging of Guatemalan wealthy landowners and U.S.-based corporations with business operations in Guatemala, such as the United Fruit Company.  In relation to this, Walter LaFeber, a professor of history and author of the book, Inevitable Revolutions:  The United States in Central America, states,

“Guatemala has historically been the most economically powerful nation in Central America, but half the population average only $81 income each year.  This half are the pure-blooded Indians (descendants of the great Mayans) who are among the poorest and most isolated people in the hemisphere….  They and other exploited Guatemalans became the targets of a 20,000-man army trained and largely supplied by the United States.  That army runs the government, and it is a direct descendant of a regime placed in power by a U.S.-planned golpe (or coup) in 1954 that overthrew the constitutionally elected, reformist Arbenz government.  [See:  Inevitable Revolutions:  The United States in Central America, pages 8-9]”

“It is indeed disturbing to note that, mostly from 1954 through the 1980s, a series of Guatemalan military dictatorships that were backed and financed by the United States executed what was essentially a modern-day campaign of genocide against [South] American Indians.  The Historical Clarification Commission, a commission sponsored by the United Nations, stated that the Guatemalan military had committed “acts of genocide” in which 200,000 people (mostly Mayan Indians) were killed.  Along these same lines, in an article titled, “Indians Fight Modern Conquistadores,” Deborah Menkart [see:  Rethinking Columbus, pages 60-61] explains that, in order to suppress growing resistance among the poor starving peasants, the Guatemalan military took part in the mass killings of Mayan Indians, destroyed fields of crops and forests, raped and tortured countless women and children, sadistically amputated the limbs of many Indians and then abandoned them in holes to suffer alone, fouled water supplies, slaughtered livestock, demolished hundreds of villages, and desecrated Mayan sacred places and cultural symbols.  A 1999 United Nations report stated that the Guatemalan army demonstrated “an aggressive racist component of extreme cruelty that led to extermination en masse of defenseless Mayan communities, including children, women and the elderly, through methods whose cruelty has outraged the moral conscience of the civilised [sic] world.”  Mass graves containing the bodies of murdered people were uncovered.  Also, over a million people, primarily Mayan Indians, were displaced and forced at gunpoint to move into so-called “model villages” (militarized concentration centers) where the government maintained oppressive control.  (pages 183-185)”

The author’s next section:   Multinational Corporations

See previous posts about this book:

+HERE’S A TAKE ON THE RICH RICH RICH RICH AND THE POOR POOR POOR POOR

+FINDING MY COURAGE TO TAKE A LOOK AT ‘WHAT’S WRONG WITH AMERICA’

+ONGOING TRAUMAS: AMERICA’S BIG MONEY PERPETRATORS

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