Posted 6:37 PM by Floyd

It's Commie propaganda day over at Beato-blog. The soundbitten one puzzles over the totally irrational prejudices people have against Communism:

In 1980, the United States helped thousands of Muslim rebels, including Osama Bin Laden, defend Afghanistan against a Soviet invasion, because free people should never have to wonder about the reliability of world opium supplies, and there's no telling what might have happened to Afghanistan under Communist control.

No telling at all! Of course in the existing dozen or so Communist nations there were purges, torture, millions of people worked to death, so many informants that people didn't trust their own families, war, subversion, starvation, censorship, secret police, and automobiles made of cardboard. So what can we extrapolate from this when considering the fate of a Communist Afghanistan?

Well not a fucking thing, of course! It's all just coincidence.

Beato also parrots the usual line from the tinfoil brigade:

In 1963, the CIA helped Iraq's 850-member Ba'ath party overthrow General Abdul Karim Kassem, because a world in which a small group of violent extremists is given control over an oil-rich nation is a world where free people can breathe easy.

How did the CIA "help" the Ba'ath party take control? I am constantly hearing about how the CIA overthrew this or that dictator, but what is the mechanism by which they do so? Does the CIA give them money? Well, China gave Bill Clinton money. You can call Slick Willie a lot of things, but "Beijing's puppet" is kind of stretching it. Does the CIA give the coup-makers America's "support?" Well America has been loudly proclaiming its "support" for anyone who wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein for the last 12 years; hell of a lot of good that's done us.

I once got into a debate with some Chomsky types in a Palo Alto coffeshop. The subject of Chile came up and here it was: The CIA overthrow Allende. I reminded them that the military hated Allende and asked what assistance the CIA gave to Pinochet. "They gave him weapons."

Imagine! Augusto Pinochet is a general in the Chilean military, and the only weapon the poor guy can lay ahold of inside Chile's borders is a stick with a nail in it!