Il arrivera, donc. ce moment où le soleil n’éclairera plus. sur la terre. que des hommes libres. et ne reconnaissant d’autre maître que leur raison.

It will happen, then, in the moment the sun is brightest upon the world, that men will be free and they will recognize no other master than their reason.

Nicolas de Condorcet

We need to reconsider something curious that US President Obama mentioned in his State of the Union address. This was the subject of America’s commitment to human rights and free speech.

Obama claimed that the US government firmly stands up for free speech, the rights of political prisoners, and the interest of women, ethnic minorities and sexual minorities. In reality, I would argue that the US  only brings up these issues when it needs some fuel to criticize the countries opposing its hegemony. It doesn’t really value such things as free speech or human rights at all, or it might be more committed to such values in its own country. The US is persecuting its own country’s dissidents such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, and the US under Obama is responsible for supporting more repressive dictatorships around the world than any other country.

It is especially strange, in view of the recent torture report which disclosed the CIA’s crimes to the public, that the US government would profess to be the biggest advocate in the world for things like human rights and free speech. It is especially rich of the US government to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin as an autocrat, when their own record on human rights and free speech seems so much worse than Putin’s.

Officially, the CIA cannot tell us where their torture “black sites” are because it doesn’t want to endanger the personnel working at those facilities. The US government doesn’t value the lives of its personnel. The real reason the government can’t afford to disclose the locations of its black sites is that we would see they are all located in various repressive countries in Eastern Europe and the third world, proving the CIA is guilty of most of the domestic repression and torture applied by repressive regimes against their subjects today. Such a disclosure would shatter the myth that the United States is fighting tyrants, and confirm that the United States is actually supporting tyrants.

We only have to look to the events in Ukraine to realize that the United States government doesn’t really favor a liberal democratic transition for other countries, but military dictatorship.

It’s time to stop falling for the scam that the US is interested in expanding the zone of freedom (“free trade”, perhaps) and democracy (more like, NATO membership) in the world. The only interest the US has in other countries is about spreading the methods and technologies of tyranny, torture and repression. The US only cynically uses liberal democratic ideology as a kind of propaganda “wedge strategy” to start justifying its infection of other countries with its political influence, with the goal of ultimately ousting democratically elected rulers and replacing them with executioners and dictators trained by the CIA. It is a strategy of staging coups, as old as the 1950s:

1. The US criticizes the democratically-elected ruler as someone on a possible slippery slope to autocracy (e.g. Morsi in Egypt or Yanukovich in Ukraine), like it does regarding Vladimir Putin
2. The US starts supporting an “all means necessary” coup against the quasi-autocrat. It befriends anyone willing to destabilize the country, including the neo-Nazis it supported in Ukraine and the al Qaeda terrorists it supported in Libya and Syria
3. Once the CIA’s coup team has stormed the capital, the new US puppet dictators take the first actual constitutional steps to make the country autocratic: they outlaw all opposition parties and independent media in the country, as Sisi did in Egypt and Poroshenko did in Ukraine. They build the more sordid and autocratic regime than the original one they were complaining about when they started to interfere
4. This is the most ridiculous part: the US government will take the sudden and baffling step of saying democracy isn’t important anymore and they are just committed to the new regime’s security instead (right after convincing the US taxpayer to waste billions of dollars, and often thousands of lives in the target country, supposedly trying to spread democracy in previous stages of the coup)

The most recent victims of this kind of CIA conspiracy have, as given in the examples above, been Egypt and Ukraine. In both of those countries, the CIA brought new abominable dictators to power who were worse than their predecessors: Sisi and Poroshenko. Both of them have outlawed opposition and independent media – two crucial steps in the consolidation of power of a totalitarian state. Somehow, the US was able to recognize Morsi and Yanukovich’s alleged autocratic tendencies, but is incapable of seeing anything autocratic about the new CIA-backed thugs and dictators liquidating lawmaking bodies, banning and beating up opposition politicians and journalists, and ruling by decree.

It is equally true that if the Bashar al-Assad regime was overthrown in Syria, the US would suddenly switch priorities and only talk about the new Syrian state’s security, saying democracy doesn’t matter anymore. Democratization, so called, is just a sorry excuse for the US government to begin meddling in other countries, whereupon it will only be interested in establishing a new dictatorship. Imagine it, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have died, listening to America’s empty promises of democracy, when all the US was ever interested in was replacing Assad with a new dictator who is on their payroll. They wouldn’t care if the civil war continued, either – as it did in Libya. They just want the head of state to be a puppet, to obey their commands, like Sisi in Egypt or the new dictatorial general they are backing in Libya.

We should all be appalled by how most of our media are very selective in their coverage of repression in other countries. Specifically, they only ever talk about repression when it helps the US undermine its political or military rivals, and they simply avoid all recognition of repressive policies if the dictator is on the side of the Pentagon.

By Harry J. Bentham