Allan Nairn Quotes

Abrams was the key man in Reagan administration policy toward Central America, when that administration was abetting what a court recently ruled was a genocide in Guatemala, when the U.S. was backing the army of El Salvador in a series of death squad assassinations and massacres, and when the U.S. was invading Nicaragua with a Contra force that went after what one U.S. general described as “soft targets,” meaning civilians, things like cooperatives.

In addition to allowing the U.S. to rewrite the notion of political sovereignty assuming for itself the right to really name anyone president of any country. I mean, if they follow that principle, what’s to stop naming any individual in any country, anywhere in the world as the recognized president. They’re also messing with the very notion of property. This is the kind of thing that maybe should give other countries and even foreign capitalists and rich people some pause when placing their holdings within the borders or within the control of the U.S. government because the principle they seem to be establishing is if the U.S. turns against you politically, they could just take your property straight up. It should give pause to lots of people who are using U.S. banks now.

In the case of El Salvador, after the massacre in El Mozote, where a U.S.-trained battalion massacred more than 500 civilians, slitting the throats of children along the way, Abrams took the lead in denying that such a thing had ever happened. And he later described the results of the Reagan administration policy, his policy, in El Salvador as a fabulous achievement. He said this even after the El Salvador Truth Commission had issued a report saying that more than 85 percent of the atrocities had been committed by the armed forces and its death squads, death squads which had a particular practice of cutting off the genitals of their victims, stuffing them in their mouths and putting them on open display on the roadsides of El Salvador.

When I was in high school, I started working with Ralph Nader and worked for him for about six years. And after that I planned to go down to Puerto Rico and do some work there. My mother is from there. And I found that about ten percent of the land there was U.S. military bases... Then I went to Guatemala in 1980.

You can't do that in today's U.S. You can't do that really in any major country today. The only partial exception to that at the level of rhetoric is Israel. Israeli generals and politicians still talk openly about the need to shed Palestinian blood. But they're really the only ones. Everywhere else—Europe, Russia, China, the U.S.—they have to hide their [activities].

Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves but even more importantly, Trump needs a new war. He needs his own war and he hasn’t started one yet. And that fits with his method of creating new spectacles. The institutions, the Pentagon, state and the CIA would probably have second thoughts because first, it wouldn’t be clear whether they could get it over with quickly and second, it’s not even clear that they would win. Because they would encounter some serious resistance within Venezuela. So, it seems what they’re trying to do now is to try to get the army to defect, get them to stage a coup and bring down Maduro. It’s kind of remarkable that some people maintain the pretense that the U.S. cares at all about elections anywhere. This is just another illustration of that.

For years, I’ve been documenting how many of the senior Democrats are complicit in war crimes, how they belong in prison. But we are now in an emergency situation in which there is a huge, fundamental difference between the Democrats and the Republicans at this moment. The Republicans would abolish democracy. They’re looking — because that’s the only way they can perpetuate their power. They have a minority of the votes. They have to rig the system so they can stay in power, as their minority of votes diminishes over time.... And there are many good Democratic candidates in this election, people who, in one way or another, will represent a breakthrough for social justice, who all have essentially pledged to support Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, Medicaid, when the Republicans would abolish it. But also, many of these, or a substantial number of these, Democrats are arguably war criminals — not as big as the war criminals on the Republican side, but still war criminals. And they belong in prison.

Trump essentially came out and said: Look, the system is totally corrupt, I’m a crook, I’ve been part of this rigged system for years, I’ve been paying off the politicians, now I’m going to be your crook. I’m going to be fighting on your side. People heard that, and it sounded a lot more credible to many people than Hillary saying: “Oh no, the system is not rigged! The system is not corrupt!” Those Wall Street contributions I take don’t affect my decisions. She said that first to Bernie, then to Trump. She said: “In fact, Obama took more Wall Street contributions than I did.” People heard that and say, “Come on!” They hear Trump say, “Look, it’s crooked, I’m a crook, I’m going to be your crook — it sounds a little more plausible.” And, in one sense, Trump is following through. He’s indeed demonstrating again that he’s a crook. But, of course, he’s not doing it on behalf of the working people who he claimed to be campaigning for. However, that fact has only gotten through to a limited extent.

Because, well, partly those who set the rhythm of repetition, the rhythm of what facts get repeated day to day, in the highest profile media outlets, and the rhythm of repetition is basically everything in politics. Because under the American system, there’s no centralized state censorship, unlike the old Soviet system. So, almost everything, almost every atrocity committed in the U.S. system is on the public record somewhere, it’s somewhere in a library, it’s somewhere in a posting on the Internet, somebody has done a good investigative piece on it. It’s all out there somewhere .But unless it’s repeated, hammered away, day after day, on the big media outlets, it may be on the public record but it’s not in the public consciousness. And that’s all that matters in politics: What is in the public consciousness? And those that set the rhythm of repetition that determine the public consciousness — in this case, the media outlets like MSNBC and CNN, which today play an absolutely central role... have seized on this Russia scandal as their theme... they devote vast portions of their airtime to speculation about this Russiagate scandal, to the exclusion of hammering away on all these other themes about the outright decimation and crushing and theft of the American working class.... about what he’s doing to the health of Americans, to the environment, to the basic rights of Americans.

When I appeared on the Charlie Rose TV show with Elliott Abrams, I suggested that he be put on trial, that he be brought before a Nuremberg-style tribunal and tried for his role in facilitating war crimes and crimes against humanity. He dismissed the idea of him being put on trial as “ludicrous,” but he did not actually deny any of the facts of what he has done—what he had done. He said it was all necessary in the context of the Cold War. So, this is Elliott Abrams, who has now been put in charge of key aspects of the U.S. policy toward Venezuela.

Some commentators have said, “Well, Abrams is not a Trump guy. He represents traditional, established U.S. foreign policy.” And that’s true. The problem is that that U.S. policy has been to abet genocide when the U.S. feels it’s necessary.