Secret Papers About China Are Released By The CIA:
The documents show that American intelligence agencies were slow to recognize the emergence of differences between the Soviet Union and China in what is known as the Sino-Soviet split. As late as 1966, three years before clashes along the border took the relationship to its lowest state, an estimate described an open break in relations between the Soviet Union and China as unlikely.(My emphasis.)
A main shortcoming, Mr. Suettinger wrote in his assessment, was "overestimating the importance of ideological solidarity and other centripetal forces within the Communist Bloc at least during the 1950's."
Totally, dude! Because, like, all commies were a monolithic evil! And therefore there was not only no diplomatic means by which America could deal with communist countries as separate entities, but there was no philosophical reason to assume that their interests would not always, to put it mildly, coincide. Thus, the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Tito's Yugoslavia, they were all the exact same. And if you asked someone rightwing enough, they told you that you could throw in Egypt and India, and for good measure those socialists of Sweden, Tanzania, and Chile, too. There, that was easy. And when they are all falsely grouped in dreaded sameness, turn up the hate and invent a doctrine by which you subvert every principle and virtue you ever had -- become a True Believer. And make money while you're at it.
Luckily for US, and the world, Richard Nixon (because of his study of De Gaulle) and his successors until the dread Ronald Reagan did not buy this version of the Enemy. Thus, the exploitation of the rift between the Soviet Union and China, and with it detente and the acceptance of co-existence: the only good thing Nixon ever did, and it was quite good indeed.
But the same principle shown in the CIA's fuck-up in the 1960s is again fashionable among the thoughtless; hence the monolithic label of Islamofascism which is used to describe, uniformly, everyone from Chechnyans to Palestinians to the legitimately vile al-quaeda to (ditto) Saddam Hussein's Ba'athists to China's Uighurs. Yet these groups often hate each other with a passion and so have no way by which they can cohere into the homogenous entity Western propagandists present them as. But then facts are pesky things to be batted away by people who have a tribalist hatred for any Muslim, who wish to use fear of the Monolith to consolidate their own power and effect their own religious standards on a secular populace, who have a hatred for any religion to such an extent that they will endorse any means to destroy it, who desperately wish to acquire the material wealth of Islamic countries, who think that Jesus has sent them on a divine crusade, etc.
Which is why we're in Iraq.
All their interests converge in maintaining the myth of The Monolith. All our interests converge in destroying that myth and then making war on the parts of "it" that are legitimate threats (al-qaeda), making peace with those that are not, and exploiting the differences between the two to our advantage.
posted by RETARDO MONTALBAN @ 5:00 AM
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