Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Race to Destruction
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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received the same treatment a few years later, with US and British
support. 56
Much the same was true in Asia, including Vietnam, Thailand, the
Philippines, and Korea, while in Europe the US moved to abort steps
towards any form of “national capitalism” (let alone socialism) that
might have led to independence from the US-controlled global order. US
influence and control expanded, in part by design, in part as a reflection
of the objective power balance, at the expense of France and England
(not to speak of indigenous populations), in the Middle East and Latin
America.
The US attitude towards fascist restoration was hardly different in
Latin America. The US showed little concern when pro-Franco, pro-
German elements overturned Colombian democracy in 1949 creating
what the New York Times described as “a totalitarian state, directly
instigated by the [fascist] Government of Spain on the very frontiers of
the Panama canal,” with hundreds of people killed. 57 “The fascist
seizure of Colombia was far more brutal” than the Communist takeover
in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Fleming writes: “But the advance of fascism
to the Panama Canal itself did not cause a wave of anger and fear to
sweep through Washington and the West. This was due to two reasons:
fascism was not then led by a great power; and, in the main, it
preserves the privileges of the upper classes, instead of turning the
social structure upside down.” Panama itself was taken over in the same
month by another supporter of Franco and Mussolini, who was so pro-
Axis that he had been deposed in 1941, while the year before,
Venezuelan democracy had been destroyed by a military coup, again
raising no great concern in the US.
One aspect of the postwar project was the recruitment and protection
of Nazi war criminals in the service of the war against the anti-fascist
resistance and the Soviet bloc. In Asia, collaborators with Japanese