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Chapter 2: The Crime of the Last Century—And of This Century?
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merely the expressions of specific historic conditions, “variably present and having variable effects” subject to the “historical continuities and discontinuities in capitalist production and accumulation.” In this sense, acts committed and omitted by, on behalf of, or of the state have usually become repressive means directed at the real and imagined enemies of a given state and its associated relations to the prevailing political and economic arrangements. As some of the following excerpts from the epilogue exemplify, these passages are just as relevant today when it comes to explaining the crimes of the capitalist U.S. state in its post–September 11, 2001, war on terrorism as they were when used to explain, justify, or deny the state crimes committed in the name of anticommunism or socialist revolution when CBCS was published: With respect to the United States’ capitalist state power, former case officer and agent for the CIA Phillip Agee (1988, 8) has concluded that the covert and overt activities, for example, of his former organization’s role in the political oppression and denial of fundamental human rights in developing nations (especially in Latin America) have always had the primary objective of maintaining “long-range control of the natural resources, the labor, and the markets of other countries.”Allegedly, however , this type of intervention was engaged in for the purposes of making the world freely democratic and anticommunist. In the anticommunist political culture of the West, “any popular revolutionary movement that seeks revolutionary change or fundamental radical change in favor of the worker” is equally threatening to the capitalist state (Agee 1988, 9). . . . Hence, the actions taken by the CIA and the local oligarchies (e.g., banking and commercial interests) in Latin America against Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic or Salvador Allende in Chile—and against the vast majority of rural peasants or of marginalized urban workers—were rationalized through the emotional and political rhetoric of anticommunism used to justify subversive operations abroad. “They are subversive in the sense that from the very beginning, the CIA has used money and control of the people to seek control over the so-called free, pluralistic, democratic institutions of other countries” (Agee 1988, 6) . . . statesupported terrorism of the kind waged by the U.S. trained Contras in Nicaragua has also resulted in fifty thousand wounded and twenty thousand dead Nicaraguans in less than ten years. But these expressions of state criminality are not limited to the torturing and murder of political enemies ; they also include the crimes against self-determination committed by trade policies, for example, that assert adverse economic pressures on political parties, the church, and the press, or by waging disinformation campaigns inside and outside these Third World countries. As former Contra pubic relations person Edgar Chamorro has noted about the Revisiting Crimes by the Capitalist State 45 actions and consequences of various disinformation campaigns aimed at the people of Nicaragua:“Our psychological wars [were] very cleverly oriented to use people or to lie and they [were] very cruel to the recipient. Because there is cruelty not only in rapes, or in assassinations, but also in destruction of the economy, in making people suffer for lack of full electricity and water (Chamorro 1988, 24). . . .With respect to the more general economic, political, and social development of countries and peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the role of the U.S. intervention through its foreign policy has certainly been a deterrent to the materialization of the rights of Third World people, at least since 1945. And . . . “it is unfortunately the United States of all governments in theWest that has most consistently opposed the realization of the right of self-determination by the peoples of the Third World and is, therefore, portrayed as an implacable foe of the rights of people” (Falk 1989, 60).The record of the United States,for example,“when it comes to the ratification of the major multilateral human rights instruments has one of the very worst . . . among all of the so-calledWestern liberal democracies” (Boyle 1989b, 71) [including the contemporary failure of the United States to have recognized and endorsed the International Criminal Court]. The arguments implicitly and explicitly developed throughout this book suggest that the reduction of wholesale as opposed to retail forms of state criminality would have a far greater impact on the levels of violence and suffering worldwide—especially since the former are often criminogenic of the latter.Our nontraditional arguments about the legal and non-legal relationships of the crimes by...