Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Scott Peter Dale
Title : Transnationalised repression Parafascism and the U.S.
Year : 1977

Link download : Scott_Peter_Dale_-_Transnationalised_repression.zip

Preface. This essay was written in the summer of 1977. I lost track of it in subsequent summers, when I first suffered a major illness, and then was side-tracked into preparation of a trade book on the Kennedy Assassination (Beyond Conspiracy) that was eventually killed by its publisher on the eve of its appearance. I am grateful to Lobster for reviving 'Transnationalised Repression'. Though the essay starts from events of the seventies (Watergate, the murder of Orlando Letelier in Washington, the Nixon war on drugs) which have since passed into history, the essay also builds to a general overview of transnationalised backing for right-wing repressive forces, or parafascists, that operate on the fringes of state intelligence and security systems. Except in details, I have not attempted to update the essay, whose general thesis has been unfortunately only too corroborated by ensuing events. The assassins of Letelier did in fact go to jail, but with sentences that were either token, or soon reversed in higher courts. On a higher level, the fall of the Shah in Iran and of Marcos in the Philippines have been followed by new revelations of those dictators' links to private as well as public forces in the United States. Indeed the speculation reported in this essay (at footnote 159), that Asian bribes had influenced Nixon's Vietnam interventions through the Watergate period, seems only too relevant today, as we learn how much money had been channelled by Marcos into U.S. political campaigns over the last decade and a half. The thesis of "Transnationalised Repression" also seems only too relevant to U.S. politics in Nicaragua, as we learn of support for the Contras from first Argentina and Israel, and now allegedly from South Africa. The restrained optimism of the essay's conclusions, written in the first year of the Carter presidency, may sound a little odd after six years of Reagan. Support for drugrunning criminals has moved from being the dark underside of U.S. foreign policy to (in the case of the Nicaraguan Contras) being at that policy's visible centre. In 1977 I was concerned about the access of foreign parafascists and WACL publicists to the office of Senator Thurmond and the staff of the National Security Council. Today General Singlaub, the President of WACL, has access, through his support work for the Contras, to the Reagan White House (cf. footnote 50). In my view, this continuing demoralisation of U.S. foreign policy and the concomitant trivialisation of domestic U.S. political debate, makes my modest hopes for change through "new human groupings", or what since the fall of Marcos has become famous as "people power", not less but more relevant. It is not that I am at all sanguine about the possibilities for such transpolitical change outside the traditional political system. It is just all the clearer that such new human forces, however weak and immature at present, are ultimately our best hope. PETER DALE SCOTT. ...