The American Monster Machine

 America likes to think of itself like Van Helsing in a world full of monsters; a rogue vigilante republic cursed with the responsibility to protect the weak and the downtrodden from the forces of evil with it's superpowers. After all, without the great benevolent savior state of America, who would be there to combat autocracy and rid the world of the scourge of drugs and terrorism? And it's true, America does wage a constant battle against a veritable rogues gallery of supervillains. But there is just one tiny detail that's often left out of this Hammer House narrative. America may be defined by its forever war with the monsters of the world, but this Helsing nation gave birth to most of them. In reality, the American horror story bares far more in common with Frankenstein than any other mythology, with our indispensable nation playing the titular role of the mad scientist at war with the scourge of it's own hideous creation. A simple glance at history makes this analogy painfully clear.

America detests autocracy. Or at least so we're told. Ours is a nation which markets itself as a champion of freedom and democracy across the globe. However, this marketing campaign rings a bit hollow when you count the bodies. For a shining beacon of hope, America caries a rather odd addiction for launching coup d'etats against downtrodden nations it deems unworthy of autonomy. By some historical estimates, such as that of the work of late State Department hack turned imperial historian, William Blum, America has launched nearly 60 coups in the last 60 years with more than half being successful, and the targets have far too often been those democracies we claim to protect.

There's the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran in 1953, Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954, the great Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1960, Joao Goulart of Brazil in 1964, Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973, all the way up to Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti in 2004 and Manuel Zeleya of Honduras in 2009. The list literally goes on and on. America has become so devoted to sabotaging democracy in it's own hemisphere that it runs a school, formerly known as the School of the Americas, who's curriculum includes everything from torture to propaganda and who's alumni reads like a who's who of human rights abusers, including some of Latin America's more heinous autocrats, like Argentina's Jorge Videla, Bolivia's Hugo Banzer and Panama's Manuel Noriega.

In fact America has a rather storied history of creating and propping up some of histories most heinous strongmen. Creatures like Suharto of Indonesia, who inaugurated his thirty year reign of terror by helping his masters in Washington to liquidate the third largest communist party on the planet with paramilitary hordes of machete wielding fiends. Over the span of several months between 1965 and 1966 more than half a million people were butchered. Men strung from flagpoles in town squares, women raped to death with knives, their heads decorated the streets on pikes, their severed genitals decorated the quarters of Suharto's proud headhunters, what remained of the bodies were impaled with bamboo to keep them from floating and clogging up the rivers. All while unrepentant State Department hacks at the American embassies checked off the names of the slain that they provided to these ghouls one by one.

Then there's the blood caked reign of Haiti's Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son, Jean Claud "Baby Doc" Duvalier, who terrorized their impoverished island nation for decades with the American trained demons of the Tonton Macoutes, a death squad of witch doctors who burned and stoned their victims alive and then hung their corpses from the trees and slaughtered any civilian who dared to take them down. Some estimates put their body count at 60,000. Their fearless leader, Luckner Cambronne, better known as "The Vampire of Caribbean", died in exile in Florida a rich man after making a fortune selling the blood and corpses of his victims to American universities and hospitals.

Of course, when our monsters take their reign of terror too far, usually by nationalizing a prized resource or sharing the sugar with the wrong neighbors, America gets to play it's coveted role of hero, saving poor nations from the monsters we built by bombing them into oblivion. When our old friend, Saddam Hussein, outlived his usefulness gassing his own people with the chemicals we sold him, we simply used another monster in neighboring Kuwait to goad him into invading the wrong nation so we could save them by subjecting our former allies in Iraq to decades of starvation sanctions and infant warping depleted uranium. We offered a similar treatment to School of the Americas alumni, Manuel Noriega, of Panama, which we also decimated with weapons of mass destruction, leaving razed ghettos and mass graves of civilians in our wake.

But America also detests drugs. We must, after all, we've burned through a trillion dollars of the tax payer's money on a fifty year war on getting high and created an entire industrial complex to warehouse more than one million Americans who dare to partake a year. But once again, America has a long history of disturbingly cozy relations with the monsters we fight. On no fewer than two occasions, the CIA has virtually constructed and coddled the world's number one suppliers of heroin on the globe. During our multinational bloodbath in Indochina during the 60s and 70s, the US erected the Golden Triangle with the help of Taiwan's KMT and warlords like General Ving Pao, supplying 70% of the world's supply of opium, shipped in the corpses of dead GIs and slung on the streets of New York by our old friends in the Mafia during one of the nation's worst heroin epidemics. History repeated itself again during the 1980s when we helped those fine gentlemen in the Mujahedeen to turn Afghanistan into the new Golden Triangle, supplying half of America's heroin, all while helping Nicaraguan death squads introduce the crack epidemic to South Central Los Angeles with a little help from Mr. Noriega. 

America combats the scourge of its own beasts in the drug trade the same way it does with wayward dictators, by declaring more endless wars. We've turned both Colombia and Mexico into killing fields, often combatting death squads we once trained like Los Zetas and the Cali Cartel with new death squads which will inevitably take their place. In the meantime, back on the home front, America has used this war on consensual behavior to re-enslave the Black community, tearing generations of families in twain and creating a new multi-trillion dollar Jim Crow with America's colossal prison system. Liberal drug warriors like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden have made Jefferson Davis their bitch by achieving the same goals of enslaving an entire race of Americans for profit while selling themselves as their virtue signaling white saviors. Remember kids, if you don't vote for master, you ain't black. 

And then there's America's latest Frankenstein monster, that beast called terrorism, which America has poured $8 trillion and counting into combatting and has murdered over 900,000 brown people to avenge the lives of 2,000 in the Twin Towers. But who brought down those monuments to American capitalism? Well, none other than the offspring of our former partners in the dope trade back in Afghanistan. The true father of modern Islamic extremism is none other than dear old Jimmy Carter, who built the Mujahedeen with a little help from his favorite dictators in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, in order to lure the Soviet Union into an unwinnable quagmire in the mountains of heroin country. But America's endearing bromance with jihadism didn't end with Gorbachev. It didn't even end with 9/11. We continue to arm and train Wahhabists from Libya to Syria to topple dictators too secular to buy into our holy war bullshit. And round and round we go.

You see, dearest motherfuckers, America isn't a monster. America is something far more horrifying. America is a monster factory, building heinous ghouls so it can justify it's very existence fighting them and footing you for the fucking bill every step of the way. The wars on autocracy, drugs and terror are little more than massive hustles and the hustle never stops. America's latest imperial hustle is the so called crisis at the border. Refugees worldwide have doubled to 82 million in the past decade alone thanks to our Frankenstein wars, and now the same mad scientists who created this international tragedy want to get richer fighting it with more guns, more troops, and more prisons. This fucking madness doesn't end until we end it. We need to stop wasting our torches and pitchforks on monsters and turn them on the mad doctors who build them. The root cause of all this violence is Uncle Sam and we're never gonna vote him out of power, so we might as well burn his laboratory to the fucking ground and rebuild on the ashes.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  I Put a Spell On You by Screamin' Jay Hawkins

*  Frankenstein by New York Dolls

*  American Nightmare by the Misfits

*  Stigmata by Ministry

*  Uranium Rock by Warren Smith

*  Closer by Nine Inch Nails

*  Tommy Gun by the Clash

*  Search & Destroy by the Stooges

*  New Kind of Kick by the Cramps

This post is dedicated in loving memory to William Blum. May his ghost continue to haunt us with the knowledge of our empire's sins in hope that we can rectify them with the fire of true democracy.