Earlier this year, Bill O’Reilly had Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders on his program to discuss some of the policies Sanders would have as president. In his usual antagonizing fashion, O’Reilly talked over the calm Sanders, interrupting him whenever he was about to make his point and snidely telling the Senator that he makes a lot of money and wants to know what kind of pain he would inflict on him with tax increases, as if O’Reilly has ever experienced pain economically.
The discussion then turned to the defense budget, a true determinant of how American you are in the Fox News alternate universe that Jon Stewart has called “bullshit mountain.” As Sanders described how we spend nearly as much on defense as the rest of the world combined, O’Reilly blurted out, “because we’re the ones that protect freedom.”
See, on bullshit mountain there's something called the freedom factor, where every little thing is determined by how much freedom is involved. Things like owning a gun, paying no taxes, and being able to drill into the ground without any government oversight are full of freedom. On the freedom scale, these things are right at the top. This also goes for our military, who apparently help protect freedom around the world, and if you think the budget should be cut, your obviously anti-freedom.
In this delusional world, freedom is not a state of being, but a state of owning. Owning property, owning business, owning politicians, now thats freedom! America has never much cared about protecting freedom in the true sense of the word, but in this latter sense. Throughout the twentieth century, the United States government did not support freedom over repression, but Capitalism over Socialism, or more literally, business interests over human rights. FDR’s infamous saying that brutal Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García was “our son of a bitch” holds true to this day.
Salon has a well organized list of all the brutal regimes that America has supported over the years, the most famous being in developing countries like Afghanistan, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Cuba (during Batista), Iran, and Iraq. Not only has the United States supported countless authoritarian regimes who have eliminated civil liberties and murdered citizens for political dissent, they have also helped overthrow democratically elected governments to put brutal dictators with American interests in their place.
In 1953, the CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, a secular democrat who had introduced many social reforms similar to the New Deal. When Mosaddegh began nationalizing Iran’s oil industry after Britain’s Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known as BP) refused to cooperate in new term negotiations, Britain and the United States began planning a coup d’etat. Eventually an Absolute Monarchy was restored, and the king Mohammad Reza Shah cracked down on any political dissent, violating human rights in the process while maintaining the full support of America.
Another disgraceful CIA supported coup took place in Chile, when democratically elected President Salvador Allende, a Marxist, was overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet would go on to murder and torture tens of thousands in his repressive dictatorship while implementing destructive economic policies that caused the poverty rate to sky rocket. American Economist Milton Friedman and his students, the “Chicago Boys” took advantage of this dictatorship power to implement their theories which resulted in much human misery. But it also resulted in the opening of their economy to foreign investors, which was highly beneficial to American business.
The historical list goes on, and today we still support oppressive regimes, as long as they are beneficial to American interests. One of our closest allies, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia rules as an Islamic dictator, opposing civil liberties for woman, homosexuals, the press, and political dissenters.
So, do we spend more than a half a trillion dollars each year to “protect freedom,” as O’Reilly would have his viewers believe? It would be humorous if a great percentage of Americans didn’t buy into this, but of course they do. This idea that America spreads the ideals of Democracy and Freedom through military and intelligence intervention is one of the strangest myths of our time. What the American defense industry really cares about is making a profit, and corporations like Lockheed Martin are trading at record highs amid all the trouble in the world. The military industrial complex does not support freedom, but destruction.
Apparently Bill O’Reilly’s freedom to believe and propagate whatever myths he deems useful for the right wing has gone to his head. Because in the real world, the United States is not the worlds protecter of freedom. If we were, we would not support autocratic regimes or coup’s against democratically elected officials, plain and simple. This kind of hypocrisy has always existed in the American mindset, ever since Thomas Jefferson declared that all men are created equal while owning hundreds of slaves. Today it exists on an international scale. We claim to be the world protecters, but really we only care about protecting the interests of the moneyed elite. The freedom to buy and sell and own. But who really cares when you have the freedom buy a gun and watch Fox News?
This manufactured myth is just like the fable that there are makers and takers in this world, created to divide the country while the extremely wealthy laugh all the way to the bank. Freedom and interests are not the same thing, and sometimes to protect the freedom of human beings, you must go against your apparent interest.
The next time Bill claims that we protect freedom, he should have a talk with an old Chilean or an Egyptian and ask just how free they felt while our country provided support to their oppressors.