School of the Americas (feat Picturesofabettertomorrow)
Since @PicturesOfABetterTomorrow keeps bringing up the lame School of Americas down in Fort Benning, Georgia (now Fort Moore, Trump's gonna switch the name back), I'll just dedicate a threat to it.
When you have a language like English or Spanish, certain ideologies will dominate in one language more than another. In the Francosphere, Socialism and Communism of varying stripes dominate. In English, it tends to be Enlightenment era Free Markets, pro-Democracy. In Latin America, it was a four way push between the older ideologies the Catholic Clergy pushed on conservative statecraft circa 1700s, English styled Free Markets (as NATO was pushing that), Soviet Marxism, and Chinese Maoism.
Of these four groups, three could get you weapons. The Americans/NATO, The Soviets, and the Marxists. You had some old fashion conservatives still running about who took a Nietzschean Conservative worldview that sometimes matched up with old school monarchial spanish conservatism, Julius Evola or Pinochet's movement.
US at this time did not produce any Marxist thinkers in the ranks. Trotsky would bitch that Americans out of all the european peoples never showed up to their international movements. In this era, we mostly produced classical American thinkers, and European philosophers knew so little about our intellectual traditions they were convinced we didn't produce political philosophers (yet magically managed to win WW1 & WW2 somehow).
In the beginning of the cold war, all we knew was we didn't like Marxism, and it wasn't from some deep insight into Marxist Dialectics, but rather because Marxist-Leninists wanted to conquer the whole world, and take out America last. We caught on to that little nugget of information and freaked the fuck out. That's the ultimate origins of what would later on become the Domino Theory of Marxist Aggression. Everytime a country fell to Marxism, the Marxist were one step closer to wiping us out.
The instructors at the original school of the americas were tasked with training Latin Americans how to use artillery. Not just the mechanical operstion, but also how to use forward observers, plot a point on a map, and hit it. Nothing ideological about that, Soviet and Chinese and Western Artillery largely worked alike.
We expanded the courses. It involved infantry, tanks, leadership, etc. It wasn't high level stuff.
Some of the groups who went to these schools embraced Marxism or Fascism. Most of the problem groups were marxist. Why? Hitler's reich collapsed, and these countries couldn't get fres weapons from them. You had to have your own weapona industries to pull that off. People into Marxism had access to China or Russia, and in this era China and Russia did not get along at all, and would supply weapons to literally anyone who said they supported one or another, however superficial their beliefs actually were.
These ideas were already floating around. At no point in time did anyone from the US train the locals on Marxism or Fascism. We trained how to move a military around competently. These guys just sometimes happened to already be into Marxism or Fascism. America didn't like either. Both are nearly identical socialist ideologies that hated the US. America doesn't like ideas that want to destroy America. We are a simple people.
Reason why the US largely ignored the american leftist protestors wanting the school shut down was because.... they didn't understand the difference between correlation and corallary. They were protesting against something that could not logically exist. It would be like protesting against Hindus for Beef Eating. The Hindus will look at you amused and agree with you, or screw with you for being so stupid.
Eventually the army twmpirarily shut the school down, then renamed it. Protests largely stopped, because the people protesting are largely idiots who are easily fooled.
The people who trained latin americans in Marxism were Latin Americans interested in that sort of thing. Coincidentally, they attracted students of the School of the Americas who kearned how to use those weapon systems. They launched coups.
As a result, we are careful on what we introduce to young countries with weak educational systems. Pretty much, people like YOU, who read a couple of books on Socialism. We don't want to train you how to use weapons so you can conquer Winnipeg and set up your own kingdom. But at some point we do have to train a country, so they act reaponsibly like a normal, stable country. That's why dyring the uprisings in Egypt against the Muslim Brktherhood, it was US officers talking to the Egyptian Officers we knew, twlling them not to set up another silly dictatorship and not create crimes against humanity. Egypt was advance enough to pull that off and not collapse into total shithole status. Libya was not, it was just a hodgepodge of random revolutionary thought, mostly Green Anarchism but also a little bit of everything smuggled in. For every gun in someone's hand you had a different ideology. It took time for larger ideas to emerge, largely due to Egypt, Turkey, UAE, Qatar, Europe and America building blocs and funneling weapons in. That is what happens when you don't have a well established educational system and a highly literate population used to classical liberal debates. They think any fucking random idea can work, and they shoot at anyone who disagrees. It is a enviroment that people like YOU thrive in. You got a bunch of ignorant bumpkins you can preach your revolutionary theories to. They feel they got ripped off in life, they want loot, they want to rape, and someone like you tells them they are the good guys bringing heaven down to earth. Of course they buy it.
