Part One: The Deadliest School in History

And that may seem like it's not connected to other things in history, but it's actually connected very directly to the subject of our podcast today, which is a little something called the School of the America's UH. And the way that these two tied together is very fascinating. And the oh you just heard UH is my guest today Joel Monique, who is a culture critic and a podcast You know, the thing that this is that you're listening to a podcast producer. You produced the things that that

are occurring right now in everyone's ears. Joel, how are you doing? I'm hanging in there. We're in the apocalypse done. It's orange and the sky is gray. I am just trying to keep it. It feels weird to keep going, Like I feel like I have to change something actively in my life to reflect the chaos outside. I haven't figured what that is yet. I don't know that's how

I'm doing. I don't know how I'm doing. It's chaos. Yeah, we need a German word for how surreal it is to like go out to a grocery store or meet a friend for lunch, as like plumes of smoke the size of skyscrapers drift by and and like the smell of death fills the air, and fascist militias begin like bivouacking, you know, twenty minutes away from your door. It's surreal, um. But you know what's not surreal is how fashional the

introduction of this episode was. I got right in there, like I directly connected it to a thing that was going on. I just I'm real proud of that. Proud of you, Robert, Thank you. School of the America's is uh spoilers horrific uh c I a slash Defense Department UM operation that that led to the overthrow of like a dozen different democratically elected governments in Latin America over the course of several decades. Um, oh yeah, no, it's a bad thing. School the America's is a bad thing.

It's a bad It was a real terrible thing that existed for a while, only happened on this podcast on Our Home the episode it does tie in rather directly to what's going on right now in the United States because a lot of the things we're seeing the government clamping down on unrest, you know, illegal arrests, suppression of political opposition, the disappearance of political activists, the increasing um interorganization between state law enforcement uh in different sort of

militias and paramilitary groups. All of that stuff that's happening right now that people are getting really terrified about in the United States is exactly the stuff that we've been doing in Latin America in a number of different countries for decades, going back to when like our parents were kids. Um, and today is the episode about how a lot of

that was organized. So a lot of the things that are happening in America today have their genesis and things the United States was doing the Latin America and we're

going to learn about that. So that's going to be good. Yeah, listen, I really am because the more people from who've been in countries where they're like, oh, yeah, no fascists took over here, They're like, pay attention to this small detail here, and I'm like, oh okay, and then they're like, and let me show you how that expanded into something that was horrible. Try to stop this before it becomes a fire.

Uh sorry, that's maybe bad phrasing right now. So it actually I think it compares really well to a fire because it's one of those things where you don't have to have this kind of problem with fires like you can there there are ways that people dealt with, you know, the propensity and the fact that this both like every the West Coast needs to burn a lot every year. Um, it doesn't need to lead to hundreds of thousands of people losing their homes because it's it can be managed

in predictable ways. But I mean, we they do control fires and like put them out and get rid of a lot of the nurseries that we have that exist to just like raise a bunch of trees for commodification, which you know are are much worse in terms of like areas, like like they contribute to making an area of vulnerable to fires, we can bury our power lines, we can shut off power access to areas. Like, there's a whole lot of things that can be done. And we want to solve a problem after it's become a

problem never before. And the calamity that Oregon in California's experiencing right now, a lot of people saw it coming, just like a lot of people have seen the rise of fascism coming for decades in the United States, and instead of doing anything about it, we had that one TV show where Um Flavor Flav he does this like he had this he was looking for a wife. If I'm remembering correctly, Um, expect to be the next Reverence. Yeah, I blame the rise of fascism in the United States

entirely on Flavor Flav. Actually, Um, I would read that essay Robert Flavor Flav well known the backer of the c I A. Uh So let's look, I think we should start. If we're gonna we're gonna explain the school of the America's and how the United States did what is now happening in the United States to uh a huge chunk of the world and Americans didn't pay attention. If we want to really tell that story. We have

to go back in time almost as well. It's our almost two centuries to eighteen twenty, you know, at that point, and the US was only established in like or you know, the whole Revolutionary War kicked off in seventeen seventy six, So the US was like younger than a lot of presidential candidates now um in in eighteen twenty three. But it had started to get like enough power and geographic reach that it was beginning to like look south at

what was going on in Central and South America. UM. And you know, there were at that point all these kind of powers, these these rates, these burgeoning nations, and in what we call Latin America to day, we're starting to in a really effective way, throw off kind of

the yoke of colonial oppression. They were there were a bunch of revolutions, they were kicking out their European masters, and kind of President Monroe, who was the guy in charge of the US at that point, looked at all this going on, um, and he started what came to be known decades later as the Monroe Doctrine, where he was basically like, hey, europe um, if you know, European powers aren't allowed to take over any new chunks of Latin America. Like, we the United States are not going

to stand for that. Um, this is the area that we have influence in and you're not allowed to like keep coming in. It was for a country that had like just gotten the ship kicked out of it in the War of eighteen twelve and like barely held on it was it was it was quite a statement to make, but it was hard for the European powers to like get troops and shipped down to South America, so you know,

the US had a big advantage there. It was basically like the Monroe would came to and the Monroe started making that, like made this statement in like eighty three, but the Monroe doctrine didn't get start to be called the Monroe Doctrine to like eighteen fifty. But it was basically the US saying to Europe, stay the funk out of our backyard. And this was initially kind of like an aspirational thing because we didn't really have the ability

to project any power down there. But over the decades, as the United States grew into more of a functional nation and gained more sort of military and naval power, it became something that like we actually had the ability to back up somewhat. So Yeah, Now, there were a few different, big reasons why the United States felt it was so important, you know, even as early as the eighteen twenties to start telling Europe to stay the hell

out of Latin America. One of the reasons was that Europeans of the mid eighteen hundreds were like they were just the messiest bitches in the world. Um, Like, they were constantly at war with each other, huge these huge, terrifying what seemed like you know, like you look at the Napoleonic wars and stuff, you look at that through a lens of like where ship wasn't it looked like the end of the world to a lot of people,

and these revolutions that were just horribly bloody um. And so the monarchs in the street, there's no lawless you have. There's like a widespread starvation at that time, right because we're having like horrible droughts and things, and so the lower classes all suffer. Yeah, it feels very similar. Yea, and Napoleon is raising you know, you've got starting like European war lords are raising, like armies that are in the hundreds of thousands that look that are like a

significant chunk of the entire US. It just seemed like a nightmare to a lot of Americans. UM and Europe was just seen as such, like what they like the the result of European squabbling and fighting was seen as so apocalyptic that the US. There were a lot of people in the U S who like thought about the idea of, like, what if they start coming back to South America and trying to make new colonies, like it will inevitably lead to horrible, horrible wars right at our

doorstep that will pull us in. So there was there was and that's a that was a reasonable thing at the time to be scared at, Like the stuff that the year the British Empire was like getting up to all sorts of horrible bloody ship in India and Afghanistan, um in part as a result of their conflicts with

Russia at this time. UM. So like the idea that like that that South America might become another European battleground, like that was a real thing to be afraid of the U S. What Like the President Monroe wasn't being unreasonable when he was like, uh, this is we don't want to let this happen. So there was a reasonable reason for the Monroe doctrine. There were also like racist reasons for it, which one of which is that like the US didn't want any competition when it came to

politically dominating Latin America. Um. Yeah, so lots of lot a lot of former slaves down they're just chilling right to be recolonized. Yeah, it's not them. They have kings and ships, so stay over there. Yeah. And there were a lot of folks like the people who went on to be like part of the Confederacy, who you know, once upon a time, we're looking at Latin America and like, well, eventually we're gonna have to like, that's a lot of

that's going to wind up being ours too. I Mean it makes sense that if we think about manifest destiny just being like we're going to conquer all of the I'm sorry to as we beheathens. Uh. Yeah. It always kind of surprised me that we didn't continue to go further down south aggressive takeover. A lot of folks wanted to um, like a lot of Americans wanted to um.

And there were even cases of like like Confederate survivors sort of like packing up and moving down into Latin America to establish plantations and try to keep you know, their ship going for a while, just like similar things actually kind of happened with the Nazis. But so time goes by, you know, the Monroe Doctrine gets his name in eighteen fifty. It becomes like more and more kind of solid US policy every year, you know, the decades go by, the United States becomes more and more of

a world power. It has a big civil war, it has a couple of wars with Mexico, um, and by and by, you know, time passes. The nineteen hundreds come and the United States finds itself with a dude named Teddy Roosevelt in the Oval Office. So Teddy tr Yeah, we all, we've all heard of Teddy, and he was He's like, he's one of these guys that if you if you don't think too much about aspects of what he believed, he's a fun dude to read about. Oh man, people love the burly back. He hunted his own bear.

And then he's like, yeah, yeah, people people love him. If you don't think too much about what he actually believed. I would see that drunk history is just Ron Swanson virgin Teddy Roosevelt. That's a well and it is it is the truth most of our If you're a white person and you didn't talk about the things that he believed about race, you probably could get along with Teddy Roosevelt because he was a fun guy outside of the

horrific genocidal racism. Every history's teacher's favorite president, Like this is going to get boys to read. Yeah. Um, but he was also like as as hardcore and imperialist as you can. Like, it doesn't get more imperialist than fucking Teddy Roosevelt. Um. He'd gone out of his way to fight in a hysterically unjust war of colonial domination down in Cuba. Um. And he's one of the reasons that we all have owned Guantanamobe today, which is, you know,

have you ever do you enjoy partly on in Guantanamobe? Joel, I do not. It weirds me the hell out. We've committed human atrocities there. Uh, it seems like a place America, the land of the Free sition maybe not half I disagree. I love the fact that we just to own part of Cuba and use it just to torture people, and we don't talk about it all that often. I think it's a great thing to just forget about and just

keep doing forever. Um. I love that Obama campaigned on getting rid of that and then just stop talking about it. Because what a fucking cool country. So by the turn of the twentieth century, Teddy's Teddy's the president, and the US is like a full continental power, right like we've we've we've achieved more or less our final form, like you can see, like the United States is the United States, and it's a real you don't want to you wouldn't want to funk with her. So Roosevelt like has the

ability to project power now. And he was a big believer in the Monroe doctrine, and more to that, he wanted to kind of expand what the the idea behind the Monroe doctrine because he thought the United States had a right and a duty to act as the policeman of the America's And I know in the early two thousands, like we all started talking about America as like world police um as like a bad thing. But Roosevelt would have used those terms, and he thought it was a

good thing. He thought, it's it's what we we ought to be doing, but not in the world, just in our hemisphere. Oh, very reasonable man. So you know, one of the things that Roosevelt gets concerned with is that Venezuela is in a huge amount of debt to a bunch of creditors in Europe, and he's worried that this is going to lead to her being invaded by European powers, which would destabilize Latin America and again lead to this thing.

There's not entirely unreasonable thing, because nineteen o four, if you're at all aware of what's happening, most people know some horrible European war is coming. So again you've got this mix of he's an imperialist, but also he's just kind of looking at what Europe is doing and like, we gotta keep this ship away from as far away from us as possible, which again, not an entirely unreasonable thing to want to do. Okay, I guess yeah, So he's he's he's got both these racist reasons for what

he's doing and these pretty reasonable reasons. It's a mix of things. Uh. And in nineteen o four he issues what's known as the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe doctrine quote, the United States would intervene as a last resort to ensure that other nations in the Western Hemisphere fulfilled their obligations to international creditors and did not violate the rights of the United States or invite foreign aggression to the detriment to the entire body of American nations. That's how

our own State Department summarizes it. So we're not just the police, were also the bank. Yeah, kind of. He's like, basically, I don't want Europe coming in here to like ensure its own debts, so we will police and invade Latin American nations on behalf of European powers to keep them out of here. White nonsense. Yeah, that is some white nonsense.

And again that quote I read is from our own State Department's Office of the Historian, and it goes on to note quote as the corollary worked out in practice, the United States increasingly used military force to restore internal stability to nations in the region. Roosevelt declared that the United States might exercise international police power in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence. So that's very broad stability. Yeah,

remember what our state department calls stability. The people who live in those countries might not have called stability. Just a thing to keep in mind. So tr we we again, we tend to think about like the stuff he did as a person. His actual presidential policy is pretty overlooked, in part because he's like, he's in power right before all the cool ship century starts to happen, so like,

you know, nobody really gives a ship. Most average person on the street about like fucking nineteen hundred and nineteen fourteen, you know, World War One starts and people start to get interested. But his corollary to the Monroe doctrine would go on to become one of the most tragically influential

decisions made by a US president. More than a century later, the United States is still operating under the logic Teddy Roosevelt enshrined and policing large chunks of Latin America, always in the name of internal stability, but somehow never really helping to further that cause. Now you fast forward a couple of residents, right, uh, so tr has his time in the sun, and then it's nineteen twelve and this cool cat named Woodrow Wilson is running for president UM

now Wood Drow. As part of his like election campaign, he starts shopping around something at campaign rallies called the Pan American Treaty UM. And his idea for the Pan American Treaty would have been a little bit like creating a US, like a not a U S, but an

American EU. Right, So the you've got like this continent, all these states in it that have been independent, start to like form common economic and trade zones and stuff and in and in Wilson's mind, the Pan American Treaty was going to include the United States, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, which were then kind of the most powerful nations in

the region. Now, I found a really good master's thesis from a guy who's a historian now named Dr Matthew Hassett, and he kind of summarizes the goal of the Pan American Treaty, and I'm gonna quote from him. Now. His plan contained two main points. The first was mutual guarantees of political independence under republican forms of government and mutual guarantees of territorial integrity. The second was that the signatories to the treaty would acquire complete control within its jurisdiction

of the manufacture and sale of munitions of war. The wording of these points is telling, and the first signatories must guarantee the survival of republican forms of government. Wilson believed peace and security rested on the establishment and maintenance of liberal democracies. Memor nations would only ensure the maintenance of republican forms of government. However, the United States would send in the Navy and the Marines to ensure compliant governments,

regardless of how they came to power. So number one, he's ensuring, you know, quote unquote republican forms of government, and there's a difference between a republican government and a democracy. Number Two, he's he's insisting that these this new political union that he's working for, would acquire like complete control of the manufacture, of sale and of munitions um, which which essentially is saying like the United States and her allies are going to have complete control of what weapons

get made and where the get distributed. That's that's the idea as early as nineteen twelve. And well, we must

now pause here because imagine a world. It's just crazy to me how quickly we're like Oh, I don't care what's happening with any of the people that actually live there, like their entire indigenous community, that there are forms of government, and like I'm trying to imagine the braun the floors it takes to just walk into somebody else's neighborhood, district country and be like, no, this is how we do things now. So also, you can only buy guns from us,

Please do each other with our weapons. And also, like whatever indigenous concern whatever concerns you as indigenous people have, the thing that matters most to us is making sure that arms sales are respected and that the kind of governments we like come to power, and we'll send our troops in if you funk with either of those things, which are the only things we care about in your whole country, with whatever history it has, Like funk that ship. We're here for selling guns and ensuring a form of

government that we can dominate. So that's cool. Wilson was known as was what's known as a reformer imperialist. Now that means he did reject a lot of the obvious cruelties of European style colonialism, with like permanent and direct military occupation of foreign lands, but he still wanted the US to be able to loot and culturally dominate an entire content. He was still willing to use the military to do that. Just ask the people of Arrack Cruz. Um. Now,

he framed this as simple compassion on his part. He thought the United States should use its power to ensure good government in nearby lands. And he never bothered to define what good government was, but he was emphatic that the U. S should use the basically use the Marines to violently force Latin American governments to have what he would consider to be good governments, which is where you

ever hear the catchphrase like sending the Marines. It's not really used that much now, but it's like, um, deal with a problem, right, he send in the Marines. Um. Like it was the thing they used to say, like, well, my grandpa was like a young man, um and it But it comes out of this period because Wilson basically says, if anything starts happening in these Latin American governments that we don't approve of in the United States, will send

in the Marines to fuck them up. Um. Because the Marines, the Marine Corps kind of like historically the people we send in to funk up folks. Hardcore like training program and I've yes, extremely that's a big part of it. Um. And they like boats, which are useful for traveling places. I've been told, so you know what is also useful for traveling places, Joel. The products and services that support this podcast, including our main sponsor, the United States Marine Corps.

The United States Marine Corps. Do you need some guys on boats to funck to funk people up? Because that's essentially the Marine Corps. They're coming and they're gonna get you. Yeah, they have helicopters too, but they will just replace your president. That's not what they're famous. Yeah, products, we're back. Thank you, United States Marine Corps. It was a weird choice to sponsor this podcast, but but but we appreciate it. Um. I don't know, I don't know where to take I

don't know where else to take this joke. Woodrow Wilson laid out his vision of the future very openly in campaign speeches. In declaring that the United States had a special place on the world stage as a disseminator of democracy, he told crowds, we are chosen and prominently chosen to show the way that to the nations of the world, how they show walk in the paths of liberty? Uh? Now the the guy, the historian who wrote this master's

thesis that I found. Dr Hassett argues that Wilson's dedication to spreading democracy was real, kind of within Wilson's conception of democracy, but it was also heavily compromised by his outrageous racism. Um and doc Or Hassett rights, Wilson's racism obscured his vision of a new world order. While the president of Princeton University, Wilson successfully persuaded all African Americans

to withdraw their applications for admission. Josepha's Daniels, a wilson campaign manager and later his secretary of the Navy, stoked racial fears in East St. Louis to garner votes. Once in office, Wilson told darky stories and jokes during cabinet meetings and presided over the segregation of the Department of the Treasury, Post Office and the Bureau of Engraving. These offices had been desegregated since the end of the Civil War.

Wilson refused to condemn the lynching of blacks, and the only federal actions taken regarding racial conflict was to keep African Americans from attaining equality. So that's Wilson is the guy who, like in nineteen twelve, expands segregation. Um, that is the craziest thing, especially knowing like what's around the corner for black people in government jobs, Like if you like post like nineteen fifties, early nineteen sixties, we see a lot of black people starting to work for the

post Office. Like the only like quote unquote respectable job you can get as black person is like doing some type of government work. Um, usually like low level, uh foot blue collar kind of stuff. I would argue that maybe the only respectable government job that exists as the post office, um and park rangers. Post office and park rangers.

What else do we really need? We love you guys, yeah, so uh yeah, it's this is this is important not just because like, oh, here's a story about another racist American president, but because this plays directly into what Wilson is thinking about what he's doing in Latin America. Because Wilson is a guy who does believe in democracy, Like he worked himself ill trying to push forward this vision

he had of the League of nations. And like one of the problems when whenever we have someone who's terrible and Woodrow Wilson's a horrible person, I think people tend to just kind of write it off as that and assume they don't really believe things. And Wilson is a big believer in his what he considers to be democracy, um, which people and in democracy it's a republic. Right, That's a big thing for him, is it's not he's not a fan of like this like a pure democracy. He's

like a populist democracy. Um. Wilson believes that you should have a republic dominated by white people who are able to direct things and act as patient stewards for their racial inferiors. Wilson believed that democracy was the fullest form of state life, and non white people's were not ready to take part in that, which is why you need a part of why you need a republic um. He believed that they needed to undergo what he called a period of political tool in order to know how to

be good democratic citizens. So this this is like very vital information to me, Robert, because it helps me understand like why some people still hold these beliefs, Like it's it's hard to wrap your mind around I think. I mean, I don't like, I'll just be for myself, like from living in black skins, sometimes it's hard to be like, okay,

but where where is this hate rooted in? And I understand from a larger perspective, like, Okay, you've believed that because of the way history has been taught to you. I know a lot of racist white people believe like, oh, white people invented everything, and white people are the ones who like colonize the world, and we made sure you believed in God or like saying things, and we invented all of the science that clearly we're like the superior race.

But like to hear on a governmental level, like this idea of we can train the blackness, the part we fear, the part that doesn't sit right with us, the part that isn't like us, out of you, and then that's like the world that will be better, Like that's how we uplift and make the world better is by removing It's like it's horrifying, it's so scary, Like it's because

it's happening right now. It is happening right now. And one of the reasons I think this is so important to understand is that Number one, there are a lot of people today who will say the same basic things about the US and its actions and the way that it influences and sort of changes the political course of other nations, like like political lives right now. There's people who will argue the same basic things Wilson will argue, Um,

they will not argue the same things domestically. And the fact that because because you can't admit that right, you can't sit down. You can, as an American today say hey, like these people need to learn from us the ways of democracy, and it's our responsibility to teach the right like that that we fucking Afghanistan and Iraq and like a bunch of plays all around the world, like that's that's going on today, And there's people who will argue

forcefully for that. You can't say black people aren't ready to be full democratic citizens and they need our tutelage as white people, which is why we have to oppress them. You can't say that openly in mainstream politics anymore. But the fact that people argue for that in foreign countries

shows you what they believe about the domestic situation. And if they Yeah, looking at Woodrow Wilson, I think is important because we see, we can see the truth of what the people who believe that ship internationally are saying. What they also believe domestically. They're the same as Woodrow Wilson. They haven't changed. It's just not acceptable to say what he says or what say what he used to say. Um, I think that's important for people to kind of understand.

We don't. It's vital age. So Dr Hassett goes on to write, quote the supposed need for a period of tutelage was Wilson's method of justifying interventions in Latin America and the disenfranchisement of blacks in the United States. Non whites needed the guidance of whites, often lasting many years until they were ready to operate autonomously in a democracy. Of course, it was white too then decided when their pupils passed their Civics courses. Yeah, probably like us. Yeah,

when when a majority. I feel like, especially if I look at like countries like Colombia and Brazil and the way that white passing people were sort of allowed to ascend the ranks while we look at read a lot of stories of like brown, black, indigenous former slaves talking about like where their class system is at and how similar almost exact actually the way it has worked in

America has fostered over there as well. This the idea of segregation, idea of like even even the basic like non political stuff like the idea of good hair and who gets to be on billboards and things like that. It is absolutely insane. Even their attempts to like d desegregate, like to desegregate and to bring in like black people

has had like horrifyingly racist connotations. If we look at like a lot of Spanish soaps where you're just like, good lord, is this still where we're at representation wise? And then sometimes I'll just slick around here too and be like, oh, well, you know, I can, I can complain and and maybe I get a little bit about on my Woodrow Wilson box and be like they should learn from us in the ways we've desegregated. Our Hollywood

system are media empire, but we haven't. We still have so many issues here as well, and how we represent black people. Yeah, we don't seem to be good at it. We're good at a tear gas though gas. We know how to beat the hell out of a protest if you if you want entire city blocks tear gas. I know some guys who are just pros at it at this point. Oh my god. And now we know how to fence off the White House, so really defense off the White House. Yeah, we're growing anyway, So back to

back to Wilson. Let's talk about So Wilson gets elected. Uh, this North American you know, Pan American Treaty thing gets signed. It takes a while though, it's not signed until but yeah, World War One happens and Wilson like, lets the US get pulled into that cluster fuck um, And it takes until after the war when the League of Nation gets established.

The Pan American Treaty gets signed as part of a bunch of international League of Nations pacts, but kind of like a lot of the rest of the League of Nation ship, it doesn't amount to much, but the impulse that the pact represented, this idea that the US could could group up with the strongest nations in Latin America, sell them arms, and use them to dictate. However, one in the continent lived without using US troops. That idea never like went out of vogue. In the US government, um,

up until the present day. And and just so you know where kind of we are eventually headed in here, it's equally popular with Republicans and Democrats. So like, no matter where you land on this, Joe Biden loves him some fucking we'll talk about playing Columbia maybe a little bit. That's but yeah, so uh, World War two kind of distracts the United States from affairs in you know, it's

its own hemisphere for a while. We're not we're not focusing so much on Latin America during that whole war thing because it's you know, a lot of stuff is going on in the other parts of the world. Um, we have other people to kill. We have we have so many people to kill. Um and thankfully like some of them deserve it, which is better than we usually do. Um. Yeah. Yeah, World War two was the time where some of the

people we bombed from this guy deserve to die. Man, how we have forgotten so quickly is crazy, demi So uh yeah. It also like World War two also saw the sudden pull out of European military advisors from a lot of South American states because while like they hadn't been like European colonialism never kind of in the in the modern era, got was even vaguely on the same levels like what happened in Africa. UM, because of the Monroe doctrine. There were still it was still a lot

of European involvement in Latin America. They were they were selling arms to a lot of these states, and they would send in military advisors to train their militaries. And it was a way both of European states kind of projecting power, and of course it was very profitable. UM. And if you were in Latin America, you were an up and coming state and you wanted to get because there were all these wars between Latin American powers in this period of time to constant, constant, really horrific wars.

So if you're one of these states, you have a lot of enemies all around you, and you want to get a jump on your opponents. UM. You you want to be partnered with some state that has a more advanced military, both access to better guns and access to better sort of training UM and like military organizational techniques. And you know, the US was certainly in a more advanced state than a lot of Latin America at this point.

But Europe was the gold standard prior to World War Two. Um, So a lot of these Latin American countries before World War Two, they have like German, or French or Italian. Unfortunately Italian you don't want them as military advisors. But ideally you'd have like the Germans or the French or something advising your military. Like Argentina spent about a century using German officers to train their militaries. And actually up until like the present day, you can find pictures of

the ship from the nineties. I don't know if it's continued pass that you can add pictures of Argentine soldiers giving the Fascist salute because that's how they were trained to salute, like a lot of actually one of Hitler's best friends, you know, best friends who Hitler then had killed. Um this guy, uh, like the leader of the brown Shirts went and trained Argentine soldiers while the Nazis were in power. So like a lot of different Latin American

states have European advisors and stuff. But by the end of the Second World War, Europe was kind of broken as a military power. Even the states that had won were in ruins h France and Germany were like bled white, and the governments of Latin America like started having needing to look to the United States for military training and for equipment, because the US has all the guns at this point, and it has a huge military, It has a lot of excess shipped to sell, it has a

lot of soldiers to send over to train them. Um, and Europe just doesn't so me at the same kind of time, while all these Latin American states are starting like turning from Europe to the United States for advice on how to have armies, the guys that sort of the top of the political establishment in the US, we're kind of starting to realize the position the end of World War Two had left them in. And you know, everyone knows in a World War two the US is

kind of the big power in the world. But I don't think a lot of people know how what a dominant position we had. At the end of World War Two. The United States was in control of fully half of the planet's wealth. What yeah, half of the wealth in the world was controlled by the United States. Um. Yeah, like I'm trying. I mean, I guess it makes sense if you think about like how much of the world was like absolutely death and made it just totally fu

and how clean. Like it's always I love studying like what was happening as we come out of World War two culturally because the idea of like all of these women being forced back into their homes so rapidly asked to reduce their status and power in not just in like outside of their homes, not just in businesses and stuff, but in the government too, Like we had risen up

to take so much power. And then this idea of like black people who had come back from the war and the way they were treated is basically like you didn't do anything for me, and you're still just a

black person. There's so much people like there were so many opportunities for quick development on a social level that because I think because we had money, accent and access to guns and power and because we're really feeling ourselves, uh, was squashed so quickly and scary to think about how both when we are in power and when we are out of power we tend to take a dumb on

everybody who isn't a white male. Yeah, it's the real One of the real tragedies of World War two is at the end of it, the US had the power and influence to do literally anything UM. And we basically chose to hoard that wealth and power and compromise every single thing we've ever claimed as a as a core belief of this nation UM, in order to try to keep it for as long as possible. And that this kind of thinking. People talk directly about this in the

US government. And I'm gonna quote now from a State Department policymaker named George Kinnon, who was one of like the most influential minds in the US during the Cold War. This is something George Kinnon wrote in nineteen forty eight, and he's talking about kind of how he's talking about U S policy in Southeast Asia at this time. But it applies to kind of the the way that the men in charge of our government post World War Two, we're looking at the whole world. So this is something

George Kinnon wrote for the State Department. We have about fifty of the world's wealth, but only six point three percent of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.

To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our most immediate national objective. If we need not deceive ourselves, that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction. Wow, just laying it

all out there now. Kennon was watching his nation, Like the specific thing that prompted him to write this as he was watching the United States start to flail round in China because at this point China civil wars still

going on. We're backing, you know, the quote unquote democratic sort of side of things, the Republicans or whatever, which is not working out great, and we're starting like ship in South Korea, like that's beginning kind of like we're starting to see that like what what was called at the time, French indo China, like a bunch of ships going to go wrong there right, Like France is starting to get fucked up by Vietnamese rebels and it's it's

becoming obvious to folks in the State Department that Southeast Asia is going to be a place where the US either has to just kind of abandon to the influence of these quote unquote communist powers or it's going we're gonna burn a lot of treasure in lives fighting there. Um. So Kennon at the time is kind of specifically referring

to US policy in Asia. But again, the pattern of thinking that he talks about up there, this idea that the most important thing is to maintain the position of disparity we have with the rest of the world, and we can't we can't let ourselves. Um, you know, I'm reminded, like we can't let ourselves be human, like think about altruism and stuff. You have to think about holding onto power. And it does make me. Um, it reminds me reading that of a quote from Yard Kipling's White Man's Burden. Um,

take up the white Man's burden. You dare not stoop to less nor call too loud on freedom to cloak your weariness. Like it's the same, the same pattern of thought, right, Like where you can't you can't let yourself what's important is maintaining this position of disparity and maintaining our position of power. And you can't let whatever we we claim to believe, you can't let that matter more to you than continuing to dominate. Um, that's it's interesting to me.

You can draw it like it's the same kind of thinking that you see in the British Empire too. It just got transferred over to us when we took power. So again, this is Kennan talking about Southeast Asia, but it's you can generalize it to a lot of how a lot of American leaders in the late forties are

thinking about Latin America. I want to read one more quote from George Kennon's right up there before we before we continue on, we should cease to talk about vague and for the Far East unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are

than hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. Wow. I'm gonna use a slogan from Don Draper and it's I have a life and it goes in only one direction forward And this whole like mentality of late forties, like needing to not just like you have almost all of the power, like that breakdown a fifty of the wealth to six percent of the population ideology that like we have to continue to build on that. But why would you? How could you possibly need to build like that? Is the

most mind fucked thing ever. I can't imagine being like, oh, I have fifty of everything, how do I get more? Like yeah, and and and like the idea that like we have to immediately discard our beliefs about democracy and human rights in order to maintain the power that we currently holdings more important than the power. Yeah, and again, this isn't the period after which like kind of America, Like I think a lot of people who looking at the story, I think that like America's like idealism was

broken by Vietnam. This is nineteen forty eight, right, we It wasn't like the Cold War wasn't even like really up to what it would become like there was still like World War two had just ended. Fascism have just been beated, and immediately were like, well nothing matters more than keeping all this money that we've got. Funck human rights. That's the people in those influential folks in the State

Department are saying this ship. So again, Kennan was writing about Southeast Asia there, but you really can generalize what he's saying to what a lot of US State Department and in sort of military thinkers in Latin America belief. These people supported straight power, and they found themselves kind of discarding unrealistic objectives like human rights because straight power is they thought that they would have claimed that it's

more realistic. It's really that it's just easier. It's easier to shoot people than to try to improve their material conditions, um, even though improving their material conditions probably does cost lesson as a general rule. So the school of the America's became this thing that we're talking about today. The actual focus of our article was what became these men's kind of the lynchpin in their plan to do that in

Latin America. UM. And it's also sort of a It acted as kind of a fulfillment of Woodrow Wilson's dream the United States being able to act as a police force for Latin America to ensure good what we would consider good governance. So the US spens the first few years after World War two kind of rebuilding Europe and starting to sunk around in Asia, and there wasn't a

lot of military manpower to spare in Latin America. So the decision was made to do something more subtle than the Pentagon traditionally, did you know, rather than just like sending in troops and like building bases. In nineteen forty six, the Army established a new training school for foreign soldiers in the Panama Canal zone, which is still under US control right Panama. The Panama Canal is like owned by the United States at this point, and it's it's not

its own independent thing. Our government is basically like it's a little US outpost in Latin America. And so they build a new school there to train officers from all around Latin America. And they call it the Latin American Training Center ground Division. And at this point Ground Division is just kind of like what I'm going to call the schools. This is what it's named before. It's called

the School of the America's. So in nineteen forty seven, the United States had signed the Rio Treaty with twenty different Latin American nations. Now, this was kind of an expansion of a lot of the ideas that Wilson had had back in nineteen twelve. It was a mutual defense pact meant on paper to provide a unified hemispheric front against like a foreign invasion. Um, this was all window dressing.

The real agenda of the treaty had nothing to do with mutual defense for the hemisphere and everything to do with the maintenance of US political dominance in the region and control over raw material. And I'm gonna quote now from a book, a really good book called The School of the Americas by Leslie Gill. Quote, Well, the United States dedicated itself to containing the global expansion of the Soviet Union and persecuted domestic critics with varying degrees of intensity.

It assigned its Latin American allies the task of guarding against the threat post by internal subversion. National Security Doctrine n s D provided the broad rationale for fighting communists by assigning the maintenance of internal order to Latin American security forces and by delegating to the United States the task of guarding the ramparts of the Western hemisphere from external aggression. So you see what what's what's being done here, This is being framed as like we need to protect

our hemisphere from like a Soviet invasion. What's really happening is the US so because it doesn't have a lot of troops to spare at the moment, is setting up, arming and training Latin American national militaries to act as internal security forces to keep communism out of Latin America. That's what's being done here. We're building a continental police force to enforce American political ideology on an entire continent.

When the school, like when the school opens, right, and there's this because I'm trying to picture like the type of person that goes into this, like I know, the type of person who believes they can go into the police force and change it and make it a force

in a space for good. Very normal soldiers at first, so initially and this is like you hear a lot of folks on the left on like Twitter and stuff talk about the School of the Americas, and generally most of what they talk about is stuff that happened kind of later on when there was and we'll talk about like all the torture classes and ship that happened, But that wasn't how it started. It started as very normal

military training. It's first class was a bunch of Argentine soldiers who were being taught to use US anti aircraft guns that their nation had just been allowed to purchase. So it was not there's nothing really shady there, right, Like, they buy these advanced weapons from the US that are primarily defensive in nature, and they need to be trained

in how to use them. Um so the actual classes, the goal of the ground school at first, there's nothing really you wouldn't call that shady, right, Like, that's a reasonable thing to do if you believe selling arms as reasonable as reasonable We're like, oh, yeah, you should train them how to use the guns. Okay, that's fine. And the most dangerous thing that's going on here is not the actual curriculum of the school. It's what's happening around

that curriculum. But yeah, we'll we'll talk about that in a little bit. I want to quote something Leslie gil writes here about sort of what the defense industry is starting to do in Latin America in this period. Quote, defense manufacturers sought out new markets for their wears, and Congress created generous military aid programs facilitating arms transfers not only helped secure US access to raw materials and the

general cooperation of regional militaries. It also tied Latin American militaries to the use unless the continued purchase of technology produced in the United States. The Defense Establishment referred to

the ladder as standardizing Latin American militaries. Yeah, and the Caribbean Defense Commander put up bluntly when he stated that standardizing Latin American armies with US equipment further the quote penetration of the United States and the military system of any countries, so that such nation becomes dependent on us. What's but you can standardize the equipment that they use,

and then you make them dependent on you. They can't fight you, they can't rebel against you, they can't resist you if they need your factories to produce the weaponry that allows them to defend themselves from their neighbors. This is devious as hell. Yes, it's extremely insidious, because now we also know everything you have. We knows and can advance our ship before we give you access to the advanced ships. We're always one step ahead. Oh my god. Yeah,

there's a lot going on here. U s weapons were again considered the most advanced on the planet at the time, and Latin American militaries were very much comparatively technologically backwards compared to the United States. In this period, a lot of them had recently been at war with each other, so there was really very reasonable fear of invasion, of

losing territory. It had just happened for a lot of them. Um. So there says understanding that number one, you can defend yourself, you can gain massive local advantages by buying US guns. But it also on the U s side, it gives us this permanent influence in national politics because the ammunition that these weapons need, the parts that they need, the training, their reliant on the United States for all of that.

But the thing that was truly insidious about the Ground School had nothing to do with weaponry and everything to do with what I would consider to be the deadliest fantasy in human history, probably the American Dream. And that's what we're going to talk about after we get back from the real American dream, which is products and services. Yeah, right, let's do it. Buy some things, buy some things products. All right, we're back, and we're talking about the thing

that was most dangerous about the American School. And this is the thing that everybody I see talking about this ship on Twitter, like really does seem to miss which is not that, Like they're not wrong about the torture programs being awful and like everything else we're going to talk about, but I don't see this being referenced and something that strikes the hope of having a dollar and a dream. Yeah, this is what and this is this

is really fascinating to me. So in the late nineteen forties and fifties, right, the US winds up after the war with all of the money in the fucking world, and this leads to an unprecedented explosion in like the rates of home ownership, vehicle ownership, employment, job security, regular people. Suddenly we're gaining access to labor saving devices like washing

machines and dishwashers, luxury products like television. It was a it was a heady period of time, and it it was easy to kind of when you see regular working people making these kinds of gains, it's easy for the propaganda of like this is because there's something special and beautiful about this, this dream America has what life can be.

It's very easy to sell that when you've got because this is a period you do have to like obviously the benefits in this period weren't evenly shared, but like black people, you know, made a lot of like wealth improvements and stuff in this too. Everybody did. It wasn't evenly distributed. But you can look at damn near anybody in the United States who's working class in like the late forties, early fifties and be like, God, damn, there might be something to this us, this American dream thing, um.

And the rest of the world isn't benefiting from that, right, Um. But they're look, they're they're able to look in from the outside and they're able to see what's happening in the United States. And the soldiers who are being sent from other Latin American countries to Panama to partake in the ground school, because Panama is run by the United States, they get to live in that world for a brief

period of time. These students, most of whom had come from lower middle class families and very very poor nations, are able to get a glimpse into the American way of life. Um. They're they're they're getting paid money, they're getting they're able to buy American products, and so they're there. They kind of get get a taste of what American

are enjoying in the late forties and early fifties. So in the in the Ground School starts to offer a special training program for Argentine officers and enlisted men that mixed technical training with what Leslie Gill calls cultural persuasion. The U. S Army officials at the Ground School wanted badly to make a good impression on the Argentines, who would broadly lean towards the axis during the war. Because remember, Germany had taught their army a lot, a bunch of stuff.

So as Argentina was one of the great powers of Latin America, gaining their trust successfully, you know, and drawing them into the bosom of US power was seen as a really important thing to do. Um. It was a critical step and kind of locking down the continent in the whole hemisphere quote from leslie Guilt. They dwelled on every aspect of the training program, they being the US trainers, which they believed carried considerable symbolic weight for the United States.

One individual effused that it is no exaggeration to state that the cooperation and the solidarity of the Western Hemisphere nations depends to a great degree upon the impressions which the Argentine personnel take back with them to their native country. Army officers described the Argentines as extremely high type personnel

who are probably well qualified. They told everyone who interacted with them to learn the customs of the Argentine Army and to recognize the insignia used to designate particular ranks. Most importantly, the officials advised course instructors from the fifty six Anti Aircraft Artillery Group to instill among the trainees faith in the weapons, and in this way to draw a connection between the powerful weapons in the United States.

They asserted that if the Argentines had confidence in the weapons, they would have confidence in the United States, and this confidence would spread when the Argentines returned home and taught others to use the guns. Building confidence in the United States was a complex undertaking that involved much more than

impressive weaponry. The Argentine trainees held strong opinions about their national and racial superiority visa the other Latin Americans, and these views did not go unappreciated by their North American hosts. So fortunately for this whole dream of getting Argentina on the U S A side. If there's one thing you could rely on US military planners in Night to know how to do, it was how to be super fucking racist.

So officers at the Ground School wrote that it was essential, in view of the nationalistic feelings of the Argentine and their belief in certain racial theories, that they be made to feel they enjoy equal privileges with American officers and enlisted men. Like most places in the American Empire, the Ground School and Panama was was pretty segregated. White American soldiers ate better food, lived in better dorms, and enjoyed

higher standards of comfort than their Latin American students. Uh So they start issuing the Argentine soldiers passes that distinguished them from other Latin American students at the Ground School and grant them privileges such as special food rights, exemption from maintenance duties carried out by darker skinned Latin Americans. And you know, obviously the US military and Panama has

kind of its own racial theories. Um. They believe that like white suffered more from prolonged exposure to intense heat and humidity than than other people's, were more susceptible to certain diseases. Um, yeah, so I laugh because racism is so easy, Like I get it, Like we we've I've been talking a lot about racism. I write about you know, black representation in media and this, Like it's so davidly easy to see, like the comfort racism provides, Like my

skin is so fair? How can I possibly do the labor this person is to look at their dark skin and the side right off of it, this is where you belong. And you know, the idea that we essentially brainwashed people to believe that, like if we think about you, the way that the way racism separates and divides makes it nearly impossible to come together and have those conversations that allow you as like a community to grow and develop.

So this idea of like, oh, make sure the lighter skin like Latin Americans understand that they're better, so that as a country they can never will always be unrest in that space that is so sick. Yeah, it's really fucked up. Um, And there's this, there's this, So what's happening there is like white people kind of believed had been like dark skinned people in Latin America and the Canal Zone had been doing all the physical labor because of this belief that like white people like they just

weren't weren't as suited to hard labor. And we we add the Argentinean soldiers in like we treat them as white people as part of a propaganda campaign to kind of get the number one, to separate them from other Latin Americans further, um, and to kind of get them on our side. Um. So there's this kind of immediate willingness to like start racially playing the people's of Latin

America against each other. Um. Now yeah, so this is this is uh has a big impact on Argentinian soldiers, and it provides them with a taste of the American way of life, a sample of what it's like to be a white American um. And this meshes well with kind of the other tastes they were offered at the ground school. Students were paid to attend, and as Panama was under you as control, it's a place where they

could buy a lot of consumer goods. This included a lot of labor saving devices and luxury products that would have been unavailable back in these students home countries, things like laundry machines and dishwashers and blenders in the late forties and early fifties. A lot of this stuff was was just kind of like magic to many of these soldiers coming into the Canal Zone, and the fact that

they could buy this stuff. Now when we're being like able to kind of participate in this this racially segregated society on the top of it for a period of time, not only does it reinforce the idea in their mind that the US is this kind of all powerful utopia, but it lets them feel like they're a part of it. Um And yeah, so that's that's a big aspect of what the American you know, at this point called the

ground school is trying to do with these solds. To be fair, though, Robert, I still find washing machines and dishwashers to be magical. I hate them, not a fan. Not a fan. Well, I like washing machines, I don't like dishwashers. So, uh, school instructors worked hard to keep their students occupied constantly with very little unstructured downtime, and this too was part of the grander strategy Leslie Gill

right quote. They did so for two reasons. First, they hope to convey to the students a particular vision of U. S citizens is industrious and successful. Second, they wanted to keep students in the canal zone and out of Panama. Officials worried that disorders created by students, such as public drunkenness, expressions of immorality, or fights, would provoke the ire of Panamanian authorities and cause of public relations difficulty for the

US military. The Commandant did not mince words when he told a group of staff officers that in addition to taking care of these people and making them welcome and happy while here, they must be kept busy, organize their instructions, make the schedule so that they do not have too much free time, give them organized athletics that they will stay in the zone and out of Panama. They are here to learn the equipment and technique. They must carry with them the impression that this is the way we

work and why we are a great nation. So again, this is all there's there's there's this kind of basic military training going on, but there's also this much deeper cultural training and what what the United States is and kind of us pushing like this is what your country should be. Um. This reminds me a lot of the vow. I don't know if you guys are Yeah, there's not enough set about that. Yeah, you're very like yeah, the brainwashing the way like a lot of the way they

treat them like children. This idea of like, oh no, the devil and I don't mind, is the devil's workshop, Like make sure they're they're kept busy, because who knows what they'll get up to on their own devices. Like that wasn't, at least from what I just heard. It wasn't based off of like, oh, these are like young kids who are getting rowdy, Let's give them something constructive to do. It's like they might embarrass us, so let's

make sure they stay under our thumb. Like yeah, so much of racism is infantilization of a people, and I it's yeah, yeah, there's a lot going on here. So for more than a decade, this kind of goes on, and the ground school quietly trains hundreds and then eventually thousands of soldiers from not just Argentina, but Guatemala, Chula and a bunch of other countries in Latin America, and these men walked away from their months. It was often like a year long course in Panama with more than

just an expanded understanding of US weapon rate. They left with deep and personal knowledge of the wonders of American culture, American capitalism, the benefits that it could bring. And they they walked away in a lot of cases, with an understanding, a personal, brief and fleeting understanding of how good it

felt to be a winner in that society. So these young ambitious men get this taste of America at its height, and then they go home to their own nations, which much must have felt like crude backwaters by comparison, there's not a lot of luxury goods and appliances to buy. People don't work in the same way like this capitalism thing that has taken over the whole world now hadn't yet.

And it's this kind of like what what's one of the things that a lot of Latin American cultures are known for, you know, really really um putting a lot of emphasis on this idea of like a siesta or whatever, Like you don't always work all the time. There's like, culturally, you build in periods of rest because it's healthy to rest even in like the middle of the day. We don't fucking do that in America. We drink coffee so that you can work through you know, a sixteen hour shift. Right.

So these guys, these these young ambitious men, get a taste of you know, American main manic work culture and the kind of the kind of benefits that it can bring in terms of like the things you get to

own when you partake in it and succeed. And then they go home to these countries where like people don't have the same attitude towards work and don't have access to a lot of the same luxury goods and appliances, and they draw connections between all this stuff, and they start to they start to place blame on segments of their society for why they don't get to enjoy the same things they enjoyed, you know, in the Panama Zone, including the fact that indigenous cultures in these regions valued

leisure and community over relentless capitalism um, and including the fact that there were a lot of left wing movements who were arguing that like things should be nationalized rather than this kind of free for all Lasi fairship that the US really wanted to push in all these Latin American countries because it benefited larger and already established American corporations.

So not only you know, they're frustrated when they come back, and they also have a ready group of people than their own countries to blame for the fact that things aren't the way they want them to be at home now that they know how, you know, things are in the United States. So a lot of these soldiers, you know, they would finish their time in their respective militaries after going to the ground school, and they go on and

do something else. But a significant number of them went on to be career officers, and since training at the ground school was prestigious, they often rose high in the ranks of their national militaries. As the fifties rolled along, there were a series of left wing revolutions in Latin America.

In nineteen fifty two, Bolivia had a left wing coup, you know, kind of socialisty that brought in a new government that was dead set on nationalizing every mine in the country, which at that point we're basically owned by a bunch of US based corporations. Then, of course there's the Cuban Revolution of nineteen fifty nine, which brought that bearded heart throb Castro, you know, into the hearts and minds of everybody, um. And then kind of it seems like in the early fifties, the left is on the

rise in Latin America. UM. And it was in the eyes of a lot of these officers who have been thoroughly if you know, you compared you compared it earlier to a cult. They've been thoroughly enraptured by the cult of the American way of life. It seems like these these left wing movements are hell bent on stopping Latin

America from ever achieving that same dream. So the US government gets caught off guard by all of these revolutions, as it generally is, by everything that happens uh and Latin America like they saw it as basically our property. And suddenly, like the Russians are parking nuclear missiles in Cuba seventy miles off the Florida coast. So US officials kind of panic and they're afraid that they might start to lose the whole region to this new wave of

left wing politicians. The prevailing kind of political wisdom at the time was something called the Domino theory, which stated the fall of one nation to communism would start this like horrible chain reaction would doom the whole continent, because yeah, yeah, and there's no way that people could be like, what have we just had free healthcare and we didn't let random foreign companies own everything in the country, And it's like, no, that the only that only leads to identical things, to

Stalinism and Maoism. You could you couldn't just do that and then keep just like whatever. It's a very frustrating

idea that people have. So the US, like Panics, as these revolutions start to take hold and they start turning to this network they have in Latin America of all of these military officers who are dedicated pro US capitalists just kind of waiting in the wings, furious at these damn commies who are like pulling their people away from the promised land of being able to buy washing machines.

So by the time the Cuban Revolution succeeded, nearly about eight thousand students had graduated the ground school, and these guys were a good start, But Washington realized that kind of the revolutions sweeping Latin America were of such a scope that they were gonna need a lot more than eight thousand dudes to put a lid on all of this. Now, President Kennedy is the guy who issued orders for the

Ground School to start training students in counter insurgency. US Special Forces were sent to the Ground School and they start teaching courses and traveling around to these countries too and teaching people. And you the exact nature of the counter terrorism courses that start getting counterinsurgency courses that start getting taught after Kennedy gives the order. UM Professor Michael McClintock describes them as the legitimization of state terrorism as

a means to confront the sinse subversion and insurgency. And that's really what's. Yeah, the we start backing state terrorism in order to stop left wing politics in Latin America. That's what happens in this period. And that's again people accusing me of like going after the right wing. That's JFK. Like, let's just keep that all in mind. That that's sucking JFK.

Who does this, right? Um, So, in nineteen sixty three they change the name of the Ground School to the School of the America's that's when that that alteration happens, and this new name kind of reflected its expanded role as a tool in the hands of the US government. So in nineteen sixty seven, just a couple of years later, that's when che Guevara, who had kind of gotten his start as acute like fighting with Castro, launches a guerrilla

campaign and Southeast Bolivia. Uh, and the School of the America's you know, had started kind years before this a is left wing sort of militancy, and Bolivia had grown they started taking in more and more Bolivian students. Um. And so it was US trained soldiers who captured she

Guavara shortly after his arrival in the country. Um. And you know, once he was captured, the U s forces, like who were kind of actually embedded there, actually wanted him at least a lot most of the stories you'll here, like wanted him to just kind of be taken into custody because they thought that killing him would turn him into a global martyr who had his face on a bunch of T shirts and music festivals for decades. Um. But the soldiers we'd trained were like, no, let's just

murder him. So they murder him, and yeah, now he's

he's on all sorts of T shirts. Um. Yeah, yeah, Well, I mean I mean, and you know, I'm not a big fan of schet, but it clearly like one of the things that's funny to me is that you've got some of the guys who were some of the US guys who were in the field instructing these troops are smart enough to recognize what's going to happen if, say, gets executed, But the actual soldiers in charge, these Latin American officers had learned so well from the United States

who was doing nothing in this period but creating martyrs, that they like, they can't even listen to the direct advice in the field because they've been inculcated in this US style of thinking that that that yeah, they just

murder this guy. It's very funny. So yeah, by opening up more slots in the school of the America's to students of a different nation, the US was able to kind of modulate like which countries got floods of these motivated far right um military officers who were willing to like take power and execute camp basically act as death

squads against leftists. So they do that in Bolivia, right, which is a big part of like why ship what she's doing there doesn't work as the US had already flooded Bolivia with these trained and uh motivated um kind of right wing idealogue soldiers. UM. And we do that in every country that we start to see the left

wing take offense. So in nineteen in the nineteen sixties, that chill lay in left wing starts to organize and gain political power um, led by a charismatic socialist named Salvador Allende UM and one of one of you know for an understanding who a end was he was. He was a big backer of better educational policy. He wanted better education for like indigenous people, poor people in in

in Chile. He want a monster pay for this by nationalizing a lot of the different resources in Chile because like corrupt politicians prior to him had made these very much illegal deals with US companies that basically gave them all of Chile's resources for for nothing. UM. So he was like, well, let's stop that ship. Let's use the money from the resources that we have in our country

to make life better for our people. And a bunch of Americans with financial interest in stealing Chile's resources are like, oh, that doesn't seem like a good idea. UM. And so in the early late fifties early sixties, the School of America starts taking in more Chilean soldiers under the guys that will train them how to be more effective soldiers. And we'll also teach them about how salvadorai Ende and everybody like him need be fucking murdered. Um. So yeah,

this again starts under the Kennedy administration. Um. But you know, as as the whole Kennedy thing doesn't work out so well, things actually do work out for a while for the Chilean Left. Something happen. Yeah, Bernard Montgomery Sanders made a

couple of key decisions there. So as the as the Chilean Left begins to win more victories, they start kind of quietly inviting the U S starts quietly inviting more and more Chilean soldiers into the School of the America's um, and in fact, more Chilean soldiers trained at the School of the Americas than soldiers from any other country during the nineteen seventies. Between nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy five.

I have a quick question, are they like I know that the job like when if you graduate from school, you're more luckily to get a job. That's higher up in the ranks, which probably means more money. But is there other financial incentives from going to the school that like allow these people to maintain their power like or

is there proper strictly come from their training. It gets them better positions, which gives them con troll of more and more men and higher numbers of their men are also trained at these schools, and they don't get money directly from that, but the fact that they're in this position means that suddenly there's this opportunity to Hey, if we take over, right, we have all the guns, we

have the millet, we are the military. If we take over, well, then we can get all that money for ourselves and we can personally start to enjoy the benefits of this like this, this lucrative American life, Like we can get rich like that. That can happen for us if we take over the country. If we stop these resources from being nationalized and going to all of the people, we can just sell them, access to them to the United States and get this ship for ourselves. This is happening

all over Latin America. That that's why all these people

get fucking rich. A lot of them do, like when they when they do their coups is because like they take over the country and then they get to sit down with all these corporations who had backed the overthrows of the governments in these nations and say like, hey, we can keep this ship flowing to you, but like daddy needs a little cut, and it's cheaper to you than giving than the entire nation getting a cut, because all you gotta do is help me and my buddies out.

But yes, there that's the financial incentive. And a lot of these guys, by the way, the ones who are really smart, wind up buying homes and property and immigrating to the United States. There's a bunch of America, Like they're a bunch of the School of the America's graduates, help overthrow their governments, loot their own countries, and then flee to the United States when things start to turn against them politically. It happens all the fucking time up

to the present day. You know, we'll talk about Olivia a little bit at the end um of this of this series. So when Salvador and finally gets elected president of Chile. You know, the whole sixties were pumping soldiers who are you know, trained to be these right wing idealogues into Chile, and the Chilean left is rising politically,

and I and finally gets elected president in nineteen seventy. Um, and you know, now he's going to be in a position to actually nationalize all these resources, help the Chilean people and kind of funk over some big US corporations that have financial interests in Chile. So as soon as this happens, as soon as I gets elected, and in fact, a little bit before he actually gets elected, talking the

White House turns to cooing him out of power. Um, Henry Kissinger says, I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its people. Because it's the seventies, so Nixon, Yeah, yeah, Nixon's in charge now. Yeah. But again, same basic idea under Nixon and JFK. And in fact, you look at that quote from Henry Kissinger, we don't why would we stand by and let a country go communist because it's

people are irresponsible. That's the same attitude that Woodrow Wilson professed, you know, sixty years ago earlier. Too ignorant to run your own country. Yeah, the most bad ship thing. I've ever never understand that. Yeah, and of course Nixon expresses and again we have this on tape. That's what we know.

Like Kissinger said that ship um, and Nixon is terrified that the nation might become another Cuba, which, like, I don't want to whitewash the bad things Castra did, but Cuba also has some of the best disaster response in the world and more doctors than basically any other country. Like it's not exactly the nightmare story of Commune, but whatever. Um. You know, every nation, because it's a nation, has bad

shipped to it too. But like I it's just so crazy to me people looking at Cuba as this like nightmare when it's like, well you want to look at the grand scheme of every nation on the planet, They're like not in the worst part of the places in the world to be Yeah, I don't know whatever. Um. So, under Nixon, the US backs ends far right opposition for several years and it engages in a program of vicious economic sabotage aimed at collapsing the Chilean economy. Uh and

thus you know, all support in the new president. So the CIA starts reaching out to officers in the military who were solid right wing anti communists. Uh. And one of the men that they reach out to is a general named Augusto Pinochet, um who I guess that name

is at least familiar to a lot of people. Uh. Now, there's some debate as to whether or not Pinochet was the main architect of the coup that followed, which he claimed um or if he was just brought in at the last minute as a bunch of other members of the coup claim. And again, Pinochet's a liar, so I'm not going to say what the actual truth is here. But he gets involved at a certain point, and he was not a graduate of the School of the America's.

But basically a hundred percent of the other officers who were involved in the plot against Diende, including the guys who started the plot, were all graduates of the School of the America's. How did Pinochet like just get ahead of all of them. He's real smart. He's a very very very very cunning political operator, right, Like you just have to give it to them sometimes, Like he was good at what he did, which was become the dictator

of Chile. Yeah, it's kind of like, how did Stalin wind up in power, because if you look at the way things were kind of at the start of the Bolshevik Revolution, he probably isn't the guy you would have guessed would wind up with all of the power. But he does. And it's a very complicated story as to how. Um, but it boils down to he's real fucking smart dude and hot. Well that is overblown, but he was very intelligent. Um. Get a lot of acne scars that get that, get

photoshops out of skin shame him. I am gonna skin shave the dictator of the Soviet Union. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not. That's not the thing to and I actually they were like small box cars. Um. So yeah. The so all of these, basically all of the Chilean officers who start this plot to overthrow all End and organize the military against them are graduates of the School of the Americas, and these men saw Allende, who sought to improve public education and ensure Chile's resources were shared for

the benefit of its people, as a threat. I End meant a future without shiny new American malls filled with shiny new luxury goods that they could buy with the bribes they received from the Western resource extraction companies that wanted Chile's wealth um So. In September of nineteen seventy three, a large group of Chilean officers, again basically all of whom were graduates of the s o A launch a coup. They surround the presidential palace and President i Ende is

found dead from a self inflicted gunshot wounds. Shortly thereafter, there's the bait over whether or not he shot himself, whether or not an AID shot him, if the military killed him. We don't really need to get into that. He's certainly murdered by this coup, Like whether or not he pulled the trigger. He dies because there's a coup against him. Um yeah. So General Pinochet winds up in power and he would hold. He would stay in power

until nineteen nine. During his reign, Chilean soldiers continued to train at the School of the America's. They learned fun new counterinsurgency tactics to suppress the left, like throwing suspected leftist militants out of helicopters. They learned how to torture, and they practice their new skills on tens of thousands of their fellow Chileans between twelve hundred and thirty two hundred people were executed by Pinochet, more than eighty thousand

were interned, and again tens of thousands were tortured. Now, Pinochet himself didn't, you know, attend the School of the America's, but the head of his secret police, Manuel Contreres, did graduate from the s o A. Another graduate of the s o A was the deputy director of Pinochet's secret police, and so also another graduate of the s o A was the head of the Via Grimaldi, which was Pinochet's

notorious torture castle. He had a castle where you tortured people. Uh, and the Via Grimaldi was was particularly famous for its signature punishment, which was rape. Like that was like one of the things that's notorious about this is like male or female, you get sent here. One of the things that happens, you're gonna get that you're gonna get really really raped, um like either by individuals or by individuals like using objects. And it's kind of it's to humiliate

the men. I guess it's to humiliate the women too. But like this is like a lot pretty much every torture prison that exists rape as a part of it. But I'm wanna say it's just their guantanamo, but this

it's particularly a thing here that is so uh. It's wild to me that in the desire for not just things, not just the ability to buy, and not just the American dream, but like prosperity and future and like growth and development, we all, like we as human being is always seem to take a step back to the dark age. Is like build a castle with giant walls and like assault people as a firm of development so that we

can all be better. Like where is the logic? Well, you know, I think they had this building and it was a good place for a prison, and they you know, for whatever reason. One of the things you find studying in the School of the Americas is that when people are trained in how to punish leftists by the US military, they wind up raping their prisoners all the fucking time. Um, it's a huge thing for s O A graduate big rapists. Graduates of the s O A huge fans of rape

as a method of violent political control. Are we just seeing the same thing? And oh my god, there's a country right now where there's a coup happening and they just forced a guy to like assault himself with a bottle. Oh yeah, yeah, I forget where that was. I think so, yeah, that wouldn't have anything to do with the U. S. Real because Belarus not um not a lot of ties with the Belarusian Belarusian soldiers aren't being trained by the

US military. Like that's one you can't That's that's kind of more rushes into things, but also like just kind of bellary. How different are we from like I feel like so much of our tactics are just very similar

in the same results. This this is the thing. And again it's the thing when you start talking about like um, you know, people will talk about will praise the things that let's go back to Cuba, the things that Cuba do is right, and someone will bring up like all of the horrible human rights things that are real things the Cuban government has done some fucked up ship like a lot of like LGBT people, you know, what was

happening during the AIDS crisis. A lot of reasons to criticize the Cuban government, But you try to find a single thing the Cubans did that the United States isn't also doing. In this period, two members of multiple foreign nations into its own nation. Um Like, we've got we've got no leg to stand on when it comes to criticizing these people, just because you personally didn't get brought taken into a rape castle and molested to death. Um Like, we trained people in how to do that, and then

we were like, it's good that they're doing this. Let's be their friends while they do it, because this is what we want them to do because it gets us copper like funk everybody. Um So, yeah, the Via Grimaldi fucked up place. And I'm gonna quote from a report in Amnesty International on it. Quote. They took us to an interrogation room where they had a metal bunk bed. There was another detainee on the top, and my partner

was tied to the side. They were interrogating all three of us at the same time, taking turns to electrocute us one after the other. The interrogation session lasted through the night into the next morning. Jesus Christ. Yeah, Now, in Via Grimaldi, detainees would be electrocuted, water boarded, They had their heads forced into buckets of urine and excrement. They were suffocated with bags. They were hanged by their feets or their their feet or their hands and beaten.

Women obviously were raped, and for some detainees the punishment was death. Um. The dark, cramped cells they were held in was just like, yeah, that was that was that was that was the world you lived at. Um. One detainee later recalled, after an interrogation, you would be thrown back in your cell. They would shut the door, and then the first thing you would experience as someone coming closer. They would hold you, help you lie down, take the

blindfold off, and put some water to your lips. The electric shocks would make you stream with sweat and you'd get extremely dehydrated, so very thirsty. And about forty hundred people went to this place over the course of the time Pinochet was in charge. A lot of them never made it out. We'll never know how many died. They're huge numbers of people are still missing. UM horrible. Yeah.

General Carlos Pratt's was one of the few members of the Chilean military command who remained loyal to President i Ende. For this, he and his wife were murdered by a car bomb in nineteen seventy four in Buenos Aires. Before his death, he mused on exactly how his former comrades in the Chilean military had, in his kind of words, confused Chilean national interest with the interest of the United States,

betraying their own people. Because again, because of these ideas they buy into about like American the American way, like this American dream they want for themselves, they send thousands of their own people off to die. So this this general, who is one of like the loyal to the people of Chile generals, is kind of before his own murder, musing on how this happened. And this quote from him,

I think is really really telling. As far as the internal enemy is concerned, the opinion acquired by those who have attended courses at the School of the Americas and

others organized by the Pentagon has been increasingly prevalent. Many of these soldiers have responded to the stereotypes and thoughts which were inculcated into them during these courses, and, believing they were liberating the country from the internal enemy, have committed a crime which can only be explained by their ingenuousness,

their ignorance, and their political shortsightedness. I used to tell the President that we should send our officers to know what it was like in the countries of Europe, Africa, and Asia, so as not to copy or imitate their armed forces, but so that they could widen their horizons and understand that the world does not begin to end

in the Schools of the Pentagon. So this is kind of his blame, you know that, this is him specifically saying that, like the the the mindset, it's not the specific training at the at the School of the America's that has as much an impact on why these men do the things they do as the mindset the inculcated in them. It turns them into It turns them into the same kind of right wing, uh extractionary monsters that are currently government governing our own country and that have

for a while determined US public policy. It turns them into little fucking Nixon's right. That's that's what's happening here now. Another famed School of the America's graduate was Hugo Banzer. He graduated from the s o A in nineteen fifty six. He went home to Bolivia. He rose through the ranks, and he became a general. In nineteen seventy one, he seized total power during a violent coup. He immediately closed

universities and banned all political parties and activity. He jailed labor leaders, arrested three thousand political opponents, and had more than two hundred of them executed. Under Banzer's rule, the basement of the Ministry of the Interior was turned into a torture chamber, or more than two thousand prisoners were held for his good work. Bands are to spot on the Wall of Fame back at the School of the

America's now shiit, Yeah, it sucks. It's It's one thing to go down there like mega school, brainwatch a bunch of people, spread them across the entire continent and allow them to take over. It is entirely another to be like this is a prime example of the students were trying to create. This is this guy did it. This is what we want you to do. I mean, you

couldn't be more direct, You couldn't be more so. Now, remember how I kind of started talking about the ground school and like what it was trying to do to the minds of soldiers by talking about these Argentine soldiers

who were like the first way into that school. Well, one of the men in that first wave was a young officer named Leopoldo Gaultieri, and he went on to again become a general because it's great for your career to go to the School of the America's UH, and eventually he helped carry out a military coup that took power in Argentina. In the late nineteen seventies, he became the dictator of Argentina UH and as the dictator School of the America's graduate gult Erry presided over more than

thirty thousand executions other countries alone. We have to stop doing this ship right, stop messing with us other countries. And I mean honestly, right now, most of you have keep that up, like keep this coronavirus energy. Later, like protect your citizens. That's nuts. It's fun. A lot of stuff's fun. There's a lot I could say about this.

One of the things that so fucked is that like we funk all these countries over and help them established dictatorships, and because of how badly it goes, you get this attitude that the U s should never do anything else ever, so that when the people of these countries rise up against their dictators UH, there's basically no nobody, there's no you can't you can't make a political argument for helping them. Um, because of how bad it works. Every time we like

it's this, and it just it compounds the heart. It's just all fucked. Everything's fucked. Um. I wish a lot of different and there's a lot of people. If I could unborn people, there's a lot of people that would make not have been born. Um. And most of them are Americans. So over the decades that it was open, the School of the America's is known to have graduated at least eleven students who became dictators, which is a lot.

That's so many dictators for one school. Is there any school competing with them for a number of dictor No, No, there's not, Like, Um, it's that so many fucking dictators from a single school. Yeah. I don't think anywhere has that kind of pedigree. Um, not even fucking Harvard. So the school. Yeah, many of the school's deadliest graduates weren't

always the ones who became world leaders. Though. More than anything, School of America's men were the willing instruments of dictators, the happy killers who made the right wing authoritarian wave that crashed over Latin America in the seventies and eighties possible el Salvador in general, Juan Zapato was a graduate. He planned the assassination of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and their teenaged honor. The crime of these Jesuits was

providing humanitarian aid to suffering left wing peasants. We'll talk a lot more about Catholics and jesue being murdered in the next episode, because they're a big part of in Latin America. They get killed all the time by these right wing death squads because like, say, what you all about the Catholic Church in Latin America. A lot of Catholic and Jesuit leaders are like, oh, there's all these people starving to death, and like we should help them.

And those people are also left wing, so you've got to murder those priests and stuff. It's this whole thing, um all about Oscar Romero a bit, Yeah, um Jesuits, Yeah, It's like it's I of the things the Catholic Church has done, this is the best of them, is their attempts to reduce the horrors happening in Latin America in

this period of time. Probably so uh Zapeta, against School of the America's graduate, was involved in two hundred and ten summary execution, sixty four tortures and a hundred and ten illegal detentions during his career. US training certainly influenced how he did what he did, but it's important to remember that a very deliberate campaign of US propaganda influenced

why he did what he did. Leslie Gill, the author of that book The School of the Americas that I keep citing, interviewed a number of graduates of the school, including a Bolivian colonel who told her about the El Salvadoran soldiers he'd met there. And this guy is really interesting.

We'll hear from him in part two because he's very critical of the School of the Americas and what he learned there, but he also went like he has this experience, he knows all these people who go there, so he's able to talk from direct experience about how would influences them as human beings and changes the way they think, which is part of why this book, The School of the Americas by Leslie Gill is such an incredible resource that really, if you care about this, you should buy

and read. It's a very readable and and very detailed breakdown of what happened there. Um so I'm going to read a quote from this Bolivian colonel. He's talking again about the El Salvadoran soldiers he met at the School of the Americas. Those guys thought about three things. First, they wanted to train themselves well. Second, they wanted to buy pickup trucks and drive them back to El Salvador. When I finished class at the end of the day and went to the library, they would go out and

look for cheap pickups to buy. And third, they had a lot of relatives. And this is during this is after nine, this is the period where the School of the America's has moved to the United States. And third, they had a lot of relatives who they wanted to see in the United States, especially Washington, and it was not the first time that they've been to the United States. They admired the United States and the same way as the Bolivians who trained at the School of the America's.

So like this is um like like that. That's interesting to me. These guys when they get trained at the School of the Americas in the US, like the first thing they want to go do is buy cheap pickups and drive them back home. Against this thing, this continuous thing from the nineteen forties of being an American, the thing that I've been inculcated and is this idea of like easy access to luxury goods. That's huge for these guys, um. And they have family members who have moved here and

like become part of the culture. They're they're very much in their head in a lot of ways, they're Americans, and they're frustrated by the fact that other people in Bolivia, most of their countrymen, don't want their country to be more like the United States, and the only thing way they can sort of it's the same thing you're seeing now with all these right wing militias in the United States who see folks on the left here who want things that are different from them, and the only thing

they can think to do is kill them, because at the end of the day, like that's the kind of people that they are, and they have guns. Um, And

it's the same thing going on in Latin America. It happens here, it happens there first, right, it happens there first is part of an organized plan by the United States, and it happens here sort of by this is just the way things are going to go you have all these people who believe the same thing, who here in the United States to believe the same things as the officers were training in Latin America about the American Dream, and they also come to believe the same thing about

communists and Marxists and whatnot, making it impossible for them to live that dream by stopping the heedless extraction of resources and trying to build a more equitable society. And both groups come to the same conclusion, these soldiers in Latin America and these militia dudes in the United States, which is murder everyone who disagrees with me and doesn't

want me to have a cool truck. There's like a level of absolutism to the American dream, which is like this idea of all or nothing, which is to me so fraught with like, I don't want to live my life on terms of like pass or fail, you know what I mean, And then how that extends then to us versus them, and then pass that to you either

live our way or die. I'm obsessed with this idea of like, especially if when you start to look at like the items that they obsess over, like not only is there like a very strict uniform code, Like if you've ever been in a protest with a ship tone of undercover cops, you can pick them out so fast they can't break that like uniform. Look. But then to this idea of like trucks, like trucks being a symbol not just of masculinity but of like freedom at the

expensive others? Is that the way you say that, like this idea of like it's what is it about a pickup truck that makes you feel so much more? Is it the height? Is it the fact that you can haul a lot of things. I don't understand boys in their toys. I mean I I just bought I. I have a large off roading vehicle and they're fun. I wouldn't you know, uh, shoot babies to death and light a church on fire to have access to an off roading vehicle. But they do have a power to them. Um, yeah,

I don't know. Like, there's a lot there's a lot to be said about what trucks mean within the context of the American dream and within sort of the American willingness to do violence both to the world, like to the environment and to individuals around them. Like, there's actually a lot I think that should be ethnographically studied about

how Americans view trucks. UM, but that is too much of a topic for this We're near the end of our episode and kind of before we close out, and in part two, we're gonna talk a lot more about you know, we're gonna talk about the Almosote massacre. We're

gonna talk about Oscar Romero. We're gonna talk about horrible things that happened in Guatemala, and we're gonna talk about kind of what happens in the United States when the School of the America's moves there and how it operates when it leaves Latin America, and and it's it's it's operated off of Columbus, Ohio after n UM, so like Columboids. That's what they call people from Columbus. Uh, we're talking about your backyard next episode. Hey, bastard fans, best start

a renos whatever we call you. Just jumping in here to let you know that I made a mistake. Uh, I said Columbus, Ohio. There, it's actually Columbus, Georgia. Um. The School of the Americas in the United States was outside of Fort Bidding. I do apologize for the error. I've never actually made a mistake before in my entire life, so I you know, we we we regret uh this

being my first one. I want to cite a passage from an article on the School of America's that I found in the Thomas Jefferson Law Review that just kind of runs through a horrific laundry list of the different things graduates of the s o A did to give you an understanding of just how widespread the destruction from this school is. It's almost impossible to keep in your head.

So I'm gonna read that quote now. Pedro Pimentel Rios, who an El Salvadoran soldier trained in the s o A, participated in the Dos Aires massacre, which resulted in the killing of two hundred and one people. Soldiers systematically murdered men, women and children, bludgeoned villagers with a sledgehammer, threw them down a well, and raped women and girls. Haitian colonel

Frank Romain directed the Saint Jean Bosco massacre. As Father Jean bertrand Aristide was saying mass armed men broke into the church, killing twelve parishioners and wounding at least twenty seven. They then doused the church with gasoline and set it on fire. Honduran general Romero Veasquez led the two thousand nine military coup and Honduras that overthrew a democratically elected government. Beasquez is the third sa A graduate to overthrow governments

in Honduras Nicaragua. During the Samosa dictatorship, more than four thousand National Guard troops graduated from the the s o A. Many of them became, contrast, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Nicaraguan peasants. Between nineteen forty seven and nineteen seventy nine, more soldiers from Nicaragua attended the school than from any other country Peru. Telmo Hurtado directed the massacre of sixty nine men, women and children and Echo Marca.

After separating the women and children from the men, his unit raped them, ordered them into buildings, and then set them on fire, where they burned alive. That's a tiny it's five, maybe, of the of the crimes committed by s o A graduates. Um, that's just one pair. I could have picked a bunch of different ones. Just summarizing the fucking nightmares that come out of this place. And we're going to talk about a massacre that makes all of those look tiny tomorrow the almazote mascor we're talking

about it on Thursday. I should say, um, not cool stuff hard hard, It's hard to like process right right? Well, I mean I think like I can won't you to say something? And I'm like, oh, but no, that's happening right now, Like how could you hate your fellow countrymen so much that you burned them on non we we've been stopping you from getting a truck. How dare you stop the progress of all of us? I must progress faster or even just the idea of like it's hard

for me to Okay, So I have two thoughts. One is I've been so poor. I've almost been homeless before. I understand looking at a life of ease and coveting it and and being like that temptation of like what would you like and really having to face the question of like what would I do in order to have

access to those things? Right? Like it's I have like some level of sympathy for the boys that went into this school and we're inundated with opportunity, Like that's the opportunity is a hell of a drug, Like, especially when it's fed to you in such a sense of like, if you work hard, it's going to be there for you. All you have to do. It's all within you, right, Like that that part of the American dream of like it's already in there, you just have to tap into

it hard enough. Is what I think drive some people right over the line, um, because you don't want to be a thing that stops yourself. That should be the

easiest hurdle to overcome. And then I'm thinking about like these men who returned to home, and like, there must be such a level of like self hate to look at people that look like you or have shared experiences as you and then not just violently rape them, but also burn them alive, women and children, and like it's just, yeah, I commend you on your ability to continue to find bastards after all these people. I truly wouldn't be like I hate you for what you've done. I can't understand it.

And I'm mystified, Um, at the level of hate and destruction we as human beings are able to cause. It's

just it's never ending. Yeah, it's it's it's amazing, and it is one of those things like I'm not going to pretend I don't see why part of what these people find appealing because like I am, I am someone who I don't think I'm I think as an adult, i've ever been taken in by the American dream as a an ideal, but I have been taken in by like I grew up poor and or at least poor by I don't know, kind of white people standards, right, Like we weren't we weren't in the streets, but with

my parents were worried about like being bankrupt and stuff, and like it was it was really like economic anxiety is a huge part of my youth and it has kind of it did propel me to focus on making money, right, Like I I that has always been a huge thing for me is being able to like live comfortably on my own without any help from anybody. And that's not a healthy part of my personality. Like it's it's not a good thing that I that I did. It's a thing that I did because of the way in which

I grew up in sort of an inability. I had to kind of um like this constant fear that I had to say before I could accomplish anything else, Like I had to not be scared about finances before I could do other things because of the it's not a good thing, right, it's it's not a it's not a good thing, but it's a I get how powerful the thing is. I'm looking forward to hearing more about the gentleman you were describing who went to the school but

didn't come out brainwashed. Yeah. It's a really interesting and guy, Yeah, how did you? How were you like one of I imagine very few people who were like no, this is

insane happening around us. There's some people who just kind of have that ability, even within you know, training regiments that are designed to I have a friend who was um who was in you know we're talking about the Marines and Marines, and like one of the things he'll say about basic training is that like he kind of immediately realized, like, oh, this is a game, and I have to pretend to agree with and believe and react in certain ways in order to succeed at it and

and and get through this part that like I know what they're trying to do and how they're trying to alter me, and I have to pretend like it's having this effect so that I can get through this part and and do the stuff I guess that I want to do right like some some people just have. And you get the feeling from this guy that he kind of like goes to this school and he doesn't agree with a lot of what's happening and he but he's

able to see what's happening to other people there. And it's good you know that he went and did that and brought back this experience so we're able to understand it on a human level. Right, we need witnesses. Yes, not bad that this guy brought that experience to us. Yes, yes, yes, this is exactly what James Baldwin talks about, is being a witness. It's a it's a legitimate role. Some people frown upon it because you're literally like I think some people view a witness is like just taking up space

and documenting the story. But by not participating and by not stopping, you can better explain how things happened. And it's it's just as important as our quote unquote heroes who are are changing the world for the better. Like it's it's where would we be without understanding how we got here in the first place? Yeah, I mean, and it is one of those things like one of the critiques. I mean, obviously, like like Leslie Gill and her book,

like they didn't stop anything. You know, the School of the America's was kind of already passed its period of real influence, of major influence by the time, you know, her book came out. But it's important that it be documented that we understand this stuff because it if if the information is allowed to get out to the people it needs to, it can act in building our cultural immunity to some of this stuff. And we have to have we have to let it do that. We have to.

We can't we can't not learn these lessons, which is why I think and you get the feeling one of the this is really The School of the Americas is such an amazing book to me because of the depth Leslie gil goes into the number she talks to instructors at the school and in from different errors, She talks to people who went there, She talks to their victims, like she she is really you can see motivated and she is She's a person who had spent a lot of time living in and around and like writing about

Latin America and Latin American issue. She's a very very um competent um, you know, ethnographer, I guess you'd say, um, but you get this feeling that it was there was this kind of she understood how important it was for the story of what this place did to people, how it succeeded in its goal, in the consequences, how crucial that is to get out to people, because I mean, for one thing, it's happening in Oregon right now, like we're seeing School of the America's ship starting just the

earliest stages, thankfully not the mass grave stages, but the things that could lead to that if people aren't careful, like it's it's happening here, So we should understand what happened over there. Um that we did to these people, you know that that we did in a lot of cases, and and a lot of them did too, like you know, not too. I don't want to, like you don't want to.

One of the problems sometimes with criticizing like the US influence on places like this is like then you you you don't criticize the fact that there's a lot of you know, folks who live in those countries and come from those countries who did a lot of fund up ship too. But like we what happened over there, the violence they committed in our name was part of a plan that US leaders had and executed, and that's important to know. So Joe out. We'll talk more later. Let's

start two. Is it coming? I look forward to it. You want to plug anything? Uh, if you're intrigued by any of the comments I made about black representation in America and the horror story that that is. I am recapping Lovecraft Country for the A V Club right now. Uh is a doozy. There is a lot happening, especially if I don't know when this will be released. But if y'all have seen episode five, then you know what

goes down. Um, so yeah, check that out. Otherwise, you can find me all over the internet at Joel Monique. That's j O E L L E M O N I q U E. Uh. Yeah, come chat with me about the crazy bastards. You muys talk about always fascinated by the show, and uh, you can't find me at those same places online because I am not Joel Monique. So that's the end of You can follow Robert on Twitter and I right, okay, you can follow us on Twitter. Scarab bastards thought we have a t public store. Uh,

don't do it. I don't know. I was trying to explain to them where they couldn't find me because I thought that would be useful to people. Yeah, but they contact you. Post is important, all right, Well, thank you everybody Twitter. Uh, don't be in a fire, um,