The Other Axis of Hypocrisy: America’s Love Affairs with Dictators

The same empire that armed the mullahs also armed the generals. The same Washington that financed the madrassa in Peshawar financed the torture chamber in Santiago. The contradiction was never religious or ideological — it was structural. America did not defend democracy; it defended obedience. The slogans of freedom were merely camouflage for control.

From the moment World War II ended, the United States turned the planet into a chessboard and itself into God. The rhetoric was noble — liberty, democracy, human rights — but the method was medieval. Any government that aligned with Washington was declared “free,” no matter how bloody its record. Any nation that refused was branded “tyrannical,” no matter how democratic its aspirations. The result was a global graveyard of American clients and their victims, all buried under the banner of freedom.

In 1953, the CIA overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran — a secular democrat elected by his own people. His crime was nationalizing oil. His punishment was the Shah, a monarch who tortured, murdered, and looted his nation while serving as Washington’s policeman in the Gulf. That became the blueprint: assassinate democracy, install dictatorship, and call it stability.

The same playbook unfolded in Latin America. Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz, another democratically elected leader, tried to reclaim land from the United Fruit Company. The CIA removed him and replaced him with a series of military thugs who bathed the countryside in blood. In Chile, Salvador Allende — a physician, socialist, and constitutionalist — won an election. The United States decided that elections were dangerous. Henry Kissinger financed and blessed General Augusto Pinochet, whose regime killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands more. Washington called it “freedom from communism.” The victims called it hell.

Indonesia followed the same script. In 1965, General Suharto’s coup unleashed one of the worst massacres of the twentieth century — more than half a million people executed, leftists hunted like animals, rivers clogged with bodies. The CIA provided lists of names. American newspapers celebrated a “victory for democracy.” Corporations celebrated the reopening of Indonesia’s oil fields. Blood and business were the twin pillars of American morality.

The Philippines was another chapter in the same story. Ferdinand Marcos looted his country while ruling under martial law, crushing opposition, censoring the press, and imprisoning dissidents. Yet Washington hailed him as a “reliable ally.” His wife Imelda filled closets with diamonds while his police filled prisons with students. When he was finally forced out, the U.S. flew him to Hawaii — a dictator’s retirement package for loyal service.

In Nicaragua, Somoza ruled for decades with American blessing, turning the country into a family estate of corruption and brutality. When the Sandinistas overthrew him, the U.S. could not tolerate even a leftist democracy. It funded and armed the Contras, whose atrocities became synonymous with Reagan’s hypocrisy. In El Salvador, death squads trained by American advisers slaughtered peasants and priests — the gospel of freedom written in blood.

From Argentina’s generals to Haiti’s Duvaliers, from Greece’s colonels to South Korea’s Park Chung-hee, the list of American-sponsored dictators reads like a roll call of moral bankruptcy. The pattern was identical across continents: support tyranny to stop communism, then support new tyranny to stop the memory of the last. The Cold War was not a clash between freedom and slavery. It was a business arrangement between arms dealers and dictators.

And when communism finally collapsed, the machinery of hypocrisy did not stop. It simply rebranded. Washington found new “evil empires”: first Islamism, then China, then Russia, then whoever next refused to privatize its economy or surrender its resources. The moral vocabulary never changed; only the enemies did. Freedom was no longer about liberty. It was about alignment. Human rights became a weapon, not a value.

Even the twentieth century’s icons of democracy were drenched in this duplicity. Franklin Roosevelt called Nicaragua’s dictator Somoza “a son of a bitch, but our son of a bitch.” Harry Truman approved coups that murdered democrats while lecturing the world on the sanctity of elections. Dwight Eisenhower blessed the CIA’s global operations while warning, too late, of the military-industrial complex he had himself nurtured. And Henry Kissinger — the most eloquent apologist for evil ever produced by the American academy — turned realpolitik into religion. He received a Nobel Peace Prize for bombing Cambodia.

What united all these dictators was not ideology but loyalty. As long as they purchased American weapons, opened their markets to American corporations, and voted the right way in the United Nations, they were declared “moderate.” The victims’ screams were edited out of the official soundtrack. When the Marcoses, Pinochets, and Suhartos outlived their usefulness, they were quietly discarded — not because they were brutal, but because they were embarrassing. The empire has no permanent friends, only permanent amnesia.

The irony is that the very societies crushed by these dictators are the ones that later produced the moral critique of America itself. Latin America’s liberation theologians, Asia’s human-rights lawyers, Iran’s dissidents — all speak the language of freedom America claimed to own. They learned democracy not from Washington but from surviving it. For them, freedom is not a flag. It is a wound.

The American elite, meanwhile, continued to speak as if it invented morality. The same government that armed Pinochet lectures Venezuela on elections. The same Congress that funded Suharto now condemns China for human rights. The same Pentagon that trained death squads in El Salvador now claims to defend women’s rights in Afghanistan. The hypocrisy is so vast it has become invisible. It is the air American diplomacy breathes.

And like all empires, America is now choking on its own hypocrisy. The refugees who flee from the ruins of U.S.-backed wars arrive in Europe and America not as strangers but as witnesses. The descendants of the tortured stand in the streets of London, Paris, and New York — silent evidence that history remembers even when governments forget. Every immigrant is a reminder of empire. Every dictator’s ghost is an unpaid bill.

The Cold War’s secret was simple: America feared democracy more than dictatorship, because genuine democracy could vote against it. That is the truth no textbook will admit. The United States exported dictatorship under the slogan of freedom, and now it imports the consequences — mistrust, rebellion, and moral fatigue. It built a world where everyone pretends to be free while living under someone else’s rules.

The tragedy is not only historical; it is psychological. The American mind, trained to believe in its moral innocence, cannot comprehend that it created much of the world’s suffering. It celebrates its victims’ revolutions as its own victories. It writes their resistance into its own myth. But history has a longer memory than propaganda. The ghosts of Chile, Indonesia, and Iran are not gone; they are merely quiet, waiting for the next crisis to whisper: we remember who armed the torturers.

The same contradiction that armed the mullahs and the generals is now arming the drones. The vocabulary changes, the victims do not. America’s greatest export is still hypocrisy — and it always ships in bulk.

Citations

1. Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (Times Books, 2006).
2. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Anchor, 2007).
3. Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (The New Press, 2003).
4. Geoffrey Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66 (Princeton University Press, 2018).
5. Raymond Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy (Times Books, 1987).
6. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (South End Press, 1979).
7. Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Brookings, 1979).
8. Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan Books, 2006).