The purpose of this article is not to argue the case — it is to show both sides of the argument. The imbalance is impossible to ignore once you see who sits in which camp.

NO — Taiwan is not part of China

• Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party and the Taiwan independence camp say Taiwan is a sovereign, independent country.

• Western media frames Taiwan as a separate country under threat from its neighbour. This does not reflect any official position, but it shapes public opinion more than any official statements might.

• Governments that recognise Taiwan as an independent state: Belize, Guatemala, Haiti, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Tuvalu, Eswatini, the Marshall Islands, Palau, and the Holy See and no other countries

YES — Taiwan is part of China

• The People’s Republic of China (Chinese Communist Party, Beijing) The One-China principle: Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and unification is a national task.

• The Republic of China (Kuomintang, Taipei). Its own constitution still claims jurisdiction over all China, including the mainland. The government the United States armed for decades says Taiwan and China are one nation.

• The United States — officially. Its One-China policy “acknowledges” the Chinese position that Taiwan is part of China. Washington does not recognise Taiwan as an independent country.

• The United Nations. Resolution 2758 (1971) places the People’s Republic of China (Beijing) as the representative of “China,” which the resolution treats as including Taiwan.

• The Cairo Declaration (1943) and Potsdam Proclamation (1945). Together they designated Taiwan to be returned to China after Japan’s defeat.

• Governments that do NOT recognise Taiwan as an independent state: the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Canada, Australia, Russia, India, Brazil, and South Korea — and roughly 170 others, i.e. the vast majority of the world’s ~195 states.

Note: A small camp holds that Taiwan’s status is legally undecided — the 1951 San Francisco treaty had Japan renounce its claim without naming a recipient. It fits neither camp cleanly.

In summary, the YES camp has all the superpowers, the UN, and most of the world. The other holds a single political party — and the habits of Western media.

The “simple” version repeated in the West is the position held by almost nobody with a seat at the table, including Washington. This is the sleight of hand described in If You Wanted to Keep the World at War, a divided people presented as a single, unified victim.

The awkward fact is that nearly every official position says Taiwan is part of China is exactly the one the supporters of conflict must keep off the page.

See also:

Axiom 1. Borders created by earlier empires are sacred if they promote conflict

A border that cuts through ethnic, religious or linguistic groups is a gift. It keeps the peoples inside it permanently poised for conflict.

Nigeria’s 19th Century Borders

Nigeria’s boundaries were a European invention of the nineteenth century: a predominantly Muslim north was attached to a mostly Christian south.

A century of trouble has followed, and persists — Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is forbidden”, is active in the north, while the government in the south has called in American air-strikes as recently as Christmas Day 2025 [2]. Since the British left their colony, millions of people have been killed as a result of conflict. Some will remember the dreadful scenes of starvation seen in the southern region Biafra, in the early 1970s as it tried to secede from Nigeria. Insisting that peoples of such divergent views live as one has been deadly.

Korea and the 38th Parallel

In 1945 two American colonels divided a nation that had been whole for a millennium. Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel were given half an hour in a Pentagon side room, a single National Geographic map, and no Korea experts to consult — the map did not even mark provincial borders. They chose the 38th parallel because it ran just north of Seoul. Rusk later admitted the line “made no sense economically or geographically”.

The tension it caused has played out ever since. The three-year war of the early 1950s killed around three million people, including 36,000 United States troops (see also Iran and Korea 1953: How America Split the Regime‑Change Atom). Today the divided country is arguably the most unstable place in the world where nuclear weapons are poised for use. If Korea had not been seen by the USA as a Cold War pawn to be divided in two, perhaps the people would have been able to resolve their differences peacefully.

Ukraine: Europe’s contested border lands

Ukraine’s borders were drawn by Soviet administrators in the decades after the Russian revolution. Prior to the Soviet era, Ukraine was a contested borderland as shown by the 1919 caricature above. It shows a region attacked by Bolsheviks from the North, White Russians from the East and by Poles, Hungarians and Romanians from the West. [3]

Today’s Ukraine encloses two constituencies, as the 2010 presidential election showed. The Russia-friendly Yanukovych won overall by taking the east and the south, while his rival, Tymoshenko, friend of the EU and the USA, dominated in the west.

The late Senator Lindsey Graham saw Ukraine’s division as an asset. Casting the war as resistance to “Russia’s unprovoked aggression,” he argued that sending money and arms to one of Ukraine’s constituencies was a wonderful way to weaken Russia without losing American lives [4].

The West’s policy to portray Ukraine as a unified nation with sacred boundaries falling victim to Russian aggression has left the country in ruins with countless dead. The policy has been an abject failure and the official approach in the West seems to be to forget history, forget the recent past and blame everything on Putin.

Axiom 2. A community’s historic divisions are gold to be exploited.

Taiwan has been ruled by many hands. The Dutch dominated in the seventeenth century. Later, settlers from the mainland competed with the indigenous peoples. The Japanese held “Formosa” from 1895 to 1945, and then came the Kuomintang, opponents of Mao’s communists, who fled the mainland in 1949. Each era left its mark creating a mosaic of ethnic and linguistic groupings.

Despite this complexity, the West insists on portraying Taiwan as a separate, unified nation living under threat from another country, China. In the West we are encouraged to forget that Taiwan’s status as part of China remains the premise of every agreement the United States has made with Beijing — affirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 (1971), “Restoration of the lawful rights of the People’s Republic of China in the United Nations.” The fact that Taiwan is a formally recognised part of China contradicts the narrative of one country bullying another.

The above map shows Taiwan’s 2024 presidential election results. Blue represents the Kuomintang, who favour engagement with Beijing. Green represents the Democratic Progressive Party, for whom Western ties and self-determination are more important.

Rather than let the island’s people seek compromise and resolve their differences themselves, the United States periodically sends warships into the Taiwan Strait to make its preferences clear. Imagine the uproar if China stationed warships between Hawaii and the US mainland to signal support for the significant minority of Native Hawaiians who favour some form of sovereignty [5].

Axiom 3. If Votes on Self-determination Must Be Promised — They Can Also be Deferred Forever.

Sometimes it is unclear which way a divided people leans. A vote can settle that — but it should be held only if your preferred side will win. If it will not, postpone it, possibly forever.

Vietnam - Making War While Resisting the Inevitable

In 1954 the Geneva Accords ended France’s colonial war with a promise: nationwide elections were to happen in 1956 to reunify Vietnam. The United States refused to sign, believing communist Ho Chi Minh would win. The election was cancelled. President Eisenhower, writing later, expressed a consensus that “possibly 80 per cent” of the population would have voted for Ho Chi Minh [6].

More than a decade of war followed America’s obstruction of the promised vote. Millions were killed but Ho Chi Minh’s side won anyway. With hindsight, the fear of a communist takeover looks misplaced: the country that emerged after the defeat of the USA became a peaceful, middle-income nation and, ironically, a popular destination for American tourists. (See also Saigon 1963: Monsters in Vietnam [Film])

Kashmir, Western Sahara, Palestine

The examples multiply. Kashmir and the Western Sahara have both been promised votes on their destiny for decades; none has taken place. Palestine is the starkest case: the self-determination promised under the League of Nations mandate (1922) was never administered, and the United States has blocked more than fifty Security Council resolutions concerning Palestine [7].

Conclusion

The sponsors of war can take comfort: people have short memories, and arguments based on history — or on anything beyond the current headlines — carry little weight. Furthermore, the media publishing those headlines depend on the sponsorship of corporations with significant defence interests. The system is of course managed by individuals who typically suffer no personal cost from the ravages of war.

See also:

References

[1] The changing religious composition of Nigeria: causes and implications of demographic divergence, Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2016

[2] US says it struck Islamic State militants in northwest Nigeria, Reuters 26 December 2025

[3] Ukrainian People’s Republic, Wikipedia retrieved 16 August 2026

[4] Dismissing Russian criticism, U.S. Senator Graham praises Ukrainian resistance, Reuters May 28, 2023

[5] Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Wikipedia retrieved 16 August 2026,

[6] Mandate for Change, Dwight Eisenhower, 1963, p372:

“I am convinced that the French could not win the war because the internal political situation in Vietnam, weak and confused, badly weakened their military position. I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of Bao Dai was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for.”

[7] List of vetoed United Nations Security Council resolutions, Wikipedia, retrieved 17 August 2026

In 1981, Chen Wen-chen returned to Taiwan to introduce his one-year-old son to his grandparents. He was an assistant professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon — brilliant, successful, mildly critical of the Kuomintang in private. On his last night on the island he was taken in for questioning by the regime’s secret police. The next morning his body was found on a university campus. The official story was suicide. He had been thrown from a fire escape. He was thirty-one.

The trap that killed him was set before he was born.

When Chiang Kai-shek lost China’s civil war in 1949, he fled to Taiwan with a million and a half followers and turned the island into a fortress under martial law. For four decades the White Terror followed: tens of thousands imprisoned or killed, dissent crushed. Washington backed it all with money, weapons and diplomatic cover, because Chiang was a valuable Cold War frontline asset.

The film traces the trap’s full arc: the 1958 Quemoy crisis, when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles threatened nuclear war rather than lose Chiang’s island; Chen’s years in America, where speaking his mind marked him as a target; and to the present day.

Throughout those decades, the arms and money kept flowing. Peace, justice and democracy were never the point. Taiwan was a tool, used against China.

Today the island is sold to us as a simple story of democracy vs. tyranny. Taiwan’s history is not a cartoon. The West’s part in it is not pretty.

What if the catastrophes of history weren’t mistakes at all?

Anthony Eden was a war hero. In 1917 he was awarded the Military Cross. Following a night raid into a German trench, a 20-year-old Eden carried a badly wounded man back across no man’s land under enemy fire. The citation records “conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty.” It was an auspicious start to a career that would see him take on many important roles from Winston Churchill’s foreign secretary in World War II to Prime Minister at the time of the Suez crisis.

An Honourable Man

Eden’s honours included:

- Privy Counsellor (1934) — grants the title “Right Honourable” for life as well as access to the nation’s highest secrets.

- Order of the Garter (1954) — the most exclusive order of chivalry in Britain. It carried the title “Sir.”

- Wateler Peace Prize (1954) — awarded by the Carnegie Foundation for contributions to international peace.

- Earl of Avon and Viscount Eden (1961) — a hereditary peerage, it granted a seat in the House of Lords for life for Eden and for his descendants.

When Eden died in 1977, the British establishment spoke as one:

- Queen Elizabeth II — “an outstanding diplomat and ... a man of courage and integrity.”

- Prime Minister James Callaghan — “A most distinguished man.”

- The House of Commons motion — “Courage, integrity and honour are the highest qualities in human life. Anthony Eden’s place in our national history will be assured.”

A Perfect Hero?

When writing fiction, frequent advice is “don’t make your villains too evil, nor your heroes too perfect.” Amidst the glittering career and establishment praise, there was a detail that does help take the shine off Sir Anthony Eden, who might otherwise come across as too perfect.

In March 1956, Eden, then UK Prime Minister, telephoned his Minister of State at the Foreign Office, Anthony Nutting. Eden was angry about President Nasser of Egypt, who had been increasingly asserting Egyptian independence. Nutting had prepared a memo on “neutralising” Nasser through diplomatic and economic pressure. Eden was not interested.

This is what he said to Nutting [1]:

When Nutting pointed out that there was no obvious alternative to take Nasser’s place, Eden replied:

When the British establishment called Eden a man of “courage, integrity and honour”, they chose not to mention that he had called for the murder of a 38 year foreign head of state and father of five children.

Eden was never convicted of any crime, however under s.4 Offences Against the Person Act 1861 — in force in 1956 and still today — soliciting or encouraging murder is a felony carrying life imprisonment.

Eden told a subordinate minister “I want him murdered” - that might just qualify.

[1] Brian Lapping, End of the Empire (London: Granada, 1985), p. 316. Nutting first recorded the line as “I want him removed” in his 1967 memoir, published while Eden was still alive; in later accounts he insisted Eden’s actual word was “murdered.”

More:

Each HistoryInBites article circles the same question: what if the catastrophes of history were not mistakes at all?

My new novel (!) takes a related but slightly different angle: what if the past is not as set in stone as it seems?

The Ghost of Downing Street is a literary thriller. Garrick Townsend, a Downing Street protection officer, thought he understood the stories we are told about history, power, and the world. Then, a chance encounter changes everything. There are rumours of ghosts — but the ghosts are not what anyone expected. They are echoes of history, waiting for someone to listen.

The same drive that fuels HistoryInBites — the refusal to take official stories at face value, the need to peel off the layers and find the deeper truth — also drives the novel. Restrained, atmospheric, in le Carré territory.

NetGalley offers free advance copies to readers who leave honest reviews. The Ghost of Downing Street is available there now - how about it?

Get a free review copy

See also:

MERVYN LOVATT

News and updates concerning the novel The Ghost of Downing Street

By HistoryInBites

Imagine a neighbour who frequently borrows your ladder. One day you need it yourself. He smiles, thanks you, and borrows a ladder from someone else. The next morning, because you are no longer useful to him, he burns your house down while you sleep.

When an individual does something like this, we term it psychopathic, the absence of moral compass. But for a superpower, we call it foreign policy.

Nasser — America’s late night drinking buddy.

In 1952, Egypt’s British-backed monarchy was overthrown. The US was eager to gain influence and sent CIA Agent Kermit Roosevelt to befriend President Nasser. reportedly “thrilled with each other”.

Miles Copeland, the CIA’s Cairo station chief (and father of Stewart Copeland, drummer of The Police), regularly stayed up late drinking and joking with the Egyptian leader. Washington thought things were under control

But Nasser was a proud Egyptian who believed in genuine independence. He co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement, seeking not to take sides in the cold war. He nationalised the Suez Canal to the fury of the British and French. When Washington refused to help fund the Aswan dam, he turned to Moscow. This may have been the last straw. The friendly Western faces stayed in place, but behind them, assassination plots began. One such plan came to light when the £20,000 sent by MI6 was delivered to the wrong person. The money was intended for Nasser’s doctor, an inducement to administer a lethal injection.

In 1970, aged 52, Nasser died, officially, of natural causes, a heart attack. The timing was perfect for his enemies and within years, his successor, Anwar Sadat, had reversed every policy and realigned Egypt with Washington.

The pattern is this: befriend a useful leader, borrow his ladder, extract what you need, but when he fails to do as you wish — keep smiling, but burn his house down.

Nasser of course was not the only one.

The Precedent — Mossadegh

Two years before the CIA met Nasser, the same Kermit Roosevelt had overthrown the government of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran.

Mossadegh had been educated in Switzerland and was a democrat by instinct. He had appealed to Washington in 1951 as a natural ally — a man who believed the United States, having fought its own anti-colonial war against the British, would understand Iran’s wish to control its own destiny, also in defiance of the British. He made his case in Washington but Truman listened and sent him home empty-handed.

Soon after, the British lost their oil to Iran’s nationalisation program and Mossadegh refused to back down. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 spread propaganda and bribed politicians and rioters. Mossadegh was deposed, arrested and tried by prosecutors seeking death by hanging. In the end his sentence for supposedly trying to overthrow the monarchy, was reduced to three years solitary confinement, followed by house arrest for life.

So although Mossadegh was aligned with Western values, the moment he stepped out of line, the West installed the Shah, ending Iran’s democracy and Mossadegh’s freedom.

The Catholic Nationalist — Diem

South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem was America’s man in Saigon. Washington put him in place, funded him, and backed him as president of a shaky anti-communist state. For nearly a decade, he was useful even if his government was authoritarian and repressive towards the country’s Buddhist majority.

Then a 73-year-old monk named Thich Quang Duc sat down at a busy Saigon intersection and set himself on fire in protest. The pictures circled the globe. America was embarrassed. But even worse, Diem had begun privately exploring peace options with Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam.

In November 1963, the CIA backed a coup. Diem and his brother were murdered in the back of an armoured personnel carrier. President Kennedy was shaken. He knew what the American machine had done and that he had been unable to stop it.

Three weeks later, JFK too was dead. Diem had been useful. Then he wasn’t. Borrow the ladder. Burn the house.

The Payroll Dictator — Noriega

Manuel Noriega is remembered as a drug trafficker, arms dealer, and brutal dictator of Panama. In 1989, the US invaded, arrested him, and he died in prison. Good riddance, most people might say.

They should know the rest. Before 1989, Noriega was on the CIA payroll — paid $100,000–200,000 per year for intelligence on Cuba and Nicaragua. Washington knew exactly how he operated.

The problem was not his murderous brutality, that was accepted and paid for. The problem was that he started to embarrass his masters. In 1988 a US grand jury indicted him for drug trafficking, and Noriega refused to go quietly. So the US invaded, bombed civilians in Panama City, and dragged Noriega to Miami in chains.

Noriega’s character had not changed, only his usefulness. Borrow the ladder. Burn the house.

The Handshake — Saddam

In 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Two wars followed, led by two presidents named Bush. Saddam ended his days hanged by the neck, his execution filmed on a mobile phone while his captors shouted insults. Few tears were shed for him in the West.

But before he was enemy number one, he was a friend worth cultivating. In 1983 Donald Rumsfeld, then Ronald Reagan’s special envoy, flew to Baghdad for a friendly visit. The US was providing satellite intelligence and dual-use chemicals to Iraq during its war with Iran — well aware that those chemicals would be used against Kurds. When Halabja was gassed in 1988, the US deceitfully blamed Iran.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, the US ambassador had reportedly signalled ambiguity about Iraq’s border disputes. Saddam must have been shocked the next day to be declared the new Hitler.

His crimes had not changed, only his usefulness. The US no longer needed his ladder, so they burned his house down.

The Longest Burn — Afghanistan

During the 1980s, the CIA ran Operation Cyclone — the largest covert operation in its history. Billions of dollars in weapons were funnelled to Islamic fighters resisting Soviet occupation. The effort was championed by Texas Congressman Charles Wilson, leaning into the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

When the Soviets withdrew in 1989, Washington walked away. Afghanistan collapsed into civil war and the Taliban emerged. The weapons the CIA had supplied now served new masters — people who described America as the Great Satan.

After the attacks of September 11 2001, America invaded — to “fight terrorism”. For twenty years it fought a war against people they had once armed until withdrawing abruptly in 2021. The US left behind an estimated $7 billion in military equipment. Unsurprisingly most of this was gratefully received by the same Taliban.

Arm them, fight them, arm them again, run. Borrow the ladder, burn the house, borrow again, burn again. Rinse and repeat. Nothing achieved, except death, destruction and enormous profits for the arms industry.

The Drainage Pipe — Gaddafi

Muammar Gaddafi seized power in a 1969 coup, overthrowing a Western-backed monarchy. In the West he was considered a sponsor of terrorism. But inside Libya, he was popular, using oil wealth to make the country into Africa’s richest. Libyans had free healthcare, free education, free electricity, and interest-free loans. The literacy rate rose from 10% to over 90%. His people had never had it so good.

In 2003 he voluntarily cancelled a nascent nuclear weapons programme and in return, the West embraced him. Tony Blair paid a friendly visit to his tent. Western investment poured in. The ladder was now firmly in place.

Then Gaddafi began to talk about a gold dinar — an African currency that would allow Libya and its neighbours to sell oil outside the petrodollar system. This was like taking the bottle from a drunk. Shortly afterwards, NATO bombed Libya into chaos. Gaddafi was captured hiding in a drainage pipe and killed by a mob. The “rehabilitation” was complete. Now high living standards and social welfare in Libya have been replaced by open air slave markets.

From Blair’s tent to a drainage pipe in eight years. Borrow the ladder. Burn the house.

The Burning Ladder — Yanukovych

Viktor Yanukovych was a corrupt and authoritarian leader of Ukraine — the West knew this. He was also useful as a lever to try and pull Ukraine away from Russia, so the EU courted him. But the courtship was miserly: €610 million against the $160 billion he said he would need to cover the loss of Russian trade. Also the West insisted on some harsh conditions. The IMF demanded brutal austerity and the EU insisted he release his political rival Yulia Tymoshenko from prison. The deal was friendship in return for political suicide.

In November 2013, Yanukovych said no to the EU and accepted $15 billion from Russia instead as well as a crucial one third discount on energy prices.

On 20 February 2014, violence erupted in Kiev’s main square, the Maidan. Snipers - no one knows whose - killed dozens of protesters and the ensuing chaos and retribution broke Yanukovych. EU foreign ministers brokered a deal — reduced powers for the President, a unity government and early elections. Yanukovych signed, but within 24 hours the deal was shattered by violent right-wing agitators. The deal’s EU “guarantors” said nothing.

Weeks earlier, a leaked phone call had caught Victoria Nuland, Obama’s top diplomat for Europe, picking the next prime minister: “Yats is the guy.” The EU had other ideas, but as Nuland said in that infamous call: “F**k the EU.

Yanukovych was forced to flee to Russia in a helicopter. From the West’s point of view, he should have signed the EU’s deal. When he didn’t the housed started to burn.

And Inline with Nuland’s “recommendation” Arseniy “Yats” Yatsenyuk did indeed become the next prime minister of Ukraine.

But the house continued to burn, especially in Eastern Ukraine where pro-Russian and pro-Western factions fought a civil war. Rather than send the fire-brigade, the West sent truckloads of bombs and explosives. They blamed Russia, deceitfully characterising events as an “unprovoked invasion”. They hoped the fire would damage Russia.

As Ukraine was consumed by the fire, the West insisted on calling itself the country’s best friend.

Conclusion

A person who burns your house when you no longer have a ladder to lend them we would call a psychopath. What about a country or a system of countries?

Sometimes the doctrine runs in reverse. Enemies stop being enemies the moment they become useful. Ask the new man in Damascus.

See also:

The plot failed — the cash went to the wrong person — but the message was clear: the West would rather kill Nasser than let Arab nationalism threaten its oil.

Gamal Abdel Nasser was the voice of a rising Arab world. He nationalised the Suez Canal, defied both Cold War blocs, and inspired a generation. His crime was independence. His punishment was a decade of CIA and MI6 plots, a war that killed his own people, and a death at 52 that five million mourned.

This is the story of a man who stood in the way of empire — and what happened when he did.

The CIA had been working to bring him down since 1964. Nixon’s order: “Make the economy scream.”

William Colby, the CIA director who later testified to Congress about what the US had done in Chile, died under suspicious circumstances in 1996 — his body found on a riverbank that had already been searched.

This is the story of a democracy destroyed for copper, control, and Cold War paranoia. And the question it still asks: what if Allende had been left alone?

One event can be explained away. A sequence becomes harder to dismiss. When repeated sequences form a pattern, doubt begins to look less like healthy scepticism and more like cowardice. A hypothesis that identifies and explains the pattern is hinted at in the following table:

In some important respects, the world is not governed as we are told it is. Neutral does not always mean neutral. Accidents, it seems, are sometimes done accidentally on purpose. The public is encouraged to think in fragments that, in isolation, mean little.

Control by Excision

US regime-change operations are usually discussed one episode at a time, as if each belonged to a sealed moral universe. Iran. Guatemala. Congo. Chile. Vietnam. Indonesia. Each treated as a discrete controversy — regrettable, but isolated.

Stack them, and the picture changes. Not unfortunate misunderstandings and random bad actors, but a recurring logic: when a leader moves from rhetoric to action, the system responds.

Mosaddegh challenged foreign control of Iran’s oil. Árbenz threatened the landholding power of an American corporation. Sukarno articulated a vision of non-alignment that was intolerable to hegemonic powers. Allende pursued economic sovereignty and ran headlong into interests that had no intention of allowing it.

Different countries and different pretexts, but the same underlying offence: acting as though sovereignty meant something.

The response is not always a coup or a bullet. Sometimes it is sanctions, propaganda, colourless diplomatic language, the patient erosion of legitimacy. But the aim is the same: to remove, neutralise, or discipline those who challenge the operating assumptions of power.

Who is behind such acts? Not necessarily a smoky room of sinister men sipping their whisky while conferring on the deeds of the day. Reality is less theatrical and more durable: an interlocking ecosystem of corporations, banks, dynastic wealth, intelligence agencies, bureaucracies and diplomatic networks. Importantly there are people who move between these worlds without ever having to explain themselves to voters.

The Congo Test

The Congo is where Hammarskjöld enters — not as a side note, but as a revelation. He believed the United Nations could be something more than a stage set. He thought that international law could restrain the older pathological habits of empire. The Congo tested that belief to destruction.

The Congo was not merely a post-colonial crisis. It was a test of whether independence would mean anything beyond a formality. The overt architecture of empire was collapsing, but the old habits and expectations remained intact. The valuable minerals were still there. The strategic anxieties remained as did the fear of African independence becoming more than symbolic. Under Hammarskjöld, the UN began to look less like a ceremonial forum and more like an instrument that might actually be used — one that could give real meaning to the independence that new African states had formally acquired, rather than merely supervising a change in terminology.

Hammarskjöld knew the odds. He was not naive about the power games being played by both sides in the Cold War. He understood that neither Washington nor Moscow wanted a truly independent Congo. He knew that that both sides could be ruthless. He insisted on an independent UN regardless. That insistence was, in the end, the point.

The Crash and the Question

On 17 September 1961, his plane came down near Ndola, in what was then Northern Rhodesia. Hammarskjöld and fifteen others were killed. Officially, it was a tragic accident.

The questions began almost immediately and have not stopped since. Local witnesses reported seeing a second aircraft in the vicinity. Others reported hearing shots. Communication records were incomplete, delayed, or missing. Subsequent investigations — including a 2017 independent panel commissioned by the UN — concluded that the evidence was consistent with an external attack or sabotage, and called for further inquiry. No definitive answer has ever been established. The key files in multiple jurisdictions, remain classified, if they have not been lost. [1]

Individual anomalies can always be disregarded as unexplained mysteries. But when they accumulate — the witness accounts, the missing records, the delayed reports, the redactions, the institutional incuriosity — the balance of probabilities shifts. A singular argument can be brushed aside as a one-off. A cumulative argument becomes too strong to be ignored. This is true whether we consider details of this particular plane crash, or the rise of US hegemonic power at the end of the twentieth century.

Parameterised Freedom

What happened at Ndola, whatever its cause, illustrates the process. Modern liberal power does not present itself as tyranny. It invites the public to believe in impartial institutions, sovereign nations bound by constitutions, and curated versions of history.

Independence is tolerated only as long as it remains decorative. Reform may be allowed unless it is structural.

Hammarskjöld believed that principle, exercised through international institutions, could triumph over force. In the Congo, he found the limit of that belief — a ruthless and implacable opposition that did not argue back, but took silent action.

His death matters, not only as a personal tragedy, but for the pattern it reveals alongside the stories of others: Mosaddegh, Árbenz, Sukarno, Allende and more. Each case has its own character and uncertainties, but taken together, there is a pattern and shape that cannot be dismissed as coincidence.

The fragmentation of history serves power well. If every story is isolated, every outrage can be treated as an exception. The larger structure stays invisible and the public can be reassured that troubling incidents are merely a series of unfortunate, but meaningless local events.

But once the episodes are stacked, what becomes visible is a world system whose real priorities are not self-determination but control. Not justice, but continuity. Not truth, but deniability.

The public clings to the accident narrative because it is psychologically cheaper. It is easier to treat the worst events in modern history as anomalies than to accept that they are features, not bugs of the system we are part of.

If Hammarskjöld was killed, his death was a demonstration of how power protects itself. If it was truly an accident, the wider argument still stands. No single hand needs to have directed events. The world he inhabited had perfected something durable but well camouflaged: a system in which corporations, states, intelligence agencies and financial elites had enough in common that coordination was rarely necessary.

Democracy provides the scenery. The casting decisions are made offstage. That is the operating system. And once seen, it cannot be unseen.

[1] Susan Williams’ Who Killed Hammarskjöld? (2011) remains the most thorough examination of the Ndola evidence.

This film follows the threads that connect Hammarskjöld’s death to two of the Cold War’s bloodiest chapters: the Congo, where the CIA backed the overthrow and murder of the country’s first elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba — and Indonesia, where a US-supported coup brought a genocide that killed up to 3 million people, almost entirely unknown in the West.

Hammarskjöld stood in the way of all of it. He believed newly independent nations had the right to govern themselves, free from outside interference. That made him dangerous to the people who preferred chaos and foreign control to self-determination.

Harry Truman put it plainly: “He was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him’.”

It was August 18th 1960, at a meeting of the National Security Council. In a memorandum from that day, Staff Secretary Robert Johnson, the official minute taker, recalled Eisenhower turning to CIA Director Allen Dulles — “in the full hearing of all those in attendance” — and saying that Patrice Lumumba should be “eliminated.”

Five months later, Lumumba, former Prime Minister of the Congo, wrote a farewell letter to his wife and five children before being tortured and killed, with the knowledge and complicity of both Washington and Brussels.

How do we reconcile Eisenhower’s stature with his willingness to deprive a wife of her husband and children of their father? This is not, in the end, simply about Eisenhower — many others would have stood in his shoes given the chance. It is about a society that holds a man capable of this in such high esteem.

From Normandy to the Oval Office

Perhaps at the heart of the issue is a fundamental incompatibility — between the mindset required to command a war machine and the values necessary for civilian leadership. Eisenhower’s career was defined by the industrial-scale disposal of lives in the meat-grinder of Second World War Europe. When you appoint such a man as president, you inevitably import his cold calculus into the Oval Office.

Military command demands secrecy. Plans cannot be shared with a citizenry, decisions cannot be exposed to public scrutiny. For Eisenhower, conducting affairs of state beyond the reach of public accountability would have felt not just necessary but natural.

It also normalises violence as a problem-solving tool. Secrecy and violence, the twin instruments of war, travelled with Eisenhower into peacetime. He deployed clandestine operations to overthrow Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran — democratically elected leaders removed in the name of the very democracy the US claimed to support and had fought to defend.

And then there is democracy itself. Dissent is not a threat to democracy — it is a symptom of it functioning. A military commander cannot afford to tolerate it. Eisenhower, it seems, never unlearned that lesson. It was during his tenure that the CIA transformed from an intelligence-gathering body into a unaccountable paramilitary tool for control.

For the man who had commanded the liberation of Europe, the irony appears to have been lost on him entirely.

A Price Worth Paying - Especially if Others Are Paying it

Lumumba is an early example of a leader removed with lethal force because his vision appeared to some to run counter to US interests. He was committed to liberating the Congo from the legacy of savage Belgian colonisation — but Washington feared he would enable Soviet influence in Africa.

Tragically, Lumumba had only turned to Moscow after the US had rejected his requests for help in stabilising a new democracy. He had asked America first. They refused to help with independence, not wanting a Congo they couldn’t control.

In the short term, the US got what it believed it wanted. Lumumba was replaced by Mobutu — a corrupt and murderous dictator, but one reliably aligned with Washington’s interests. The people of the Congo would suffer decades of repression. From Washington’s point of view, this was a price worth paying — and they weren’t paying it anyway

On January 17th 1961, Eisenhower delivered his farewell address to the nation. In it, he issued a grave warning about the threat posed by what he called the “military-industrial complex” — a machinery of power that only an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” would be able to resist. What Eisenhower did not mention, as he spoke those words, was that Patrice Lumumba had been killed less than an hour earlier, somewhere in remote Central Africa. The man who had ordered his elimination was on television warning America about the very machinery he had just used. As Eisenhower spoke to the TV cameras, Lumumba’s blood was still soaking into the ground

A Precedent Had Been Set

Perhaps the most consequential outcome was not Mobutu, but the precedent. The assassination of a country’s leader had become an accepted instrument of policy — something that could be ordered in a National Security Council meeting, to be taken care of by machinery that, once built, would never dismantle itself.

In Dealey Plaza, November 1963, John F. Kennedy’s presidency was brought to a brutal and sudden end. The threads connecting that moment to Eisenhower’s order to eliminate Lumumba are subtle and indirect — but they are there. A culture of lethal intent towards inconvenient leaders had taken root in Washington. Eisenhower had given it presidential legitimacy. Three years later, Kennedy was consumed by it.

More than sixty years later, it is worth asking not whether this anti-democratic tolerance for secrecy and violence could reappear — but whether it ever stopped.

[1] Office of the Historian: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v23/d11

On the morning of February 13th 1961, three weeks into his presidency, President Kennedy received the news that Patrice Lumumba was dead.

He had been tortured, shot, and dissolved in acid by men working — directly or indirectly — for Western governments. He was thirty-five years old. He had been Prime Minister for less than three months.

Kennedy’s reaction, captured in a photograph from that day, is unlike anything you expect to see on a president’s face. His predecessor had ordered the killing. Kennedy looked like a man confronting something he couldn’t yet name.

This seven-minute film tries to name it.

At the age of 23, John F. Kennedy published his Harvard thesis under the title Why England Slept (1940). It sold well enough to buy him a Buick convertible, but more importantly, it offers an early insight into the cast of mind that would later define his presidency.

In his book, Kennedy examines why Britain was ill-prepared to confront Germany at the outset of World War II. He attributes this, in part, to a “natural feeling of confidence, even of superiority” in the English man.

Against this, Kennedy argues that foreign threats demand “clearheaded and informed calculation.”

Even at this early stage, we see the outline of the man: sceptical of national arrogance, and committed to cool, rational judgement.

1951 Tour of Asia

As a young Congressman with ambitions for the Senate, Kennedy knew he needed a deeper grasp of foreign affairs. In the autumn of 1951 he embarked on a seven-week study tour of Asia.

A key stop was French Indochina — today’s Vietnam — where French colonial forces were fighting a war against a communist-led independence movement. After visiting Saigon and hearing a range of informed perspectives, Kennedy concluded the French were doomed to lose. More strikingly, he believed the United States would meet the same fate should the attempt to take the place of the French.

To Kennedy, Vietnam was not an isolated struggle but part of a broader pattern playing out across Asia and Africa: colonial powers were confronting nationalist movements they could no longer contain. It was a conclusion he would never abandon.

A Third Way

For Kennedy, the forces of nationalism and self-determination were too powerful for any empire to suppress indefinitely. This set him apart from much of the foreign policy establishment, which saw European dominance of the Global South as both natural and necessary — above all as a bulwark against China and the Soviet Union.

Kennedy searched for a third way — a path by which newly independent nations might escape colonial rule without being forced into either Western or communist camps.

It was in this context that he formed relationships with leaders such as Diem of Vietnam and Sukarno of Indonesia ― with mixed results. Kennedy had thought that such figures might help nations become independent, stable, and friendly to the United States — without becoming pawns in the Cold War.

1957 Algeria Speech: Kennedy Goes Public

Kennedy’s sympathy for those under colonial rule became unmistakably public in his 1957 Senate speech on Algeria. As in French Indochina, a violent conflict was unfolding between a nationalist independence movement and French colonial powers.

Kennedy broke ranks not just with Washington convention but with America’s NATO obligations, arguing for Algerian self-determination rather than backing France. The New York Times called it “the most comprehensive and outspoken arraignment of Western policy toward Algeria yet presented by an American in public office.”

After a firestorm in the press after the speech and criticisms from his own party, Kennedy worried that he had damaged his career. His father was certain that that the contrary was probably true. Perhaps most importantly, he had demonstrated that he had the courage of his convictions.

An Uneasy Alignment

Despite earlier instincts that challenged imperial thinking, Kennedy’s public position on foreign policy largely aligned with Cold War orthodoxy.

By 1963, France had been expelled from Vietnam, leaving a divided nation at war with itself. In the South, the US-backed Ngo Dinh Diem held power; the North was led by the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh.

Under Kennedy’s presidency, American involvement deepened — thousands of “military advisers” were deployed to the country, alongside growing calls for greater and more direct military intervention.

Kennedy supported this deepening involvement — at least in public, and at least for a time — but it sat in direct conflict with the convictions he had formed in Saigon in 1951 and the empathy he had shown for the victims of colonisation.

1961 The Bay of Pigs: The Spell Is Broken

At some point early in his presidency, Kennedy reassessed the case for US involvement in Southeast Asia. Central to this shift was his growing belief that he had been misled by his own intelligence services.

In 1961, the CIA backed an invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro exiles at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy had made clear he would not commit US forces. Yet when the operation faltered, Kennedy came to believe it had been deliberately designed to fail — in an attempt to force his hand towards the full-scale invasion he had explicitly ruled out.

Kennedy chose humiliation over escalation. In the aftermath, he developed a deep distrust of both military and intelligence advice, reportedly vowing to “smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.”

From this point on, when assured that victory in Vietnam was achievable, Kennedy could no longer suspend his disbelief. Publicly, he maintained support for the war — aware of the political cost of appearing weak. Privately he began to plan for withdrawal.

1963 Honolulu: Building the Plan for Withdrawal

On May 6, 1963, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara chaired a military conference in Honolulu, where he directed US commanders to develop concrete plans for a full withdrawal from Vietnam.

The military leadership was unenthusiastic, even resistant to this change in direction. McNamara was acting on Kennedy’s policy, pushing against the institutional momentum towards escalation.

McNamara–Taylor Report: Justifying the Plan

In September 1963, Kennedy dispatched McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor on a ten-day “fact-finding” mission to South Vietnam.

The resulting McNamara–Taylor Report was supposedly drafted on the flight home, though much of it had been prepared in advance in Washington. Kennedy had decided on withdrawal months earlier; the mission’s purpose was to provide a formal rationale for the decision already taken.

NSAM 263: The Decision in Writing

On 11 October 1963, just days after receiving the McNamara–Taylor Report, Kennedy signed National Security Action Memorandum 263. It set out, in clear terms, his intention to begin withdrawing US personnel from Vietnam.

Six weeks later, Kennedy was dead.

The Old Order is Restored

The day after Kennedy’s funeral, his successor, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, signed NSAM 273 overriding Kennedy’s earlier directive. The document was being drafted while Kennedy’s body was lying in state, not yet buried.

While the language of Johnson’s new directive suggested continuity, in substance it emphasised continued military engagement — effectively cancelling Kennedy’s earlier move toward withdrawal.

Five days after the assassination, Johnson, in his televised “Let us continue” speech, urged the nation to “continue” its commitments in Vietnam, leading the American people to think that escalation under the Johnson presidency would be a continuation of Kennedy’s policy. It was in fact, the opposite.

Who Pulled the Trigger?

The precise mechanics of the Kennedy assassination remain obscure. We do not know how many assassins were involved, where they were located or their subsequent fates. No definitive account has ever commanded universal acceptance.

The Warren Commission, established by Johnson, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Yet the report has been widely challenged. Critics have pointed to a troubling misalignment between the nine volumes of evidence collected and the conclusions drawn from them; its failure to establish a credible motive; and its reliance on the highly contested interpretations of evidence such as the “magic-bullet theory.”

The process itself has also drawn scrutiny. The inclusion of Allen Dulles — recently dismissed as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency by Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs fiasco — raised questions about independence, while later investigations, including the 1979 United States House Select Committee on Assassinations, fundamentally contradicted the Warren Commission, concluding that the assassination was likely the result of a conspiracy.

The sequence of events only deepened the uncertainty. Oswald was killed while in police custody by Jack Ruby before he could stand trial, and key questions—around both Ruby’s actions and the killing of Officer J. D. Tippit, also killed that day — remained unresolved.

What emerges is not a settled account, but an absence of one.

Conspiracy Hypotheses

More than sixty years later, competing theories about the assassination persist. These range from Cuban exiles angered by the botched Bay of Pigs, to Texan oil interests opposed to tax changes, to foreign actors such as Israel, reportedly at odds with Kennedy over nuclear policy.

Around these theories swirl conflicting arguments, some well-evidenced, others merely compelling, none conclusive. Remarkably, genuine efforts to establish the truth continue to compete with an apparently deliberate production of professional disinformation.

There are multiple plausible explanations, but they cannot all be true, and none of them is proven.

The Investigation and the Problem of Control

Despite all the doubt and confusion, one issue stands above the rest: the conduct of the investigation itself. Many groups may have had motive and means. Some may have played a role. Others may even have been incentivised to muddy the waters. However, only the US government had the authority to control the investigation and shape the official narrative.

The Warren Commission was largely controlled and overseen by former CIA director Allen Dulles who was the only member of the commission to attend every hearing. Kennedy felt he had been deceived by Dulles over the Bay of Pigs and had fired him. This raised an unavoidable question: could an investigation controlled by a controversial figure drawn from the very institutions under scrutiny be considered independent?

In Conclusion

John F. Kennedy was a serious thinker from a young age, evident in his 1940 book Why England Slept. His divergence from prevailing orthodoxy on colonialism and empire emerged during his 1951 tour of Asia, and became public in his 1957 Senate speech on Algeria. His disillusionment with the military and intelligence establishment deepened after the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion. By May 1963, plans for US withdrawal from Vietnam were being formalised at the Honolulu conference chaired by Robert McNamara. In October, he signed NSAM 263 confirming that intent. A month later, he was dead.

Kennedy’s instinctive sympathy for the colonised placed him increasingly at odds with the strategic logic of American power. The assassination not only stopped him dead, but its dramatic public nature served as a deterrent for anyone else who might follow.

We do not know for sure who, if anyone, was on the grassy knoll nor who fired shots at the president that day. But one thing is clear: to the architects of empire, a president with Kennedy’s convictions was like a crucifix to a vampire.

See also:

• Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa

The Source

All three rivers can be traced to a single source, in a single week of November 1963: the coup in Saigon and the killing of South Vietnam’s leader, Ngo Dinh Diem.

It was Washington’s mirror moment — the instant it chose to kill its own reflection. Diem had been America’s creation: Catholic, anti‑communist, a modernist meant to embody Western virtue in Asian form.

U.S. officials had long sponsored Diem’s brutality, but by 1963 the Vietnamese were disgusted with him, and even Washington found him unbearable. They convinced themselves that removing him would restore control.

When Diem and his brother were executed by CIA‑backed operatives in the back of an armoured car, the bullets and stab‑wounds didn’t just end a regime — they exposed the hypocrisy at the heart of Washington’s mission.

From that week onward, the United States was no longer exporting democracy or even defending business interests, as it had in Guatemala. It was generating chaos — and losing control.

Diem’s murder became the pattern for every later intervention — Vietnam, Iraq, Libya — each founded on the same delusion: that American moral superiority could be imposed through subterfuge and violence.

From a distance, the absurdity is obvious: how could covert killing ever be a force for good? In murdering its own puppet, Washington revealed its own incoherence. It appears as if the stage, the play, and the actors upon it, had all been misunderstood.

The Bureaucracy Takes the Wheel

The Saigon coup was never properly authorised. Between October and early November 1963, Washington’s machinery moved on its own momentum.

Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge whispered one story to the generals; CIA officers spread another. Each presumed presidential approval. By the time doubts reached the Oval Office, events in Saigon had already slipped beyond the president’s control.

The State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA were no longer executing policy — they were creating it.

The apparatus designed to serve democracy had instead, seized its power. After Diem’s death there was no turning back. A few discreet assassinations were cheaper than invasions, cleaner than debate, and infinitely easier to deny when things went wrong — as they soon did, horrifically, in Vietnam.

Kennedy seemed to sense the danger. Into his dictaphone he confessed, “I should not have given my consent to it,” referring to the memo that triggered the coup. His own government had killed an ally he had once personally befriended.

Perhaps one day Kennedy would have tamed the beast; he had reportedly said that he wished to “scatter the CIA to the winds.” But three weeks later, he too was dead. Within four weeks, his order to exit from Vietnam had been cancelled by President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The Deep State Finds Its Voice

After November 1963, the institutions that had acted beyond presidential control carried on with little restraint. A new consensus hardened in Washington: presidents come and go, but “policy” must endure. The will of the electorate became secondary to the preferences of a permanent bureaucracy.

The entity we now call the Deep State had found its feet. The 1954 Guatemalan coup had been a corporate experiment; Saigon was a proof‑of‑concept that had spun catastrophically out of control. The result was the Vietnam War — millions dead, a nation divided, and America’s image of itself in ruins.

But Washington learned the wrong lessons. Instead of humility, it sought more power. Disaster was a merely a narrative. The control of perception replaced the pursuit of truth.

The Dream That Wouldn’t End

The three rivers — JFK’s assassination, the slaughter in Vietnam, and the manufactured fear of communism — merged into a single dark current that transformed the American soul.

A generation came of age believing their government had murdered their president, lied them into a war, and were generating unnecessary conflicts that could end the American way of life. Such suspicions were pushed below the surface, but never left. They mutated, hardened, and were passed on to the next generation in different forms.

Something terrible happened in 1963. It unfolded like a fever dream: an honourable republic sleepwalking into a corrupt empire, guided by illusions and haunted by suppressed guilt.

More than half a century later, America is still trying to wake up.

On Monday November 4th 1963, with his children playing in the background, President Kennedy dictated a quiet confession into a dictaphone.

Over the weekend, a coup had taken place in Saigon. Two men were dead. And Kennedy knew that America bore responsibility.

Three weeks later, Kennedy too was dead. The withdrawal order he had signed was reversed before his funeral.

This seven-minute film traces what happened — and why it still matters.

Rivera already understood the dynamics clearly: who ordered it, who paid for it, and who the victims were. Mainstream historians would take decades to catch up. The CIA didn’t formally acknowledge the character and scale of its activities until 1997.

The sky in the painting is blue. The trees are attractive shades of green. But the ground is soaked blood-red. Rivera connects the handshake to the body count, the boardroom to the bomb, the bishop’s blessing to the unmarked grave.

We would like to think we live in more civilised times. We know that we do not.

The film is a three-minute tour of Rivera’s devastating canvas. Join me.

Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, exiled for his extremism, was pushed forward to rule the country as Washington’s chosen dictator: obedient and loudly “anti‑communist.”

Installed through the CIA’s Operation PBSuccess, he was selected for pliability rather than ability. He depended on U.S. advisers whispering policy into his ears and American dollars to keep an illusion afloat that he was anything but a disaster.

Even the CIA saw the cracks — a paranoid man with no charisma, lost without orders. Yet a myth was created: Guatemala “liberated,” democracy “restored.”

The story of Castillo Armas is as much about the West’s ability to deceive itself as it is about Guatemala’s unravelling.

The Architect’s Delusion

Overthrowing Árbenz had been almost embarrassingly easy and Washington drew the wrong lesson. If the Guatemalan people could be programmed into accepting an externally selected dictator perhaps they could also be controlled long-term?

So it was with full U.S. support that Castillo Armas assumed power — winning an election in which he was the only candidate and all political parties were banned.

Castillo Armas’s rule began with the arrest of thousands of opposition leaders, branded “communist” and placed in specially built detention centres. He acted in line with U.S. priorities, reversing the land reforms of his predecessor so that the American United Fruit Company regained control of the bananas — much to the satisfaction of the Dulles Brothers — men who knew United Fruit rather well. This was a blow to rural Guatemalans, but changes to electoral rules meant they were silenced. Peasants who refused to leave the land when told were simply arrested. At the same time, lists were compiled of suspected communists, leading to further arrests, dismissals, and a climate of fear. The U.S. provided the regime with financial assistance, advice, and guidance.

But people are not programmable. The policies imposed by Washington via Castillo Armas did not settle Guatemala; they fractured it. Legitimacy was manufactured, dissent suppressed, and stability continually propped up from abroad.

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When Control Becomes Chaos

Washington’s assumption that they could control Guatemala collapsed on contact with reality. The officers and mercenaries who had helped put Castillo Armas in power proved unequal to the task of running a country — and thoroughly corrupt. As Castillo Armas silenced the press and crushed unions, the economy showed little sign of stabilising, despite the incoming flow of dollars.

It was a regime built on fear and fantasy, and it began to devour itself. Every purge, every “communist plot,” every midnight arrest revealed a government terrified of its own shadow.

The Puppet String Snaps

In July 1957, Castillo Armas was shot dead by one of his own guards. A regime built on paranoia had finally turned the gun inward. It wasn’t so much an assassination as an implosion — the system had lost its ability to distinguish friend from foe.

He was followed by successive iterations of non-democratic rule, while the disenfranchised rural population became more organised and violent in its resistance. The consequence was thirty-six years of civil war. Between 1960 and 1996, the country saw massacres, disappearances, and a genocidal campaign against indigenous Mayan communities. More than 200,000 civilians were killed.

In 1999, the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification found that ninety-three percent of the atrocities were committed by Guatemala’s U.S.-backed military. These murderous decades were the long echo of 1954 — fear turned into a system.

The Illusion of Control

Castillo Armas’s brief rule exposed Washington’s delusion — the belief that artifical controls, once installed, could endure. America’s chosen dictator died in his palace, shot by one of his own men. Yet the paranoid arrogance that created him persisted — assimilated and lurking within the operating model of the West.

The empire’s enemy was never really communism. It was reality itself.

5 minute film telling the story of the Guatemalan coup of 1954:

In the spring of 1954, a former actor, playwright and prisoner of war sat down at a typewriter in Honduras and began manufacturing a country’s defeat. His name was David Atlee Phillips. He worked for the CIA. And the war he was about to conjure from words alone would bring down a democratically elected government without a single decisive battle being fought.

Their secret weapon was not soldiers but stories.

We are all, at some level, confirmation bias machines. Each piece of information we absorb shapes how we select and interpret the next — and the next, and the next. In an age of social media and information flood, we feel this acutely: the struggle to distinguish signal from noise, truth from fabrication, news from theatre. But this vulnerability is not new, and it has been understood and exploited for a very long time. In Guatemala in 1954, the CIA ran the first modern experiment in manufactured reality — and it worked with devastating precision.

A corporate grievance over Guatemala’s bananas had been brought to the attention of the Dulles brothers, each with close professional ties to the United Fruit Company — John Foster as its longtime lawyer, Allen as a board member. The brothers, as heads of both the State Department and the CIA, reframed the situation as a communist crisis. President Eisenhower’s administration was persuaded, and authorised a covert operation to remove the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz.

Operation PBSuccess

The coup’s codename was PBSuccess — “PB” being the CIA’s cryptonym for Guatemala. Under CIA Director Allen Dulles, with Frank Wisner and Tracy Barnes directing fieldwork, a small clandestine crew was assembled. Their weapons were not guns but narratives — and the man they needed was not a soldier but a storyteller.

The Gentleman-Spy

Front and centre stood David Atlee Phillips: former bomber-crewman, actor, playwright, and editor of The South Pacific Mail in Chile. Fluent in Spanish and an instinctive narrator, he understood something that military planners often miss — that people do not respond to reality, but to their perception of reality. Change the perception, and you change everything else.

In 1954 he scripted and voiced La Voz de la Liberación — a fake rebel radio network broadcasting from Honduras. Each bulletin announced imaginary victories, phantom defections, and the imminent fall of Guatemala City. Phillips created an entire war from words. He was a gentleman-spy whose typewriter was more lethal than a pistol.

Beyond radio theatrics, CIA operators sent counterfeit military communications on frequencies they knew Guatemalan officers monitored — dispatch after dispatch describing units deserting or switching sides. CIA-friendly journalists printed stories that the country’s well-equipped 7,000-man army faced a vastly larger force of invading rebels. In reality, America’s chosen proxy, Carlos Castillo Armas, commanded only 600 lightly armed men — a militia that would have been crushed in open battle. But the Guatemalan officers didn’t know that. They knew only what they were hearing. And what they were hearing was the sound of a war they were already losing.

Theatre of War

To complete the illusion of apocalypse, a handful of borrowed aircraft of World War II vintage lumbered over Guatemala City dropping a scattering of antiquated bombs. Two or three civilians were killed, yet the psychological effect was immense. CIA-friendly reporters amplified the explosions into a narrative of devastation. Rumours swirled that U.S. Marines were poised to land if Árbenz didn’t surrender.

Each new story confirmed the last. Each report made the next more believable. The Guatemalan army — absorbing broadcast after broadcast, intercept after intercept — became convinced that resistance was hopeless and capitulated. Castillo Armas flew in and took control. The coup wasn’t won on the battlefield. It was won inside people’s heads.

Fallout and Afterlives

What followed was brutal: decades of dictatorship, civil war, and hidden graves. Washington’s “success” planted the seeds of a catastrophe that would cost countless lives. PBSuccess wasn’t just a coup d’état — it was a media simulation of war.

The information flood we navigate today — social media, rolling news, algorithmic echo chambers — is in many ways a vast, anarchic version of what Phillips built in Honduras with a transmitter and a typewriter. The technology has changed. The vulnerability it exploits has not. We are still confirmation bias machines. We still believe what we are primed to believe. And there are still people who know it and use it.

Once Guatemalans stopped believing in their own sovereignty, they lost it. A question always worth asking is: what are we being primed to believe right now?

Postscript

Years later, some of the characters from this story would reappear in other dark corners of American history.

During the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations, CIA-sponsored Cuban exile Antonio Veciana testified that he had seen Lee Harvey Oswald — the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy — in conversation with his CIA handler — a man he knew as “Maurice Bishop”, He saw this in Dallas in September 1963, two months before the assassination.

The committee’s seasoned investigator, Gaeton Fonzi, became convinced — though could not prove it — that “Maurice Bishop” was an alias for Phillips himself. Later, on the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination, Veciana would confirm in a letter to Fonzi’s widow, that yes, Bishop and Philips were one and the same.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

In 1954, the United States overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala. The official reason was communism. The real reason was bananas.

President Jacobo Arbenz had made a simple promise to his country’s poor: land reform. He kept it. In doing so, he made an enemy of the United Fruit Company — and through them, of two of the most powerful men in Washington.

The Dulles brothers didn’t send an army. They sent a radio station, a handful of planes, and a suitcase of cash. It was enough.

What followed — for Guatemala — was seventy thousand dead, three decades of civil war, and the longest armed conflict in Latin American history.

What followed — for Washington — was a template. The same playbook to be used again and again. And again.

Guatemala 1954 is an essential piece of the puzzle. The below film provides a five minute overview:

In the summer of 1953, two American conflicts ended - but only one in the way that Washington had hoped.

The Korean War took three years and millions of lives, including those of 36,515 American soldiers. At the end there was no victor, just a frozen battlefield and a country partitioned into North and South - two alienated halves, condemned to mirror each other’s fear forever. What a waste of blood and treasure.

At the same time, another conflict was unfolding in Iran. To the average American it was invisible. It lasted just a few weeks and was waged by the CIA with rumours, bribes, and hired mobs creating chaos in the streets of Tehran. Success came swiftly. The government fell and Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was put on trial. His American‑backed accusers demanded his execution.

For President Eisenhower and his advisers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles, the contrast could not have been starker: failure in Korea at a staggering cost; success in Iran for small change.

Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the CIA officer who ran the coup, later wrote that he had been authorised to spend one million dollars - but had used far less. The Korean War, by contrast, cost about thirty billion dollars - that translates to around three hundred million per day in today’s dollars - for three years.

You can imagine the cogs turning in the brains of the Washington elite. Korea was war in the old style - warships, bombers, and more than a million American troops. Iran was led by a handful of men who needed only their guile and a suitcase full of cash. No American deaths. No parades of coffins. No questions asked. And no questions asked meant no story told — except the one Washington chose to tell.

Almost by accident, America had discovered how nations could be subdued cheaply and quietly - without the moral and political liabilities that came with vast expenditure and endless casualty lists. Big wars produced scrutiny; cheap coups did not.

For Washington insiders, the revelation was intoxicating. Here was a new kind of warfare that meant no battlefields, no American body bags, and—most importantly - no accountability.

It was the political equivalent of splitting the atom: power, without accountability.

For decades, the American people would be distracted by entertainment and inspiring stories of “freedom and democracy”. Meanwhile America’s rulers could shape the world in their own image - and on the cheap. That was the revelation of 1953.

The discovery changed not only Iran, but the American imagination itself. Less than a year later, in a small Central American country of Guatemala, similar tactics would be used again - carefully refined and improved.

And from that point forward, America no longer needed wars to conquer. It only needed to tell stories.

Four minute account of the 1953 Coup in Iran: