There are four key books that together have influenced and largely framed much of my discussions in this and recent issues of The Republic. They are Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, by Elizabeth A Cobbs; All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer; The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, by Frances Stonor Saunders; and Confessions of an Economic Hitman, by John Perkins. There are many others, of course, but these stand out for how, over time, they have continued to provide an unwavering structure through which so much else today can be understood, and I recommend them.

Thy Will be Done is astonishing for its breadth. It tells the whole story of the oil age and how oil’s most influential family, the Rockefellers, deployed the power of the American government, the military, NGOs, and missionary groups—not all of them witting partners, but certainly all effective—to find, seize, and exploit oil resources wherever they could be found in South America. The basic pattern the Rockefellers established early last century, explains Cobbs, was to first deploy government-paid engineers to poke around unexplored land looking for possible sites where oil might be found underground. Then, anthropologists would be deployed to those areas to map out the different groups of people that could be found living where the drilling and pipeline installations were to be taking place. After that, Christian evangelical missionaries would be deployed to attempt to Christianize those groups so that they would be less inclined to protect their inheritance in this world in exchange for promises of a greater inheritance in the next. When exploration drilling teams from Standard Oil arrived to begin punching holes in the ground and tearing out the forests and destroying the rivers, some local people were still inclined to resist. That was when Rockefeller was able to call in various levels of US military deployments.

Missionaries were just doing good work, they thought

The anthropologists did not necessarily know where their grant money came from, they only knew that the money was to finance work in certain specified areas. No problem: few asked questions. Same with the missionary groups, usually starved for cash. When money and airplanes arrived by anonymous donation to this or that missionary group to speed their godly work, they naturally assumed the grateful assistance was from a rich person with a conscience. They didn’t ask why they got support while brother missionaries doing the same work only a few villages away did not. The book reveals the history of missionary evangelism as much as it does the history of oil, and makes the case, astonishing on first hearing it, that they are very much the same history.

All The Shah’s Men recounts in kaleidoscopic detail the complete plan in all its intricate parts to surgically remove the democratically elected government of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. This plan was largely concocted by Kermit Roosevelt, nephew to the first President Roosevelt, and cousin to the second, and executed by Norman Schwarzkopf—the father of (Stormin’) Norman Schwarzkopf Jr, who was in charge of the US military assault decades later on Iraq in 1991.

Look closely at the columnists in your newspapers

The chief value in this book is the revelation of memos sent between CIA operatives in Tehran and CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia, in which the operatives—ensconced as newspaper columnists in Tehran daily newspapers, as commentators on Tehran radio stations or TV news reporters, or as key figures in arts and cultural institutions through-out the country—systematically attacked and broke down public confidence in the democratic government, all to ready the public for quick acceptance of a staged Iranian military coup—in truth, a US coup, since the ranks of the Iranian military had been equally penetrated by American operatives.

From the point of view of the public in Tehran, reading the newspapers and listening to TV and radio, what was unfolding was an extraordinary but quite believable series of blunders and scandals by the government, increasingly laughed at by cartoonists in the papers and ridiculed by columnists. False stories of bombings and kidnappings came next, followed by more media ridicule of the government’s inability to stop the disorder. The two-year plan invented by Kermit Roosevelt then called for signs of military revolt—the last straw in a proud and authority-respecting people. When the string was pulled, the people welcomed the coup that brought the Shah back. The humiliating story is well known in Iran. The brutality of the Shah over the next 26 years is legendary in the annals of torture and repression, and in obscene levels of private theft of public wealth, and neither the 1979 revolution, nor events today can be understood at all without reference to this event. The successful 1953 coup in Iran, the first by the CIA, became the model for all attempted and successful foreign coups by the CIA ever since.

Bringing the war home

The Cultural Cold War, in many ways, tells the same story as both All the Shah’s Men and Thy Will Be Done—only this time, the target audience is Western Europe and, later, Americans themselves. Where the first two books tell how anthropologists, missionaries, and media types were (often unwittingly) recruited into a US-corporate-military scheme to steal resources, The Cultural Cold War tells how Western European and American painters, dancers, authors, cultural and literary magazine publishers, etc, were manipulated into extolling the virtues of capitalistic exploitation and denouncing the vices of democratic socialism, then in vogue.

An example: the strong and bold styles of socialist realism painting gained influence over a new generation of post-World War II younger painters. To counteract that influence, the CIA seized on an unknown painter by the name of Jackson Pollock who was producing abstract impressionistic work by splattering paint almost randomly on huge canvasses. Where socialist realism had something of substance to say to viewers, abstract impressionism very much did not. The worried elite preferred public art that did not have anything to say. The CIA began showering Pollock and other abstract impressionistic artists with grants, shows, and reviews—much of the CIA largesse having been channelled through the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and other seemingly benign philanthropic organizations. Other artists, seeing Pollock get so much attention, began to imitate him, especially when socialist realism painters found themselves shut out of shows and grants (by CIA orders exercised through the same philanthropic organizations). The overall idea—well executed and successful—was to buy off the so-called “soft left” and divide them from the “hard left,” the source of any real threat to the established order, and leave that threat shut out and left to wither from lack of any support and recognition.

How it’s done today

Finally, Confessions of an Economic Hitman updates the story to the mechanisms used today. Perkins, who worked in NGOs ostensibly interested in spreading aid and loans to third world countries, shows how the real plan was to get third world governments so hooked on aid and sunk with loans—often for useless highways, airports and bridges—that their sovereignty was drained. Then, being threatened with economic destruction, the hapless governments were offered bail-outs by the IMF and World Bank, so long as they agreed to certain conditions. Those conditions were invariably geared toward allowing American and European resource-extraction companies to come and take the public wealth under the feet of the third world populations, and often sell back to them goods produced with their own resources. Government types savvy to the methods of those who, like Perkins, arrived at the embassies offering aid and loans, found instead heavier hitters offering stiffer contracts. Continued resistance met with CIA attention and other forms of hostile meddling. Continued resistance was met with military deployments, and ultimately, bombings and, as we so much of now, violent regime change.

Organized crime

These four books tell the same story: Western corporate powers first used missionaries, then artists, then journalists, then economic advisors, then the US military, all to achieve the same thing: to steal by one way or another the wealth belonging to usually impoverished third world people and transfer it to the pockets of elites who own the global corporations. The common and tragic thread running through all the stories is that the public, and even the specialists used in every step, were usually completely unaware of how they were being led and how they were being used.

It’s enough to make someone want to start a newspaper.