In Korea (where we ran the operation alone), restoring the traditional order meant killing about 100,000 people just in the late 1940s, before the Korean War began. In Greece, it meant destroying the peasant and worker base of the anti-Nazi resistance and restoring Nazi collaborators to power. When British and then American troops moved into southern Italy, they simply reinstated the fascist order-the industrialists. But the big problem came when the troops got to the north, which the Italian resistance had already liberated. The place was functioning- industry was running. We had to dismantle all of that and restore the old order.
Our big criticism of the resistance was that they were displacing the old owners in favor of workers' and community control. Britain and the US called this "arbitrary replacement" of the legitimate owners. The resistance was also giving jobs to more people than were strictly needed for the greatest economic efficiency (that is, for maximum profit-making). We called this "hiring excess workers."
In other words, the resistance was trying to democratize the workplace and to take care of the population. That was understandable, since many Italians were starving. But starving people were their problem-our problem was to eliminate the hiring of excess workers and the arbitrary dismissal of owners, which we did.
Next we worked on destroying the democratic process. The left was obviously going to win the elections; it had a lot of prestige from the resistance, and the traditional conservative order had been discredited. The US wouldn't tolerate that. At its first meeting, in 1947, the National Security Council decided to withhold food and use other sorts of pressure to undermine the election.
But what if the communists still won? In its first report, NSC 1, the council made plans for that contingency: the US would declare a national emergency, put the Sixth Fleet on alert in the Mediterranean and support paramilitary activities to overthrow the Italian government.
That's a pattern that's been relived over and over. If you look at France and Germany and Japan, you get pretty much the same story.
Nicaragua is another case. You strangle them, you starve them, and then you have an election and everybody talks about how wonderful democracy is.
The person who opened up this topic (as he did many others) was Gabriel Kolko, in his classic book Politics of War in 1968. It was mostly ignored, but it's a terrific piece of work. A lot of the documents weren't around then, but his picture turns out to be quite accurate.
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