12-08-2019, 10:45 PM
(This post was last modified: 15-08-2019, 04:07 PM by David Andrews.)
Anthony, I'm reading the Google Books edit of Revolutionaries for the Right - it's all I can afford right now. It's premature to judge a book with absent chapters; the main chapters on Central America in the 1980s, for instance, are missing. However, I notice a seeming complete innocence of the financing anti-Communism through drug dealing. Is the entire book devoid of this aspect? Not even the Rockefeller family could have underwritten the Contra War without drug trafficking. (And why would they?)
Some figures well ensconced in the drug trade - Jiang Jieshi in China and Taiwan, and a certain US general well known to the Contra effort - are never mentioned apart from their relations with straight-up financial backers and zealotry leagues. Didn't any of the latter drop their funding and associations with the Contras when the Oliver North drug scandal surfaced? Did any groups support drug financing?
I understand that the book is an academic study of anti-Communist organizations in the west, but these covert wars, and Vietnam, weren't fought in a vacuum free of crime. It seems that the nexus of dirty money and clean money is inseparable from this story. Do the BCCI, Nugan-Hand Bank, and other corrupt financial institutions even make appearances? Otherwise, this is less a history than a phenomenology.
Some figures well ensconced in the drug trade - Jiang Jieshi in China and Taiwan, and a certain US general well known to the Contra effort - are never mentioned apart from their relations with straight-up financial backers and zealotry leagues. Didn't any of the latter drop their funding and associations with the Contras when the Oliver North drug scandal surfaced? Did any groups support drug financing?
I understand that the book is an academic study of anti-Communist organizations in the west, but these covert wars, and Vietnam, weren't fought in a vacuum free of crime. It seems that the nexus of dirty money and clean money is inseparable from this story. Do the BCCI, Nugan-Hand Bank, and other corrupt financial institutions even make appearances? Otherwise, this is less a history than a phenomenology.