The CIA once again attempted to recruit at Loyola University New Orleans and was met with fierce resistance from the Liberate and Unite New Orleans Chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (LUNO-SDS). LUNO-SDS member and The Daily Salad contributor, F. J. Shields gave a rousing speech against the CIA and in support of the nations that have long faced CIA repression.
Real democracy, like what we see here today, is the sworn enemy of the CIA. Democracy is the antithesis of all that the CIA stands for. Since its inception, this cesspit of an agency has remained hellbent on silencing the voice of the people; on killing hope, replacing it with fascistic destruction, and blaming those subjected to this destruction for tearing their countries apart-blaming those hopefuls for leaving their once burgeoning democracies in search of a better life.
Just three years after the democratic election of Salvador Allende in Chile, the CIA backed a coup led by the bloodthirsty Pinochet, who during his administration, executed over 1200 Chileans and tortured many tens of thousands more. Or 20 years earlier, when the CIA aided in the overthrowing of Iran’s progressive government under Mosaddegh, and replaced it with a government that acted purely in the interests of the west and which ignored its people. All because Mosaddegh dared to nationalize Iran’s oil industry.
The CIA is not simply a perpetrator and supporter of senseless evils towards those beyond our borders. They are terrorists to the very people they claim to work in service of. Let us not forget the horrors of MKUltra, when the CIA terrorized unwitting American citizens–among many reasons, to see if LSD could be used as a truth serum for interrogations. These agents abused their power and abused innocent civilians. The CIA also aided in and allowed for the widespread poisoning of Americans through the crack-cocaine epidemic in the 1980s.
And skipping ahead to the 21st century, when it was revealed that the CIA and other government agencies like the NSA, were spying not just on the American people, but on citizens of allied countries like Germany, France, and Mexico. In today’s technological world, the CIA has untold power over the basic rights of everyday people, and they have been consistently violating these rights all to gain more and more intelligence. Unscrupulous does not begin to describe the practices of this heinous agency. They are a cancer, that has spread nothing but corruption and degradation of moral principles–and have no place in a government supposedly, of, by, and for the people.
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| Student Protestors at Tulane University Rally Against the CIA on Campus | Src: Fight Back! News |
They are a blight on this country, on this hemisphere, and on the world at large. They symbolize an inherent hypocrisy that infects this countries values, stretching all the way back to President Monroe. The notion that so long as we have the resources and the strong-arm, we can seek to control and hold power over who and what we please, simply because it is our right. So long as there are people in this country who truly believe in democracy and who truly believe in the rule of law, actors like the CIA have no place here. Not on our campus, not in New Orleans, and nowhere else on this planet.
