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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, NOV 5–11, 2025  
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_ Kissinger Does His Best to Do His Worst (1970), Rubin
“Hurricane” Carter Exonerated (1985), Four Months of
Broad-Daylight Treason (1860), CIA Outlaws in Charge (2005), United
Fruit Plays for Keeps (1950), 500 Years Too Many for Angola (1975) _

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_KISSINGER DOES HIS BEST TO DO HIS WORST_

NOVEMBER 5 IS THE 55TH ANNIVERSARY of a fateful meeting between
then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and President Nixon,
during which Kissinger successfully lobbied Nixon to agree with
Kissinger’s extreme hostility to Salvador Allende and his brand-new
progressive Chilean government.

Kissinger wanted the U.S. to “oppose Allende as strongly as we
can,” instead of following the State Department’s plan to
establish a modus vivendi with Allende. 

There was no question, as Kissinger acknowledged, that Allende had
been elected in a free and fair election and his claim to power was
legitimate, which was why the State Department was in favor of
treating the Allende government coldly but correctly and not
attempting to subvert it.

Kissinger convinced Nixon that because Chile was in the U.S. “sphere
of influence,” the U.S. had the right to use all possible covert
methods to get rid of the anti-imperialist Allende. Later that day,
when the State Department and Kissinger debated the question at a
National Security Council meeting, Nixon settled the matter by taking
Kissinger’s side. Less than three years later Allende was overthrown
by a bloody coup that had the full, but covert, support of the U.S.
[link removed]

   

 

_RUBIN “HURRICANE” CARTER EXONERATED_

NOVEMBER 7 IS THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY of the federal court ruling that
freed Rubin (“Hurricane”) Carter, who had been framed for a murder
he did not commit and imprisoned for more than 18 years.

When Carter was arrested in 1966 he was  a successful middleweight
boxer, never a champion but widely considered to be a contender. 

Each of Carter’s two murder trials (the second occurred because the
first verdict had been thrown out) was full of contradictory and
confusing testimony, none of which clearly indicated Carter’s guilt
or even his presence at the crime scene, but both ended in his
conviction. 

Eighteen years after his arrest, a federal court judge ruled that
“The extensive record clearly demonstrates that petitioners’
convictions were predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than
reason, and concealment rather than disclosure.”

After his release, Carter devoted the rest of his life to freeing the
wrongly convicted from prison. He wrote two autobiographies, was the
inspiration for a Bob Dylan hit (“Hurricane”) and was the subject
of a movie, “The Hurricane” in which he was played by Denzel
Washington. He became a symbol of racial injustice and the penal
system.

Carter founded a nonprofit organization, Innocence International, to
work to free prisoners it considered wrongly convicted. To learn more
about Rubin Carter’s life, visit the Zinn Education Project’s 
[link removed]

 

 

_FOUR MONTHS OF BROAD-DAYLIGHT TREASON_

NOVEMBER 8 IS THE 165TH ANNIVERSARY of the day when enough of the
votes had been counted so the people of the United States knew that
Abraham Lincoln had won the bitterly fought presidential election that
had been held two days earlier. It was also the first day of a
17-week-long episode of what might be called “daylight treason,” a
long series of sinister acts designed to to prevent the success of
Lincoln’s anti-secession government, which had to wait nearly four
months before it could take office.

The main culprits in the treasonous plot were the President of the
United States, James Buchanan, and his cabinet, all of whom had been
fiercely opposed to candidate Lincoln and who remained steadfast in
their antagonism to President-elect Lincoln and the Republican Party,
which might have won an election but who would not be in power for
nearly one-third of a year.

As Ulysses S. Grant, who would become a hero of the Civil War and then
President of the United States, recalled in the memoir that he
published in 1885, “The winter of 1860-1 will be remembered by
middle-aged people of to-day as one of great excitement. South
Carolina promptly seceded after the result of the Presidential
election was known . . .  Meanwhile the Administration of President
Buchanan looked helplessly on and proclaimed that the government had
no power to save its own life.”

Grant’s memoir continues that Buchanan and his cabinet “scattered
the army so that much of it could be captured when hostilities should
commence [as they did in April 1861], and distributed the cannon and
small arms from Northern arsenals throughout the South so as to be on
hand _WHEN TREASON WANTED THEM_. [Emphasis added by xxxxxx] The
navy was scattered in like manner. The President did not prevent his
cabinet preparing for war upon their government, either by destroying
its resources or storing them in the South until a de facto government
was established with Jefferson Davis as its President, and Montgomery,
Alabama, as the Capital.”

Grant’s accurate recollection of one of the roughest political
periods in U.S. history might be regarded today as a quaint historical
footnote. But it also might augur events of the not-too-distant
future.

For the source of the Grant
quotation: [link removed] Chapter XVII

 

 

_CIA OUTLAWS IN CHARGE_

NOVEMBER 9 IS THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY of the CIA’s 2005 decision to
flout the law and feloniously destroy 92 videotapes it had made of
hundreds of hours of CIA interrogations, some of which involved
torture, including waterboarding.

When the tapes had been created in 2002, their existence had been a
major bone of contention within the CIA, because they were thought to
include incontrovertible evidence that CIA agents or CIA contractors
had committed very serious war crimes. When they were not destroyed
and the White House became aware of their existence, the White House
ordered that they not be destroyed without White House instructions.
If the tapes were evidence of a crime, then their destruction might
also be a crime.

The debate over the fate of the tapes began to come to a head on Nov.
4, 2005, when the Washington Post first reported the existence of
secret CIA interrogation sites in Asia and in Eastern Europe. As
reports of the tapes’ existence multiplied, on Nov. 8 the CIA chief
of operations ordered that they be destroyed, which took place the
next day.

No one was ever disciplined or charged with a crime concerning either
the tapes’ creation or their destruction. One person who was known
to have been directly involved in ordering their destruction, Gina
Haspel, was promoted to become the seventh director of the CIA in
2018. [link removed]

 

 

_UNITED FRUIT PLAYS FOR KEEPS_

NOVEMBER 10 IS THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY of the election that resulted in
Jacobo Arbenz taking office as the President Guatemala. Almost all
observers declared the 1950 election had been conducted fairly, and
that the outcome was not unexpected, because Arbenz, who was a colonel
in the Guatemalan Army, was the favorite of the popular outgoing
president, who had a solid history as a supporter of social and
political reform.

Before Arbenz took office in March 1951, no one could be sure what
kind of president he would be, because he was a soldier who had never
before been elected to anything. He surprised large numbers of people
by taking up the cause of social and political reform with
unanticipated enthusiasm. With the support of the Guatemalan
legislature, Arbenz pushed through a radical agrarian-reform law that
expropriated hundreds of thousands of acres of land owned by the
Boston-based United Fruit Company. 

The expropriated land was singled out because the United Fruit Company
was holding it unused, in order to limit the size of the banana crop
and keep prices up. The expropriated acreage was enough to provide
farmsteads to more than a half-million landless Guatemalan peasants,
nearly one-sixth of the country’s population.

Arbenz’s unwillingness to give into the threats of United Fruit was
a surprise to almost everyone, but he insisted that Guatemala was a
democracy and the government would pursue a policy to benefit the
masses and not the tiny class of landowners, many of whom were not
even Guatemalan citizens. 

His staunchness was unacceptable to both the landowners and the U.S.
State Department, which was more interested in the demands of Boston
investors than it was in the needs of Guatemala’s population.
Accordingly, in June 1954 a force of 480 men, trained, funded and
armed by the CIA, invaded Guatemala and began a 10-day battle that
ended in the overthrow of Arbenz and the country's entire
democratically elected government. The expropriated land was returned
to United Fruit, and much of it remains in corporate hands to this
day. [link removed] 

 

 

_500 YEARS TOO MANY FOR ANGOLA_

NOVEMBER 11 IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY of the establishment of an
independent Angolan government in 1975, which brought an end to almost
500 years of Portuguese colonial exploitation of what is now the
seventh-largest African country. 

The Angolan defeat of the Portuguese Army required more than 13 years
of fighting, which was then followed by a civil war that continued for
nearly a quarter of a
century. [link removed].

For more People's History,
visithttps://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/

* Salvador Allende
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* Henry Kissinger
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* exonerations
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* Ulysses S. Grant
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* Torture Crimes
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* United Fruit
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* Angola
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