The 1980s... a brief thought...

During the 1980s, the United States gave 4 billion (that's "b", "billion") dollars in military and other aid to the brutal and repressive government of El Salvador to fight the "spread of communism". An amount tertiary only to the amounts given to Egypt and Israel by the US during the same period. At the height of the Cold War, "800 people a month were being murdered by the Salvadoran military and its affiliated death squads" (Bourgois, Philippe. ‘The Continuum of Violence in War and Peace: Post-Cold War Lessons from El Salvador’. Violence in War and Peace. Ed. Philippe Bourgois and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 425–434. Print.). I remember at the time, wearing "US Out Of El Salvador" buttons... sometimes replaced with the tongue-in-cheek "US Out Of North America" buttons that were inspired by the former when that phase of the El Salvadoran crisis was over (it ended, unsurprisingly, when the US stopped propping up the government there). It isn't much of a stretch — and which is the intent of this post — to draw a parallel between the "fight against Soviet communism" phase of history and the "fight against Islamist terrorism" phase that we are still in the middle of (just follow the money).

And yes, this comes out of the readings for the class in Gendered Violence I'm taking this term. Unlike my classmates, I did live through the 1980s as a young adult (and was politically active during it) and thus have a somewhat more than academic understanding of what was going on in the world at the time. Again, the parallels are easy to see for someone who has lived through a similar cycle of Western imperialist policies (my label here is not confined to the US here, fyi, Canada's government is currently more interested in supporting that imperialist project, although as a lapdog without a lap, than is the US at the moment I think).