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Most Americans have absolutely no idea how many governments our country has overthrown.
Americans grow up believing we're the good guys, that our government travels around the world fighting dictators, defending democracy and protecting other countries from the very things we claim to stand against. But once you start digging through the CIA files and declassified records, you realize the history we were taught didn't just leave out the ugly parts, it completely rewrote what happened. Because so many of the things we're taught to fear and condemn when other countries do them, overthrowing governments, interfering in elections, funding armed groups and forcing nations to bend to their interests, are things our own government has been doing around the world for decades.
And we’re not talking about a handful of isolated incidents.
The United States has overthrown or destabilized more than 80 foreign governments. And despite what we’ve been taught to believe, many of the governments we targeted weren’t dictatorships. They were democratically elected governments whose leaders became a problem for Washington when their policies threatened American corporate profits and interests.
The pattern is almost always the same: a country elects a leader who wants the country’s oil, land, minerals or industries to benefit the people who actually live there. And since America has spent decades subjugating other countries and exploiting their resources, Washington tends to have a pretty serious problem when that country refuses to play along.
So when a leader gets elected and decides to nationalize their own resources, cutting foreign interests out of the equation, the CIA steps in.
First, they start funding opposition groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Then they start planting stories in the media, bribing generals and arming rebels. And when that isn’t enough, they go after the economy and collapse that too.
Then comes the coup.
The leader is removed and, again and again, Washington ends up backing a military dictatorship willing to play along. The people living there are left to deal with what comes next: political repression, civil war, mass killing and, in most cases, decades of instability.
And somehow, after all of that, Americans are still told these wars and coups were about spreading democracy. They weren’t. They were about power, control and profit.
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REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
In Iran in 1953, Mohammad Mossadegh, who was democratically elected, came to power and did something the United States and Britain absolutely did not want him or any foreign leader to do: he nationalized Iran’s oil industry.
In other words, Iran wanted control over its own oil. Seems like a pretty reasonable thing to desire.
But not to the American or the British governments, so they overthrew him.
The CIA launched Operation Ajax, paid politicians, flooded the country with propaganda and helped orchestrate protests to bring Mossadegh down. Once he was gone, the Shah was put firmly back in power, where he would rule Iran as a military dictator for the next twenty-five years with the full backing of the United States.
The Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, became infamous for hunting down political opponents, journalists and dissidents, throwing them in prison and torturing them.
And want to know who helped train SAVAK?
The CIA.
Seriously, think about that the next time someone tells you Iran just “hates us for our freedom.”
Americans are brainwashed through the media and our “education” system to look at the Iranian Revolution as if Iranians just woke up one morning and decided they hated America. We helped overthrow their government after Iran tried to take control of its own oil. We backed the Shah for decades while his government imprisoned and tortured anyone who opposed his illegitimate rule, and our own intelligence agencies helped train the secret police carrying it out.
Then the Iranian Revolution happened in 1979, and suddenly that became the beginning of the story.
Americans saw Iranians burning American flags. We saw the hostage crisis. We heard crowds chanting “Death to America.” And the message was basically: Look at these crazy people who hate us.
But the media and our politicians conveniently left out the part that explained why Iranians were so angry with us in the first place.
We helped overthrow their government. We helped prop up the dictator who replaced it. And then, after decades of our government interfering in their country, we acted shocked when their anger finally turned toward the people responsible: the U.S. government.
And I truly wish Iran was the only story that ended this way, but it isn’t. The U.S. government has killed millions of people around the world through coups, wars and conflicts that most Americans know almost nothing about.
And if you’re reading this thinking, “How did I never learn any of this?” that’s exactly why I created the Forbidden Reading List.
But don’t take my word on any of this. Go down the rabbit hole yourself. Read the books they never assigned you in school, watch the documentaries that never made it into the mainstream, and dig through the declassified files where our own government documented what it was doing behind closed doors.
I put everything in one place so you don’t have to spend years trying to find it yourself. The entire list is free, and once you start reading this history, I promise you will never look at the world the same way again.
Start digging here:
Relevant reading:
If you’re tired of being told everything is fine while it clearly isn’t, you’re exactly why this publication exists.
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I keep my news, investigations, and analysis free and accessible to everyone. If you value my work, your support makes it possible for me to keep doing it. Please like, comment, share, and subscribe.
