In this context there have been series of major upheavals: the overthrow by an unprecedented popular mobilisation of the dictatorship Shah, who played the role of local policeman for the imperialists; the upsurge of the revolution in Central America Caribbean, with the removal of Somoza through a popular insurrection; a new rise anti-imperialist mobilisations in Iran around the US embassy hostages, finding an echo in a number of "Islamic' countries.
The Soviet intervention Afghanistan underlines relative decline of the ability to intervene in a vital region. Carter couldn't simply barge in at will.
But all these blows to imperialism should not allow us to gnore an apparently paradox cal-aspect of this crisis: on the military level, the USA is still the world's major power. It has at its disposal the greatest and most terrifying means military destruction in history. Force But to make effective use of this military force, to be able to enter a new stage of tne arms race', to be able to strike directly at an advancing revolution, American imperialism first has to 'cure' its working people of their post-Vietnam 'shock'. This has been Carter's aim, since he won the presidency.
First of all, Carter launched his human rights' policy, with the intention of creating an ideological climate similar to encouraged by Kennedy until it crumbled under the blows of the Vietnamese revolution. As the radical American professor Noam Chomsky has it is striking that the "discovery" of the Gulag took place at the end of the Vietnamare war went midue sense. to distract attention away towards other atrocities'