“School of Americas” is the True Face of Western Civilization

Assassinated Ecuadorean presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was honored on Friday (11 August 2023) at a funeral mass and public memorial in Quito. Villavicencio, a former lawmaker and crusading anti-corruption journalist, was gunned down as he left a campaign event on Wednesday evening, less than two weeks before the election. As a labor organizer and then a journalist, Villavicencio had made many enemies and had long been exposed to threats due to his scathing and meticulously documented corruption accusations targeting some of the biggest names in Ecuador’s political and financial establishment. “He was aware that the threats against him were real,” Villavicencio’s wife Veronica Sarauz told Colombia’s Caracol Radio. “We know they are the material authors," she said of the six charged men. “But we need to know who the intellectual authors are. Who hired them?” (Reuters)

This murder is only another episode in the long tragic history of the Latin Americas. Numerous books have been written about Latin America’s dirty wars. Political murders, such as that of Villavicencio’s, have been the go-to method for political engineering within democracies as well as dictatorships. The US created and supported an elite section, from the military, politicians, judges and businessmen, in these societies throughout the region. It worked with them to stop communism throughout Central and South Americas. The US built a multi-country approach for this purpose. “Operation Condor” is an example of such cross-national cooperation for anti-communism drives. The United States' involvement in Latin America’s dirty wars has been well-documented.

Ronald Reagan supported the plot against socialist governments in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. The Reagan administration supported the Contras in Nicaragua who are responsible for killing thousands of civilians. The Former Secretary of State Kissinger is on-record in supporting Chilean and Argentinean generals in their fight against communism. Even US corporations such as Coca-Cola, Del Monte, and Ford worked with the CIA in advocating for more capitalist-friendly governments in Latin America.

To fight communism in the Latin Americas, their military elite was trained in torture and unconventional warfare at American bases, first in Panama, and then on US soil itself. These facilities operated under different names, where Schools of Americas [SOA] earned the most notoriety. These unconventional warfare methods included, but were not limited to, forced disappearances and custodial killing. The Pinochet regime in Argentina alone is blamed for killing 30,000 political activists by flying them over the Atlantic in helicopters and throwing them overboard. The methods also included attacks on civilian infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and churches to produce a perception of a failed state. This was in addition to target killing, armed militias and abduction for ransom.

These ruthless techniques, polished here, were replicated all across the globe, wherever communism was to be resisted and in more recent times, to fight Islam. Indonesia, Greece and Ethiopia are just a few countries where similar tactics were implemented. Similarities can be drawn between the War on Terror events and activities in the Afghanistan-Pakistan (Af-Pak) region and the greater Middle East, in the decades after September 11 incident. The activities of Blackwater Corp and Xi Corp were right out of the SOA playbook.

This is the true face of liberal Western values. Although the Western civilizational narrative is built on sanctifying freedoms, such as the freedom of opinion, time has proven that whenever the Western hegemony has been threatened, it will not hesitate to sacrifice the creedal idea of freedom of expression. The approximately fifty years of ideological war between the capitalist West and the socialist East has demonstrated again and again how the US and its allies used every dirty trick to rob people of their choice. Every Third World country’s politics is a testament to it. To earn a higher moral ground, after fifty years of operations, the US politicians and operatives started voicing concern on the role of SOA graduates, appearing as champions of so-called human rights, conveniently, after the demise of the ideological nemesis, the USSR.

The West takes pride in the claim that their civilization is built on a value system and set of creeds, that are so-called rational, if not outright scientific. Hence, it unilaterally declares them universal. On the contrary, it is only a view built on maximizing material benefit for Western nations and sensual pleasures for the individual. The absence of the Khilafah State, a state that espouses Islam as its ideology, allowed the West to falsely profess the superiority of reason over revelation. It has been the lack of guidance for humanity based on revelation, that produced the clash of the two man-made ideologies of Capitalism and Socialism. The world witnessed the utter failure of one of the products of human reason, socialism, and this result came after the loss of millions of souls to the tyrannical rules of socialist dictators.

Today humanity moves from one crisis to the other and the Western civilization is producing one mega problem after the other in every field of human interaction from economics, and politics to social issues. Where the world fears another economic catastrophe, after the 2008 credit crunch and the 2019 pandemic shutdowns, it is foreseeing the birth of another despot from the same liberal world order like the despots of the past, such as Hitler, Mussolini, Franko, McCarthy, Churchill and De Gaulle. Trump and Johnson are only the beginning here, as the worse is yet to come. On the social front, feminism started as a movement for equality for women but today stands defending men’s right to encroach upon women’s space by accepting men to be women. The movement for reproductive rights and the narcissistic approach to life have resulted in the complete destruction of family and family values.

The Khilafah, a state that takes laws extracted from revelation only, will rescue humanity from these man-made systems, and their self-centered approach. Rather than plunging a plethora of countries into anarchy, deprivation and tyranny, while amassing their looted wealth, the Khilafah state is obligated to treat all humanity with one revealed law. There will be no national security or national interest but the subjugation to what the Al-Mighty Allah has revealed. The Khilafah (Caliphate) on the Method of Prophethood will annex new lands to the Islamic State and implement Shariah law on all people organizing their affairs according to what was revealed by Allah (swt).

Allah (swt) says in the Noble Quran,

[وَأَنِ احكُم بَينَهُم بِما أَنزَلَ اللَّهُ وَلا تَتَّبِع أَهواءَهُم وَاحذَرهُم أَن يَفتِنوكَ عَن بَعضِ ما أَنزَلَ اللَّهُ إِلَيكَ فَإِن تَوَلَّوا فَاعلَم أَنَّما يُريدُ اللَّهُ أَن يُصيبَهُم بِبَعضِ ذُنوبِهِم وَإِنَّ كَثيرًا مِنَ النّاسِ لَفاسِقونَ]

“Judge between them by what Allah has sent down, and do not follow their desires. Beware of them lest they should beguile you from part of what Allah has sent down to you. But if they turn their backs [on you], then know that Allah desires to punish them for some of their sins, and indeed many of the people are transgressors.” [TMQ Surah Al-Ma’ida 5:49].

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Engineer Dr. Mohammad Akmal – Wilayah Pakistan