Chinese state media chose Veterans Day to drop some anti-American propaganda, including posts by the People’s Daily celebrating Cuban Communist dictator Fidel Castro for …
Chinese state media chose Veterans Day to drop some anti-American propaganda, including posts by the People’s Daily celebrating Cuban Communist dictator Fidel Castro for outlasting American efforts to dislodge him and hyping the Vietnam-era Gulf of Tonkin incident as a “clear-cut example of U.S. escalation and warmongering toward other countries.” The People’s Daily celebrated Castro overthrowing “Cuba’s pro-American dictatorship” in 1959 and establishing a “revolutionary government,” a deeply offensive whitewash of a brutal regime noted for slaughtering dissidents and murdering those who tried to help refugees fleeing from Castro’s island paradise. The Chinese Communist paper focused on Operation Northwoods, a controversial plan devised in the early 1960s, although the People’s Daily tried to make it seem more recent by saying only that it was “exposed in 1997.” Operation Northwoods was, as the People’s Daily described it, a covert plan approved by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Kennedy administration to stage “false flag” attacks against U.S. civilians and military personnel, to create a pretext for military action against Cuba. The proposal was swiftly rejected by civilian leaders and kept under wraps for decades. In a final embarrassment for the Joint Chiefs, author James Bamford said in a 2006 interview the Operation Northwoods documents became public because someone forgot to destroy them as ordered in the Sixties, and public interest in papers from that era peaked after the 1992 Oliver Stone film JFK.
