Retro Review: Newsletter #1 - 03/18/2023
Exploring History's Relevance in Today's Headlines
Update: With the currently low number of paid subscriptions, I thought I’d republish this first newsletter as free so you can see what you’d be getting if you upgraded to a paid subscription! Retro Review will be a paid subscriber only content from now on however!
Welcome to the very first edition of Retro Review! If you are reading this, it means you are a paid subscriber to the Bitchy History substack and your support means the absolute world to me!
(No, really, like…history doesn’t pay well as a career path, honestly. You guys are keeping the bills paid, for real, thank you.)
Because this is the first edition, I’ll be covering a few news articles that are less “recent” (meaning not in the last two weeks) just because they’ve been frustrating the hell out of me.
The first appeared in a tiktok I made a few weeks ago, and it is this absolute garbage fire of an article from Foreign Affairs.
The United States’ Missed Opportunity in Latin America
Now, this isn’t strictly speaking a “news” event. It’s a policy article, but it really highlights what I want to do with this newsletter; because it utterly fails to provide any of the relevant historical context for the subject it covers.
That said, my outrage over this article came full circle on March 6th at a State Department Press Briefing when this sentence was uttered by State’s spokesperson, Matthew Miller.
But just to be clear, the United States does not support violent or undemocratic changes in government in Africa or elsewhere.
This led to one member of the press asking, in disbelief:
QUESTION: Wait a second. The United States does not support violence or undemocratic changes to government in Africa or elsewhere?
MR MILLER: We do not.
QUESTION: Come on…wanna a list?
Mr. Miller, unfortunately, did not want a list.
For those of you confused, let’s add some historical context that Mr. Miller and Shannon K. O’Neil over at Foreign Affairs seems to have conveniently forgot.
Iran (1953): In Operation Ajax, the CIA orchestrated a coup to overthrow Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, reinstating the Shah of Iran. This was primarily due to Mossadegh's nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, which threatened Western oil interests.
Guatemala (1954): The U.S. backed a coup to remove President Jacobo Árbenz, who had implemented land reforms that affected U.S. business interests, notably the United Fruit Company. The CIA-supported operation led to a prolonged period of political instability in Guatemala.
Congo (1960): The U.S. played a role in the destabilization and eventual assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Congo. His socialist leanings and perceived pro-Soviet stance alarmed the U.S., leading to support for rival factions that led to his downfall.
Chile (1973): In 2000, the CIA acknowledged its involvement in the 1970 abduction and assassination of René Schneider, the Chilean Army's Commander-in-chief, due to his refusal to deploy the army to prevent Salvador Allende's inauguration. Additionally, documents declassified in 2023 revealed that President Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the U.S. government, who had labeled Allende as a significant communist threat, were informed about the military's intentions to oust Allende shortly before the coup d'état occurred.
Nicaragua (1980s): The U.S. funded and supported the Contras, a rebel group fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Reagan administration viewed the Sandinistas as a communist threat in Central America, leading to a controversial and covert campaign against them.
Now not all of these are relevant to O’Neil’s piece at Foreign Affairs, but all are relevant to the hilarity of Mr. Miller’s statement earlier this month. No matter how you feel about these events, they show a longstanding history of American involvement in
Let me contextualize my problems with O’Neil’s piece a little further though. It is unconscionably remiss for anyone, let alone someone with the title of “Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations” to write up an article using an image this disrespectful:
And just completely leave out the fact that there is a reason for the long standing economic and political instability in South America…namely that America has never once missed an opportunity to mess with South America. We overthrew democratically elected government after democratically elected government, usually replacing them with brutal dictators like Augusto Pinochet (Chile) with a total number of people killed, tortured or imprisoned for political reasons to 40,018 or Carlos Castillo Armas (Guatemala) who, in only 3 years as dictator, was responsible for the imprisonment of 3,000 Guatemalans and the murder of over 1,000.
Haven’t we done enough to this continent? Leave them the fuck alone.
Alabama’s IVF Ruling
This one might have you scratching your head, wondering what historical context I could add, but trust me…I’m about to clear up this issue for a lot of you.
One of the things I noted after this ruling, was a lot of sincere confusion from liberals.
“But why would they oppose IVF? Don’t they want more babies? Wasn’t that the whole point of overturning Roe?”
Well…yes, but also emphatically no.
There are two particular issues that drive the opposition to IVF and neither of them actually have a good goddamn to do with them actually thinking a fertilized embryo is the same as a baby.
The first, as this article states, is less about their opposition to the procedure of IVF and more about their opposition to who uses IVF. Many of those that utilize IVF are not what you might call…traditional marriages. Many members of the LGBTQ+ community use IVF as a part of reproduction, leading to the “immoral” family that is two mommies or two daddies raising little John or Jane.
Another “nontraditional” use of IVF are single women who have opted to have children without involving anything more than a male sperm donor in the process. Why? Any number of reasons…maybe they’ve met men. Maybe they’d rather have one child, rather than a child AND a manchild who can’t find ketchup in the grocery store or figure out how to load a dishwasher without a detailed diagram. Maybe they just hear that biological clock ticking and haven’t found anyone they want to reproduce with yet. It doesn’t matter; the why is not any of our business, but as usual, the Republicans can’t accept that.
Emma Waters at The Heritage Foundation explains it this way:
To put it simply, a pro-family culture emphasizes what is good for the whole family, not the most technologically efficient way to create babies for adults who want them. Pro-family Christians recognize children are blessings from God and that we need more of them. They also know that children have the best social outcomes when they are raised by their married biological parents in a loving home.
Right, single women can’t be allowed to have babies if they so choose, because that’s going against God’s Will™.
“But” you say “what about IVF between heterosexual married couples? Surely they support that!?”
You’d think, but actually no…some of you clearly never heard about the Quiverfull movement.
Now we all know about the Duggars and the IBLP, but I grew up before the Duggars really reached major cultural saturation, but the concept of Evangelical Christians valuing popping out as many babies as possible was not news to me, because I grew up hearing about the “quiverfull” movement quite a lot.
The movement is based around Psalm 127:3-5
Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.
Basically, this is a protestant evangelical mindset that centers on the belief that large families are a manifestation of God's blessing.
Meaning that they eschew any use of birth control and leave it up to God’s Will™ how many children will be born to their family. Purists don't permit even natural family planning methods, such as tracking fertility cycles.
But another important factor? No fertility treatments, absolutely none. They are unnatural and a denial of God’s Will™. If God wants you to be barren, then you’ve probably done something to deserve it.
Jessica Roldan at “The Heavenly Hearth” says this:
The blessing of children or the curse of barrenness in the verses quoted above are said to be directly related to obedience or disobedience…[t]hese are laws God Himself set in place — the laws of consequences related to our decisions.
…
Sometimes we have actual sin in our lives, but sometimes we just have ignorance about how to be healthy and end up making choices that are destructive to our health. This, too, can lead to our missing out on the blessing of children.
And before you say “well that’s just one nutjob’s blog, that can’t be a commonly held belief that influences the legality of IVF in America!”
Oh, you sweet summer child.
Remember Emma Waters? The Senior Research Associate in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation?
You know? The same Heritage Foundation that is trying to turn America into a Christian Nationalist Hellscape?
Yeah, she buys into this too.
Infertility is not fair, and even our best attempts to have children do not always work out. Indeed, as with the Israelites, Abraham and Sarah, and Rachel and Jacob, many of the options before the Christian to address infertility, although culturally normal, may be false options…The desire to have children comes from God; fertility is his idea, not ours. Such children, however, are a gift from God and not a right for adults. When we make children our goal, we run the risk of sinning in our attempt to achieve a child by any means necessary.
Now I’m not saying this is directly the cause of the Alabama IVF clusterfuck, but it isn’t coincidental that the concurring opinion from Chief Justice Tom Parker contained the phrase:
“Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.”
Again, thank you so much for being a paid subscriber!
I hope this first edition of the Retro Review has given you some much-needed historical insight into these major stories from the last two weeks.
The Retro Review will be published twice a month, giving historical context to any major news stories I think could use a little more nuance or explanation. Please feel free to suggest stories as well, I’d love to cover the current events you have questions about.