Turning religion into a political actor, even physically eliminating progressive and secular forces, has historically been done in the service of imperialist militarism. In 1978, the Carter administration, with its security advisor, the Pole Zbigniew Brzezinski, began to sponsor the anti-communist far-right of different religions. They financed Sunni jihadists to dismantle the socialist government of Afghanistan and Ayatollah Khomeini's Shia jihadism to abort the Iranian democratic revolution. And, in the same year, while financing Lech Walesa's pseudo-workers' union in the People's Republic of Poland, they installed John Paul II at the Vatican, the center of the soft power of global capitalism, a Polish anti-communist and opponent of liberation theology. All these were maneuvers related to countries that, by "coincidence," were neighbors of the Soviet Union.