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=== ‘Savage Tribes Do Not Conform to the Codes of Civilized Warfare’ === | === ‘Savage Tribes Do Not Conform to the Codes of Civilized Warfare’ === | ||
Young Winston Churchill went off to fight in ‘a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples’. In the Swat Valley, in today’s Pakistan, Churchill and his troops mowed down local resistance with extreme violence. When he reflected on that murderous war, he wrote that his troops had to be bloody because the people of Swat had a ‘strong aboriginal propensity to kill’. The French borrowed a distinctly American word, ''gook'', first used in the Philippines, for their war in Algeria, sending in their troops on ''gook hunts''. It is the native who is the savage. The colonizer is civilized, even in his brutality. The colonizer can never be the terrorist. It is always the savage who is the terrorist. | |||
Discussions around the First Geneva Convention in 1864 made no mention of the colonial wars. There was nothing about the terrible repression against the Indian uprising of 1857, nothing about the savagery in the crackdown against uprisings of enslaved people in the Americas, silence about the genocidal killings of indigenous peoples in Australia and the Americas – silence. | |||
The silence would run through the Geneva Conventions, from 1864 through 1929 and into 1949. ere is nothing to cite here to show that there is this silence – only that there are no references to any colonial wars in these laws of war. It was only in 1977 – as Additional Protocol I – that the Geneva process acknowledged that wars of national liberation were to be considered as armed conflicts under the framework of the Conventions, and therefore to be subjected to international law. But that was only because the formerly colonized, newly independent states in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) – formed in 1961 – ''fought'' to bring in this addition. | |||
Till this happened, in the colonies, all interventions were legal, all attacks and massacres were legal. If the natives misbehaved, the colonizer could do what they wanted. The term ‘gunboat diplomacy’ exemplifies the nature of the lawlessness. Sometimes the liberal conscience had to confront its own brutality. Then, justifications had to be conjured up. In 1923, British officials in London worried about the harshness of their operations in Afghanistan. But after a brief discussion, they concurred that international law – the Geneva Conventions – was not applicable ‘against savage tribes who do not conform to codes of civilized warfare’. This was Westlake’s 1894 textbook in a war bureaucrat’s 1923 notes. | |||
King Leopold II of Belgium and his genocidal regime in the Congo – which killed at least ten million people in a decade – was an embarrassment to the European project. He had to relinquish control of the Congo in 1908. But that is because he was too extreme. The principle that European colonizers could be lawless in the colonies was not challenged – the quality of lawless colonialism remained, only the quantity of dead became the scandal. | |||
Later, when technology produced the ability to kill from the skies, anxiety remained for a brief instant and then was quickly shunted; the colonizers saw aerial bombardment as a way to bring civilization to the natives. The Italians were the first to bomb human beings from the air, when they bombed Libya in October 1911, just a few years after Leopold was removed from the Congo. Some newspapers complained. The ''Daily Chronicle'' described the scene vividly: ‘Non-combatants, young and old, were slaughtered ruthlessly, without compunction and without shame.’ The use of the legal word ‘non-combatants’ is significant. The editor of the paper – Robert Donald – tolerated war, but not slaughter. The Italian air force, which saw the value of the bombing, wrote in its communiqué from the field that the bombs ‘had a wonderful effect on the morale of the Arabs’, namely that the Arabs were terrified of the colonizers. Robert Donald’s British air force would mirror the Italians in the campaigns against the Iraqis in 1924. British jurist J.M. Spaight wrote in ''Air Power and War Rights'' (1924) that aerial bombardment has ‘almost limitless possibilities’. ‘It can turn the old, crude, hideous, blood-letting business into an almost bloodless surgery of forcible international adjustment.’ The swift and deadly bombing runs shift the balance of forces so that ‘international adjustment’, or surrender of the native, could be hastened. That is what passed for the laws of war when these related to the colonized people. | |||
That brutality would run long past the creation of the United Nations, long past the slogan of ‘never again’ that came out of disgust at the Holocaust. During Britain’s genocidal war in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, the colonial police chief Ian Henderson led the most brutal pseudo-gangster operation. Henderson’s book – published to great acclaim in 1958 – was called ''Man Hunt in Kenya''; he was after terrorists and savages, and his attitude was fully in the saddle as he prosecuted one of the ugliest colonial wars of the 20th century. In 1976, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo dramatized the trial of Dedan Kimathi – the leader of the Mau Mau rebellion, who Henderson had captured. They meet in the cell – the national liberation leader Kimathi and the colonial policeman Henderson. ‘Look, between the two of us,’ Henderson says, ‘we don’t need to pretend. Nations live by strength and self-interest. You challenged our interests. We had to defend them. It is to our mutual interest and for our good that we must end this ugly war.’ Kimathi responds, ‘Do you take me for a fool?’ | |||
‘I am a Kenyan revolutionary,’ Kimathi said – a human being who stands against the lawless colonial wars. Before Kimathi was executed, he told his wife Mukami, ‘[M]y blood will water the tree of independence.’ | |||
=== Natives and the Universal === | === Natives and the Universal === | ||
Gradually, and with intensity, the movements for national liberation grew across the colonized world. These movements did not merely demand political freedom against colonial regimes. We are part of the human race, they said, and therefore we are part of universal ideas of freedom and humanity. ''I am a Kenyan revolutionary'', said Kimathi, but what he meant was also that I am a ''human being''. No such ideas as that of ‘the savage’ could be used to remove those who had been colonized from universal principles. This was the essence of the resolutions that emerged from the League Against Imperialism meeting held in Brussels in 1927–28. The political resolution amplified this demand with its anger at the ‘reign of terror’ and ‘brutal measures of repression’ used against the national liberation movements from Nicaragua to India. Nothing, it was felt, can stand in the way of the demands of humanity to walk freely onto the stage of history. | |||
Over the decades that followed, the national liberation movements grew in strength, endured the vicious attacks by the imperialists, and developed their own understanding of the essential unity of humanity. The racism of colonialism was not to be mirrored in the national liberation movements, which fought for universality and not for their own particular advancement. | |||
The 1941 Atlantic Charter, pushed by US President F.D. Roosevelt, came with all the high-minded principles of universality that mirrored the demands of the national liberation movements. But, like US President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points (1918), Roosevelt’s Charter was more bombast than reality. Anxiousness about anti-colonialism impacted the highest reaches of the imperialists – Wilson worried about the 1911 revolutions in China, Iran, and Mexico, as well as the 1917 Russian Revolution; Roosevelt saw history in the face, and it revealed that anti-colonialism would prevail after the Second World War ended. British Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee went before a group of West African students – electric with their hope for freedom from colonialism – in 1941 to say, ‘The Atlantic Charter: it means dark races as well. Coloured people as well as white will share the benefits of the Churchill–Roosevelt Atlantic Charter.’ His Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not share this view. In 1942, he announced as the Allies landed in North Africa, ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’ Imperialists had to acknowledge the rising power of national liberation, but they were not going to give in without a brutal fight. | |||
Just as Hồ Chí Minh announced freedom for Indochina in 1945, French troops returned to re-take the region, as they did in Algeria. The British would fight brutally to hold on to Malaya and Kenya but would accept the partition of India as long as their airbases in northern Pakistan remained untouched. Flag freedom was permitted, but the newly freed countries were under economic and political pressure to hastily join up to the imperialist military alliances. In 1965, after he had been overthrown in a coup, Ghana’s first leader Kwame Nkrumah wrote a book called ''Neo-colonialism''; that was the mood of the new period. The principle contradiction in the years after 1945 was not along the axis of West–East – the Cold War – but North–South – the imperialist war against de-colonization. | |||
Roosevelt saw that the structural basis of the North–South divide, or more properly the West–South divide, was war. When he visited Gambia, then a British colony, in 1943 after the Casablanca Conference with Churchill, Roosevelt noted, ‘The thing is, the colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of these countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements – all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war.’ This was not all high moral principle, but an acknowledgement of reality. Roosevelt had seen this pressure from Latin America, which moved him to the Good Neighbor Policy of 1933 that pledged nonintervention in the hemisphere in exchange for drawing resources towards the war effort. Pressure from the national liberation movements and the resistance to intervention (in Nicaragua and Haiti) forced the imperialists to come to terms with the changing balance of forces. Even Gambia, which is not often considered a major front line of the anti-colonial movement, was home to the Bathurst Trade Union, which – with some assistance from the League Against Imperialism – led a general strike in 1929–30. This strike startled London, where the officials hastily tried to control the situation by recognizing the rights of trade unions and trying to buy off union leaders (through the Passfield Memorandum of 1930). But, as the Communist leader George Padmore wrote in ''The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers'' (1931), these strikes – including in Gambia – were ‘taking on more and more of an anti-imperialist character’. | |||
The native said it was part of the universal. That had to be recognized. | |||
=== UN Charter === | === UN Charter === | ||
In 1945, the United Nations came into existence. At the founding meeting in San Francisco, a Charter was drafted which articulated the highest principles of statecraft and international relations. The UN Charter drew from the failed efforts of the League of Nations, whose own documents struggled to come to terms with the complexities of universal jurisdiction and the reality of a colonized world. | |||
On the ashes of Dresden and Hiroshima, the Allies fashioned the United Nations. Power was to be held by the five permanent members of the Security Council – China, France, the USSR, United Kingdom, and the United States. The UN Charter adopted the League of Nations’s concern with how the ‘great powers’ must be responsible for international security. In Article 39 of the Charter, the powers agreed that it would be the UN Security Council which would ‘determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression’ in the world. In the Council, the five permanent members would have a veto over the overall decision-making; it was a Council of the five rather than of the 51 founding members of the UN. In Article 41, the Charter goes on that it is the Security Council that ‘may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions’. The UN said that these measures could include ‘complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of air, rail, sea, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations’. This is the long form of the legal justification for the sanctions policy that would become harshest in our time. | |||
If these did not work, Article 42 under Chapter VII allowed the ‘member states’ to use armed force against sovereign nations. Some ‘member states’ had more power than the others. One sought preponderant power. That was the United States. | |||
It is important to recognize that the UN Charter provided the legal framework for lawless interventionism. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and not the almost two hundred states in the UN General Assembly, have the power to decide when and how to intervene against sovereign states. | |||
From 1945 to 1989, the USSR operated as an umbrella against the fully lawless usage of these UN loopholes, these mechanisms to offer the old colonial states a back door to continue their colonial wars in a modern form. The importance of this shield was evident within the first decade of the UN’s operations. The USSR boycotted the Security Council because the UN did not replace the Nationalist Chinese delegate with the delegate from the People’s Republic of China; during this period, the West weaponized the UN to authorize its intervention into South Korea against the Communist forces in the north. The USSR reversed its boycott as a consequence of this inability to veto the UN’s action. It returned to the UN. The first 56 vetoes in the UN Security Council were made by the USSR. The importance of the shield comes mainly on the anti-colonial, national liberation question. It was the USSR that used its veto to defend the process of national liberation, from the struggles of the Palestinians to the struggles in South Rhodesia, from the South African freedom struggle to the liberation war in Vietnam. | |||
In 1953, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. went to the United Nations as the United States ambassador. He was horrified by the way in which the new nations that came out of colonialism had a positive attitude towards the USSR. Lodge created a Psychological Strategy Board to advise him in how to make the Soviets appear like the imperialists. Arthur M. Cox, who would later head the Brookings Institute, wrote negatively of Lodge’s plans. ‘I think we have made a great mistake as a nation of assuming that because Soviet power and subversion is the greatest problem facing us today,’ he wrote in a memorandum in 1953, ‘it is therefore the greatest problem facing everybody else.’ Cox was a liberal who respected reality. ‘No amount of horror stories demonstrating the crimes of the Kremlin will convince millions of people in the free world that Soviet-inspired Communism is their main problem because they know,’ he said sharply, ‘that it is not.’ Lodge was deaf to this. He understood that if the United States battered the USSR by using its vast cultural apparatus – from the media to the films – it could succeed. Paint the Soviets as the imperialists, went the final programme of the Psychological Strategy Board, call them the ‘new colonialists’. ‘While the Soviet Union preaches its concern for the liberation of dependent peoples,’ the US officials wrote, ‘it has ruthlessly converted every territory over which it has acquired domination into a vassal of the Soviet state.’ This was written in August 1953, while the CIA overthrew the democratic leader of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh. | |||
=== ‘I am for America’ === | === ‘I am for America’ === | ||
The term used at the US State Department in its early years is ‘hub and spokes’. The United States is the hub, and its allies are the spokes. In the first decade after the Second World War, France and Britain – the two old imperial powers – thought they could regain their place of primacy. This was not to be. Both France and Britain prosecuted debilitating colonial wars, from Malaya to Algeria, from Vietnam to Guiana. Key here was the rise of Arab nationalism, which threatened old colonial power; Nasser’s Egypt gave support to the Algerian revolutionary struggles against the French, and to the Iraqi rumbles against the old king. These forces of national liberation had to be cut down if the old colonial countries were to maintain their power. The gambit by France and the United Kingdom to assert power over the Suez Canal and to dent the role of Arab national liberation – with the assistance of Israel – failed them in 1956; it was the last gasp of Europe leading the way. The United States was furious. It punished the old world and took advantage of the situation to assert its authority. Both Britain and France took their places as spokes around the US hub. | |||
Of all the major industrial powers, the United States had been least damaged by the depredations of the Second World War. None of its cities had been hit by bombs, and none of its considerable productive base had been destroyed; its scientists and engineers advanced their skills to increase productivity in US manufacturing and to develop swiftly the technological capacity to sweep ahead of the rest of the world. The total US casualties in the Second World War stood at just over 400,000. Without question, the US – with its massive industrial and technological advantages, and its military power – emerged after the Second World War as the pre-eminent power; it was not a stretch for Nitze to call for ‘preponderant power’, eternal power over the planet. | |||
Meanwhile, just in the Battle of Stalingrad, 1.2 million Soviet citizens were killed. Soviet manufacturing was hit hard, as the Nazis bombed the industrial base of the USSR. Close to 32,000 industrial enterprises were put out of production during the Second World War; this was over 80 per cent of the manufacturing base located in the key areas of Belorussia and Ukraine. What manufacturing was hastily shifted into western Siberia was mainly for war production. Capital stock fell by 30 per cent. By 1942, two-thirds of Soviet national income was allocated to the war effort, with household consumption falling from 74 per cent of national income in 1940 to 66 per cent of a much-lowered national income by 1945. At the end of the war, the average Soviet citizen lost 25 years of earnings due to the cost of war. When offered a very small amount of the Marshall Plan – less than what was given to Germany, the key belligerent of the war – the USSR declined the money and relied upon its own population to generate resources. The USSR was in no position to exert its power across the world, except through the prestige gained by the Soviet people for their stubborn resistance to the Nazi blitzkrieg and through the global impact of Communists in the anti-fascist resistance. | |||
Not only was Europe destroyed and the USSR weakened, but so too were vast stretches of North Africa and Asia. As the war began to end, it became clear that the United States would emerge as the most powerful country: its industrial heartland was robust, its currency was strong, and its cultural industries had not suffered from the trauma of warfare. | |||
A year before the World War ended, in 1944, the United States welcomed government officials from around the world to Bretton Woods (New Hampshire) for a conference on the new world order. It was clear that this was not a conference of equals, but it was a meeting to dictate terms of surrender. The future of Europe had to be settled first before the US could tackle the rest of the world. Europe was not only bankrupt, but its various currencies had no value (many of them had been yoked to the Nazi Reichsmark); the United States pegged European currencies to the Dollar, which was then pegged to the price of gold (at the rate of $35 per ounce). Out of this conference came the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Their purpose was to rebuild a destroyed world and to stabilize capitalist turbulence. | |||
At Bretton Woods, the US delegation came to undermine European power. Already in Article VII of the Lend-Lease Agreement in February 1942, the United States had made it clear to the British that their ‘imperial preferences’ system, whereby Britain dominated the economic lives of its colonies to the detriment of other colonial powers, had to end. Britain, in debt and despair, would have to take its place just behind the United States, not ahead of it. Senator Robert Wagner, who was the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, told the US Treasury Secretary Robert Morgenthau and his associate Harry Dexter White at Bretton Woods that the European quotas in the Bank and Fund must not be increased because they still have colonies. White said, ‘I think the Queen of the Netherlands would be very disturbed if you did anything [with regard to the Dutch East Indies].’ Wagner answered, ‘The Queen? She is a Queen, but she is not my Queen. I am for America.’ In February 1947, US Secretary of State Dean Acheson said, ‘There are only two powers left. The British are finished.’ He might as well have said all the old colonial powers are slowly dying off; with the Soviets in grave trouble, it was more accurate to say that the United States had emerged out of the war as first amongst unequals. | |||
In 1947, George C. Marshall, the US Secretary of State, gave a lecture at Harvard University about what would be called the Marshall Plan. The United States would pledge $12 billion to the Europeans to redevelop their continent. Meanwhile, the US urged the European states to form some kind of political unity, ‘some agreement among the countries of Europe’, Marshall said. Pressure from the US led to the creation of the Committee for European Economic Co-operation, which – in 1948 – would become the Organization of European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), one of the first major pan-Western European bodies. ‘Europe’ was born at Harvard. | |||
Little doubt that by the time Nitze wrote his memorandum in 1952, the United States had exercised ‘preponderant power’ over Western Europe. In 1949, at the initiative of the United States, Western European powers joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); NATO was the military aspect of European unification under the US umbrella, a move – as Acheson said – ‘completely outside our history’. | |||
There was no partnership here. The US dictated the terms. It had the money, and it had the industrial capacity. | |||
Lord John Maynard Keynes went to both Bretton Woods and then to Savannah (Georgia) to sign the terms of the surrender. He asked if the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank could at least be situated in New York, so that they would not be under the full influence of the US Treasury Department. US Treasury Secretary Fred Vinson said that they would have to be in Washington, DC; ‘this was a final decision the merits of which they were not prepared to discuss’. Lord Keynes, distraught, went back home to London and died. | |||
Western Europe was now one of the spokes for the projection of US power. | |||
=== Solidarity with the United States against Communism === | === Solidarity with the United States against Communism === | ||
Treaty organizations were the mechanism for the creation of the spokes. The pioneer was the Organization of American States (OAS), set up in 1948 inside what the United States had long considered its ‘backyard’. The first meeting of the OAS was held in Bogotá (Colombia); it left no doubt as to who was in charge when its headquarters were established in Washington, DC, at the old Pan-American Union building. On 1 November 1947, a CIA memorandum worried about ‘Soviet objectives in Latin America’. This worry defined the formation of the OAS. US Secretary of State Marshall did not come to Colombia with only a cheque book; he came with the full arsenal of anti-communism that had swept Washington, DC. | |||
As Marshall sat with leaders of some of the hemispheric states, on 9 April 1948 a gunman shot to death Jorge Gaitán, a presidential candidate who was the champion of Colombia’s poor; not far away, a World Bank mission led by its president John J. McCloy was in town to provide the intellectual cover not for a Marshall Plan but for the entrapment of Colombia’s economy into the web of US transnational corporations and of the bank accounts of the Colombian oligarchy. People took to the streets of Bogotá, angered by the assassination of Gaitán; their unrest is known as the ''Bogotazo''. Marshall, inside the OAS meeting, said that these protests were ‘the first important communist attempt in the Western hemisphere’. He was wrong about that. It was another gasp of a country that faced from 1948 a terrible phase of violence known – precisely – as ''La Violencia''; the Colombian oligarchy simply would not permit the masses to enter history, and so they used the full arsenal of state power to execute hope from their country. In the name of anti-Communism, the Colombian oligarchy subordinated itself to Washington, DC. | |||
The Conference centre was ‘completely gutted’, Marshall noted. ‘Conference records and equipment destroyed.’ The city, he told the delegates who met in the residence of the Honduran delegate, is in ‘shambles and fires still burning’. While he spoke, the Colombian ruling class united to form a Conservative-Liberal government and arrested the Communists, who were later released for lack of evidence. Nonetheless, a 1949 US Council on Foreign Relations study pressed the case saying, ‘[I]t was clear that the Communists took advantage of the outbreak if they did not actually start it. They did their best to disrupt and discredit the conference.’ The US played its hand effectively. ‘Many Latin American governments were genuinely concerned over the threat of communism to the existing order. Practically all of them saw that they could lose nothing and might gain something by declaring their solidarity with the United States against communism.’ The Final Act of the Ninth International Conference of American States, Bogotá, signed by the ruling classes of Latin America, pledged to ‘prevent agents at the service of international communism or any totalitarian doctrine from seeking to distort the true and the free will of the peoples of this continent’, namely to be governed by a caste of the oligarchy. Then, at the end of the Final Act, comes the language of epidemics – the oligarchies of Latin America will ‘proceed with a full exchange of information’ about Communists and take ‘measures necessary to ''eradicate'' and prevent activities’ of the Communists. To eradicate is a word that takes on especial meaning given the pogroms against the Left in the hemisphere. | |||
A few days before Gaitán’s assassination, two young Cubans were arrested in Bogotá for distributing leaflets that wanted to revive hope in their region. Their leaflets called for four objectives: the overthrow of the vicious dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the independence of Puerto Rico, the return of the Malvinas islands from Britain to Argentina, and an end to US control of the Panama Canal. These were basic demands of the era of anti-colonialism. The two students were Fidel Castro and Rafael del Pino Siero. They had come to Bogotá to help organize a Latin American student meeting. When they were released, they heard that Gaitán had been killed. Fidel, wielding an iron bar, joined the protest. ‘These experiences,’ he later told Katiuska Blanco Castiñeira, ‘taught me about the mass struggle.’ | |||
The OAS, the Latin American oligarchs, and the US government (through multilateral agencies like the World Bank) set the terms for the hemisphere and for its spokes. These came swiftly around the world. The US initiated the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954 (the Manila Pact), and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in 1955 (the Baghdad Pact). These ‘treaty organizations’ were created to yoke in the post-colonial states into a close embrace with the United States, and to encircle the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the Democratic Republic of Korea. In February 1950, the USSR and the PRC signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. This is what had to be undermined. | |||
=== ‘No Communist in Gov. or Else’ === | === ‘No Communist in Gov. or Else’ === | ||
Spokes had to be fashioned. This was class warfare. The classes that favoured imperialism were frequently the old aristocracies, the landed oligarchy, and the emerging capitalists; they were joined by forces of tradition – such as hierarchical religious orders – that understood clearly that they would be pushed aside by socialism and communism. The factory owner, the baron, the landlord, and the priest rushed to assist and be assisted by the CIA and its friends. It is these groups that colluded with the imperialist forces to overcome their class adversaries. It was class against class in the immediate years after the Second World War, with the CIA helping the ruling elites to maintain their property and privilege against democracy. The spokes were made in this class war. | |||
If the parties of the workers and peasants came near power, or if they took power, and if they defied the rule of the imperialists, they would have to be prevented or ejected from office. The most common instruments used by the United States – without any mandate from the UN or by international law – were interference in elections and the ''coup d’état''. | |||
Those that appeared to be obvious allies had to be brought into line. It was too bad for imperialism that their natural allies in Europe had collaborated with the Nazis, while their decisive enemies – the Communists – had played heroic roles in the fight against Nazism. The Communists – from France to Yugoslavia – had the highest level of popularity. In this class war, the Communists had to be destroyed and the old social elites – even the Nazis – had to be reinstated to power. In West Germany, the CIA was quite happy working with a Nazi intelligence officer – Reinhard Gehlen – who formed the anti-Communist Gehlen Organization, which then was essentially absorbed into the West German Federal Intelligence Service, which Gehlen ran. There was no embarrassment to have a Nazi as the CIA’s main asset in West Germany, and none at all that this was the man who then founded and ran West German intelligence a mere decade after the Holocaust. | |||
A CIA memorandum from 1949 admitted that the Albanian Communists in the National Liberation Front partisan brigades ‘did fight effectively’. In nearby Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito’s partisans beat back the Nazis with little outside support. The same could be said of Greece, where the Communist Party formed the bulk of the partisans. In the 1945 legislative elections in Albania, the Communists – as the Democratic Front – won all the seats. Observers from the United States and Britain grudgingly conceded that this was a fair election. Their favoured Albanians had cooperated with the fascists; no one wanted to vote for them. Their ears rang with the partisan song – ‘''Hakmarrje Rini''’ – in which the voice of a young partisan asks for vengeance; there would be no class collaboration with those Albanians who had danced with the Nazis. This attitude ran through the Greek Communist Party (KKE), which was not in any mood to create a government of national unity that included collaborators. They went into the hills as the Democratic Army of Greece and fought a civil war from 1946 to 1949. Konstantinos Tsaldaris’s right-wing government was bathed in monarchism and gangsterism (with its maa-like ''parakatos'' on the streets), but it was also energized by money and support from Washington, DC. Dollars brought back to life the cadaver of Europe’s reactionary political bloc. It had permission to use maximum force against the Communists. Washington would manage the world media on behalf of this doddery fascistic government. | |||
Much the same sort of political equation was necessary in far-off Japan. There, the elites had all been compromised by their role in the brutal war in Asia and then in the Second World War. The United States guided the early elections in 1946, 1947, 1949, and 1952. The US occupation forces struggled to bring the far-right (Liberal Party) and the liberals (Democratic Party) into coalition against the socialists. In the 1947 general elections, the Socialist Party won and its leader Tetsu Katayama served as the prime minister for a year. A month after his shocking victory, the Democrats and the Liberals formed the Democratic Liberal Party, whose formation was egged on by the US State Department and whose creation was well-funded by the CIA. The Democratic Liberal Party absorbed old fascists (Ichiro Hatoyama and Nobusuke Kishi) and developed enduring ties with big business and organized crime (Yoshio Kodama), going on to rule Japan for 38 years (the Democratic Liberal Party would become the Liberal Party in 1950 and then the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955). Whatever esteem lay with the Japanese Socialists and the Communists had to be undermined. Japan became a key spoke of the US hub. | |||
It would appear that the most obvious candidates to become subordinates of the United States and of transnational corporations would be France, Italy, and Germany – the three most important Western allies for the decades to come. But this was not the case. In France and Italy, the Communists emerged as the most powerful political forces – largely because of their leadership in the antifascist resistance. US Secretary of State Marshall told the Prime Ministers of both France (Paul Ramadier) and Italy (Alcide De Gasperi) that he would not write a cheque to the countries if they retained Communists in their ministries. In Italy, the Communist leader Fausto Gullo – as the minister of agriculture – had begun deep reforms in the countryside, including basic land reforms that had been blocked by an old alliance between the landlords and the mafia. Even the conservative De Gasperi could not rein in Gullo. In France, the Communists commanded a full quarter of the votes, and played a key role in Ramadier’s socialist government. ‘I told Ramadier,’ Marshall wrote in his diary, ‘no Communists in gov. or else.’ It was a direct threat. A wave of strikes in France and a mafia attack on Communist militants in Italy provided the two Prime Ministers their excuse. The Communists were removed from government. Washington blessed the Prime Ministers, and then paid them off. The money did not come only from the US Treasury. It also came from the transnational corporations. Exxon Corporation contributed almost $50 million to the Christian Democrats in Italy from 1963 to 1972. This was a soft coup against the Communists. | |||
It was expensive tool-and-die work; at its end, the spokes were ready, and they – because of their class interests – remained loyal for decades to come. | |||
=== ‘Nothing Can Be Allowed’ === | === ‘Nothing Can Be Allowed’ === | ||
In May 1943, the USSR disbanded the Communist International. The Soviet Union – in the midst of the Nazi invasion – wanted to mollify the United States and Great Britain; the USSR wanted the Allies to open another front in Europe to relieve the pressure of the Nazi onslaught. In September 1943, the Allies finally landed in Italy. After the war, the USSR created a Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) to draw together its allies along the eastern edge of Europe (but including the French and the Italians). No Communist parties from the colonized world were members of the Cominform. Instead, they would become part of people-to-people communist organizations such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the World Peace Council, and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. These mass fronts provided the main contacts for Communists and their allies in the immediate period after the war; but there was nothing like the Communist International to use the resources of the USSR to spread revolution in the world. The revolutions that did take place, such as in Vietnam (1945), had their own dynamic with minimal assistance from the Soviets. | |||
The main contradiction in the period after the Second World War was not between the capitalist powers – led by the United States – and the USSR, what became known as the Cold War. US President Harry S. Truman, who had authorized the use of the nuclear bombs on Japan, formulated a doctrine in 1947 to use any and every means to defeat – or at least contain – the spread of Soviet influence and of Communism. It was this Truman Doctrine that authorized the use of US assets to interfere in the elections in Greece, France, and Italy, and it would be the Truman Doctrine that justified the US use of asymmetrical wars and hybrid wars against the process of decolonization. The main contradiction of this new period was between the forces of decolonization (which included the USSR when it allied with anti-colonial national liberation movements) and imperialism. This contradiction – between North and South – rather than the Cold War – between East and West – shaped the character of US-led imperialism. | |||
In 1953, the US National Security Council produced a report that candidly spoke of US interests in the world. The United States, the NSC notes, must make sure that ‘nothing can be allowed to interfere substantially with the availability of oil from those sources to the free world’. It referred to the Gulf region, which had already become a key producer of oil for fossil fuelled capitalism. The United States must make ‘every effort to ensure that these resources will be available and will be used to strengthen the Free World’. | |||
That term was key to Truman – the Free World. The term emerged during the Second World War to refer to the countries that fought against fascism, although many of those countries – such as Britain and France – held colonies where they maintained authoritarian regimes. The United States government of Truman weaponized the term through a massive campaign of psychological warfare, which included Truman’s Campaign of Truth of 1950 and the celebrated publication of Hannah Arendt’s ''The Origins of Totalitarianism'' (1951), which made the case for the identity of fascism and communism. These were totalitarian and unfree ideologies, while Western liberalism was identical to freedom. The ‘Free World’ was the world led by the United States. What the US champions is freedom; its adversaries are the forces of unfreedom. | |||
So, in this prison house of psychological warfare it is perfectly acceptable for the Free World to claim resources from the colonized world, which should be forced to surrender its wealth for the sake of someone else’s freedom. | |||
In 1950, Truman wrote to the Saudi monarch King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud about the renewal of US rights to the Dhahran Air Base – a military project that would secure Saudi Arabia’s loyalty to the US. Underneath all this was the oil. Truman praised the King for his ‘enlightened leadership’ and for Saudi Arabia’s role as a ‘bulwark to peace in the Near Eastern world’. This ‘enlightened’ leader faced severe labour struggles in the oil region of Saudi Arabia from June 1945, which deepened in 1953. Communists played a key role in these mobilizations, which threatened the Saudi-US oil company, ARAMCO. Enlightened leadership, if it meant the swift dispatch of oil to the West, was allowed to use any means against the workers, particularly against the Communists. The Saudi monarchy was threatened by its own workers and its own Communists; but it used the Cold War to tighten its links with the United States. Dhahran Air Base is located in the oil region, and so the deal to have US troops based there was insurance against any Communist-led rebellion. That same year, the Saudis agreed to a 50-50 split on oil profits within ARAMCO between the United States and the Saudis. This was the price that the Saudis were willing to pay; they would rather leech their resources to the United States to maintain their power rather than share the benefits of resources with the oil workers. The Saudi monarchy bound the United States to itself through the 1951 Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement. The defence of the Saudi monarchy – and its oil fields – was the charge of the United States government. | |||
''Nothing can be allowed'', said the NSC document of 1953 – not labour unrest in Qatif, nor Communist organizations; not even the basic elements of the ‘free world’, such as a free press and the right to free association. A June 1956 strike by oil workers was crushed with the full force of the Saudi apparatus; whatever newspapers had emerged were closed down, and labour leaders and Communist activists were imprisoned on long terms. The oil had to flow. It was freedom of the oil that mattered, not the freedom of the people. Their freedom could not be allowed. | |||
=== Third World Project === | === Third World Project === | ||
The US-instigated coups against Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) took place when the Third World bloc was not fully established; the Bandung conference of the post-colonial states of Africa and Asia took place only in 1955. The Soviets made their objections in the UN, but the Sino-Soviet dispute was already on, and it would severely weaken the ‘red zone’ in its ability to stand fast against these kinds of manoeuvres. After Bandung, the Third World bloc was stronger, and it was able to draw the Soviets in as a more reliable shield. | |||
In December 1960, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution on decolonization. ‘The process of liberation,’ agreed the nations of the world, ‘is irresistible and irreversible.’ This resolution was the summary of major fights from Cuba to Vietnam, from Indonesia to Egypt. Over the course of the 1960s, a broad understanding emerged in the former colonial world about the necessity of freedom from colonialism and from imperialism. The temperament of the various national liberation struggles differed based on the class alignment of their leading organizations. It is this difference that fractured the new nations in the anti-colonial world. There were rightward leaning states and leftward leaning states, but each of them – from Saudi Arabia to Tanzania – would remain within the Non-Aligned Movement, created in 1961. By 1973, even the rightward states would acknowledge the radical agenda set by NAM in its New International Economic Order (NIEO). Indeed, even countries like Saudi Arabia and Brazil – steeped in monarchies and military dictatorships – found merit in the argument that the global economic and political order needed to be reformed. | |||
New states that won their independence after the Second World War gathered at Bandung (Indonesia) in 1955. There they laid out the outlines of what would be considered a ‘non-aligned’ foreign policy. These were states led by political movements that had a range of class alignments and therefore of domestic policies. There was, however, broad agreement against the dangers of warfare (particularly nuclear warfare) and for the creation of the context for a national development agenda. It was these states – notably Egypt, India and Yugoslavia – that led the way for the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 and, that same year, the Committee of 24 or the Decolonization Committee in the United Nations. This inter-state movement had a cognate in the United Nations through the Group of 77 (G77), formed in 1964 at the UN Conference of Trade and Development. It was out of their agenda that the guts of the NIEO were crafted: subsidies and tariffs to grow national economies, cartels to protect prices of exported raw minerals, preferential financing to go around the prohibitive rates set by banks, and so on. | |||
By the mid-1960s, NAM was challenged on its right and left flanks. From the right came NAM states that had formed close associations with imperialism, whether by joining the Manila or Baghdad ‘security’ pacts or by the formation in 1969 of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (led by Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Pakistan). These formations took a position against Third World-style socialism and communism. From the left came the Tricontinental, a group established by Cuba of state and national liberation movements that believed in a fuller freedom – often to be attained by armed struggle. The Tricontinental would not only gather heads of states, but leaders of national liberation movements from Cape Verde to Vietnam. At the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba’s President Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, who had been present at the NAM’s founding in Belgrade, was crisp in his denunciation of the mood and strategy of conciliation to imperialism – ‘The problem of underdevelopment, even of independent nations, cannot be solved with palliatives, with institutions and technical instruments that emerge out of international conferences. The cause of underdevelopment is none other than the subsistence of imperialist domination, and thus it can be overcome only through a struggle against and by total victory against imperialism.’ These were strong words. By the 1970 NAM meeting in Zambia and the 1973 NAM meeting in Algiers, the ethos of the Tricontinental would be centre stage. | |||
Cuba’s revolution of 1959 could not be contained. Everything that the new revolutionary government led by Fidel Castro did was rational and logical, from land reform to control of electricity and housing prices. Each time the government moved one of these reasonable policies, it was met by resistance from the local landowners, from the Cuban property owners, and from the US transnational firms. It was this resistance that proved the Marxist analysis of capitalism, that the social development of the people was constrained by the hideous prejudice of private property. It was not that Castro came to Havana as a Communist, but it was that the wretched resistance of the owners – whether in Cuba or in the United States – made him into a Communist. Castro challenged the transnational oil and electricity companies, and they fought back; but the new Cuban revolution was stubborn, so it took what it wanted. The US embargo and the turn to Communism was a consequence of the impossibility of the United States to tolerate a free country in the Caribbean. Haiti had suffered that fate after its revolution in 1791. Che Guevara was in Guatemala when Árbenz was overthrown; he knew not to trust the United States and he knew that the revolution had to arm the people and defend itself. Indio Naborí, a Communist poet, took the line from Louis XIV and gave it to the Cuban worker, ''The state, now it is me'' (‘''el estado, ahoro soy yo''’); Castro quoted this line in a speech at a graduation ceremony in 1961, when three thousand children of peasants lined up to take their degrees – and claim the state as their own. | |||
In 1966, Castro would welcome the national liberation movements to Havana. Between 1960 and 1965, the CIA had tried to assassinate Castro at least eight times (Castro told Senator George McGovern in 1975 that the actual number by then was 24). Even the CIA acknowledged to the Church Committee in 1975, that it had at least twice sent maa gangsters with poison pills, poison pens, and deadly bacterial powders to kill Castro in those years; the mobsters failed. In 1961, the CIA attempted an invasion of Cuba at Bay of Pigs. This failed because Castro armed the people. And then he turned to the world of national liberation as well as the socialist bloc to provide a shield. | |||
In 1966, Che Guevara was on a secret mission in Tanzania to assist the resistance movement in the Congo. Che was disappointed. ‘The human element failed,’ he wrote in his Congo Diary. ‘There is no will to fight. The leaders are corrupt. In a word, there was nothing to do.’ He would draft two books on economics and philosophy before moving on to his tragic mission in Bolivia. All this was supported by the Cuban government. The export of the revolution, the Cuban leadership felt, was the essence of their revolution. At the Tricontinental conference in 1966, Castro announced that this new body would ‘coordinate support for revolutionary wars of liberation throughout the colonized world’. Cuba would provide logistical support and people to all liberation movements ‘within its means, wherever they occur’. | |||
The imperative of armed struggle at the Tricontinental came fully developed from Amílcar Cabral of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), who argued that ‘we are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults against it. For us, the best or worst shout against imperialism, whatever its form, is to take up arms and fight’. Cabral picked up the gun not out of choice, but out of necessity. The PAIGC began its independence struggle in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in 1956. Three years later, the Portuguese authorities conducted a massacre at Pijiguiti, killing 50 unarmed dockworkers. It was this colonial violence that pushed the PAIGC into the armed struggle that ran from 1961 to 1974. It was imperialism’s harsh face that moved the national liberation struggles of the 1960s and the 1970s into the armed phase. It was the viciousness of imperialism which denied the national aspirations of the people of places like Vietnam and the Congo that pushed them to move to the gun. An inventory of that colonial violence would include the Malayan Emergency (1948– 60), the Kenyan Emergency (1952–60), the French war on Algeria (1954–62), the French war on Vietnam (1946–54), the US war on Vietnam (1954–75), the failed 1961 US invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the 1961 assassination of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, the US invasion of Guatemala (1954) and the Dominican Republic (1965), and the massacre of the Communists in Indonesia (1965). In the lead-up to the Tricontinental, in October 1965 French intelligence and Moroccan intelligence assassinated Mehdi Ben Barka, one of the planners of the Tricontinental. What different kind of futures might have been available to the Congo and to Morocco had the Congolese National Movement and the National Union of Popular Forces in Morocco been able to triumph? Such different futures buried with the corpses of those who had been assassinated. It was this colonial violence that set the tactical terms for the armies of national liberation that came to Havana in 1966. They did not want violence; violence was imposed upon them. | |||
The violence of the armies of national liberation was, as Amílcar Cabral put it, ‘to answer the criminal violence of the agents of imperialism. Nobody can doubt that, whatever its local characteristics, imperialist domination implies a state of permanent violence against the nationalist forces’. Violence is the essence of imperialism and it is the instinct of a cornered imperialist bloc. It was this violence that was on display in the Vietnamese village of Mỹ Lai in March 1968. One soldier described his mission with brutal honesty – ‘Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill: to kill Communists and to kill as many of them as possible. Stack ’em like cordwood.’ Four years later, in 1972, Portuguese colonial troops went into the village of Wiriyamu in Mozambique and massacred between 150 and 300 villagers. Before they killed them, the Portuguese colonial troops made the villagers clap their hands and say goodbye. | |||
By 1975, the Vietnamese had defeated the US, and Portugal was defeated by its African colonies. Cuba remained afloat, despite every attempt to overthrow that government. No question that the Carnation Revolution of Portugal would not have taken place to overthrow the Estado Novo in 1974 without the wars of national liberation in Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique. No question that two decades later the apartheid regime of South Africa would not have fallen without the victory of the Angolan liberation forces, with the Cubans against the South African regime in the 1987–88 battle of Cuito Cuanavale. Democracy in Portugal and in South Africa was taken by the gun. It was not given by liberalism. This narrative is now submerged. It has to be revived. Not just the sounds of the battlefield, but also the stories of the doctors and the technicians, of the revolutionary educational programmes in Mozambique and Cape Verde, the attempt to build a new society out of the detritus of the colonial order. This was the revolutionary energy that is now forgotten. | |||
It was not forgotten due to the passage of time. A condition of amnesia was produced by the corporate media and the profession of history-writing, both of whom became stenographers of power. There was concerted effort by the West to undermine the entire dynamic of decolonization, from coups against the Ghanaian people (1966) to coups against the Chilean people (1973). Violence of the colonizer was slowly justified in humanitarian terms, with the West re-establishing itself as the architect of humanity who would now need to manage the violence of the native. The great decolonization process – whose highpoint was in the 1960s and 1970s – became the prelude to poverty and war that now racks the former Third World. Beneath the paving stones in these colonized lands there is no beach. Beneath the paving stones, the corpses of freedom fighters. | |||
=== Expose the US ‘Unnecessarily’ === | === Expose the US ‘Unnecessarily’ === | ||
The anti-colonial movement had, by the late 1950s, delegitimized the idea of colonialism. National liberation leaders – even when they had different political orientations – fought to build united platforms on the world stage to oppose both colonialism and imperialism. The most important institution for them was the United Nations, which they saw as an instrument for the decolonization struggle. In 1960, these states pushed for that important resolution at the UN that summarized their views: ‘the process of liberation is irresistible’. Even if the French tried to hold on to Algeria and the British tried to hold on to Rhodesia, the process of liberation could not be stopped. | |||
The United States has always hesitated before admitting its own colonial history. There is a great myth of the American Revolution of 1776 as an anti-colonial revolution. It is worth asking if 1776 was a revolution at all. There was no class struggle of any importance, no movement from below of the workers that defined the revolutionary process, no social unity of the various peoples (Europeans, Africans, Native Americans) in this struggle. Instead, there was a genocidal attitude towards the Native peoples, and a great fear of a revolt of the enslaved Africans. The war against the English was premised against a desire by the European settlers to break out of the Thirteen Colonies and conquer the entire continent; this was a war for colonization, not a war against colonialism. When the break with England did happen, no real change took place in the order of property, with the contradiction between Southern plantation capitalists and Northern industrial capitalists put off for a few generations till the Civil War broke out in 1861. | |||
From its early years, the new country looked outwards to conquer, with one Kentucky man saying in 1810 that ‘his countrymen were full of enterprise’ and ‘although not poor, are greedy after plunder as ever the old Romans were. Mexico glitters in our eyes – the word is all we wait for’. They did not have to wait long. President James Polk sent the US troops south to claim Mexico. The ''New York Herald'' on 8 October 1847 cheered the soldiers on:<blockquote>It is a gorgeous prospect, this annexation of all Mexico. It was more desirable that she should come to us voluntarily; but as we shall have no peace until she is annexed, let it come, even though force be necessary at first to bring her. Like the Sabine virgins, she will soon learn to love her ravishers.</blockquote>Mexico lost one-third of its territory, including what would become the US states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. Earlier, the United States had gone into the 1812 war against the British to seize Canada; some hoped to go to war against the Spanish for Cuba and Florida; yet others called for the genocide of the Native Americans so that the settlers could have the entire continent for themselves (‘you are a subdued people’, the US government told Native chiefs as early as 1784). US imperialism was born not in the harbours of Havana and Manila in 1898, but on the vast territory that would eventually stretch from New York to San Francisco. But this ‘internal colonization’, with its full-scale genocide of the Native peoples, did not fully appear to be colonialism since it was muddied by conceptual blankets such as ‘territorial expansion’ and the ‘frontier of settlement’. | |||
In 1823, James Monroe delivered an important speech which laid out the Monroe Doctrine. In his speech, Monroe made it abundantly clear that the United States of America was supreme in the hemisphere of the Americas. At the same time, Monroe told the Europeans both that they must not interfere politically and commercially in the hemisphere, and that the US is perfectly within its rights to interfere in Europe (the issue here was Greek independence). In 1893, just before the US went to war against Spain to expand its colonies, Frederick Jackson Turner in his celebrated speech on the frontier found the ‘germ of the Monroe doctrine’ in the colonial tendencies of the farmers of the Ohio Valley, whose wars against the Native Americans and whose drive to California and the purchase of Louisiana defines the beginning ‘of the definite independence of the United States from the state system of the Old World, the beginning, in fact, of its career as a world power’. Or, to be frank, of an imperialist state. | |||
Even the US role in the ‘Spanish-American’ war is shrouded in the falsehood that the US sent its troops in 1898 into Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Samoa to help liberate these lands from the Spanish empire. In fact, the US absorbed these countries into its orbit, forcibly defeating the national liberation forces in each of these places. Cuba’s revolutionaries were denied a role at the peace talks in Paris, and US General William Shafter did not allow General Calixto García to attend the Spanish surrender in Cuba. This was symbolic of the usurpation of the gains of that war by the United States. None of these former Spanish colonies were allowed to become independent; they were hastily absorbed into the expanding archipelago of US power. | |||
Rudyard Kipling wrote his poem ''White Man’s Burden'' (1899) to urge on the United States to take up its imperialist mantle. It is a silly poem. It misunderstood the US posture. It was not as if the US would not be an imperialist power, since it was already one in many of its aspects and would become one in the decades to come. What Kipling did not recognize was that the main political leaders in the United States masked their imperialism by various forms of anti-imperialism. Albert Beveridge, the US Senator for Indiana, wrote a tract with just this theme – ''For the Greater Republic, Not for Imperialism'' (1899). ‘Imperialism is not the word for our vast work,’ Beveridge wrote, because imperialism came with all the suggestions of domination and theft. What imperialism truly represents, he continued, is the ‘mighty movement and mission of our race’. What was that mission? Kipling wore that mask tighter than Beveridge. In his poem, he defined imperialism or the white man’s burden as ‘to seek another’s profit, to work another’s gain’. The imperialist did not act to aggrandize himself, to steal wealth; he worked to bring civilization to the barbarians. This was an old trick – the mission of civilization as the objective of imperialism, when it was clear from all evidence that the objective was to plunder wealth and subordinate sovereignty. Beveridge won his seat to the Senate with an impassioned speech that called for outright colonization of Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. ‘The trade of these islands,’ he said, ‘developed as we will develop it by developing their resources, monopolized as we will monopolize it, will set every reaper in this republic singing, every spindle whirling, every furnace sprouting the flames of industry.’ These were honest words – annexation to subordinate these islands so that they provided raw materials for US industry, and then bought the finished products from the United States. | |||
Anxiety about being an imperialist power runs through the entire history of Washington’s expansion. Nitze, who framed the policy of preponderant power for the United States, wrote in 1955 that support for colonialism was ‘abhorrent to American sensibilities’. But this did not mean that Nitze supported the decolonization process that would include the meeting of the African and Asian states at Bandung that year. He understood, as the UN would say in 1961, that the process of decolonization was inevitable. But its timing could be slowed. There was a taste of Hegel in Nitze’s essay, the acknowledgment that the ‘historic development of world forces’ would lead to decolonization and that the US should throw ‘its weight behind the acceleration of self-determination for all peoples’. But then came the caveat. The US should throw its weight but only ‘under conditions which will see preserved these precious freedoms’. Here’s an important hesitation. Only if the new states would drive in the lanes drawn by the US – who would determine what are these ‘precious freedoms’ – could they be allowed eventually to flourish. The language of freedom and liberty would fly off the lips of US diplomats, but the meaning of these words would be unique. | |||
In 1962, the administration of US President John F. Kennedy produced an Overseas Internal Defense Policy document. It is a clear statement of the class allegiance of the United States with the worst elements of countries in the Third World – despite the glamour of the Kennedy administration and its veneer of liberalism. This Policy document was being prepared by Kennedy’s team just as 6,500 US Marines landed in Thailand to ‘support that country during the threat of Communist pressure from outside’, and just as Kennedy – after his failed attempt to overthrow the government in Cuba – pledged to ‘go all the way’ against Vietnam’s Communist government. This 1962 document merely established in print what had already been written in blood: that the full force of the United States would be used to make sure that ‘developing nations evolve in a way that affords a congenial world environment for international cooperation and the growth of free institutions’. All this is verbiage for a simple motto: the US government will make the world safe for the capitalist system whose major beneficiaries were transnational corporations (most of them based in the West). In fact, there is no need to annotate the Policy document. The US, the authors write, has an ‘economic interest in assuring that the resources and markets of the less developed world remain available to us and to other Free World countries’. | |||
Those Marines arrived in Thailand in July 1962. They had come to bolster the anti-Communist militias and the Thai police – both trained by the CIA – in a war to weaken the communist Pathet Lao forces in nearby Laos and the Communist Party of Thailand, which began armed struggle in 1961. The US sent in its premier former CIA diplomat John Peurifoy, fresh from overthrowing a democratic government in Guatemala, to oversee operations in Thailand, and to ensure that the military – led by Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat – came to power. Millions of dollars owed out of the Kennedy administration to train the Thai Army and the Royal Lao Army in a project known as Ekarad. Theirs was a policy – as the US embassy in Bangkok put it – of ‘covert harassment’. It is what created the conditions for a clash with the Pathet Lao, the triggering of the SEATO pact, and then the arrival of US troops – with the sound of US aircraft overhead, threatening the wrath of napalm. Garment workers from factories that ringed Bangkok and college students moved in a radical direction; they, along with the insurgency at the fringes of the country, threatened the monarchy, the military, and the bourgeoisie. It was to crush them that the US lent its full force, in return for which it got a subordinated ally and military bases – and it could ensure its economic interests remained alive and well. | |||
The intervention of the US Marines – little known now as it was little discussed then – took place alongside the ‘covert harassment’ provided by droves of US advisors to the Thai and Laotian military forces. The US whispered into the ears of the militaries of these regions, who were quite pleased to suspend any talk of democracy in the interests of stability; stability is a synonym for anti-Communism. These militaries were not simply marionettes of US power; they represented classes in their own societies that wanted to suppress workers and peasants to maintain both local oligarchic rule – from which they benefited – and international imperialism – from which the US and its allies benefited. | |||
What was impossible was for the United States to admit that it was an imperialist power. The times were against that. In January 1962, Kennedy asked the CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell to oversee the Special Group (Counter-Insurgency). It was this group that produced the Overseas Internal Defense Policy document. Bissell was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in the home that was built by Mark Twain, one of the leaders of the Anti-Imperialist League that was set up to protest the US war on the Philippines. Bissell went to Yale, and then the CIA; the men who joined him in this Group were also well-read men from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. They knew both their history and their current events. The countries of the Third World had just met in September 1961 in Belgrade (Yugoslavia) to set up the Non-Aligned Movement. That is why the Special Group emphasized covertness in its operations. US power must be used through military action (asymmetrical wars), but also through the use of measures such as economic inducements, sanctions, and information warfare as well as support for local police and military forces (hybrid wars). | |||
‘It is important,’ Bissell and his colleagues wrote, ‘for the US to remain in the background, and where possible, to limit its support to training, advice, and material, lest it prejudice the local government effort and expose the US unnecessarily to charges of intervention and colonialism.’ | |||
== Part 2 == | == Part 2 == | ||
Revision as of 13:07, 14 January 2024
Washington Bullets | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Author | Vijay Prashad |
| Written in | 2020 |
| Type | Book |
| ISBN | 978-81-945925-2-5 |
| Source | Anna's Archive |
Preface
This is a book about bullets, says the author. Bullets that assassinated democratic processes, that assassinated revolutions, and that assassinated hope.
The courageous Indian historian and journalist Vijay Prashad has put his all into explaining and providing a digestible and comprehensive way of understanding the sinister interest with which imperialism intervenes in countries that attempt to build their own destiny.
In the pages of this book, Prashad documents the participation of the United States in the assassination of social leaders in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and in the massacres of the people, who have refused to subsidize the delirious business dealings of multinational corporations with their poverty.
Prashad says that these Washington Bullets have a price: ‘The biggest price is paid by the people. For in these assassinations, these murders, this violence of intimidation, it is the people who lose their leaders in their localities. A peasant leader, a trade-union leader, a leader of the poor.’
Prashad provides a thorough account of how the CIA participated in the 1954 coup d’état against the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. Árbenz had the intolerable audacity of opposing the interests of the United Fruit Company.
In Chile, Prashad shows us how the US government spent $8 million to finance strikes and protests against Allende.
What happened in Brazil when the parliamentary coup removed president Dilma Rousseff from office in August 2016 is an example of the perverse practice of ‘lawfare’, or the ‘use of law as a weapon of war’. The same method was used against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who suffered in prison for 580 days as a result of a trial in which the prosecutors did not provide concrete evidence – just ‘firm beliefs’.
Times have changed, and business is no longer carried out in the same way, but the underlying methods and responses of imperialism have remained largely unaltered.
Bolivians know this perverse politics well. Long before our fourteen years at the head of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, we have had to confront the operations, threats, and retaliation of the United States.
In 2008, I had to expel Philip Goldberg, the ambassador of the United States, who was conspiring with separatist leaders, giving them instructions and resources to divide Bolivia. In that moment, the US Department of State said that my claims were unfounded. I don’t know what they would say now, when the participation of the US embassy in the coup that overthrew us at the end of 2019 is so clear. What will future researchers say who take up the work of reading the CIA documents that are classified today?
The Monroe Doctrine and the National Security Doctrine attempt to convert Latin America into the United States’s backyard and criminalize any type of organization that opposes its interest and that attempts to build an alternative political, economic, and social model.
Over the decades, the US has invented a series of pretexts and has built a narrative to attempt to justify its criminal political and military interventions. First, there was the justification of the fight against communism, followed by the fight against drug trafficking, and, now, the fight against terrorism.
This book brings to mind the infinite instances in which Washington Bullets have shattered hope. Colonialism has always used the idea of progress in accordance with its own parameters and its own reality. This same colonialism – which puts our planet in a state of crisis today, devours natural resources, and concentrates wealth that is generated from devastation – says that our laws of vivir bien [‘living well’] are utopian. But if our dreams of equilibrium with Pachamama [‘Mother Earth’], of freedom, and of social justice are not yet a reality, or if they have been cut short, it is primarily because imperialism has set out to interfere in our political, cultural, and economic revolutions, which promote sovereignty, dignity, peace, and fraternity among all people.
If the salvation of humanity is far away, it is because Washington insists on using its bullets against the world’s people.
We write and read these lines and this text in a moment that is extremely tense for our planet. A virus is quarantining the global economy, and capitalism – with its voracious habits and its need to concentrate wealth – is showing its limits.
It is likely that the world that will emerge from the convulsions of 2020 will not be the one that the one that we used to know. Every day, we are reminded of the duty to continue our struggle against imperialism, against capitalism, and against colonialism. We must work together towards a world in which greater respect for the people and for Mother Earth is possible. In order to do this, it is essential for states to intervene so that the needs of the masses and the oppressed are put first. We have the conviction that we are the masses. And that the masses, over time, will win.
Evo Morales Ayma, Former President of Bolivia
Buenos Aires, April 2020
Files
"I make no secret of my opinion that at the present time the barbarism of Western Europe has reached an incredibly high level, being only surpassed – far surpassed, it is true – by the barbarism of the United States." – Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1955
Books and documents that detail the tragedies afflicted upon the people of the world surround me. There is a section of my library that is on the United States government’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its coups – from Iran in 1953 onward, every few years, every few countries. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports make up an entire bookshelf; these tell me about the roadblocks placed before countries that try to find a way out of their poverty and inequality. I have files and files of government documents that had investigated old wars and new wars, bloodshed that destabilized countries in the service of the powerful and the rich. There are memoirs of diabolical leaders and advisors – the complete works of Henry Kissinger – and there are the writings and speeches of the people’s leaders. These words create a world. They explain why there is so much suffering around us and why that suffering leads not to struggle, but to resignation and hatred.
I reach above me and pull down a file on Guatemala. It is on the CIA coup of 1954. Why did the US destroy that small country? Because the landless movement and the Left fought to elect a democratic politician – Jacobo Árbenz – who decided to push through a moderate land reform agenda. Such a project threatened to undercut the land holding of the United Fruit Company, a US conglomerate that strangled Guatemala. The CIA got to work. It contacted retired Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, it paid off brigade commanders, created sabotage events, and then seized Árbenz in the presidential palace and sent him to exile. Castillo Armas then put Guatemala through a reign of terror. ‘If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it,’ he said later, ‘I will not hesitate to do so.’ The CIA gave him lists of Communists, people who were eager to lift their country out of poverty. They were arrested, many executed. The CIA offered Castillo Armas its benediction to kill; A Study of Assassination, the CIA’s killing manual, was handed over to his butchers. The light of hope went out in this small and vibrant country.
What other day-lit secrets of the past are sitting in my files and books? What do these stories tell us?
That when the people and their representatives tried to forge a just road forward, they were thwarted by their dominant classes, egged on by the Western forces. That what was left was a landscape of desolation. Humiliation of the older colonial past was now refracted into the modern era. At no time were the people of the Third World allowed to live in the same time as their contemporaries in the West – they were forced into an earlier time, a time with less opportunity and with less social dignity. Tall leaders of the Third World felt the cold steel of execution – Patrice Lumumba in the Congo (1961), Mehdi Ben Barka of Morocco (1965), Che Guevara in Bolivia (1967), Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso (1987), and so many others, before, after, and in between. Entire countries – from Vietnam to Venezuela – faced obliteration through asymmetrical and hybrid wars.
This book is based on a vast amount of reading of US government documents, and documents from its allied governments and multilateral organizations, as well as the rich secondary literature written by scholars around the world. It is a book about the shadows; but it relies upon the literature of the light.
‘Bring Down More US Aircraft’
Estados Unidos: el país donde La libertad es una estatua.
United States: the country where Liberty is a statue. – Nicanor Parra, Artefactos, 1972
What is the price of an assassin’s bullet? Some dollars here and there. The cost of the bullet. The cost of a taxi ride, a hotel, an airplane, the money paid to hire the assassin, his silence purchased through a payment into a Swiss bank, the cost to him psychologically for having taken the life of one, two, three, or four. But the biggest price is not paid by the intelligence services. The biggest price is paid by the people. For in these assassinations, these murders, this violence of intimidation, it is the people who lose their leaders in their localities. A peasant leader, a trade-union leader, a leader of the poor. The assassinations become massacres, as people who are in motion are cut down. Their confidence begins to falter. Those who came from them, organized them, spoke from them, either now dead or, if not dead, too scared to stand up, too isolated, too rattled, their sense of strength, their sense of dignity, compromised by this bullet or that. In Indonesia, the price of the bullet was in the millions; in Guatemala, the tens of thousands. The death of Lumumba damaged the social dynamic of the Congo, muzzling its history. What did it cost to kill Chokri Belaïd (Tunisian, 1964– 2013) and Ruth First (South African, 1925–1982), what did it take to kill Amílcar Cabral (Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean, 1924–1973) and Berta Cáceres (Honduran, 1971–2016)? What did it mean to suffocate history so as to preserve the order of the rich? Each bullet red struck down a Revolution and gave birth to our present barbarity. This is a book about bullets.
Many of these bullets are red by people who have their own parochial interests, their petty rivalries and their small-minded gains. But more often than not, these have been Washington’s bullets. These are bullets that have been shined by the bureaucrats of the world order who wanted to contain the tidal wave that swept from the October Revolution of 1917 and the many waves that whipped around the world to form the anti-colonial movement. The first wave crested in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and in Eastern Europe, and it was this wave that provoked the Cold War and the East–West conflict; the other wave went from Vietnam and China to Cuba, from Indonesia to Chile, and this wave engendered the far more deadly North–South or West– South conflict. It was clear to the United States, as the leader of the West, that no muscular conflict would be possible along the East–West axis, that once the USSR (1949) and China (1964) tested their nuclear weapons no direct war would be possible. The battlefield moved from along the Urals and the Caucasus into Central and South America, into Africa, and into Asia – into, in other words, the South. Here, in the South where raw materials are in abundance, decolonization had become the main framework by the 1940s. Washington’s bullets that pointed towards the USSR remained unused, but its bullets were red into the heart of the South. It was in the battlefields of the South that Washington pushed against Soviet influence and against the national liberation projects, against hope and for profit. Liberty was not to be the watchword of the new nations that broke away from formal colonialism; liberty is the name of a statue in New York harbour.
Imperialism is powerful: it attempts to subordinate people to maximize the theft of resources, labour, and wealth. Anyone who denies the absolute obscenity of imperialism needs to find another answer to the fact that the richest 22 men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa, or that the richest one per cent have more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people. You would have to have an answer for the reason why we continue to suffer from hunger, illiteracy, sickness, and indignities of various kinds. You could not simply say that there are no resources to solve these problems, given that tax havens hold at least $32 trillion – more than the total value of gold that has been brought to the surface. It is easy to bomb a country; harder yet to solve the pressing problems of its peoples. Imperialism’s only solution to these problems is to intimidate people and to create dissension amongst people.
But liberty cannot be so easily contained. That is why, despite the odds, people continue to aspire for alternatives, continue to organize themselves, continue to attempt to win a new world – all this despite the possibility of failure. If you do not risk failure, you cannot taste the fruit of victory.
On 2 September 1945, Hồ Chí Minh appeared before a massive crowd in Hanoi. He had never before been to the capital, but he was known by everyone there. ‘Countrymen,’ he asked, ‘can you hear me? Do you understand what I am saying?’ A few weeks before, in Tân Trào, the National Congress of People’s Representatives laid out the agenda for the new Vietnam. At that meeting, Hồ Chí Minh said, ‘The aim of the National Liberation Committee and all the delegates is to win independence for our country – whatever the cost – so that our children would have enough to eat, would have enough to wear, and could go to school. That’s the primary goal of our revolution.’ The people in Hanoi, and across Vietnam, knew exactly what Hồ Chí Minh was saying; they could hear him, and they could understand him. His slogan was food, clothes, and education.
To feed, clothe, and educate one’s population requires resources. Vietnam’s revolution meant that it would no longer allow its own social wealth to drain away to France and to the West. The Vietnamese government, led by Hồ Chí Minh, wanted to use that wealth to address the centuries-old deprivations of the Vietnamese peasantry. But this is precisely what imperialism could not tolerate. Vietnamese labour was not for its own advancement; it was to provide surplus value for Western capitalists, in particular for the French bourgeoisie. Vietnam’s own development could not be the priority of the Vietnamese; it was Vietnam’s priority to see to the aggrandizement of France and the rest of the imperialist states. That is why the French – in cahoots with the Vietnamese monarchy and its underlings – went to war against the Vietnamese people. This French war against Vietnam would run from 1946 to 1954, and then the mantle of war-making would be taken up by the United States of America till its defeat in 1975. During the worst of the US bombing of the northern part of Vietnam, Hồ Chí Minh went on a tour of air defences. He was already in his late 70s. His comrades asked after his health. ‘Bring down more US aircraft,’ he said, ‘and I’ll be in the best of health.’
Washington’s bullets are sleek and dangerous. They intimidate and they create loyalties out of fear. Their antidote is hope, the kind of hope that came to us in 1964 as the Colombian civil war opened a new phase, and the poet Jotamario Arbeláez (translated by Nicolás Suescún) sang of another future –
a day
after the war
if there is a war
if after the war there is a day
I will hold you in my arms
a day after the war
if there is a war
if after the war there is a day
if after the war I have arms
and I will make love to you with love
a day after the war
if there is a war
if after the war there is a day
if after the war there is love
and if there is what it takes to make love.
Part 1
Divine Right
Divine right is an old, established principle. It means that Kings have the right – ordained by God – to act in any way that they wish. Human-made laws are of no consequence beside the awesome power of God, and God’s representative, namely the monarch.
In Delhi, towards the end of the 16th century, the Mughal Emperor Akbar began to have doubts about the idea of divine right. He established a translation bureau (maktab khana), where he asked intellectuals to read deeply into all religious traditions. ‘the pillars of blind following were demolished,’ wrote Akbar’s biographer Abu’l Fazl. ‘A new era of research and enquiry to religious matters commenced.’ Part of the emergence of a nonreligious idea of sovereignty was the sense that the Emperor had to rule for the people, not based on his own God-given right. ‘Tyranny is unlawful in everyone, especially in a sovereign who is the guardian of the world,’ wrote Abu’l Fazl in Ain-i-Akbari (1590).
Nine years later, the Spanish historian Juan de Mariana wrote De rege et regis institutione (1598), which made the case that the people – he meant mainly the nobles – ‘are able to call a king to account’.
Abu’l Fazl and de Mariana had sniffed the mood. Peasant rebellions had their impact. Their pitchforks were sharp; their anger a tidal wave.
Sovereignty gradually went from God and King to People.
A generation later, Louis XIV of France said – L’État c’est moi, the State is Me. His descendants would be guillotined.
Preponderant Power
On 6 August 1945, the United States military dropped a bomb that contained 64 kg of uranium-235 over the city of Hiroshima (Japan). The bomb took just over 44 seconds to fall from 9,400 metres and detonated 580 metres above the Shima Surgical Clinic. Over 80,000 people died instantly. This was the first use of the nuclear bomb.
Four days later, Satsuo Nakata brought the Domei New Agency’s Leica camera to the city. He took 32 photographs of the devastation; each of these pictures – archived in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum – is iconic. The force of the bomb flattened the city, even though less than two per cent of the uranium detonated. Nakata took a picture of the office of the newspaper Chugoku Shimbun and of the Odamasa kimono store. The store’s metal twisted into a whirlwind. It is a sign of the power of this weapon. As Sankichi Toge, a hibakusha (survivor of the atom bomb) and poet, wrote of that power and its impact, as the fires burnt down from the bomb’s power in a city of 350,000: ‘the only sound – the wings of flies buzzing around metal basins’.
Between 1944 and 1946, Paul Nitze had been the director and then Vice Chairman of the US government’s Strategic Bombing Survey. He began this work in Europe, but then went to Japan shortly after the war ended. Nitze later said that he had believed that the war would have been won ‘even without the atomic bomb’. This is the thesis he hoped to prove during his time in Japan. The destruction he saw was breathtaking; it resembled the European cities that had faced conventional bombardment. As his biographer Strobe Talbott wrote, Nitze ‘believed that the measurements of the Survey at Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed the effects to be roughly the equivalent of an incendiary bombing raid’. The Japanese generals and businessmen he interviewed told him that they would eventually have surrendered but that the atom bomb certainly made further war impossible. In November 1945, Nitze met Baron Hiranuma Kiichiro, the president of the Privy Council. On 26 July 1945, the United States, the United Kingdom, and China issued the Potsdam Declaration that called on Japan to surrender or else it would face ‘prompt and utter destruction’. Kiichiro said he was moved by this threat to urge his fellow members of the Privy Council to surrender. He failed to carry the day. A week later, on 6 and 9 August, the US dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito surrendered on 15 August. Kiichiro told Nitze that the ‘biggest factor’ for the Japanese surrender was ‘the atomic bomb’. The country, he said, ‘was faced with terrible destructive powers and Japan’s ability to wage war was really at an end’.
The immense authority of the atomic bomb had an impact on the Washington bureaucrats, even those who might have felt uneasy about its use. Nitze was one of them. He would have preferred that the atomic bomb not be used; but once used, saw its utility. It is why he would urge the US government to expand its massive arsenal. The point would not be to actually attack the USSR, but to ensure that the USSR was – as the US diplomat George F. Kennan said – contained, and then eventually rolled back. Nitze, more than Kennan, would shape US foreign policy for decades. With his team at the US State Department in 1952, Nitze formulated the clear objective of US power after the Second World War. The liberals in the US government, he said, tend to ‘underestimate US capabilities’; he did not, since he had seen it as part of the Strategic Bombing Survey. He introduced a word – preponderant – that would become part of the formula of US policy planners. ‘To seek less than preponderant power would be to opt for defeat,’ Nitze’s staff wrote in 1952. ‘Preponderant power must be the objective of US policy.’
The word ‘preponderant’ comes from Latin. It means to weigh more. The King is always worth his weight in gold. Now the United States claims the scale, its weight bolstered by the payloads dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Trusteeship
Old colonial masters liked to think that they were directed by God to bring peace and civilization to the world. That idea of the colonizer as the peacemaker and the lawgiver shuffled into the grand discourses of modern international law. Natives were fractious, unable to be governed by reason; they needed their masters to help them, to be their trustees. The League of Nations Covenant (1919) assembled the lands of the natives into ‘trusteeships’, so that their masters could believe that their domination was sanctified by law. It was in Article 16 of the Covenant that the ‘peace loving nations’ – namely the imperialists – said that they had the ‘obligation’ to maintain peace and security.
European hypocrisy over terms like ‘peace’ was by then clear to the colonized world. The League of Nations Covenant was signed on 28 June 1919. A few months earlier, on 13 April 1919, British troops conducted a massacre in Jallianwala Bagh (Amritsar, India), where a mass meeting was being held in opposition to the authoritarian Defence of India Act of 1915. As many as a thousand people were killed on that one day. They were holding a peaceful meeting. The ‘peace loving nations’ murdered them. This was despite the fact that ‘India’ was a member of the League. Well, as the Indian papers – such as Rajkaran (November 1919) – understood immediately, ‘England secured a vote for India on the League of Nations in order to be able to command a larger number of votes.’ There was no benefit for India ‘in any way’.
The United States signed the Covenant. So did Nicaragua and Haiti. In 1909, the US had intervened in Nicaragua to overthrow President José Santos Zelaya who had ambitions of creating a Federal Republic of Central America. Such a project of regional unity was unacceptable to the US, which wanted to carve out a canal through Nicaragua to unite the two oceans (when the US turned its attention to Panama, Zelaya asked the Germans if they would be interested in a canal; this was a fatal error for him). The departure of Zelaya opened up space in Nicaragua for nationalists, including in the military. When they rose up in the Mena Rebellion in 1912, the US marines returned – and remained until 1933.
Haiti, which, like Nicaragua, was in the League of Nations, saw its people rise up against the pro-US dictator Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in 1915, whose death in the streets of Port-au-Prince gave the US the excuse to send in the marines; they remained in Haiti till 1934. Fifteen thousand to thirty thousand Haitians died in the repression, though this did not stop a peasant rebellion in 1919–20 and a series of strikes in 1929. The leader of part of this unrest – Charlemagne Masséna Péralte (1886–1919) – and his band of cacos fought to defend the Haitian people’s rights. He was shot in the heart by a US marine. Péralte was Haiti’s Sandino, the Nicaraguan revolutionary who met a similar fate in 1934. Every institution in Haiti was hollowed out, their functions subordinated to the United States.
A ‘peace loving nation’ invaded two other members of the League in the name of peace. But these exceptions were already baked into the Covenant. It said quite clearly, ‘Nothing in this Covenant shall be deemed to affect the validity of international engagements, such as . . . regional understandings like the Monroe Doctrine, for securing the maintenance of peace.’ The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which the US understood as its right to the hemisphere, was quite legal since it allowed the imperialists a right to its dominions.
Japan’s representative to the League of Nations meeting was Baron Makino Nobuaki. His speech at the Versailles conference – tinged with naiveté – put forward a ‘proposal to abolish racial discrimination’. Nobuaki’s brief was narrow, as made clear by Foreign Minister Viscount Uchida Yasuya; this proposal would only apply to the members of the League of Nations, and not to the colonized territories. But even this principle was too much. Australia had officially adopted a White Australia Policy in 1901. Its Prime Minister William Morris Hughes would not tolerate such a proposal at the League. Both Britain and the United States of America agreed. The Japanese proposal fell by the wayside. Baron Nobuaki returned home furious; he was a patron of the ultra-nationalist groups whose role drove Japan towards its wars of aggression in Asia.
‘International Law Has to Treat Natives as Uncivilized’
In the days of colonialism, there was no need for any justication. If a colonial power wanted to invade a territory, it could do so at will. Other colonial powers could object – and sometimes did – but this objection did not come on behalf of those who were being overrun; it came out of the competitive feeling between colonial powers. In 1884–85, the imperialist powers met in Berlin to carve up Africa. European powers and the United States vied for ‘effective occupation’ and ‘spheres of inuence’, phrases that disguised the brute and cruel seizure of lands and the suppression of people’s aspirations. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the United States carved out the landscape. A decade later, only Ethiopia, Morocco, and the Sultanates of Majeerteen and Hobyo remained relatively independent. Within decades France and Spain would seize Morocco, and the two Sultanates would be taken by Italy, which would later ght a severe war against Ethiopia to seize it in 1936. All this was done through a legal framework which disenfranchised an entire continent to serve the needs of Europe and the United States.
John Westlake, the Cambridge University professor who pioneered international law and would later be a Liberal Member of Parliament, wrote in his 1894 textbook International Law,
[I]nternational law has to treat natives as uncivilised. It regulates, for the mutual benefit of civilised states, the claims which they make to sovereignty over the region and leaves the treatment of natives to the conscience of the state to which the sovereignty is awarded, rather than sanction their interest being made an excuse the more for war between civilised claimants, devastating the region and the cause of suffering to the natives themselves.
To protect the natives, in other words, they must give up their land and resources to the colonizers, who must themselves come to an understanding through international law so that they do not go to war with each other; it is to the benefit of the natives that they surrender and watch the imperialists divide up the loot. That’s the highest point of imperialist international law, which burrows itself into the conceptual framework of present-day international laws.
Legal fictions hovered over conquest, but there was no such disquiet over the massacres of entire peoples and cultures.
The First Geneva Convention (1864) emerged out of a sense of outrage at the large numbers of Europeans killed in battles in Europe. Two particular engagements disgusted the European public: the conflict in Crimea between 1853 and 1856, which claimed over 300,000 lives, and the Battle of Solferino in 1859, which claimed 40,000 lives in a single day. Out of these two wars came the First Geneva Convention and the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded (later the International Committee of the Red Cross). This law and this institution set the moral framework for warfare.
It would all fall apart during the First World War, when the technology of war eclipsed any moral framework. Chemical weapons and aerial bombardment removed the ‘honour’ in warfare, making combat a matter of technological superiority rather than bravery. The impact of aerial bombardment was the most significant, since it meant that the divide between combatant and civilians began to dissolve in front of the technological ability to bomb civilian areas far behind the front lines of the battlefield. Further Geneva Conventions (1929, 1949) would follow, each trying to ameliorate the harshness of the new technologies of death. The Nazis had no qualms about civilian deaths, the prelude being the bombing of Guernica (Spain) in 1937. But the Allies were no less harsh. In 1942, the British government acknowledged that its bombing was to damage ‘the morale of the enemy civil population and, in particular, the industrial workers’. The 1945 Allied bombing of Dresden (Germany) is practice to the 1942 theory. The US novelist Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden as a Prisoner of War. Later, he wrote a devastating book about the bombing called Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The dead littered the city. ‘There were too many corpses to bury,’ Vonnegut wrote. ‘So instead the Nazis sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians’ remains were burned to ashes.’
The new technology of warfare – and the Holocaust – demanded that the West create the United Nations, and the UN Charter (1945). Europe had widened the jaws of hell for itself. Hell, on the other hand, had always been the condition in the colonies and for the colonized.
Thirteen hundred West African soldiers from Benin to Togo who had fought in the French army, been captured by the Nazis and held in a concentration camp, been freed and brought back to another concentration camp at Thiaroye outside Dakar, mutinied in November 1944 against the way they were being treated. They had seen the bombings and the brutality; they had thought they were on their way home to collect their war pensions. Instead, the French betrayed them, as colonialism always does. Their revolt was a cry into the dark. French soldiers opened fire and killed hundreds of them. In 1988, the brilliant Senegalese filmmaker Sembène Ousmane made a film – Camp de Thairoye – about this massacre. One of the key characters in the film is Pays, who suffers from the traumas of war, what used to be called shell shock; he cannot speak but can only grunt and scream. He is on guard duty. He watches the tanks circle the camp and tries to tell his fellow soldiers that the Nazis are back to kill them. His comrades say that he is crazy. The French tanks open fire. The Africans are all slaughtered.
‘Savage Tribes Do Not Conform to the Codes of Civilized Warfare’
Young Winston Churchill went off to fight in ‘a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples’. In the Swat Valley, in today’s Pakistan, Churchill and his troops mowed down local resistance with extreme violence. When he reflected on that murderous war, he wrote that his troops had to be bloody because the people of Swat had a ‘strong aboriginal propensity to kill’. The French borrowed a distinctly American word, gook, first used in the Philippines, for their war in Algeria, sending in their troops on gook hunts. It is the native who is the savage. The colonizer is civilized, even in his brutality. The colonizer can never be the terrorist. It is always the savage who is the terrorist.
Discussions around the First Geneva Convention in 1864 made no mention of the colonial wars. There was nothing about the terrible repression against the Indian uprising of 1857, nothing about the savagery in the crackdown against uprisings of enslaved people in the Americas, silence about the genocidal killings of indigenous peoples in Australia and the Americas – silence.
The silence would run through the Geneva Conventions, from 1864 through 1929 and into 1949. ere is nothing to cite here to show that there is this silence – only that there are no references to any colonial wars in these laws of war. It was only in 1977 – as Additional Protocol I – that the Geneva process acknowledged that wars of national liberation were to be considered as armed conflicts under the framework of the Conventions, and therefore to be subjected to international law. But that was only because the formerly colonized, newly independent states in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) – formed in 1961 – fought to bring in this addition.
Till this happened, in the colonies, all interventions were legal, all attacks and massacres were legal. If the natives misbehaved, the colonizer could do what they wanted. The term ‘gunboat diplomacy’ exemplifies the nature of the lawlessness. Sometimes the liberal conscience had to confront its own brutality. Then, justifications had to be conjured up. In 1923, British officials in London worried about the harshness of their operations in Afghanistan. But after a brief discussion, they concurred that international law – the Geneva Conventions – was not applicable ‘against savage tribes who do not conform to codes of civilized warfare’. This was Westlake’s 1894 textbook in a war bureaucrat’s 1923 notes.
King Leopold II of Belgium and his genocidal regime in the Congo – which killed at least ten million people in a decade – was an embarrassment to the European project. He had to relinquish control of the Congo in 1908. But that is because he was too extreme. The principle that European colonizers could be lawless in the colonies was not challenged – the quality of lawless colonialism remained, only the quantity of dead became the scandal.
Later, when technology produced the ability to kill from the skies, anxiety remained for a brief instant and then was quickly shunted; the colonizers saw aerial bombardment as a way to bring civilization to the natives. The Italians were the first to bomb human beings from the air, when they bombed Libya in October 1911, just a few years after Leopold was removed from the Congo. Some newspapers complained. The Daily Chronicle described the scene vividly: ‘Non-combatants, young and old, were slaughtered ruthlessly, without compunction and without shame.’ The use of the legal word ‘non-combatants’ is significant. The editor of the paper – Robert Donald – tolerated war, but not slaughter. The Italian air force, which saw the value of the bombing, wrote in its communiqué from the field that the bombs ‘had a wonderful effect on the morale of the Arabs’, namely that the Arabs were terrified of the colonizers. Robert Donald’s British air force would mirror the Italians in the campaigns against the Iraqis in 1924. British jurist J.M. Spaight wrote in Air Power and War Rights (1924) that aerial bombardment has ‘almost limitless possibilities’. ‘It can turn the old, crude, hideous, blood-letting business into an almost bloodless surgery of forcible international adjustment.’ The swift and deadly bombing runs shift the balance of forces so that ‘international adjustment’, or surrender of the native, could be hastened. That is what passed for the laws of war when these related to the colonized people.
That brutality would run long past the creation of the United Nations, long past the slogan of ‘never again’ that came out of disgust at the Holocaust. During Britain’s genocidal war in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, the colonial police chief Ian Henderson led the most brutal pseudo-gangster operation. Henderson’s book – published to great acclaim in 1958 – was called Man Hunt in Kenya; he was after terrorists and savages, and his attitude was fully in the saddle as he prosecuted one of the ugliest colonial wars of the 20th century. In 1976, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo dramatized the trial of Dedan Kimathi – the leader of the Mau Mau rebellion, who Henderson had captured. They meet in the cell – the national liberation leader Kimathi and the colonial policeman Henderson. ‘Look, between the two of us,’ Henderson says, ‘we don’t need to pretend. Nations live by strength and self-interest. You challenged our interests. We had to defend them. It is to our mutual interest and for our good that we must end this ugly war.’ Kimathi responds, ‘Do you take me for a fool?’
‘I am a Kenyan revolutionary,’ Kimathi said – a human being who stands against the lawless colonial wars. Before Kimathi was executed, he told his wife Mukami, ‘[M]y blood will water the tree of independence.’
Natives and the Universal
Gradually, and with intensity, the movements for national liberation grew across the colonized world. These movements did not merely demand political freedom against colonial regimes. We are part of the human race, they said, and therefore we are part of universal ideas of freedom and humanity. I am a Kenyan revolutionary, said Kimathi, but what he meant was also that I am a human being. No such ideas as that of ‘the savage’ could be used to remove those who had been colonized from universal principles. This was the essence of the resolutions that emerged from the League Against Imperialism meeting held in Brussels in 1927–28. The political resolution amplified this demand with its anger at the ‘reign of terror’ and ‘brutal measures of repression’ used against the national liberation movements from Nicaragua to India. Nothing, it was felt, can stand in the way of the demands of humanity to walk freely onto the stage of history.
Over the decades that followed, the national liberation movements grew in strength, endured the vicious attacks by the imperialists, and developed their own understanding of the essential unity of humanity. The racism of colonialism was not to be mirrored in the national liberation movements, which fought for universality and not for their own particular advancement.
The 1941 Atlantic Charter, pushed by US President F.D. Roosevelt, came with all the high-minded principles of universality that mirrored the demands of the national liberation movements. But, like US President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points (1918), Roosevelt’s Charter was more bombast than reality. Anxiousness about anti-colonialism impacted the highest reaches of the imperialists – Wilson worried about the 1911 revolutions in China, Iran, and Mexico, as well as the 1917 Russian Revolution; Roosevelt saw history in the face, and it revealed that anti-colonialism would prevail after the Second World War ended. British Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee went before a group of West African students – electric with their hope for freedom from colonialism – in 1941 to say, ‘The Atlantic Charter: it means dark races as well. Coloured people as well as white will share the benefits of the Churchill–Roosevelt Atlantic Charter.’ His Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not share this view. In 1942, he announced as the Allies landed in North Africa, ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’ Imperialists had to acknowledge the rising power of national liberation, but they were not going to give in without a brutal fight.
Just as Hồ Chí Minh announced freedom for Indochina in 1945, French troops returned to re-take the region, as they did in Algeria. The British would fight brutally to hold on to Malaya and Kenya but would accept the partition of India as long as their airbases in northern Pakistan remained untouched. Flag freedom was permitted, but the newly freed countries were under economic and political pressure to hastily join up to the imperialist military alliances. In 1965, after he had been overthrown in a coup, Ghana’s first leader Kwame Nkrumah wrote a book called Neo-colonialism; that was the mood of the new period. The principle contradiction in the years after 1945 was not along the axis of West–East – the Cold War – but North–South – the imperialist war against de-colonization.
Roosevelt saw that the structural basis of the North–South divide, or more properly the West–South divide, was war. When he visited Gambia, then a British colony, in 1943 after the Casablanca Conference with Churchill, Roosevelt noted, ‘The thing is, the colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of these countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements – all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war.’ This was not all high moral principle, but an acknowledgement of reality. Roosevelt had seen this pressure from Latin America, which moved him to the Good Neighbor Policy of 1933 that pledged nonintervention in the hemisphere in exchange for drawing resources towards the war effort. Pressure from the national liberation movements and the resistance to intervention (in Nicaragua and Haiti) forced the imperialists to come to terms with the changing balance of forces. Even Gambia, which is not often considered a major front line of the anti-colonial movement, was home to the Bathurst Trade Union, which – with some assistance from the League Against Imperialism – led a general strike in 1929–30. This strike startled London, where the officials hastily tried to control the situation by recognizing the rights of trade unions and trying to buy off union leaders (through the Passfield Memorandum of 1930). But, as the Communist leader George Padmore wrote in The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931), these strikes – including in Gambia – were ‘taking on more and more of an anti-imperialist character’.
The native said it was part of the universal. That had to be recognized.
UN Charter
In 1945, the United Nations came into existence. At the founding meeting in San Francisco, a Charter was drafted which articulated the highest principles of statecraft and international relations. The UN Charter drew from the failed efforts of the League of Nations, whose own documents struggled to come to terms with the complexities of universal jurisdiction and the reality of a colonized world.
On the ashes of Dresden and Hiroshima, the Allies fashioned the United Nations. Power was to be held by the five permanent members of the Security Council – China, France, the USSR, United Kingdom, and the United States. The UN Charter adopted the League of Nations’s concern with how the ‘great powers’ must be responsible for international security. In Article 39 of the Charter, the powers agreed that it would be the UN Security Council which would ‘determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression’ in the world. In the Council, the five permanent members would have a veto over the overall decision-making; it was a Council of the five rather than of the 51 founding members of the UN. In Article 41, the Charter goes on that it is the Security Council that ‘may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions’. The UN said that these measures could include ‘complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of air, rail, sea, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations’. This is the long form of the legal justification for the sanctions policy that would become harshest in our time.
If these did not work, Article 42 under Chapter VII allowed the ‘member states’ to use armed force against sovereign nations. Some ‘member states’ had more power than the others. One sought preponderant power. That was the United States.
It is important to recognize that the UN Charter provided the legal framework for lawless interventionism. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and not the almost two hundred states in the UN General Assembly, have the power to decide when and how to intervene against sovereign states.
From 1945 to 1989, the USSR operated as an umbrella against the fully lawless usage of these UN loopholes, these mechanisms to offer the old colonial states a back door to continue their colonial wars in a modern form. The importance of this shield was evident within the first decade of the UN’s operations. The USSR boycotted the Security Council because the UN did not replace the Nationalist Chinese delegate with the delegate from the People’s Republic of China; during this period, the West weaponized the UN to authorize its intervention into South Korea against the Communist forces in the north. The USSR reversed its boycott as a consequence of this inability to veto the UN’s action. It returned to the UN. The first 56 vetoes in the UN Security Council were made by the USSR. The importance of the shield comes mainly on the anti-colonial, national liberation question. It was the USSR that used its veto to defend the process of national liberation, from the struggles of the Palestinians to the struggles in South Rhodesia, from the South African freedom struggle to the liberation war in Vietnam.
In 1953, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. went to the United Nations as the United States ambassador. He was horrified by the way in which the new nations that came out of colonialism had a positive attitude towards the USSR. Lodge created a Psychological Strategy Board to advise him in how to make the Soviets appear like the imperialists. Arthur M. Cox, who would later head the Brookings Institute, wrote negatively of Lodge’s plans. ‘I think we have made a great mistake as a nation of assuming that because Soviet power and subversion is the greatest problem facing us today,’ he wrote in a memorandum in 1953, ‘it is therefore the greatest problem facing everybody else.’ Cox was a liberal who respected reality. ‘No amount of horror stories demonstrating the crimes of the Kremlin will convince millions of people in the free world that Soviet-inspired Communism is their main problem because they know,’ he said sharply, ‘that it is not.’ Lodge was deaf to this. He understood that if the United States battered the USSR by using its vast cultural apparatus – from the media to the films – it could succeed. Paint the Soviets as the imperialists, went the final programme of the Psychological Strategy Board, call them the ‘new colonialists’. ‘While the Soviet Union preaches its concern for the liberation of dependent peoples,’ the US officials wrote, ‘it has ruthlessly converted every territory over which it has acquired domination into a vassal of the Soviet state.’ This was written in August 1953, while the CIA overthrew the democratic leader of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh.
‘I am for America’
The term used at the US State Department in its early years is ‘hub and spokes’. The United States is the hub, and its allies are the spokes. In the first decade after the Second World War, France and Britain – the two old imperial powers – thought they could regain their place of primacy. This was not to be. Both France and Britain prosecuted debilitating colonial wars, from Malaya to Algeria, from Vietnam to Guiana. Key here was the rise of Arab nationalism, which threatened old colonial power; Nasser’s Egypt gave support to the Algerian revolutionary struggles against the French, and to the Iraqi rumbles against the old king. These forces of national liberation had to be cut down if the old colonial countries were to maintain their power. The gambit by France and the United Kingdom to assert power over the Suez Canal and to dent the role of Arab national liberation – with the assistance of Israel – failed them in 1956; it was the last gasp of Europe leading the way. The United States was furious. It punished the old world and took advantage of the situation to assert its authority. Both Britain and France took their places as spokes around the US hub.
Of all the major industrial powers, the United States had been least damaged by the depredations of the Second World War. None of its cities had been hit by bombs, and none of its considerable productive base had been destroyed; its scientists and engineers advanced their skills to increase productivity in US manufacturing and to develop swiftly the technological capacity to sweep ahead of the rest of the world. The total US casualties in the Second World War stood at just over 400,000. Without question, the US – with its massive industrial and technological advantages, and its military power – emerged after the Second World War as the pre-eminent power; it was not a stretch for Nitze to call for ‘preponderant power’, eternal power over the planet.
Meanwhile, just in the Battle of Stalingrad, 1.2 million Soviet citizens were killed. Soviet manufacturing was hit hard, as the Nazis bombed the industrial base of the USSR. Close to 32,000 industrial enterprises were put out of production during the Second World War; this was over 80 per cent of the manufacturing base located in the key areas of Belorussia and Ukraine. What manufacturing was hastily shifted into western Siberia was mainly for war production. Capital stock fell by 30 per cent. By 1942, two-thirds of Soviet national income was allocated to the war effort, with household consumption falling from 74 per cent of national income in 1940 to 66 per cent of a much-lowered national income by 1945. At the end of the war, the average Soviet citizen lost 25 years of earnings due to the cost of war. When offered a very small amount of the Marshall Plan – less than what was given to Germany, the key belligerent of the war – the USSR declined the money and relied upon its own population to generate resources. The USSR was in no position to exert its power across the world, except through the prestige gained by the Soviet people for their stubborn resistance to the Nazi blitzkrieg and through the global impact of Communists in the anti-fascist resistance.
Not only was Europe destroyed and the USSR weakened, but so too were vast stretches of North Africa and Asia. As the war began to end, it became clear that the United States would emerge as the most powerful country: its industrial heartland was robust, its currency was strong, and its cultural industries had not suffered from the trauma of warfare.
A year before the World War ended, in 1944, the United States welcomed government officials from around the world to Bretton Woods (New Hampshire) for a conference on the new world order. It was clear that this was not a conference of equals, but it was a meeting to dictate terms of surrender. The future of Europe had to be settled first before the US could tackle the rest of the world. Europe was not only bankrupt, but its various currencies had no value (many of them had been yoked to the Nazi Reichsmark); the United States pegged European currencies to the Dollar, which was then pegged to the price of gold (at the rate of $35 per ounce). Out of this conference came the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Their purpose was to rebuild a destroyed world and to stabilize capitalist turbulence.
At Bretton Woods, the US delegation came to undermine European power. Already in Article VII of the Lend-Lease Agreement in February 1942, the United States had made it clear to the British that their ‘imperial preferences’ system, whereby Britain dominated the economic lives of its colonies to the detriment of other colonial powers, had to end. Britain, in debt and despair, would have to take its place just behind the United States, not ahead of it. Senator Robert Wagner, who was the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, told the US Treasury Secretary Robert Morgenthau and his associate Harry Dexter White at Bretton Woods that the European quotas in the Bank and Fund must not be increased because they still have colonies. White said, ‘I think the Queen of the Netherlands would be very disturbed if you did anything [with regard to the Dutch East Indies].’ Wagner answered, ‘The Queen? She is a Queen, but she is not my Queen. I am for America.’ In February 1947, US Secretary of State Dean Acheson said, ‘There are only two powers left. The British are finished.’ He might as well have said all the old colonial powers are slowly dying off; with the Soviets in grave trouble, it was more accurate to say that the United States had emerged out of the war as first amongst unequals.
In 1947, George C. Marshall, the US Secretary of State, gave a lecture at Harvard University about what would be called the Marshall Plan. The United States would pledge $12 billion to the Europeans to redevelop their continent. Meanwhile, the US urged the European states to form some kind of political unity, ‘some agreement among the countries of Europe’, Marshall said. Pressure from the US led to the creation of the Committee for European Economic Co-operation, which – in 1948 – would become the Organization of European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), one of the first major pan-Western European bodies. ‘Europe’ was born at Harvard.
Little doubt that by the time Nitze wrote his memorandum in 1952, the United States had exercised ‘preponderant power’ over Western Europe. In 1949, at the initiative of the United States, Western European powers joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); NATO was the military aspect of European unification under the US umbrella, a move – as Acheson said – ‘completely outside our history’.
There was no partnership here. The US dictated the terms. It had the money, and it had the industrial capacity.
Lord John Maynard Keynes went to both Bretton Woods and then to Savannah (Georgia) to sign the terms of the surrender. He asked if the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank could at least be situated in New York, so that they would not be under the full influence of the US Treasury Department. US Treasury Secretary Fred Vinson said that they would have to be in Washington, DC; ‘this was a final decision the merits of which they were not prepared to discuss’. Lord Keynes, distraught, went back home to London and died.
Western Europe was now one of the spokes for the projection of US power.
Solidarity with the United States against Communism
Treaty organizations were the mechanism for the creation of the spokes. The pioneer was the Organization of American States (OAS), set up in 1948 inside what the United States had long considered its ‘backyard’. The first meeting of the OAS was held in Bogotá (Colombia); it left no doubt as to who was in charge when its headquarters were established in Washington, DC, at the old Pan-American Union building. On 1 November 1947, a CIA memorandum worried about ‘Soviet objectives in Latin America’. This worry defined the formation of the OAS. US Secretary of State Marshall did not come to Colombia with only a cheque book; he came with the full arsenal of anti-communism that had swept Washington, DC.
As Marshall sat with leaders of some of the hemispheric states, on 9 April 1948 a gunman shot to death Jorge Gaitán, a presidential candidate who was the champion of Colombia’s poor; not far away, a World Bank mission led by its president John J. McCloy was in town to provide the intellectual cover not for a Marshall Plan but for the entrapment of Colombia’s economy into the web of US transnational corporations and of the bank accounts of the Colombian oligarchy. People took to the streets of Bogotá, angered by the assassination of Gaitán; their unrest is known as the Bogotazo. Marshall, inside the OAS meeting, said that these protests were ‘the first important communist attempt in the Western hemisphere’. He was wrong about that. It was another gasp of a country that faced from 1948 a terrible phase of violence known – precisely – as La Violencia; the Colombian oligarchy simply would not permit the masses to enter history, and so they used the full arsenal of state power to execute hope from their country. In the name of anti-Communism, the Colombian oligarchy subordinated itself to Washington, DC.
The Conference centre was ‘completely gutted’, Marshall noted. ‘Conference records and equipment destroyed.’ The city, he told the delegates who met in the residence of the Honduran delegate, is in ‘shambles and fires still burning’. While he spoke, the Colombian ruling class united to form a Conservative-Liberal government and arrested the Communists, who were later released for lack of evidence. Nonetheless, a 1949 US Council on Foreign Relations study pressed the case saying, ‘[I]t was clear that the Communists took advantage of the outbreak if they did not actually start it. They did their best to disrupt and discredit the conference.’ The US played its hand effectively. ‘Many Latin American governments were genuinely concerned over the threat of communism to the existing order. Practically all of them saw that they could lose nothing and might gain something by declaring their solidarity with the United States against communism.’ The Final Act of the Ninth International Conference of American States, Bogotá, signed by the ruling classes of Latin America, pledged to ‘prevent agents at the service of international communism or any totalitarian doctrine from seeking to distort the true and the free will of the peoples of this continent’, namely to be governed by a caste of the oligarchy. Then, at the end of the Final Act, comes the language of epidemics – the oligarchies of Latin America will ‘proceed with a full exchange of information’ about Communists and take ‘measures necessary to eradicate and prevent activities’ of the Communists. To eradicate is a word that takes on especial meaning given the pogroms against the Left in the hemisphere.
A few days before Gaitán’s assassination, two young Cubans were arrested in Bogotá for distributing leaflets that wanted to revive hope in their region. Their leaflets called for four objectives: the overthrow of the vicious dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the independence of Puerto Rico, the return of the Malvinas islands from Britain to Argentina, and an end to US control of the Panama Canal. These were basic demands of the era of anti-colonialism. The two students were Fidel Castro and Rafael del Pino Siero. They had come to Bogotá to help organize a Latin American student meeting. When they were released, they heard that Gaitán had been killed. Fidel, wielding an iron bar, joined the protest. ‘These experiences,’ he later told Katiuska Blanco Castiñeira, ‘taught me about the mass struggle.’
The OAS, the Latin American oligarchs, and the US government (through multilateral agencies like the World Bank) set the terms for the hemisphere and for its spokes. These came swiftly around the world. The US initiated the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954 (the Manila Pact), and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in 1955 (the Baghdad Pact). These ‘treaty organizations’ were created to yoke in the post-colonial states into a close embrace with the United States, and to encircle the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the Democratic Republic of Korea. In February 1950, the USSR and the PRC signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. This is what had to be undermined.
‘No Communist in Gov. or Else’
Spokes had to be fashioned. This was class warfare. The classes that favoured imperialism were frequently the old aristocracies, the landed oligarchy, and the emerging capitalists; they were joined by forces of tradition – such as hierarchical religious orders – that understood clearly that they would be pushed aside by socialism and communism. The factory owner, the baron, the landlord, and the priest rushed to assist and be assisted by the CIA and its friends. It is these groups that colluded with the imperialist forces to overcome their class adversaries. It was class against class in the immediate years after the Second World War, with the CIA helping the ruling elites to maintain their property and privilege against democracy. The spokes were made in this class war.
If the parties of the workers and peasants came near power, or if they took power, and if they defied the rule of the imperialists, they would have to be prevented or ejected from office. The most common instruments used by the United States – without any mandate from the UN or by international law – were interference in elections and the coup d’état.
Those that appeared to be obvious allies had to be brought into line. It was too bad for imperialism that their natural allies in Europe had collaborated with the Nazis, while their decisive enemies – the Communists – had played heroic roles in the fight against Nazism. The Communists – from France to Yugoslavia – had the highest level of popularity. In this class war, the Communists had to be destroyed and the old social elites – even the Nazis – had to be reinstated to power. In West Germany, the CIA was quite happy working with a Nazi intelligence officer – Reinhard Gehlen – who formed the anti-Communist Gehlen Organization, which then was essentially absorbed into the West German Federal Intelligence Service, which Gehlen ran. There was no embarrassment to have a Nazi as the CIA’s main asset in West Germany, and none at all that this was the man who then founded and ran West German intelligence a mere decade after the Holocaust.
A CIA memorandum from 1949 admitted that the Albanian Communists in the National Liberation Front partisan brigades ‘did fight effectively’. In nearby Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito’s partisans beat back the Nazis with little outside support. The same could be said of Greece, where the Communist Party formed the bulk of the partisans. In the 1945 legislative elections in Albania, the Communists – as the Democratic Front – won all the seats. Observers from the United States and Britain grudgingly conceded that this was a fair election. Their favoured Albanians had cooperated with the fascists; no one wanted to vote for them. Their ears rang with the partisan song – ‘Hakmarrje Rini’ – in which the voice of a young partisan asks for vengeance; there would be no class collaboration with those Albanians who had danced with the Nazis. This attitude ran through the Greek Communist Party (KKE), which was not in any mood to create a government of national unity that included collaborators. They went into the hills as the Democratic Army of Greece and fought a civil war from 1946 to 1949. Konstantinos Tsaldaris’s right-wing government was bathed in monarchism and gangsterism (with its maa-like parakatos on the streets), but it was also energized by money and support from Washington, DC. Dollars brought back to life the cadaver of Europe’s reactionary political bloc. It had permission to use maximum force against the Communists. Washington would manage the world media on behalf of this doddery fascistic government.
Much the same sort of political equation was necessary in far-off Japan. There, the elites had all been compromised by their role in the brutal war in Asia and then in the Second World War. The United States guided the early elections in 1946, 1947, 1949, and 1952. The US occupation forces struggled to bring the far-right (Liberal Party) and the liberals (Democratic Party) into coalition against the socialists. In the 1947 general elections, the Socialist Party won and its leader Tetsu Katayama served as the prime minister for a year. A month after his shocking victory, the Democrats and the Liberals formed the Democratic Liberal Party, whose formation was egged on by the US State Department and whose creation was well-funded by the CIA. The Democratic Liberal Party absorbed old fascists (Ichiro Hatoyama and Nobusuke Kishi) and developed enduring ties with big business and organized crime (Yoshio Kodama), going on to rule Japan for 38 years (the Democratic Liberal Party would become the Liberal Party in 1950 and then the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955). Whatever esteem lay with the Japanese Socialists and the Communists had to be undermined. Japan became a key spoke of the US hub.
It would appear that the most obvious candidates to become subordinates of the United States and of transnational corporations would be France, Italy, and Germany – the three most important Western allies for the decades to come. But this was not the case. In France and Italy, the Communists emerged as the most powerful political forces – largely because of their leadership in the antifascist resistance. US Secretary of State Marshall told the Prime Ministers of both France (Paul Ramadier) and Italy (Alcide De Gasperi) that he would not write a cheque to the countries if they retained Communists in their ministries. In Italy, the Communist leader Fausto Gullo – as the minister of agriculture – had begun deep reforms in the countryside, including basic land reforms that had been blocked by an old alliance between the landlords and the mafia. Even the conservative De Gasperi could not rein in Gullo. In France, the Communists commanded a full quarter of the votes, and played a key role in Ramadier’s socialist government. ‘I told Ramadier,’ Marshall wrote in his diary, ‘no Communists in gov. or else.’ It was a direct threat. A wave of strikes in France and a mafia attack on Communist militants in Italy provided the two Prime Ministers their excuse. The Communists were removed from government. Washington blessed the Prime Ministers, and then paid them off. The money did not come only from the US Treasury. It also came from the transnational corporations. Exxon Corporation contributed almost $50 million to the Christian Democrats in Italy from 1963 to 1972. This was a soft coup against the Communists.
It was expensive tool-and-die work; at its end, the spokes were ready, and they – because of their class interests – remained loyal for decades to come.
‘Nothing Can Be Allowed’
In May 1943, the USSR disbanded the Communist International. The Soviet Union – in the midst of the Nazi invasion – wanted to mollify the United States and Great Britain; the USSR wanted the Allies to open another front in Europe to relieve the pressure of the Nazi onslaught. In September 1943, the Allies finally landed in Italy. After the war, the USSR created a Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) to draw together its allies along the eastern edge of Europe (but including the French and the Italians). No Communist parties from the colonized world were members of the Cominform. Instead, they would become part of people-to-people communist organizations such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the World Peace Council, and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. These mass fronts provided the main contacts for Communists and their allies in the immediate period after the war; but there was nothing like the Communist International to use the resources of the USSR to spread revolution in the world. The revolutions that did take place, such as in Vietnam (1945), had their own dynamic with minimal assistance from the Soviets.
The main contradiction in the period after the Second World War was not between the capitalist powers – led by the United States – and the USSR, what became known as the Cold War. US President Harry S. Truman, who had authorized the use of the nuclear bombs on Japan, formulated a doctrine in 1947 to use any and every means to defeat – or at least contain – the spread of Soviet influence and of Communism. It was this Truman Doctrine that authorized the use of US assets to interfere in the elections in Greece, France, and Italy, and it would be the Truman Doctrine that justified the US use of asymmetrical wars and hybrid wars against the process of decolonization. The main contradiction of this new period was between the forces of decolonization (which included the USSR when it allied with anti-colonial national liberation movements) and imperialism. This contradiction – between North and South – rather than the Cold War – between East and West – shaped the character of US-led imperialism.
In 1953, the US National Security Council produced a report that candidly spoke of US interests in the world. The United States, the NSC notes, must make sure that ‘nothing can be allowed to interfere substantially with the availability of oil from those sources to the free world’. It referred to the Gulf region, which had already become a key producer of oil for fossil fuelled capitalism. The United States must make ‘every effort to ensure that these resources will be available and will be used to strengthen the Free World’.
That term was key to Truman – the Free World. The term emerged during the Second World War to refer to the countries that fought against fascism, although many of those countries – such as Britain and France – held colonies where they maintained authoritarian regimes. The United States government of Truman weaponized the term through a massive campaign of psychological warfare, which included Truman’s Campaign of Truth of 1950 and the celebrated publication of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which made the case for the identity of fascism and communism. These were totalitarian and unfree ideologies, while Western liberalism was identical to freedom. The ‘Free World’ was the world led by the United States. What the US champions is freedom; its adversaries are the forces of unfreedom.
So, in this prison house of psychological warfare it is perfectly acceptable for the Free World to claim resources from the colonized world, which should be forced to surrender its wealth for the sake of someone else’s freedom.
In 1950, Truman wrote to the Saudi monarch King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud about the renewal of US rights to the Dhahran Air Base – a military project that would secure Saudi Arabia’s loyalty to the US. Underneath all this was the oil. Truman praised the King for his ‘enlightened leadership’ and for Saudi Arabia’s role as a ‘bulwark to peace in the Near Eastern world’. This ‘enlightened’ leader faced severe labour struggles in the oil region of Saudi Arabia from June 1945, which deepened in 1953. Communists played a key role in these mobilizations, which threatened the Saudi-US oil company, ARAMCO. Enlightened leadership, if it meant the swift dispatch of oil to the West, was allowed to use any means against the workers, particularly against the Communists. The Saudi monarchy was threatened by its own workers and its own Communists; but it used the Cold War to tighten its links with the United States. Dhahran Air Base is located in the oil region, and so the deal to have US troops based there was insurance against any Communist-led rebellion. That same year, the Saudis agreed to a 50-50 split on oil profits within ARAMCO between the United States and the Saudis. This was the price that the Saudis were willing to pay; they would rather leech their resources to the United States to maintain their power rather than share the benefits of resources with the oil workers. The Saudi monarchy bound the United States to itself through the 1951 Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement. The defence of the Saudi monarchy – and its oil fields – was the charge of the United States government.
Nothing can be allowed, said the NSC document of 1953 – not labour unrest in Qatif, nor Communist organizations; not even the basic elements of the ‘free world’, such as a free press and the right to free association. A June 1956 strike by oil workers was crushed with the full force of the Saudi apparatus; whatever newspapers had emerged were closed down, and labour leaders and Communist activists were imprisoned on long terms. The oil had to flow. It was freedom of the oil that mattered, not the freedom of the people. Their freedom could not be allowed.
Third World Project
The US-instigated coups against Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) took place when the Third World bloc was not fully established; the Bandung conference of the post-colonial states of Africa and Asia took place only in 1955. The Soviets made their objections in the UN, but the Sino-Soviet dispute was already on, and it would severely weaken the ‘red zone’ in its ability to stand fast against these kinds of manoeuvres. After Bandung, the Third World bloc was stronger, and it was able to draw the Soviets in as a more reliable shield.
In December 1960, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution on decolonization. ‘The process of liberation,’ agreed the nations of the world, ‘is irresistible and irreversible.’ This resolution was the summary of major fights from Cuba to Vietnam, from Indonesia to Egypt. Over the course of the 1960s, a broad understanding emerged in the former colonial world about the necessity of freedom from colonialism and from imperialism. The temperament of the various national liberation struggles differed based on the class alignment of their leading organizations. It is this difference that fractured the new nations in the anti-colonial world. There were rightward leaning states and leftward leaning states, but each of them – from Saudi Arabia to Tanzania – would remain within the Non-Aligned Movement, created in 1961. By 1973, even the rightward states would acknowledge the radical agenda set by NAM in its New International Economic Order (NIEO). Indeed, even countries like Saudi Arabia and Brazil – steeped in monarchies and military dictatorships – found merit in the argument that the global economic and political order needed to be reformed.
New states that won their independence after the Second World War gathered at Bandung (Indonesia) in 1955. There they laid out the outlines of what would be considered a ‘non-aligned’ foreign policy. These were states led by political movements that had a range of class alignments and therefore of domestic policies. There was, however, broad agreement against the dangers of warfare (particularly nuclear warfare) and for the creation of the context for a national development agenda. It was these states – notably Egypt, India and Yugoslavia – that led the way for the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 and, that same year, the Committee of 24 or the Decolonization Committee in the United Nations. This inter-state movement had a cognate in the United Nations through the Group of 77 (G77), formed in 1964 at the UN Conference of Trade and Development. It was out of their agenda that the guts of the NIEO were crafted: subsidies and tariffs to grow national economies, cartels to protect prices of exported raw minerals, preferential financing to go around the prohibitive rates set by banks, and so on.
By the mid-1960s, NAM was challenged on its right and left flanks. From the right came NAM states that had formed close associations with imperialism, whether by joining the Manila or Baghdad ‘security’ pacts or by the formation in 1969 of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (led by Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Pakistan). These formations took a position against Third World-style socialism and communism. From the left came the Tricontinental, a group established by Cuba of state and national liberation movements that believed in a fuller freedom – often to be attained by armed struggle. The Tricontinental would not only gather heads of states, but leaders of national liberation movements from Cape Verde to Vietnam. At the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba’s President Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, who had been present at the NAM’s founding in Belgrade, was crisp in his denunciation of the mood and strategy of conciliation to imperialism – ‘The problem of underdevelopment, even of independent nations, cannot be solved with palliatives, with institutions and technical instruments that emerge out of international conferences. The cause of underdevelopment is none other than the subsistence of imperialist domination, and thus it can be overcome only through a struggle against and by total victory against imperialism.’ These were strong words. By the 1970 NAM meeting in Zambia and the 1973 NAM meeting in Algiers, the ethos of the Tricontinental would be centre stage.
Cuba’s revolution of 1959 could not be contained. Everything that the new revolutionary government led by Fidel Castro did was rational and logical, from land reform to control of electricity and housing prices. Each time the government moved one of these reasonable policies, it was met by resistance from the local landowners, from the Cuban property owners, and from the US transnational firms. It was this resistance that proved the Marxist analysis of capitalism, that the social development of the people was constrained by the hideous prejudice of private property. It was not that Castro came to Havana as a Communist, but it was that the wretched resistance of the owners – whether in Cuba or in the United States – made him into a Communist. Castro challenged the transnational oil and electricity companies, and they fought back; but the new Cuban revolution was stubborn, so it took what it wanted. The US embargo and the turn to Communism was a consequence of the impossibility of the United States to tolerate a free country in the Caribbean. Haiti had suffered that fate after its revolution in 1791. Che Guevara was in Guatemala when Árbenz was overthrown; he knew not to trust the United States and he knew that the revolution had to arm the people and defend itself. Indio Naborí, a Communist poet, took the line from Louis XIV and gave it to the Cuban worker, The state, now it is me (‘el estado, ahoro soy yo’); Castro quoted this line in a speech at a graduation ceremony in 1961, when three thousand children of peasants lined up to take their degrees – and claim the state as their own.
In 1966, Castro would welcome the national liberation movements to Havana. Between 1960 and 1965, the CIA had tried to assassinate Castro at least eight times (Castro told Senator George McGovern in 1975 that the actual number by then was 24). Even the CIA acknowledged to the Church Committee in 1975, that it had at least twice sent maa gangsters with poison pills, poison pens, and deadly bacterial powders to kill Castro in those years; the mobsters failed. In 1961, the CIA attempted an invasion of Cuba at Bay of Pigs. This failed because Castro armed the people. And then he turned to the world of national liberation as well as the socialist bloc to provide a shield.
In 1966, Che Guevara was on a secret mission in Tanzania to assist the resistance movement in the Congo. Che was disappointed. ‘The human element failed,’ he wrote in his Congo Diary. ‘There is no will to fight. The leaders are corrupt. In a word, there was nothing to do.’ He would draft two books on economics and philosophy before moving on to his tragic mission in Bolivia. All this was supported by the Cuban government. The export of the revolution, the Cuban leadership felt, was the essence of their revolution. At the Tricontinental conference in 1966, Castro announced that this new body would ‘coordinate support for revolutionary wars of liberation throughout the colonized world’. Cuba would provide logistical support and people to all liberation movements ‘within its means, wherever they occur’.
The imperative of armed struggle at the Tricontinental came fully developed from Amílcar Cabral of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), who argued that ‘we are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults against it. For us, the best or worst shout against imperialism, whatever its form, is to take up arms and fight’. Cabral picked up the gun not out of choice, but out of necessity. The PAIGC began its independence struggle in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in 1956. Three years later, the Portuguese authorities conducted a massacre at Pijiguiti, killing 50 unarmed dockworkers. It was this colonial violence that pushed the PAIGC into the armed struggle that ran from 1961 to 1974. It was imperialism’s harsh face that moved the national liberation struggles of the 1960s and the 1970s into the armed phase. It was the viciousness of imperialism which denied the national aspirations of the people of places like Vietnam and the Congo that pushed them to move to the gun. An inventory of that colonial violence would include the Malayan Emergency (1948– 60), the Kenyan Emergency (1952–60), the French war on Algeria (1954–62), the French war on Vietnam (1946–54), the US war on Vietnam (1954–75), the failed 1961 US invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the 1961 assassination of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, the US invasion of Guatemala (1954) and the Dominican Republic (1965), and the massacre of the Communists in Indonesia (1965). In the lead-up to the Tricontinental, in October 1965 French intelligence and Moroccan intelligence assassinated Mehdi Ben Barka, one of the planners of the Tricontinental. What different kind of futures might have been available to the Congo and to Morocco had the Congolese National Movement and the National Union of Popular Forces in Morocco been able to triumph? Such different futures buried with the corpses of those who had been assassinated. It was this colonial violence that set the tactical terms for the armies of national liberation that came to Havana in 1966. They did not want violence; violence was imposed upon them.
The violence of the armies of national liberation was, as Amílcar Cabral put it, ‘to answer the criminal violence of the agents of imperialism. Nobody can doubt that, whatever its local characteristics, imperialist domination implies a state of permanent violence against the nationalist forces’. Violence is the essence of imperialism and it is the instinct of a cornered imperialist bloc. It was this violence that was on display in the Vietnamese village of Mỹ Lai in March 1968. One soldier described his mission with brutal honesty – ‘Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill: to kill Communists and to kill as many of them as possible. Stack ’em like cordwood.’ Four years later, in 1972, Portuguese colonial troops went into the village of Wiriyamu in Mozambique and massacred between 150 and 300 villagers. Before they killed them, the Portuguese colonial troops made the villagers clap their hands and say goodbye.
By 1975, the Vietnamese had defeated the US, and Portugal was defeated by its African colonies. Cuba remained afloat, despite every attempt to overthrow that government. No question that the Carnation Revolution of Portugal would not have taken place to overthrow the Estado Novo in 1974 without the wars of national liberation in Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique. No question that two decades later the apartheid regime of South Africa would not have fallen without the victory of the Angolan liberation forces, with the Cubans against the South African regime in the 1987–88 battle of Cuito Cuanavale. Democracy in Portugal and in South Africa was taken by the gun. It was not given by liberalism. This narrative is now submerged. It has to be revived. Not just the sounds of the battlefield, but also the stories of the doctors and the technicians, of the revolutionary educational programmes in Mozambique and Cape Verde, the attempt to build a new society out of the detritus of the colonial order. This was the revolutionary energy that is now forgotten.
It was not forgotten due to the passage of time. A condition of amnesia was produced by the corporate media and the profession of history-writing, both of whom became stenographers of power. There was concerted effort by the West to undermine the entire dynamic of decolonization, from coups against the Ghanaian people (1966) to coups against the Chilean people (1973). Violence of the colonizer was slowly justified in humanitarian terms, with the West re-establishing itself as the architect of humanity who would now need to manage the violence of the native. The great decolonization process – whose highpoint was in the 1960s and 1970s – became the prelude to poverty and war that now racks the former Third World. Beneath the paving stones in these colonized lands there is no beach. Beneath the paving stones, the corpses of freedom fighters.
Expose the US ‘Unnecessarily’
The anti-colonial movement had, by the late 1950s, delegitimized the idea of colonialism. National liberation leaders – even when they had different political orientations – fought to build united platforms on the world stage to oppose both colonialism and imperialism. The most important institution for them was the United Nations, which they saw as an instrument for the decolonization struggle. In 1960, these states pushed for that important resolution at the UN that summarized their views: ‘the process of liberation is irresistible’. Even if the French tried to hold on to Algeria and the British tried to hold on to Rhodesia, the process of liberation could not be stopped.
The United States has always hesitated before admitting its own colonial history. There is a great myth of the American Revolution of 1776 as an anti-colonial revolution. It is worth asking if 1776 was a revolution at all. There was no class struggle of any importance, no movement from below of the workers that defined the revolutionary process, no social unity of the various peoples (Europeans, Africans, Native Americans) in this struggle. Instead, there was a genocidal attitude towards the Native peoples, and a great fear of a revolt of the enslaved Africans. The war against the English was premised against a desire by the European settlers to break out of the Thirteen Colonies and conquer the entire continent; this was a war for colonization, not a war against colonialism. When the break with England did happen, no real change took place in the order of property, with the contradiction between Southern plantation capitalists and Northern industrial capitalists put off for a few generations till the Civil War broke out in 1861.
From its early years, the new country looked outwards to conquer, with one Kentucky man saying in 1810 that ‘his countrymen were full of enterprise’ and ‘although not poor, are greedy after plunder as ever the old Romans were. Mexico glitters in our eyes – the word is all we wait for’. They did not have to wait long. President James Polk sent the US troops south to claim Mexico. The New York Herald on 8 October 1847 cheered the soldiers on:
It is a gorgeous prospect, this annexation of all Mexico. It was more desirable that she should come to us voluntarily; but as we shall have no peace until she is annexed, let it come, even though force be necessary at first to bring her. Like the Sabine virgins, she will soon learn to love her ravishers.
Mexico lost one-third of its territory, including what would become the US states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. Earlier, the United States had gone into the 1812 war against the British to seize Canada; some hoped to go to war against the Spanish for Cuba and Florida; yet others called for the genocide of the Native Americans so that the settlers could have the entire continent for themselves (‘you are a subdued people’, the US government told Native chiefs as early as 1784). US imperialism was born not in the harbours of Havana and Manila in 1898, but on the vast territory that would eventually stretch from New York to San Francisco. But this ‘internal colonization’, with its full-scale genocide of the Native peoples, did not fully appear to be colonialism since it was muddied by conceptual blankets such as ‘territorial expansion’ and the ‘frontier of settlement’.
In 1823, James Monroe delivered an important speech which laid out the Monroe Doctrine. In his speech, Monroe made it abundantly clear that the United States of America was supreme in the hemisphere of the Americas. At the same time, Monroe told the Europeans both that they must not interfere politically and commercially in the hemisphere, and that the US is perfectly within its rights to interfere in Europe (the issue here was Greek independence). In 1893, just before the US went to war against Spain to expand its colonies, Frederick Jackson Turner in his celebrated speech on the frontier found the ‘germ of the Monroe doctrine’ in the colonial tendencies of the farmers of the Ohio Valley, whose wars against the Native Americans and whose drive to California and the purchase of Louisiana defines the beginning ‘of the definite independence of the United States from the state system of the Old World, the beginning, in fact, of its career as a world power’. Or, to be frank, of an imperialist state.
Even the US role in the ‘Spanish-American’ war is shrouded in the falsehood that the US sent its troops in 1898 into Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Samoa to help liberate these lands from the Spanish empire. In fact, the US absorbed these countries into its orbit, forcibly defeating the national liberation forces in each of these places. Cuba’s revolutionaries were denied a role at the peace talks in Paris, and US General William Shafter did not allow General Calixto García to attend the Spanish surrender in Cuba. This was symbolic of the usurpation of the gains of that war by the United States. None of these former Spanish colonies were allowed to become independent; they were hastily absorbed into the expanding archipelago of US power.
Rudyard Kipling wrote his poem White Man’s Burden (1899) to urge on the United States to take up its imperialist mantle. It is a silly poem. It misunderstood the US posture. It was not as if the US would not be an imperialist power, since it was already one in many of its aspects and would become one in the decades to come. What Kipling did not recognize was that the main political leaders in the United States masked their imperialism by various forms of anti-imperialism. Albert Beveridge, the US Senator for Indiana, wrote a tract with just this theme – For the Greater Republic, Not for Imperialism (1899). ‘Imperialism is not the word for our vast work,’ Beveridge wrote, because imperialism came with all the suggestions of domination and theft. What imperialism truly represents, he continued, is the ‘mighty movement and mission of our race’. What was that mission? Kipling wore that mask tighter than Beveridge. In his poem, he defined imperialism or the white man’s burden as ‘to seek another’s profit, to work another’s gain’. The imperialist did not act to aggrandize himself, to steal wealth; he worked to bring civilization to the barbarians. This was an old trick – the mission of civilization as the objective of imperialism, when it was clear from all evidence that the objective was to plunder wealth and subordinate sovereignty. Beveridge won his seat to the Senate with an impassioned speech that called for outright colonization of Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. ‘The trade of these islands,’ he said, ‘developed as we will develop it by developing their resources, monopolized as we will monopolize it, will set every reaper in this republic singing, every spindle whirling, every furnace sprouting the flames of industry.’ These were honest words – annexation to subordinate these islands so that they provided raw materials for US industry, and then bought the finished products from the United States.
Anxiety about being an imperialist power runs through the entire history of Washington’s expansion. Nitze, who framed the policy of preponderant power for the United States, wrote in 1955 that support for colonialism was ‘abhorrent to American sensibilities’. But this did not mean that Nitze supported the decolonization process that would include the meeting of the African and Asian states at Bandung that year. He understood, as the UN would say in 1961, that the process of decolonization was inevitable. But its timing could be slowed. There was a taste of Hegel in Nitze’s essay, the acknowledgment that the ‘historic development of world forces’ would lead to decolonization and that the US should throw ‘its weight behind the acceleration of self-determination for all peoples’. But then came the caveat. The US should throw its weight but only ‘under conditions which will see preserved these precious freedoms’. Here’s an important hesitation. Only if the new states would drive in the lanes drawn by the US – who would determine what are these ‘precious freedoms’ – could they be allowed eventually to flourish. The language of freedom and liberty would fly off the lips of US diplomats, but the meaning of these words would be unique.
In 1962, the administration of US President John F. Kennedy produced an Overseas Internal Defense Policy document. It is a clear statement of the class allegiance of the United States with the worst elements of countries in the Third World – despite the glamour of the Kennedy administration and its veneer of liberalism. This Policy document was being prepared by Kennedy’s team just as 6,500 US Marines landed in Thailand to ‘support that country during the threat of Communist pressure from outside’, and just as Kennedy – after his failed attempt to overthrow the government in Cuba – pledged to ‘go all the way’ against Vietnam’s Communist government. This 1962 document merely established in print what had already been written in blood: that the full force of the United States would be used to make sure that ‘developing nations evolve in a way that affords a congenial world environment for international cooperation and the growth of free institutions’. All this is verbiage for a simple motto: the US government will make the world safe for the capitalist system whose major beneficiaries were transnational corporations (most of them based in the West). In fact, there is no need to annotate the Policy document. The US, the authors write, has an ‘economic interest in assuring that the resources and markets of the less developed world remain available to us and to other Free World countries’.
Those Marines arrived in Thailand in July 1962. They had come to bolster the anti-Communist militias and the Thai police – both trained by the CIA – in a war to weaken the communist Pathet Lao forces in nearby Laos and the Communist Party of Thailand, which began armed struggle in 1961. The US sent in its premier former CIA diplomat John Peurifoy, fresh from overthrowing a democratic government in Guatemala, to oversee operations in Thailand, and to ensure that the military – led by Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat – came to power. Millions of dollars owed out of the Kennedy administration to train the Thai Army and the Royal Lao Army in a project known as Ekarad. Theirs was a policy – as the US embassy in Bangkok put it – of ‘covert harassment’. It is what created the conditions for a clash with the Pathet Lao, the triggering of the SEATO pact, and then the arrival of US troops – with the sound of US aircraft overhead, threatening the wrath of napalm. Garment workers from factories that ringed Bangkok and college students moved in a radical direction; they, along with the insurgency at the fringes of the country, threatened the monarchy, the military, and the bourgeoisie. It was to crush them that the US lent its full force, in return for which it got a subordinated ally and military bases – and it could ensure its economic interests remained alive and well.
The intervention of the US Marines – little known now as it was little discussed then – took place alongside the ‘covert harassment’ provided by droves of US advisors to the Thai and Laotian military forces. The US whispered into the ears of the militaries of these regions, who were quite pleased to suspend any talk of democracy in the interests of stability; stability is a synonym for anti-Communism. These militaries were not simply marionettes of US power; they represented classes in their own societies that wanted to suppress workers and peasants to maintain both local oligarchic rule – from which they benefited – and international imperialism – from which the US and its allies benefited.
What was impossible was for the United States to admit that it was an imperialist power. The times were against that. In January 1962, Kennedy asked the CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell to oversee the Special Group (Counter-Insurgency). It was this group that produced the Overseas Internal Defense Policy document. Bissell was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in the home that was built by Mark Twain, one of the leaders of the Anti-Imperialist League that was set up to protest the US war on the Philippines. Bissell went to Yale, and then the CIA; the men who joined him in this Group were also well-read men from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. They knew both their history and their current events. The countries of the Third World had just met in September 1961 in Belgrade (Yugoslavia) to set up the Non-Aligned Movement. That is why the Special Group emphasized covertness in its operations. US power must be used through military action (asymmetrical wars), but also through the use of measures such as economic inducements, sanctions, and information warfare as well as support for local police and military forces (hybrid wars).
‘It is important,’ Bissell and his colleagues wrote, ‘for the US to remain in the background, and where possible, to limit its support to training, advice, and material, lest it prejudice the local government effort and expose the US unnecessarily to charges of intervention and colonialism.’