I just posted commentary on 6 books I recently finished, which together give a good account of the growth of right-wing politial power since the early 90s.

A response to President George W. Bush’s foreign policy.

Introduction

Millions of Americans are genuinely confused, and in no small degree of pain, at the knowledge that few of the world’s peoples share our image of the United States as a beneficent nation, and that many people around the world genuinely hate the U.S. (Some 15 or so of these America-haters carried out the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.) These Americans feel that they are hated personally, and that the world’s skeptics and America-haters do not realize that we are fundamentally a decent and generous people. Consequently, many, if not the majority, of these Americans have adopted a defensive posture, and have dismissed the general ill-feeling toward our nation as merely an expression of envy at our economic success. The 9/11 attacks are attributed to the manifestation of this envy by a few so-called "religious fanatics."

This view is profoundly mistaken, and can be held only in the absence of knowledge of the real wellspring and history of U.S. foreign policy; or in the psychological denial of that knowledge. It goes without saying that terrorist acts such as the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center must be stopped. But, the means by which such terrorism is forestalled are crucially important to maintaining the freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, as well as to maintaining our position of leadership in the world. Our nation is in grave danger of going the way of imperial Rome. Contrary to all talk about protecting the U.S. from further terrorist threats, or “liberating people of Iraq from a murderous tyrant,” the Bush administration’s response to 9/11, and to the world, is nothing more than the latest application of the Monroe Doctrine writ large. If this response is not replaced by patience, and cooperation with the nations of the world – including a genuine effort by the U.S. to strengthen the United Nations – America will fall as Rome fell. This will be an incalculable disaster for the world.

Some of the following materials, from unimpeachable sources, are necessary, and almost sufficient in themselves, for an understanding why the U.S. is so disliked around the world. Others are simply trenchant observations on human nature and politics. It is my hope that these materials will at the least give those who support President Bush’s global stance pause to think about the moral foundation of that stance, and its likely long-term consequences.

Bill Becker


Following are edited excerpts from the views of George F. Kennan, former Director of Policy Planning Studies, U.S. Department of State, writing in the TOP SECRET Review of Current Trends: U.S. Foreign Policy; PPS 23 [Policy Planning Study 23], February 24, 1948. [Source: Foreign Relations of the United States: 1948, I (part 2), 523-26]. Published in CONTAINMENT: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950. Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, editors. Columbia University Press, New York, 1978.] Note: In the Kennan material, I have used ellipses ("...") to substitute for references to Asia, the Pacific Basin, and/or the Far East, the specific areas of Kennan's analysis. As was once confirmed by my own Congressman, using only Kennan’s original references to Asia and the Far East diverts attention from the global scope of Kennan's advice, and its application, so far as has been practicable, first, to the entire Third World, and now, at the dawn of the 21st century, to the entire globe.

George Kennan:

... "Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. ... In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction."

"In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of concepts which have underlined our thinking ... . We should dispense with the aspiration to "be liked," or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded altruism." ... We should cease to talk about vague and --...-- unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we will have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."

"We should recognize that our influence ... in the coming period is going to be primarily military and economic. We should make a careful study to see what parts of the ... world are absolutely vital to our security, and we should concentrate our policy on seeing that those areas remain in hands which we control or rely on."

Note that Kennan does not mention the evil Russkies in his comments about “maintaining the disparity” after WWII. “Maintaining the disparity” is independent of any foreign adversary, although any powerful foreign adversary is a God-send to those who shrink from honestly espousing such views as Kennan expresses here. It is of course not accidental that Kennan's comments were classified TOP SECRET. Had advice like this been discovered in top secret documents of the former Soviet Union, the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and the U.S. media, would have had a field day. In fact, Kennan’s top secret advice merely articulated what had always been the internalized wellspring of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

Kennan’s invocation of “envy” here is masterful, but Smedly Butler’s reflections, below, reveal why “resentment” is the more honest and applicable term. In fact, Kennan would have flunked Propaganda 101 for using the term “resentment,” even in a TOP SECRET document. It suggests that other nations might have good reason to feel “resentment’ toward the U.S. – a forbidden notion within the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

Smedly Butler:

Marine Corps Major General Smedly Butler was a two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner. After he retired, he was asked by a group of powerful right-wing, essentially fascist, businessmen to lead a military coup against the Roosevelt Administration. He refused. The following is a partial reproduction of his article in the progressive magazine Common Sense, November 1935, Volume IV, Number 11, p. 8. 25 cents.


America's Armed Forces
2. In Time of Peace: The Army
BY MAJOR GENERAL SMEDLY D. BUTLER

The New Deal has dealt us a military and naval hand that makes us big time contenders in the war racket. Events in Ethiopia indicate that all too soon it will be our turn to play the cards. We ought to make a good showing. We're getting plenty of practice. Our army and navy have only recently completed their largest and most ambitious peacetime maneuvers. Our National Guardsmen have done even better. In the past two years, large National Guard forces have seen active service in 20 strikes in as many different states, from the Pacific Coast to New England, from Minnesota to Georgia. They have used gas, bullets, and tanks--the most lethal weapons of modern war--against striking workers. Casualty lists have been impressive. In one instance they erected barbed wire concentration camps in Georgia to "coordinate" striking workers with all the efficiency of the fascist repressive technique. There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" (to point out enemies), its "muscle men" (to destroy enemies), its "brain guys," (to plan war preparations) and a "Big Boss," (super-nationalistic capitalism).

I Was a "Racketeer"

It may seem odd for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our country's most agile military force--the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical of everyone in the military service. Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents. The war racket operates at full swing in our own country today. Make no mistake. We no longer fulfill by our example as a nation the role of Leader in Disarmament and Peace-Maker to Mankind. Our present war preparations and military expenditures forever nullify the Kellogg Peace Pact to which we subscribed, and all our previous efforts to ease the burden of war throughout the world.

Defense or Offense?

It is commonly supposed that our armed forces are entirely defensive in nature, that they have nothing to do with the making of war or the creating of situations that lead to war. The General Staff states publicly, that the military organization "is founded on the principle that we must be unready for aggressive war, yet fully capable of defending ourselves. . . To be defensive in motive, as we intend to be, a nation must surrender all thought of initiative." If this statement was a fact and effectively translated into reality, there would be little cause for concern. But close examination reveals that it is just another publicity release from that military sap factory known as the War Department. Training Regulations No. 10-5 of the War Department contain the official "Doctrine of War," for the United States. Section II, paragraph 2, says "Decision to go to war having made, operations will be carried into hostile territory... the primary objective will be the destruction of (the enemy's) armed forces, and this demands that the strategical and tactical offensive be taken and maintained until a decision is reached." Section V, paragraph 6, says "the object to be attained by (military) training is to enable the Army to wage offensive warfare. While training must cover certain phases of defensive doctrine and police doctrine the Army must definitely understand that these are only means to the definite end--offensive warfare--and every individual in the military service must be imbued with the spirit of the offensive."

Our Ideal Never Defensive

Lest this seem to be the bellicose pipedream of some dyspeptic desk soldier, let us remember that the military ideal of our country has never been defensive warfare. Since the Revolution, only the United Kingdom has beaten our record for square miles of territory acquired by military conquest. Our exploits against the American Indian, against the Filipinos, the Mexicans, and against Spain are an a par with the campaigns of Genghis Khan, the Japanese in Manchuria and the African attack of Mussolini. No country has ever declared war on us before we first obliged them with that gesture. Our whole history shows we have never fought a defensive war. And at the rate our armed forces are being implemented at present, the odds are against our fighting one in the near future. The War Plans Section spends all its time creating blueprints for the "defense" of this country. This means, of course, vast schemes for foreign invasion and offensive ...

[End Butler]

Further commentary:

“I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own ... and if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type, because the 'haves' refuse to share with the 'have-nots' by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throat by Americans."

General David M. Shoup, Commander of U.S. Marines, Congressional Medal of Honor winner WWII. May 14, 1966.
[Note: I probably found this quote in one of the myriad sheets or pamphlets that were floating around during the opposition to President Reagan’s Central America policy. I have no reference for it, and I generally do not pass on such items when I cannot provide a reference. In this case, though, it is at least plausible that it is genuine: Shoup was a Marine, and may well have known about Butler’s repudiation of U.S. foreign policy. I consider the real strength of the U.S. to lie in the facts that 1) our Constitution makes it possible for everyone to speak their mind without being “disappeared” in the night -- the favorite method of controlling dissent in most U.S. - sponsored dictatorships, as well as the Soviet Union; and 2) our fundamental ethos seems to foster military people who exercise this right at the call of conscience. I doubt that military men in other nations have been so outspoken in repudiating needless killing at their governments’ orders as have members of the U.S. military. It’s pretty hard to label them as traitors, or to tell them to move to another country – the common “patriotic” response to liberal or progressive opponents of U.S. policy. B.B.]


Miscellany:

1. Editorial in the Washington Post, 2 Jun 1898, after U.S. seizes last of Spain's holdings: "the policy of isolation is dead. ... A new consciousness seems to have come upon us--the consciousness of strength, and with it a new appetite, a yearning to show our strength. ... Ambition, interest, land hunger, pride, the mere joy of fighting, whatever it may be, we are animated by a new sensation. ... The taste of empire is in the mouth of the people, even as the taste of blood in the jungle."

NICARAGUA, A Human Rights Chronology, July 1979 to July 1989, An Americas Watch Report, July 1989 P. 27. Cited in Paterson et. al. American Foreign Policy, p. 213.

2. "There are three stages in the life of a strong people. First it is a small power and fights small powers. Then it is a great power and fights great powers. Then it is a great power and fights small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity."

G.K. Chesterton -- quoted in National Catholic Reporter, February 28, 1992 p.16.

3. "Any competent manager of a destructive bureaucratic system can arrange his personnel so that only the most callous and obtuse are directly involved in violence. The greater part of the personnel can consist of men and women who, by virtue of their distance from the actual acts of brutality, will feel little strain in the performance of their supportive functions. They will feel doubly absolved from responsibility. First, legitimate authority has give full warrant for their actions. Second, they have not themselves committed brutal acts."

Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, Harper & Row, 1974, 1975 Colophon edition, p.122; cited in UNCLASSIFIED, Newspaper for the Association of National Security Alumni, Vol. 3, No. 4, August-September 1991, p.7. [Note: This comment applies directly to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and its foreign “assets,” which were instrumental in carrying out the policy articulated by Kennan, above. B.B]

4. "Finally, as we pointed out earlier, each person is an absolute choice of self from the standpoint of a world of knowledges and of techniques which this choice both assumes and illumines; each person is an absolute upsurge at an absolute date and is perfectly unthinkable at another date. It is therefore a waste of time to ask what I would have been if this war had not broken out, for I have chosen myself as one of the possible meanings of the epoch which imperceptibly led to war. I am not distinct from this poch; I could not be transported to another epoch without contradiction. Thus I am this war which restricts and limits and makes comprehensible the period which preceded it. In this sense we may define more precisely [our] responsibility if to the earlier quoted statement 'There are no innocent victims,' we add the words, 'We have the war we deserve.'"

Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, Philosphical Library, 1957, p.56.

5. [Nationalism is] "the greatest of human misfortunes": "It lives in the shadows and only pretends to be based on love for one's country. But in fact it is spawned in malice and hatred for other nations and for those people in one's own nation who do not share these nationalistic views."

Dmitri Likhachev, Russian historian quoted in the book BLACK HUNDRED, by Walter Laqueur. Reviewed in theChristian Science Monitor, Wed., June 30, 1993, p.13.

6. "Third, unless they're offered a quick war or a tax cut, Americans are cynical about Presidents and Congress."

Columnist Sandy Grady, Opinions, Los Angeles Daily News, November 17, 1993.

7. “The idea that the United States is a universal model has long been a feature of American civilization. ... Yet the claim of the United States to be a model for the world is accepted by no other country. The costs of American economic success include levels of social division – of crime, incarceration, racial and ethnic conflict and family and community breakdown – that no European or Asian culture will tolerate.”

John Gray, (1998) False Dawn: the Delusions of Global Capitalism, New York, New York Press, p. 216. Cited by Chalmers Johnson in Occasional Paper No. 22, Japan Policy Research Institute, August 2001.

8. "The [US] media's feat in transforming the Salvadoran "security forces," aptly described as "a deranged killing machine," into "protectors of an incipient democracy" is, I believe, a propaganda achievement that totalitarian states might conceivably approach, but never surpass."

Edward S. Herman, Professor of Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, in Covert Action Bulletin, Number 21 (Spring 1984) page 7, referring to the Salvadoran elections of 1984. [Note: I believe the description of the Salvadoran Army as a "deranged killing machine" was offered by a former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador. B.B]

9. "Tell them that we are deeply concerned about them, because a country that exports repression will one day unleash that repression against its own people. A nation that wages war against the poor in Nicaragua will ignore the needs of its own poor. A country which in the name of democracy fights wars against the self-determination of other peoples cannot remain a democracy. I have felt for a long time that the U.S. people will one day be the most repressed people in the world."

Miguel D'Escoto, Nicaraguan Foreign Minister for the Sandinistas. Newsletter of the Southern California Interfaith Task Force on Central America, 4/14/89
[Note: D'Escoto was a Catholic priest, who, I believe, was "defrocked" by Pope John Paul. His comment was in response to a question as to the message he would like a U.S delegation of peace activists to take home with them.]

10. "The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.

"I once sat a prisoner, long ago, and watched a peasant soldier just recently equipped with a submachine gun swing the gun slowly into line with my body. It was a beautiful weapon and his finger toyed hesitantly with the trigger. Suddenly to possess all that power and then to be forbidden to use it must have been almost to much for the man to contain. I remember, also, a protesting female voice nearby--the eternal civilizing voice of women who know that men are fools and children, and irresponsible. Sheepishly the peon slowly dropped the gun muzzle away from my chest. The black eyes over the barrel looked out at me a little wicked, a little desirous of better understanding.

"Thompson, Tome'-son'," he repeated proudly, slapping the barrel. "Tome'-son'." I nodded a little weakly, relaxing with a sigh. After all, we were men together and understood this great subject of destruction. And was I not a citizen of the country that had produced this wonderful mechanism? So I nodded again and said carefully after him. "Thompson, Tome'-son'. Bueno, si, muy bueno." We looked at each other then, smiling a male smile that ran all the way back to the Ice Age. In academic halls since, considering the future of humanity, I have never been quite free of that soldier's smile. I weigh it mentally against the future whenever one of those delicate forgotten skulls is placed upon my desk."

Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey, p. 140-141. Vintage, 1957