The US
Empire and the Death of Democracy
by
John Gerassi
(Professor
of
Political Science at Queens
College, New York
City)
Copyright 2005
Throughout
history, no empire has survived if it tolerated dissent. It was just as
true in
Ancient Rome as it is in Modern America. From the day that US
policy
makers, representing big business and finance capital, decided to
control world
trade, that is, to become the empire of the world, it has had to
eliminate
dissent, and therefore genuine democracy. But it did so slowly, within
its
potential, and always when the pliant media was willing to tout its
lies as
facts.
Thus in
1825, when President James Monroe proclaimed his famous doctrine of
freedom for
the Americas, by which he meant, and every Latin American well
understood, that
the Americas would hereafter be colonies of the US, the media hailed
the
declaration as a stoic anti-imperialist doctrine. But then there never
was an
established free press in America;
it was always a free-enterprise press, owned mostly by the same
business and
finance capitalists who controlled the government. Which
explains why every newspaper and journal of the times heralded
"Manifest
Destiny" by which god himself had proclaimed that the Caribbean
must become "an American lake."
And so it
almost unanimously applauded when the US
went to war against Spain
to
"help" the Cuban revolutionaries when they had already defeated Spain.
Nor did
the establishment object when the US
imposed on Cuba
total
tutelage through the Platt Amendment, took over the Virgin Islands,
Puerto
Rico, the Philippines
and various other Spanish colonies which lusted for independence. When it came to Europe,
it had to act more slowly, less belligerently, always within its
strength and
potential. During World War I for
example it had to be certain that the European powers were too
exhausted to
object, and hence waited until 1917 to enter the war.
And when it did, it
claimed to side with the
democracies, forcing the press to mimic its pronouncements that England and France
were the good guys and Germany
the bully, when in fact it was the allies who started the war to stop Germany's
rapidly expanding industrialization. Nor did our media tell Americans
that
there was much more democracy in Germany than in the
so-called
allies. In fact Germany then, with its legal Socialist parties, its
massive
union movement and its workingmen's bill of rights (including three
weeks paid
yearly holidays), was much freer in 1914 than England is today.
After the
war, the US ruling class frightened dissenters by launching nation-wide
witch-hunts, first against anarchists by tossing their leader Salcedo out the window of police headquarters,
then framing
two rank-and-filers, Sacco and Vanzetti,
to their death. It jailed Socialists and framed the Wobblies,
executing some of its leaders, for opposing entry into World War I. To
make
sure Americans did not realize the truth, the US elites next went after
public
universities, the only bastion of
academic freedom. One of the worst
such witch-hunts was in New York, the Coudert-Rapp
Committee, which "investigated" public schools and universities for
"subversive" teachers, and arranged to have them drummed out of their
schools. For all the talk about democracy, it was little by little
disappearing.
The US
constitution
correctly defines the fundamental prerequisite for democracy: life,
liberty and
the pursuit of happiness. But no country can be democratic if all of
its people
do not have access to life, that is health.
Nor can a
country be free if its citizens do not have easy access to choices, the
result
of free, equal education. And no people can pursue happiness, unless
they are
healthy and educated.
But the US,
while
proclaiming itself the bastion of freedom, quickly made sure that the
poor, the
worker, the sharecropper, the non-white, the immigrant would not have
access to
either prerequisite; it made health private and expensive and education
financed by local taxes. The result of course was that the rich went to
the
good schools, the poor to the mediocre ones. Today in Westchester
County, where
the rich pay the local taxes, every student is allotted a yearly
$17,520; in
Bayou, Mississippi, where folks are so poor they own nothing and
survive by
catching cat-fish, as the CBS "Sixty Minutes" program documented,
each student must do with $60, a State subsidy at that. The last
science book
purchased by the high school's library is dated 1961.
Though
many of the idiotic Republicans never understood that Franklin
Roosevelt was saving
their capitalism for them, it was he who decided to make the US a two-ocean power, by turning Japan
into an
enemy to stop its industrialization. FDR
imposed boycotts on Japan
of steel, manganese, oil, bauxite, thus forcing the mineral-void island
to
invade other countries for its needed minerals. And it was FDR who set
up the
machinery of state to crush serious dissent in America,
which his heirs employed
to the fullest. The arbitrary arrest and incarceration of Japanese
Americans,
even if they were born in the US, would later give impetus to Colonel
North and
his NSA henchmen to set up concentration camps all over the West, and
frighten
the Latino population into submissiveness when his boss, President
Reagan, and
the fascist team working for him (Poindexter, McFarland, Weinburger,
Perle, Abrams, et al) decided to
crush a
legally and very fairly elected Nicaraguan government, calling it
Marxist-Leninists, because it had the gall to institute the first
minimum wage
law of Central America ($1.27). The OSS (Office of Strategic Services)
which
FDR allowed to operate all over the world without oversight, stimulated
President Truman to enact the National Security Act 1968 (that's just a
number,
the date was 1946), creating the CIA and the various loyalty boards
under which
1.2 million people lost their jobs without being able to confront their
accusers.
Senator
Joseph McCarthy's "anti-Communist" crusades did the US ruling class a
disservice for a while by overdoing it, causing some newsmen (Edward R.
Murrow) and academics (Harvard President Pusey) to fight back, especially after two more
rank-and-filer dissidents, in this case the Communists Rosenbergs,
were executed. But the US ruling class never lost track of its
main
goal: pervert, intimidate, or force all other countries to accept the US 's criteria for world trade.
Bush II's infamous "if you're not with us you're
against
us" is not new to US
policy. Nor was it new with President Eisenhower's Secretary of State
John
Forster Dulles, who was the first to affirm categorically that the US had
a right
to demolish any country opposed to "our new order". No, even before
him, that great statesman whom every liberal adores, General George
Marshall,
made it quite clear in testifying before the House Foreign Relations
Committee
that his objective (known since as "The Marshall Plan") was to
rekindle Europe as a market for US goods, and any neutralist opposed to
it was
"as dangerous as any communist."
No poor
country can develop its infrastructure,
build low-cost
housing, hospitals, universities, self-defense forces without capital
accumulation. No poor country can achieve such accumulation by allowing
foreign
companies to run its utilities, its banks, its mines. Latin America has
75% of
the goodies the US
needs to maintain its industrial might, under its ground. The US
does not have enough iron
(steel), cobalt, bauxite (aluminum), manganese, diamonds
(industrial), to keep its imperial machinery running. Hence it wants
what Latin America has. To get it, it
supports every dictator
it can bribe, and it opposes every independent government which dares
to try to
develop its own country's economy. So the US
plotted against Argentina's
Peron (a "Nazi" it said), Frondizi (a
"Communist)", Brazil's
Vargas (another Nazi), Quadros (too
conservative to
be a red so a "nut"), Goulart (another
communist), etc., and of course Allende,
and
supported all the petty dictators in Central America and the Caribbean,
from
Somoza to Trujillo.
To succeed, the US had to create death squads, organize Operation
Condor
assassination teams, plan dirty wars, foster vicious military coups
and, as NYTimesman Langguth
so eloquently
described in his book, teach all the two-bit gangsters corralled into
the local
police force, how to torture. Always to support US corporations exploiting Latin
lands. With what results? Every year, 5
million kids
under the age of 14 die in Latin America alone from lack of potable
water where
that water is used and polluted by American mining (especially nitrate)
corporations. Hitler may have killed over 50 million people with his
drive to
create a thousand-year Reich, Stalin 20 or 30 million to cater to his
paranoia,
but the US has murdered more than 100 million people in the last
century alone
just to satisfy the greed of its corporate executives. It can do all
that
because it is not a democracy, its elected officials are
whores,
embedded to whatever corporations which give them the biggest
re-election
booty.
Does the
average American know any of this? Does the
mainstream media
report any of these facts? No wonder then that when a Latino rebels or
an Arab
blows himself up with a few US
soldiers, the average American thinks the Latino is an ingrate, the
Moslem a
fanatic. What paper tells him that only 14 percent of suicide bombers
are
religious? What TV anchorman tells him that the CIA murdered every
decent
leader the Third World ever had,
incorruptible
leaders who wanted to better the lot of their people? Egypt's Nasser
(heart
attack by poison), Iraq's Kassem (shot by
CIA employee
Saddam Hussein), Algeria's Frantz Fanon (leukemia by poison in a US
hospital),
Guyana's Cheddi Jagan
(heart attack by poison), Congo's Lumumba (by CIA and Belgian local gunmen), Che Guevara (by Cuban CIA employees),
Indonesia's Sukarno
(by Japanese World War II collaborator Gen. Suharto
under CIA orders), the Cameroon's Felix Moumie,
Um Nyobe and Osende
Afana (by French CIA thugs), Guinea's Amilcar
Cabral (shot in the back by a local CIA operative), ad infinitum.
Most of
the people of the world (not in the US) know that it was the US which
started
the Cold War in 1946, by violating the Berlin treaty whereby each of
the
victorious powers would rule the city together, backed by a currency
defended
by the four. But the US
decided to
issue a mark backed by the dollar. So the English
did the
same, and so too the French. When the Russians decided to follow
suit,
the West cried foul. Why did the US want the war? Because it
could
then launch an arms race and have its citizens pay for it, by
frightening them with
the coming nuclear war. Those of you old enough will remember all those
alarms
and tests, where we had to scamper under the nearest table to
"protect" ourselves against the A-bomb dropping on our heads. Fear!
That was the object, and it made the industrial-military complex rich.
Nothing
better than weapons: once one is built it is obsolete, so let's build
another. And another. And
another. Who is
going to object to paying taxes for our defense? Building hospitals is
profitable to the builder, but it can't be rebuilt every year. But
weapon
systems can, and do. And just to make sure we stayed in fear, the CIA
lied to
us; for 20 years, it claimed that Russia
was way ahead of the US
in arms build-up. For 20 years it lied, so the complex could keep
making money
-- on average-Joe's taxes.
To get
the American public to buy US
intervention in the Middle East, the Russians gave us Afghanistan.
The co-called Communist regime which came to power during Breshnev's
reign was quite good, better than Afghanistan ever had. It
built
schools, hospitals, roads. It allowed women to work, to walk the
streets
without shadors or burkas
if they wanted, to demand that their
husbands have
only one wife. The fanatic tribesmen were outraged and launched a
counter war
against Kabul.
Their operations were on the border with Soviet Russia, which was
worried that
fundamentalist Moslems would sweep into Russia as well. So Moscow
intervened, and our ruling class warmongers immediately called the Kabul regime
"Marxist-Leninist." The only Marx its leaders had ever heard of was
probably Groucho. President Carter surely
knew that,
since all he did was condemn the Soviet intervention by boycotting the
Olympics
scheduled for Moscow
that year. But Reagan and his cohorts jubilantly saw their chance to
start
dominating the whole area. The CIA poured weapons and money ($44
million to
what was to be Taliban) to the worst fanatics in the whole Middle East. And the Pentagon set up the most
advanced base it could
build in Saudi
Arabia.
How would
Americans react if, on the guise of helping the US
stop Cuban exile terrorism, Fidel built a huge modern military base in North Carolina?
As President de Gaulle told a worried British Prime
Minister
Macmillan on his way to meet JFK and hoping to resist US
domination:
"Too late. England
is now nothing more than an aircraft carrier for US goods and policies.
No
country can be free if it has a foreign base on its territory." The
effect
of the US base in Saudi Arabia
was immediate. Every Moslem whose creed opposes foreigners stationed on
their
land and every Saudi who hopes one day to be genuinely independent
rallied to
those who denounced it. But don't castigate the Reagan administration
for
that. On the contrary, that's what the US
ruling class
wanted: a "war of religion". If only the Moslems got really angry,
maybe they might resort to a bit of terrorism. And then the politics of
fear
would continue. Instead of a Cold War, the US
would now fight the War on
Terror. And once again, taxes would go for weapons, military bases,
cops,
agents, torturers, assassins, with no money left for hospitals,
schools,
entitlements, invalid children, AIDS, for anything human. Thanks to
"Terror", taxes would continue to go for death. Because
death makes more money for the rich. And to "defend
ourselves," the ruling class could tighten its repression.
Anyone
who looks Moslem could now be jailed.
And any foreigner the US
didn't like could become an
"enemy combatant." The US
could now torture anyone it wanted to at home or, if some lawyers
objected,
send them to Egypt,
Pakistan, Uzbekistan
or some other dictatorship-run friend of the US,
where they might be tortured
without interference, secretly. It is called "rendition". How many of
the 1500 American Moslems whom the ACLU has identified as
"disappeared" are being rendered
abroad? Every day we learn of a new
case. The Canadian citizen taken off a plane at JFK airport, sent to
his native
Syria,
tortured there for three years. The German Moslem, "not tortured only
severely beaten" for nine months and held long enough to force his
family
back to Lebanon.
The American Lebanese picked up in the street by FBI goons who refused
to
notify his family and held him incomunicado
for three years, compelling his wife and two kids to abandon their
lives in Queens, New York.
Not to mention systematic torture in Guantanamo,
Abu Graib, US detention camps in Afghanistan
and, we now are told,
in US prisons as well. Amnesty International defines the US camp at Guantanamo
as a "Gulag."
Logic and careful analysis of the facts tell us that the US
runs Gulags
wherever it dominates a country.
Some of
that information is now known to the average American. But
not all. Not enough, thanks to a pliable media, for average-Joe
to
understand that the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, and most local US police corps
are
today no better than the Gestapo or the KGB goons. And to make sure
that
average Joe does not get to know the extent of US atrocities, the
government is
now trying to silence even defense lawyers.
So for
you and me, who don't look Moslem or Latino or Hindu or Apache, beware:
one
wrong word and, under the US Patriot ACT, we will face the charge of
aiding and
abetting the terrorists. And we will find it harder and harder to find
a lawyer
willing to defend us, that is if we are not simply "disappeared" to Tashkent or Ryad. Under the War
on Terror, nothing can stop the empire. Years ago, the State Department
hawk
who invented the rational for the Cold War, the former ambassador to
Moscow who
invented "containment," euphemistically meant to give an acceptable
term to the US policy of surrounding Soviet Russia (and making the
Russians so
scared of our first strike policy that the US, in effect, created and
is
responsible for post-war Stalin),
the
great statesman George Kennan said:
We have about 50 percent of the
world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent 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 that will permit us to maintain this
position of disparity. 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 should cease the talk about vague,
unreal objectives, such as
human rights, raising of
living standards and
democratization. The day is not far
off when we are going to have to deal in
straight power concepts. The less we
are hampered by idealistic slogans, the
better.
In other
words, said this great American statesman, forget democracy. We don't
have
it, we don't want it. And let's stop pushing it on our totalitarian
friends.