Year 501 (7 page)

3. Showers of Benevolence

After the mid-19th century conquests, New York editors proudly observed that the US was “the only power which has never sought and never seeks to acquire a foot of territory by force of arms”; “Of all the vast domains of our great confederacy over which the star spangled banner waves, not one foot of it is the acquirement of force or bloodshed”; the remnants of the native population, among others, were not asked to confirm this judgment. The US is unique among nations in that “By its own merits it extends itself.” That is only natural, since “all other races...must bow and fade” before “the great work of subjugation and conquest to be achieved by the Anglo-Saxon race,” conquest without force. Leading contemporary historians accept this flattering self-image. Samuel Flagg Bemis wrote in 1965 that “American expansion across a practically empty continent despoiled no nation unjustly”; no one could think it unjust if Indians were “felled” along with trees. Arthur M. Schlesinger had earlier described Polk as “undeservedly one of the forgotten men of American history”: “By carrying the flag to the Pacific he gave America her continental breadth and ensured her future significance in the world,” a realistic assessment, if not, perhaps, exactly in the intended sense.
36

Such doctrine could not easily survive the cultural awakening of the 1960s, at least outside the intellectual class, where we are regularly regaled by orations on how “for 200 years the United States has preserved almost unsullied the original ideals of the Enlightenment...and, above all, the universality of these values” (Michael Howard, among many others). “Although we are reaching for the stars and have showered less favored peoples with our benevolence in unmatched flow, our motives are profoundly misunderstood and our military intentions widely mistrusted,” another distinguished historian, Richard Morris, wrote in 1967, contemplating the “unhappy” fact that others fail to understand the nobility of our cause in Vietnam, a country “beset by internal subversion and foreign aggression” (by Vietnamese, that is). Writing in 1992 on “the self-image of Americans,”
New York Times
correspondent Richard Bernstein notes with alarm that “many who came of age during the 1960s protest years have never regained the confidence in the essential goodness of America and the American government that prevailed in earlier periods,” a matter of much concern to cultural managers since.
37

The basic patterns established in the early conquest persist to the current era. As the slaughter of the indigenous population by the Guatemalan military approached virtual genocide, Ronald Reagan and his officials, while lauding the assassins as forward-looking democrats, informed Congress that the US would provide arms “to reinforce the improvement in the human rights situation following the 1982 coup” that installed Rios Montt, perhaps the greatest killer of them all. The primary means by which Guatemala obtained US military equipment, however, was commercial sales licensed by the Department of Commerce, the General Accounting Office of Congress observed, putting aside the international network that is always ready to exterminate the beasts of the field and forest if there are profits to be made. The Reaganites were also instrumental in maintaining slaughter and terror from Mozambique to Angola, while gaining much respect in left-liberal circles by the “quiet diplomacy” that helped their South African friends cause over $60 billion in damage and 1.5 million deaths from 1980 to 1988 in the neighboring states. The most devastating effects of the general catastrophe of capitalism through the 1980s were in the same two continents: Africa and Latin America.
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One of the grandest of the Guatemalan killers, General Héctor Gramajo, was rewarded for his contributions to genocide in the highlands with a fellowship to Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government—not unreasonably, given Kennedy's decisive contributions to the vocation of counterinsurgency (one of the technical terms for international terrorism conducted by the powerful). Cambridge dons will be relieved to learn that Harvard is no longer a dangerous center of subversion.

While earning his degree at Harvard, Gramajo gave an interview to the
Harvard International Review
in which he offered a more nuanced view of his own role. He took personal credit for the “70 percent-30 percent civil affairs program, used by the Guatemalan government during the 1980s to control people or organizations who disagreed with the government,” outlining the doctrinal innovations he had introduced: “We have created a more humanitarian, less costly strategy, to be more compatible with the democratic system. We instituted civil affairs [in 1982] which provides development for 70 percent of the population, while we kill 30 percent. Before, the strategy was to kill 100 percent.” This is a “more sophisticated means” than the previous crude assumption that you must “kill everyone to complete the job” of controlling dissent, he explained.

It is unfair, then, for journalist Alan Nairn, who had exposed the US origins of the Central American death squads, to describe Gramajo as “one of the most significant mass-murderers in the Western Hemisphere” as Gramajo was sued for horrendous crimes. We can also now appreciate why former CIA director William Colby, who had some firsthand experience with such matters in Vietnam, sent Gramajo a copy of his memoirs with the inscription: “To a colleague in the effort to find a strategy of counterinsurgency with decency and democracy,” Washington-style.

Given his understanding of humanitarianism, decency, and democracy, it is not surprising that Gramajo appears to be the State Department's choice for the 1995 elections, according to the Guatemala
Central America Report
, citing Americas Watch on the Harvard fellowship as “the State Department's way of grooming Gramajo” for the job, and quoting a US Senate staffer who says: “He's definitely their boy down there.” A “senior commander in the early 1980s, when the Guatemalan military was blamed for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, largely civilians,” Gramajo “is seen as a moderate by the US Embassy,” Kenneth Freed reports, quoting a Western diplomat, and assuring us of Washington's “repugnance” at the actions of the security forces it supports and applauds. The
Washington Post
reports that many Guatemalan politicians expect Gramajo to win the elections, not an unlikely prospect if he's the State Department's boy down there. Gramajo's image is also being prettified. He offered the
Post
a sanitized version of his interview on the 70 percent-30 percent program: “The effort of the government was to be 70 percent in development and 30 percent in the war effort. I was not referring to the people, just the effort.” Too bad he expressed himself so badly—or better, so honestly—before the Harvard grooming took effect.
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It is not unlikely that the rulers of the world, meeting in G-7 conferences, have written off large parts of Africa and Latin America, superfluous people who have no place in the New World Order, to be joined by many others, in the home societies as well.

Diplomacy has perceived Latin America and Africa in a similar light. Planning documents stress that the role of Latin America is to provide resources and a favorable business and investment climate. If that can be achieved with formal elections under conditions that safeguard business interests, well and good. If it requires state terror “to destroy permanently a perceived threat to the existing structure of socioeconomic privilege by eliminating the political participation of the numerical majority...,” that's too bad, but preferable to the alternative of independence; the words are those of Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz, describing the goals pursued by the National Security States that had their roots in Kennedy Administration policies. As for Africa, State Department Policy Planning chief George Kennan, assigning to each part of the South its special function in the New World Order of the post-World War II era, recommended that it be “exploited” for the reconstruction of Europe, adding that the opportunity to exploit Africa should afford the Europeans “that tangible objective for which everyone has been rather unsuccessfully groping...,”a badly needed psychological lift, in their difficult postwar straits. Such recommendations are too uncontroversial to elicit comment, or even notice.
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The genocidal episodes of the Colombian-Vasco da Gama era are by no means limited to the conquered regions of the South, as is sufficiently attested by the exploits of the leading center of Western civilization 50 years ago. Throughout the era, there have been savage conflicts among the core societies of the North, sometimes spreading far beyond, particularly in this terrible century. For most of the world's population, these are much like shoot-outs between rival drug gangs or mafia dons. The only question is who will gain the right to rob and kill. In the post-World War II era, the US has been the global enforcer, guaranteeing the interests of privilege. It has, therefore, compiled an impressive record of aggression, international terrorism, slaughter, torture, chemical and bacteriological warfare, human rights abuses of every imaginable variety. That is not surprising; it goes with the turf. Nor is it surprising that the occasional documentation of these facts far from the mainstream elicits tantrums among the commissars.

One might note that there are few novelties here either. From Biblical days, there has rarely been a welcome mat for the bearers of unwanted messages; the “responsible men” are the false prophets, who tell more comforting tales. Las Casas's eyewitness description of “the Destruction of the Indies” has been available, in theory, since 1552. It has hardly been a literary staple since. In 1880, Helen Jackson wrote a remarkable account of “A Century of Dishonor,” a “sad revelation of broken faith, of violated treaties, and of inhuman acts of violence [that] will bring a flush of shame to the cheeks of those who love their country,” Bishop H.B. Whipple of Minnesota wrote in his preface. Flushes of shame were few, even when it was reprinted in 1964 (“Limited to 2,000 copies”). The abolitionists are honored mostly in retrospect. They were “despised and ostracised, and insulted,” Mark Twain wrote—“by the ‘patriots'”: “None but the dead are permitted to speak truth.” His own anti-imperialist essays are scarcely known. The first collection appeared in 1992; its editor notes that his prominent role in the Anti-Imperialist League, a major preoccupation in the last ten years of his life, “seems to have remained unmentioned in all biographies.” The murder of six Jesuit intellectuals by the US-trained Atlacatl Brigade in November 1989 elicited much outrage. They were murdered, John Hassett and Hugh Lacey write in introducing their work, “because of the role they played
as
intellectuals, researchers, writers, and teachers
in expressing their solidarity with the poor” (their emphasis).
There is no surer way to annihilate them forever than to suppress their words—virtually unknown, unmentioned, though problems they addressed are at the heart of the major foreign policy issue of the decade framed by their murder and the assassination of Archbishop Romero, also ignored and forgotten. Soviet dissidents may have been honored in the West, but at home it was those who upheld official verities and berated the “apologists for imperialism” who were the respectable moderates.

True, such figures as Las Casas may be trotted out occasionally to prove our essential goodness. Explaining that “the demographic catastrophe which befell early Latin America was...caused not by wickedness but by human failing and by a form of fate: the grinding wheels of long-term historical change,” the London
Economist
writes that “Where cruelties and atrocities occurred, historians know of them precisely because of the 16th century Spanish passion for justice, for they were condemned by moralists or recorded and punished in the courts.” Most important, the conquerors “meant well, sincerely believing” they were offering their victims “a divinely approved order” as they slaughtered, tortured, and enslaved them, which shows the silliness of the “politically correct” loonies who rant about “the savage injustice of the Europeans” (Adam Smith). Columbus himself wanted nothing more than “to care for the Indians and let no harm or hurt be done to them”—his own words, settling the issue. What better proof could there be of the nobility of our cultural heritage than Columbus's tender solicitude and the Spanish passion for justice?

How curious that the leading chronicler, Las Casas, should have written at the end of his life, in his will: “I believe that because of these impious, criminal and ignominious deeds perpetrated so unjustly, tyrannically and barbarously, God will vent upon Spain His wrath and His fury, for nearly all of Spain has shared in the bloody wealth usurped at the cost of so much ruin and slaughter.”
41

The horrifying record of what actually occurred, if noticed at all, is considered insignificant, even a proof of our nobility. Again, that goes with the turf. The most powerful mafia don is also likely to dominate the doctrinal system. One of the great advantages of being rich and powerful is that you never have to say: “I'm sorry.” It is here that the moral and cultural challenge arises, at the end of the first 500 years.

Chapter 2

The Contours of World Order

1. The Logic of North-South Relations

“Rounding out their natural boundaries” was the task of the colonists in their home territory, which, by the end of the 19th century, extended to the mid-Pacific. But the “natural boundaries” of the South also have to be defended. Hence the dedicated efforts to ensure that no sector of the South goes a separate way, and the trepidations, often near-hysteria, if some deviation is detected. All must be properly integrated into the global economy dominated by the state capitalist industrial societies.