These are leading features of the New World Order, as of the old, well-documented in the internal record, regularly illustrated in historical practice, bound to persist as contingencies change.
Official PC rhetoric includes a variety of other terms. Thus the aspiring intellectual must master the term “security threat,” referring to anything that might infringe upon the rights of US investors. Another is “pragmatism,” a term which, for us, means “doing what we want.” For others, the meaning is: “doing what we want” In the case of the Arab-Israel conflict, for example, the US has stood virtually alone for many years in blocking any peace process that accords national rights to Palestinians, but of the two brands of Israeli rejectionism (Labor and Likud), it has preferred the former. Accordingly, Likud's Yitzhak Shamir was “ideological” but Labor's Yitzhak Rabin is “pragmatic.” “Mr. Rabin's pragmatic, non-ideological approach fits in well with the Bush team,”
Times
State Department spokesman Thomas Friedman writes, recognizing that the Bush team is pragmatic by definition, agreeing with itself. Jerusalem correspondent Clyde Haberman applauds Rabin's election in June 1992 as a victory for “pragmatism.” Similarly, Palestinians are “pragmatic” if they accept the fact that the US sets the rules: they have no national rights, because the US has so decreed. They must therefore accept “the autonomy of a POW camp” described by Israeli journalist Danny Rubinstein, an “autonomy” in which they will be free to collect their garbage in designated areas not taken over by Israelâas long as the garbage cans do not display the colors of the Palestinian flag, a leading Israeli civil libertarian adds. The term “peace process” is another of those to be mastered: in PC rhetoric, it refers to whatever the US happens to be doing, perhaps blocking the peace process, as in this and many other cases.
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There are other skills to be learned, to some of which we return; but the task is not too onerous, as demonstrated by the ease with which they are mastered.
The “Communist” danger to “stability” is further enhanced by their unfair advantages. The Communists are able to “appeal directly to the masses,” President Eisenhower complained. Our plans for “the masses” preclude any such appeal. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, in private conversation with his brother Allen, who headed the CIA, deplored the Communist “ability to get control of mass movements,”“something we have no capacity to duplicate.” “The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich.”
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The same concerns extend to “the preferential option for the poor” of the Latin American Church and other commitments to independent development or democracyâand also to such friends as Mussolini, Trujillo, Noriega, and Saddam Hussein when they forget their assigned role.
2. After Colonialism
The United States had become the world's major industrial economy by the turn of the century, and its leading creditor by World War I, a position maintained until the Reaganites took command, quickly converting the US into the world's leading debtor. Outing World War II, quasi-totalitarian measures at last overcame the effects of the Great Depression, more than tripling US industrial production and teaching valuable lessons to the corporate managers who ran the wartime economy. There has been no serious challenge since to their conclusion that private wealth and power, which were nurtured by large-scale state intervention in the first place, can be sustained and enhanced only through the same means; only in rhetorical flourishes, or on the remote margins, is capitalism regarded as a viable system. With much of the world in ruins, the US had attained a historically unparalleled peak of economic and military dominance. State and corporate planners were well aware of their unprecedented power, and intent on using it to construct a global order to benefit the interests they serve.
The highest priority was to ensure that the industrial heartland, German-based Europe and Japan, would be firmly within the US-dominated world order, controlled by domestic financial-industrial sectors linked to US state-corporate power. The first order of business, then, was to undermine the antifascist resistance with its popular base in the “rascal multitude,” to weaken labor, and to restore traditional conservative rule, often including fascist collaborators. This task was undertaken on a global scale in the late 1940s, with considerable violence when that proved necessary, notably in Greece and South Korea.
In this New World Order, North-South relations were reconstructed, though not in any fundamental way. The US sought a generally open world based on the principles of liberal internationalism, expecting to prevail in a competition that was “free and fair.” These considerations led to a measure of support for the rising anti-colonial forces. But within limits. A 1948 CIA memorandum observed that a balance must be struck between “supporting local nationalist aspirations and maintaining the colonial economic interests of countries to whom aid has been pledged in Western Europe”; there could be little doubt as to the relative weights when serious US interests are at stake. Similarly, the imperial system that Japan had sought to construct had to be restored to it, under over-arching US control. These considerations led to tactical decisions to favor traditional colonial preference systems for rival/allies; temporarily, in the context of postwar reconstruction and reestablishment of trade patterns with the industrial powers on which the US economy relied.
Intending to organize the Far East pretty much on its own, Washington barred its allies from any role in determining the fate of Japan. The goal was “to guarantee US security by insuring long-term American domination of Japan” and “to exclude the influence of all foreign governments” (Melvyn Leffler, expressing a scholarly consensus; “security” having its usual meaning). Given US power, that goal was easily attained, irrespective of wartime agreements. In the Middle East and Latin America, the ideological system confers on the United States the right to pursue its “needs” and “wants,” respectively. The plan, therefore, was to restrict foreign interference, apart from an occasional subordinate role assigned to client powers, notably Britain in the Middle East. Britain serves as “our lieutenant (the fashionable word is partner),” as a senior Kennedy adviser put it; the British are to hear only the fashionable word.
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The character of planning is well-illustrated by the case of Italy. Like Greece, its importance extended to the Middle East. “U.S. strategic interests” required control over “the line of communications to the Near East outlets of the Saudi-Arabian oil fields” through the Mediterranean, a September 1945 interagency review observed. These interests would be threatened if Italy were to fall into “the hands of any great power”âin translation: if it were to escape from the hands of the proper great power. Italy “could be used to guaranteeâor, in the wrong hands, impairâoil supplies from the Near East,” Rhodri Jeffrey-Jones observes.
It was expected that the Communist Party, with its strong labor support and the prestige conferred by its role in the struggle against Fascism and the Nazi occupiers, would win the 1948 elections. That result could have a “demoralizing effect throughout Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East,” US policymakers warned. It would be the “first instance in history of a communist accession to power by popular suffrage and legal procedure,” and “so unprecedented and portentous an event must produce a profound psychological effect in those countries threatened by the Soviets and...striving to retain their freedom.” To translate again to English, it might influence popular movements that sought to pursue an independent and often radical democratic course, thus undermining the US policy of restoring the traditional order dominated by conservative business and often pro-fascist sectors (“freedom”). In short, Italy might become a “virus infecting others.” The US planned military intervention if the election could not be controlled by other means. A combination of force, threats, control over desperately needed food, and other measures succeeded in overcoming the threat of a free election. Substantial US efforts to subvert Italian democracy continued at least to the mid-1970s. In later years, as noted, it was feared that Chile might be a “virus infecting” Italy.
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For similar reasons, after Washington failed to disrupt the 1984 election in Nicaragua by terror, its doctrinal system effaced the terrible event from history; the media rigorously excluded the approval voiced by international observers including hostile ones, US Latin American scholars who studied the election in depth, and the leading figure of Central American democracy, José Figueres.
The life of those responsible for world order is never easy, as Metternich and the Czar had recognized in their day.
Apart from subversion, policymakers sought other ways “to stabilize Italy,” Sallie Pisani writes in her study of the early days of the CIA. Subversion to achieve stability is standard procedure, quite intelligible to those who have mastered PC rhetoric; it is even possible to “destabilize a freely elected Marxist government in Chile” because “we were determined to seek stability” (James Chace). One idea for Italy was to thin the disruptive population by inducing emigration. Marshall Plan money was used to rebuild the Italian merchant marine to “double the number of Italian emigrants who can be carried overseas each year,” the chief of the ECA (Marshall Plan) mission for Italy reported. It was also used to retrain workers, “thereby making them more acceptable to other countries,” he added. Europe had unemployment problems, and more “wops” was the last thing wanted in the US. Congress therefore authorized funds for the “purpose of transporting emigrants from Italy to parts of the world other than the United States.” The ECA decided upon South America, with its “relatively less developed areas.” It funded an emigration survey “to locate specific lands suitable for Italian settlement” in South America, and to help prepare the ground. The first recipient of such aid was Brazil, in 1950.
The project was considered highly sensitive, and concealed from Italians completely. “Propaganda to stabilize the remaining Italians was equally important,” Pisani writes, and a “sophisticated campaign” was conducted in Italy, as in France, another potential “virus.” A problem in France, the ECA mission noted, was that “The French are allergic to propaganda. They often confuse what we call information with what they call propaganda.” Washington policymakers agreed that “overt American propaganda” would not be a good idea for Europeans, because of their experiences with the Nazis. The ECA therefore adopted the concept of “indirection,” defined as the ability to “get across the ECA and US Government foreign policy point of view, without either ECA or the US Government being identified as the source of the material.” At home, where the population is better trained, “information” suffices.
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In the Western hemisphere, the US had largely displaced its European rivals by World War II, and therefore rejected the principles of the new world order for “our little region over here which never has bothered anybody,” as Secretary of War Henry Stimson described the hemisphere when explaining why all regional systems must be dismantled apart from our own, which are to be extended. The US insisted that hemispheric affairs be handled by regional organizations, which it is sure to dominate; very much the principle for which Saddam Hussein was roundly condemned in 1990, when he proposed that the problems of the Gulf be dealt with by the Arab League. But here too there are limits. If the Latin Americans “attempt irresponsible use of their numerical strength in the O.A.S.,” John Dreier explains in his study of the organization, “if they carry to extremes the doctrine of nonintervention, if they leave the United States no alternative but to act unilaterally to protect itself, they will have destroyed not only the basis of hemispheric cooperation for progress but all hope of a secure future for themselves.” The guardians of world order must be ever alert for signs of irresponsibility.
The same had been true of Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy, which carried an “implicit obligation of reciprocity,” State Department Latin America official Robert Woodward pointed out: “the admittance into an American government of an alien ideology” would “compel the United States to take defensive measures,” unilaterally. Others, needless to say, have no such right, in particular, no right to defend themselves from the US and its “ideology,” which are not “alien”: indeed, the US has no ideology, apart from “pragmatism,” in the technical sense. The general point was clarified by Carter's Latin America adviser Robert Pastor, at the critical extreme: the US wants other nations “to act independently,
except
when doing so would affect US interests adversely”; the US has never wanted “to control them,” as long as developments do not “get out of control.” Others can be quite free, as long as they are “pragmatic.”
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To assist “countries striving to retain their freedom,” the US has been forced regularly to launch terrorist attacks against them or invade them outright, and to use its unparalleled capacities for economic warfare and subversion. The mission requires a cooperative class of intellectuals to shape “information” properly for the rascal multitude, rarely a problem.
After World War II, the importance of the traditional service role of the South was enhanced by “the realization that the food and fuel of Eastern Europe were no longer available to Western Europe at prewar levels” (Leffler). Each region was assigned its status and “function” by the planners. The US would take charge of Latin America and the Middle East, in the latter, with the help of its lieutenant. Africa was to be “exploited” for the reconstruction of Europe, while Southeast Asia would “fulfill its major function as a source of raw materials for Japan and Western Europe” (George Kennan and his State Department Policy Planning Staff, 1948-1949). The US too would purchase raw materials from the former colonies, thus reconstructing the triangular trade patterns whereby the industrial societies purchase US manufacturing exports by earning dollars from raw materials exports by their traditional colonies. The “dollar gap” that impeded export of US manufactures to Europe was considered an extremely serious problem by Dean Acheson and other top planners; overcoming it was taken to be a critical necessity for the US economy, which, it was assumed, would otherwise sink back into deep depression or face state intervention of the kind that would interfere with corporate prerogatives rather than enhancing them. By this reasoning, sophisticated and extensively articulated, former colonies could be granted nominal self-government, but often little more.
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