Adapted from an address, Empire, Obama and the Last Taboo, given by John Pilger at Socialism 2009 in San Francisco on 4th July.
The monsoon had
woven thick skeins of mist over the central highlands of Vietnam. I was
a young war correspondent, bivouacked in the village of Tuylon with a
unit of US marines whose orders were to win hearts and minds. "We are
here not to kill," said the sergeant, "we are here to impart the
American Way of Liberty as stated in the Pacification Handbook. This is
designed to win the hearts and minds of folks, as stated on page 86."
Page 86 was headed WHAM. The
sergeant's unit was called a combined action company, which meant, he
explained, "we attack these folks on Mondays and we win their hearts
and minds on Tuesdays". He was joking, though not quite.
Standing in a jeep on the edge
of a paddy, he had announced through a loudhailer: "Come on out,
everybody. We got rice and candy and toothbrushes to give you."
Silence. Not a shadow moved.
"Now listen, either you gooks come on out from wherever you are, or we're going to come right in there and get you!"
The people of Tuylon finally
came out and stood in line to receive packets of Uncle Ben's Long Grain
Rice, Hershey bars, party balloons and several thousand toothbrushes.
Three portable, battery-operated, yellow flush lavatories were kept for
the colonel's arrival. And when the colonel arrived that evening, the
district chief was summoned and the yellow flush lavatories were
unveiled.
"Mr District Chief and all you
folks out there," said the colonel, "what these gifts represent is more
than the sum of their parts. They carry the spirit of America. Ladies
and gentlemen, there's no place on earth like America. It's a guiding
light for me, and for you. You see, back home, we count ourselves as
real lucky having the greatest democracy the world has ever known, and
we want you good folks to share in our good fortune."
Thomas Jefferson, George
Washington and Davy Crockett got a mention. "Beacon" was a favourite,
and as he evoked John Winthrop's "city upon a hill", the marines
clapped, and the children clapped, understanding not a word.
It was a lesson in what
historians call "exceptionalism", the notion that the United States has
the divine right to bring what it describes as liberty and democracy to
the rest of humanity. That this merely disguised a system of
domination, which Martin Luther King described, shortly before his
assassination, as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world", was
unspeakable..
As the great people's historian
Howard Zinn has pointed out, Winthrop's much-quoted description of the
17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony as a "city upon a hill", a place
of unlimited goodness and nobility, was rarely set against the violence
of the first settlers, for whom burning alive some 400 Pequot Indians
was a "triumphant joy". The countless massacres that followed, wrote
Zinn, were justified by "the idea that American expansion is divinely
ordained".
Not long ago, I visited the
American Museum of History, part of the celebrated Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, DC. One of the popular exhibitions was "The
Price of Freedom: Americans at War". It was holiday time and lines of
people, including many children, shuffled reverentially through a
Santa's grotto of war and conquest where messages about their nation's
"great mission" were dispensed. These included tributes to the
"exceptional Americans [who] saved a million lives" in Vietnam, where
they were "determined to stop communist expansion". In Iraq, other true
hearts "employed air strikes of unprecedented precision". What was
shocking was not so much the revisionist description of two of the epic
crimes of modern times as the sheer scale of omission.
"History without memory,"
declared Time magazine at the end of the 20th century, "confines
Americans to a sort of eternal present.. They are especially weak in
remembering what they did to other people, as opposed to what they did
for them." Ironically, it was Henry Luce, founder of Time, who in 1941
divined the "American century" as an American social, political and
cultural "victory" over humanity and the right "to exert upon the world
the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and
by such means as we see fit".
None of this is to suggest that
vainglory is exclusive to the United States. The British presented
their often violent domination of much of the world as the natural
progress of Christian gentlemen selflessly civilising the natives, and
present-day TV historians perpetuate the myths. The French still
celebrate their bloody "civilising mission". Prior to the Second World
War, "imperialist" was an honoured political badge in Europe, while in
the US an "age of innocence" was preferred. America was different from
the Old World, said its mythologists. America was the Land of Liberty,
uninterested in conquest. But what of George Washington's call for a
"rising empire" and James Madison's "laying the foundation of a great
empire"? What of slavery, the theft of Texas from Mexico, the bloody
subjugation of central America, Cuba and the Philippines?
An ordained national memory
consigned these to the historical margins and "imperialism" was all but
discredited in the United States, especially after Adolf Hitler and the
fascists, with their ideas of racial and cultural superiority, had left
a legacy of guilt by association. The Nazis, after all, had been proud
imperialists, too, and Germany was also "exceptional". The idea of
imperialism, the word itself, was all but expunged from the American
lexicon, "on the grounds that it falsely attributed immoral motives to
western foreign policy", argued one historian. Those who persisted in
using it were "disreputable purveyors of agitprop" and were "inspired
by the communist doctrine", or they were "Negro intellectuals who had
grievances of their own against white capitalism".
Meanwhile, the "city on the
hill" remained a beacon of rapaciousness as US capital set about
realising Luce's dream and recolonising the European empires in the
postwar years. This was "the march of free enterprise". In truth, it
was driven by a subsidised production boom in a country unravaged by
war: a sort of socialism for the great corporations, or state
capitalism, which left half the world's wealth in American hands. The
cornerstone of this new imperialism was laid in 1944 at a conference of
the western allies at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire.. Described as
"negotiations about economic stability", the conference marked
America's conquest of most of the world.
What the American elite
demanded, wrote Frederic F Clairmont in The Rise and Fall of Economic
Liberalism, "was not allies but unctuous client states. What Bretton
Woods bequeathed to the world was a lethal totalitarian blueprint for
the carve-up of world markets." The World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American
Development Bank and the African Development Bank were established in
effect as arms of the US Treasury and would design and police the new
order. The US military and its clients would guard the doors of these
"international" institutions, and an "invisible government" of media
would secure the myths, said Edward Bernays.
Bernays, described as the father
of the media age, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. "Propaganda," he
wrote, "got to be a bad word because of the Germans . . . so what I did
was to try and find other words [such as] Public Relations." Bernays
used Freud's theories about control of the subconscious to promote a
"mass culture" designed to promote fear of official enemies and
servility to consumerism. It was Bernays who, on behalf of the tobacco
industry, campaigned for American women to take up smoking as an act of
feminist liberation, calling cigarettes "torches of freedom"; and it
was his notion of disinformation that was deployed in overthrowing
governments, such as Guatemala's democracy in 1954.
Above all, the goal was to
distract and deter the social democratic impulses of working people.
Big business was elevated from its public reputation as a kind of mafia
to that of a patriotic force. "Free enterprise" became a divinity. "By
the early 1950s," wrote Noam Chomsky, "20 million people a week were
watching business-sponsored films. The entertainment industry was
enlisted to the cause, portraying unions as the enemy, the outsider
disrupting the 'harmony' of the 'American way of life' . . . Every
aspect of social life was targeted and permeated schools and
universities, churches, even recreational programmes. By 1954, business
propaganda in public schools reached half the amount spent on
textbooks."
The new "ism" was Americanism,
an ideology whose distinction is its denial that it is an ideology.
Recently, I saw the 1957 musical Silk Stockings, starring Fred Astaire
and Cyd Charisse. Between the scenes of wonderful dancing to a score by
Cole Porter was a series of loyalty statements that the colonel in
Vietnam might well have written. I had forgotten how crude and
pervasive the propaganda was; the Soviets could never compete. An oath
of loyalty to all things American became an ideological commitment to
the leviathan of business: from the business of armaments and war
(which consumes 42 cents in every tax dollar today) to the business of
food, known as "agripower" (which receives $157bn a year in government
subsidies).
Barack Obama is the embodiment
of this "ism". From his early political days, Obama's unerring theme
has been not "change", the slogan of his presidential campaign, but
America's right to rule and order the world. Of the United States, he
says, "we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the
ultimate good . . . We must lead by building a 21st-century military to
ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all
people." And: "At moments of great peril in the past century our
leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted
the world, that we stood and fought for the freedoms sought by billions
of people beyond their borders."
Since 1945, by deed and by
example, the US has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies,
crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt
to Guatemala (see William Blum's histories). Bombing is apple pie.
Having stacked his government with warmongers, Wall Street cronies and
polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, the 45th president is merely
upholding tradition. The hearts and minds farce I witnessed in Vietnam
is today repeated in villages in Afghanistan and, by proxy, Pakistan,
which are Obama's wars.
In his acceptance speech for the
2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter noted that "everyone
knew that terrible crimes had been committed by the Soviet Union in the
postwar period, but "US crimes in the same period have been only
superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged,
let alone recognised as crimes at all". It is as if "It never happened.
Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening
. . . You have to hand it to America . . . masquerading as a force for
universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of
hypnosis."
As Obama has sent drones to kill
(since January) some 700 civilians, distinguished liberals have
rejoiced that America is once again a "nation of moral ideals", as Paul
Krugman wrote in the New York Times. In Britain, the elite has long
seen in exceptional America an enduring place for British "influence",
albeit as servitor or puppet. The pop historian Tristram Hunt says
America under Obama is a land "where miracles happen". Justin Webb,
until recently the BBC's man in Washington, refers adoringly, rather
like the colonel in Vietnam, to the "city on the hill".
Behind this façade of
"intensification of feeling and degradation of significance" (Walter
Lippmann), ordinary Americans are stirring perhaps as never before, as
if abandoning the deity of the "American Dream" that prosperity is a
guarantee with hard work and thrift.. Millions of angry emails from
ordinary people have flooded Washington, expressing an outrage that the
novelty of Obama has not calmed. On the contrary, those whose jobs have
vanished and whose homes are repossessed see the new president
rewarding crooked banks and an obese military, essentially protecting
George W Bush's turf.
My guess is that a populism will
emerge in the next few years, igniting a powerful force that lies
beneath America's surface and which has a proud past. It cannot be
predicted which way it will go. However, from such an authentic
grass-roots Americanism came women's suffrage, the eight-hour day,
graduated income tax and public ownership. In the late 19th century,
the populists were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and
merge with the Democratic Party. In the Obama era, the familiarity of
this resonates.
What is most extraordinary about
the United States today is the rejection and defiance, in so many
attitudes, of the all-pervasive historical and contemporary propaganda
of the "invisible government". Credible polls have long confirmed that
more than two-thirds of Americans hold progressive views. A majority
want the government to care for those who cannot care for themselves.
They would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone. They
want complete nuclear disarmament; 72 per cent want the US to end its
colonial wars; and so on. They are informed, subversive, even
"anti-American".
I once asked a friend, the great
American war correspondent and humanitarian Martha Gellhorn, to explain
the term to me. "I'll tell you what 'anti-American' is," she said.
"It's what governments and their vested interests call those who honour
America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in
all of humanity. There are millions of these anti-Americans in the
United States. They are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who
judge their government in moral terms, though they would call it common
decency. They are not vain. They are the people with a wakeful
conscience, the best of America's citizens. They can be counted on.
They were in the South with the civil rights movement, ending slavery.
They were in the streets, demanding an end to the wars in Asia. Sure,
they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath
the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional."
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