- ‘While modalities have changed, the fundamental themes of the conquest retain their vitality and resilience, and will continue to do so until the reality and causes of the ‘savage justice’ are honestly addressed.’ (5)
- ‘In highly simplified form, we see already something of the structure of the modern political economy, dominated by a network of transnational financial and industrial institutions with internally managed investment and trade, their wealth and influence established and maintained by the state power that they mobilize and largely control.’ (6)
- ‘The Iberian empires suffered further blows as English pirates, marauders and slave traders swept the seas, perhaps the most notorious, Sir Francis Drake. The booty that Drake brought home ‘may fairly be considered the fountain and origin of British foreign investments,’ John Maynard Keynes wrote.’ (6)
- ‘From mid-17th century, England was powerful enough to impose the Navigation Acts (1651, 1662), barring foreign traders from its colonies and giving British shipping “the monopoly of the trade of their own country” (imports), either “by absolute prohibitions” or “heavy burdens” on others (Adam Smith, who reviews these measures with mixed reservations and approval).’ (7)
- ‘It was thanks to their military superiority, rather than to any social, moral or natural advantage, that the white peoples of the world managed to create and control, however briefly, the first global hegemony in History.’ (Chaudhuri Parker) (8)
- ‘ ‘The principal feature that differentiates European enterprises from indigenous trade networks in various parts of the globe,’ he concludes, is that the Europeans ‘organized their major commercial ventures either as an extension of the state…or as autonomous trading companies…which were endowed with many of the characteristics of a state,’ and were backed by the centralized power of the home country.’ (James Tracy) (8)
- ‘Those who expect to win the game can be counted on to laud the rules of ‘free competition’ – which, however, they never fail to bend to their interests. To mention only the most obvious lapse, the apostles of economic liberalism have never contemplated permitting ‘the free circulation of labor…from place to place,’ one of the foundations of freedom of trade, as Adam Smith stressed.’ (10-11)
- ‘The fate ofBengal brings out essential elements of the global conquest. Calcutta Bangladesh Bengal as one of the richest prizes in the world. An early English visitor described it as ‘a wonderful land, whose richness and abundance neither war, pestilence, nor oppression could destroy.’ Well before, the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta had described Bengal as ‘a country of great extent, and one in which rice is extremely abundant. Indeed, I have seen no region of the earth in which provisions are so plentiful.’ In 1757, the same year as Plassey, Clive described the textile center of Dacca as ‘extensive, populous, and rich as the city of London’; by 1840 its population had fallen from 150,000 to 30,000, Sir Charles Trevalyan testified before the Select Committee of the House of Lords, ‘and the jungle and malaria are fast encroaching…Dacca, the Manchester of India, has fallen from a very flourishing town to a very poor and small town.’ ’ (12)
- ‘Adam Smith wrote four years later that in the underpopulated and ‘fertile country’ ofBengal , ‘three or four hundred thousand people die of hunger in one year.’ These are consequences of the ‘improper regulations’ and ‘injudicious restraints’ imposed by the ruling Company upon the rice trade, which turn ‘dearth into a famine.’ ‘It has not been uncommon’ for Company officials, when the chief foresaw the extraordinary profit was likely to be made by opium,’ to plough up ‘a rich field of rice or other grain…in order to make room for a plantation of poppies.’ ’ (12)
- ‘Adam Smith wrote four years later that in the underpopulated and ‘fertile country’ of
- ‘As local industry declined, Bengal was converted to export agriculture, first indigo, then jute; Bangladesh produced over half the world’s crop by 1900, but not a single mill for processing was ever built there under British rule.’ (13)
- ‘ ‘A significant fact which stands out is that those parts of India which have been longest under British rule are the poorest today,’ Jawaharlal Nehru wrote.’ (14)
- ‘ ‘A significant fact which stands out is that those parts of India which have been longest under British rule are the poorest today,’ Jawaharlal Nehru wrote.’ (14)
- ‘Adam Smith’s nuanced interpretation of state interference with international trade extended to the domestic scene as well. The praise in his opening remarks for ‘the division of labor’ is well-known: it is the source of ‘the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied,’ and the foundation of ‘the wealth of nations.’ The great merit of free trade, he argued, is that it contributes to these tendencies. Less familiar is his denunciation of the inhuman consequences of the division of labor as it approaches its natural limits. ‘The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments,’ he wrote. That being so, ‘the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding…and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be…But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some paints to prevent it.’ ’ (18)
- ‘Centralized state power dedicated to private privilege and authority, and the rational and organized use of savage violence, are two of the enduring features of the European conquest. Others are the domestic colonization by which the poor subsidize the rich, and the contempt for democracy and freedom. Yet another enduring theme is the self-righteousness in which plunder, slaughter, and oppression are clothed.’ (19)
- ‘George Washington wrote in 1783 that ‘the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire, both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.’ What is called in official PC rhetoric ‘a pragmatist,’ Washington regarded purchase of Indian lands (typically, by fraud and threat) as a more cost-effective tactic than violence. Thomas Jefferson predicted to John Adams that the ‘backward’ tribes at the borders ‘will relapse into barbarism and misery, lose numbers by the war and want, and we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forests into the Stony mountains’; the same would be true of Canada after the conquest he envisioned, while all blacks would be removed to Africa or the Caribbean, leaving the country without ‘blot or mixture.’ A year after the Monroe Doctrine, the President called for helping the Indians ‘to surmount all their prejudices in favor of the soil of their nativity,’ so that ‘we become in reality their benefactors’ by transferring them West. When consent was not given, they were forcibly removed.’ (22)
- ‘The War for Independence itself had been a fierce civil war enmeshed in an international conflict; relative to population, it was not greatly different from the Civil War almost a century later, and it caused a huge exodus of refugees fleeing from the richest country in the world to escape the retribution of the victors.’ (24)
- ‘Recognizing that England Texas US England Europe . ‘By securing the virtual monopoly of the cotton plant’ the US had acquired ‘a greater influence over the affairs of the world than would be found in armies however strong, or navies however numerous,’ President Tyler observed after the annexation and the conquest of a third of Mexico. ‘That monopoly, now secured, places all other nations at our feet,’ he wrote: ‘An embargo of a single year would produce in Europe a greater amount of suffering than a fifty years’ war. I doubt whether Great Britain Oregon
- ‘The horrifying record of what actually occurred, if noticed at all, is considered insignificant, even a proof of our nobility.’ (32)
- ‘ ‘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. The South is assigned a service role: to provide resources, cheap labor, markets, opportunities for investment and, lately, export of pollution. For the past half-century, the US has shouldered the responsibility for protecting the interests of the ‘satisfied nations’ whose power places them ‘above the rest,’ the ‘rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations’ to whom ‘the government of the world must be entrusted,’ as Winston Churchill put the matter after World War II.’ (33)
- ‘ ‘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. The South is assigned a service role: to provide resources, cheap labor, markets, opportunities for investment and, lately, export of pollution. For the past half-century, the US has shouldered the responsibility for protecting the interests of the ‘satisfied nations’ whose power places them ‘above the rest,’ the ‘rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations’ to whom ‘the government of the world must be entrusted,’ as Winston Churchill put the matter after World War II.’ (33)
- ‘ ‘We should cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization,’ and must ‘deal in straight power concepts,’ not ‘hampered by idealistic slogans’ about ‘altruism and world-benefaction,’ if we are to maintain the ‘position of disparity’ that separates our enormous wealth from the poverty of others.’ (George Kennan) (33)
- ‘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.’ ’ (38)
- ‘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.’ ’ (39)
- ‘Intending to organize theFar East pretty much on its own, Washington Japan U.S. Japan
- ‘Intending to organize the
- ‘It was expected that the [Italian] 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 Italy US
- ‘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 US
- ‘A significant factor in the Cold War was the imposition of Soviet rule over traditional service areas, separating them from the US-dominated state capitalist world, and the threat that Soviet power might contribute to the breakaway of other areas, even influencing popular sectors within the industrial core itself, a threat considered particularly severe in the early postwar period.’ (44)
- ‘An illustration is the controversy over a secret February 1992 Pentagon draft of Defense Planning Guidance, leaked to the press, which describes itself as ‘definitive guidance from the Secretary of Defense’ for budgetary policy to the year 2000. The draft develops standard reasoning. The US Washington US U.S. United States Middle East is a particular concern. Here ‘our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil’ while deterring aggression (selectively), maintaining strategic control and ‘regional stability’ (in the technical sense) and protecting ‘U.S. nationals and property.’ ’ (48-49)
- ‘The basic framework of policy formation tends to remain in place as long as the institutions of power and domination are stable, with the capacity to deflect challenges and accommodate or displace competing forces.’ (50)
- ‘Extraordinary deceit has been required to conceal the fact that it has been primarily the US, secondarily Britain, that have vetoed Security Council resolutions and generally undermined the UN for over 20 years, and to sustain the standard pretense that ‘Soviet obstructionism’ and ‘shrill Third World anti-Americanism’ are what rendered the UN ineffective. The no less extraordinary levels of deceit that accompanied the government-media campaign to eliminate UNESCO heresies are documented in an important study, which, needless to say, had no effect whatsoever on the flow of necessary lies.’ (53)
- ‘What could be more natural than a propaganda campaign claiming that it is left-fascist who have taken the commanding heights and control the entire culture, imposing their harsh standards everywhere?’ (54)
- ‘On occasion, developed societies take their own rhetoric semi-seriously and fail to protect themselves from the destructive impact of unregulated markets. The consequences are much the same as in the traditional colonial domains, if not so lethal.’ (55)
- ‘The experience of the US-Canada free trade agreement illustrates the process. In two years, Canada US
- ‘Note that Romania Bulgaria Russia Yugoslavia
- ‘Several hundred economically and politically powerful corporations with global networks dominate trade largely on their own terms, and then serve as their governments’ advisors on trade strategy.’ (61)
- ‘Austerity may be the right remedy for Latin American peasants, Polish workers, and the forgotten people of South-Central Los Angeles; but not for the people who count.’ (63)
- ‘ ‘Many Russians, whatever their political beliefs, resented the semi-colonial status accorded to their country in the West,’ Z.A.B. Zeman writes: ‘The Bolshevik revolution was, in a critical sense, the reaction of a developing, essentially agrarian society against the West: against its political self-absorption, economic selfishness and military wastefulness. The present North-South divide between the rich and the poor countries, and the tensions it has created in the twentieth century, had its European, East-West antecedents.’ Beyond Russia Europe …become sharper than they had ever been’ in the 19th and early 20th centuries, he adds, remaining so for much of Eastern Europe through the interwar period. The Bolshevik takeover in October 1917, which quickly absorbed incipient socialist tendencies and destroyed any semblance of working-class or other popular organization, extricated the USSR from the Western-dominated periphery, setting off the inevitable reaction, beginning with immediate military intervention by Britain, France, Japan, and the US. These were, from the outset, basic elements of the Cold War.’ (66)
- ‘The ‘rapid economic growth’ aroused particular attention in the South – and corresponding concerns among Western policymakers. In his 1952 study of late development, Alexander Gerschenkron describes the ‘approximate sixfold increase in the volume of industrial output’ as ‘the greatest and the longest [spurt of industrialization] in the history of the country’s industrial development,’ through this ‘great industrial transformation engineered by the Soviet government’ had ‘a remote, if any’ relation to ‘Marxian ideology, or any socialist ideology for that matter’; and was, of course, carried out an extraordinary human cost. In his studies 10 years later of long-term trends in economic development, Simon Kuznets listed Russia among the countries with the highest rate of growth of per capita product, along with Japan and Sweden, with the US – having started from a far higher peak – in the middle range over a century, slightly above England.’ (67)
- ‘The ultranationalist threat was greatly enhanced after Russia’s leading role in defeating Hitler left it in control of Eastern and parts of Central Europe, separating these regions too from the domains of Western control. The rotten apple was so huge – and after World War II, so militarily powerful as well – and the virus it was spreading so dangerous, that this particular facet of the North-South conflict took on a life of its own from the outset. Long before Lenin and Trotsky took power, the threat of ‘Communism’ and ‘anarchism’ had regularly been invoked by the business-government-press to organize and to gain elementary rights. The Wilson Administration was able to extend these techniques, exploiting the Bolshevik takeover as an opportunity to crush the labor movement and independent thought, with the backing of the press and the business community; the pattern has been standard since. The October revolution also provided the framework for Third World intervention, which became ‘defense against Communist aggression,’ whatever the facts might be.’ (67-68)
- ‘Facts are commonly reshaped to establish that some intended target of attack is an outpost of the Kremlin (later, Peiping ). On deciding in 1950 to support France Vietnam Washington Moscow Peiping (either would do). Despite diligent efforts, evidence of ‘Kremlin-directed conspiracy’ could be found ‘in virtually all countries except Vietnam
- ‘When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, [Truman] commented that ‘If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible.’ By 1943, the US Italy
- ‘Apparent Soviet interest in a peaceful European settlement in 1949 was regarded not as an opportunity but as a threat to ‘national security,’ overcome by the establishment of NATO. On similar grounds, the US Germany
- ‘Gorbachev’s efforts to reduce Cold War confrontation in the mid-1980s (including unilateral force reductions and proposals to ban nuclear weapons tests, abolish the military pacts, and remove naval fleets from the Mediterranean) were ignored.’ (73)
- ‘The Cuban missile crisis of 1962, revealing extreme Soviet vulnerability, led to a huge increase in military spending, leveling off by the late 1970s. The economy was then visibly stagnating and the autocracy unable to control rising dissidence.’ (73)
- ‘Great efforts have been taken to present the Soviet Union as larger than life, about to overwhelm us. The most important Cold War document, NSC 68 of April 1950, sought to conceal the Soviet weakness that was unmistakably revealed by analysis, so as to convey the required image of the ‘slave state’ pursuing its ‘implacable purpose’ of gaining ‘absolute authority’ over the world, its way barred only by the United States, with its almost unimaginable nobility and perfection. So awesome was the threat that Americans must come to accept ‘the necessity for just suppression’ as a crucial feature of ‘the democratic way.’ They must accept ‘a large measure of sacrifice and discipline,’ including thought control and a shift of government spending from social programs to ‘defense and foreign assistance’ (in translation” subsidy for advanced industry and export promotion).’ (74)
- ‘The cultural managers must have at hand the tools to do their work. And apart from the most cynical, planners must convince themselves of the justice of the actions, often monstrous, that they plan and implement. There are only two pretexts: self-defense and benevolence. It need not be assumed that use of the tools is mere deception or careerism, though sometimes it is. Nothing is easier than to convince oneself of the merits of actions and policies that serve self-interest. Expressions of benevolent intent, in particular, must be regarded with must caution: they can be taken seriously when the policies advocated happen to be harmful to self-interest, a historical category that is vanishingly small.’ (75)
- ‘In the Cold War case, there is another factor that may have helped extend the delusional system beyond its normal practitioners: the Russians had their own reasons for depicting themselves as an awesome superpower marching on towards a still grander future. When the world’s two major propaganda systems agree on some doctrine, however fanciful, it is not easy to escape its grip.’ (75-76)
- ‘From early 1989 through mid-1992, according to IMF and World Bank statistics, industrial output fell by 45 percent and prices rose 40-fold in Poland and real wages were almost halved; figures for the rest of Eastern Europe were not much better. Western ideologists are impressed with what has been achieved, but concerned that economic irrationality might impede further progress.’ (77)
- ‘Western analysts understand that such decisions are not for the Poles to make: they are to be made by the ‘free market’ – or more accurately, the powerful institutions that dominate it.’ (78)
- ‘As Karl Polanyi commented in his classic study of the laissez-faire experiment in 19th-century England, quickly terminated as it came to be understood by the business classes that their interests would be harmed by the free market, which ‘could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.’ ’ (78)
- ‘As for democracy, in the approved sense it allows no room for any popular interference in the totalitarian structure of the corporate economy, with all that follows in other spheres of life. The role of the public is to follow orders, not to interfere.’ (78-79)
- ‘Gabrielle Glaser reports one of the results of ‘Poland Poland
- ‘One may recall a few domestic examples of corruption as well, from the days of the Founding Fathers, no slouches in this game, and on to the Reaganites and Wall Street in the 1980s. Corruption is an intrinsic feature of ‘the old Communist system,’ the ideological institutions (correctly) proclaim: under ‘capitalist democracy,’ it is an aberration, quickly corrected.’ (80)
- ‘The economies of Eastern Europe stagnated or declined through the eighties, but went into free fall as the IMF regimen was adopted with the end of the Cold War in 1989.’ (80)
- ‘The US Panama US
- ‘Drugs are becoming ‘the newest growth industry in Central America ,’ Central American Report reports, as a result of the ‘severe economic conditions in which 85 percent of the Central American population live in poverty’ and the lack of jobs, conditions exacerbated by the neoliberal onslaught. But the problem has not reached the level of Columbia, where security forces armed and trained by the US are continuing their rampage of terror, torture, and disappearances, targeting political opposition figures, community activists, trade union leaders, human rights workers, and the peasant communities generally while US aid ‘is furthering the corruption of the Columbian security forces and strengthening the alliance of blood between right-wing politicians, military officers and ruthless narcotics traffickers,’ according to human rights activist Jorge Gómez Lizarazi, a former judge.’ (86)
- ‘Much can be learned about the Cold War era by observing what happened after the Berlin Cuba US
- ‘The priorities are profits and power; democracy in more than form is a threat to be overcome; human rights are of instrumental value for propaganda purposes, nothing more.’ (89)
- ‘The [NY] Times and its colleagues dutifully suppressed the opportunities for a negotiated Iraqi withdrawal that opened from mid-August, according to high-ranking US
- ‘Each year, the White House sends to Congress a report explaining that the military threat we face requires vast expenditures – which, accidentally, sustain high-tech industry at home and repression abroad. The first post-Cold War edition was in March 1990. The Russians having disappeared from the scene, the report at least recognized frankly that the enemy is the Third World .US Third World conflicts.’ The US
- ‘With the end of the Cold War, the US
- ‘Consider the response when General Chun’s military dictatorship in South Korea Kwangju US US US Kwangju Seoul US
- ‘With the conventional pretext gone, Washington
- ‘The promise of arms sales had kept stocks of military producers high despite the end of the Cold War, with arms sales rising from $12 billion in 1989 to almost $40 billion in 1991. Moderate declines in purchases by the US
- ‘ ‘There were far fewer psychotic people in jail 100 years ago than we have today,’ as we revert to practices reformed in the 19th century. Almost 30 percent of jails detain mentally ill people without criminal charges. The drug war has also made a major contribution to this technique of social control. The dramatic increase in the prison population in the late 1980s is largely attributable not to criminal acts, but to cocaine dealing and possession, as well as the harsher sentencing favored by ‘conservatives.’ The US
- ‘The world is complicated; even the most successful plans carry hidden costs. ‘The Reagan nightmare of supply side economics and military Keynesianism’ had no more enthusiastic champion than the Wall Street Journal, which now complains about the predictable effects as they impinge on wealth and power. ‘Public higher education – one of the few areas where American still ranks supreme – is being pounded by state spending cuts,’ the Journal reports, echoing the concerns of businesses that ‘rely heavily on a steady stream of graduates.’ This is one of the long-predicted consequences of the cutback of federal services for all but the wealthy and powerful, which devastated states and local communities. Class war is not easy to fine tune. The economic managers of the 1980s not only left the US with a legacy of unprecedented public and private debt, but also with the lowest rate of net private investment of any major industrial economy.’ (110-111)
- ‘Less than 0.001 percent of the profits from drugs that originated from traditional medicine have ever gone to the indigenous people who led researchers to them.’ Darrel Posey (115)
- ‘Another approach is to investigate the relation between the source of atrocities and the reaction to them. There is extensive work on that topic, again with sharp and consistent results: the atrocities of official enemies arouse great anguish and indignation, vast coverage, and often shameless lying to portray them as even worse than they are; the treatment is the opposite in all respects when respectability lies closer to home. (Atrocities that do not bear on domestic power interests are generally ignored.) Without comparable inquiry, we know that exactly the same was true of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. The importance of the finding is greatly heightened by the fact, which commissars on all sides labor to obscure, that on elementary moral grounds, abuses cry out for attention insofar as we can do something about them; primarily our own, and those of our clients.’ (120)
- ‘Solemn discourse on international law, the crime of aggression, and our perhaps too-fervent idealism can therefore proceed, untroubled. The attention of the civilized West is to be focused, laser-like, on the crimes of official enemies, not on those it could readily mitigate or bring to an end.’ (136)
- ‘Much the same was true of the black population, their awareness heightened by the British proclamation of 1775 offering to free ‘all indentured servants, Negroes or others…able and willing to bear arms,’ while condemnation of the slave trade was deleted from the Declaration of Independence ‘in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia’ (Thomas Jefferson)’ (141)
- ‘The indigenous population well understood what Alexander Hamilton had in mind when he wrote, in the Federalist Papers, that ‘the savage tribes on our Western frontier ought to be regarded as our natural enemies,’ and the natural allies of the Europeans, ‘because they have most to fear from us, and most to hope from them.’ ’ (141-142)
- ‘In the 19th century, the British deterrent prevented US
- ‘In the United States Florida U.S.
- ‘Theoretically, medicines and some food were exempt from the [Cuban] embargo, but food and medical aid were denied after Cyclone Flora caused death and destruction in October 1963. Standard procedure, incidentally. Consider Carter’s refusal to allow aid to any West Indian country struck by the August 1980 hurricane unless Grenada US Nicaragua
- ‘Of interest, in this connection, is Robert McNamara’s reaction to the late Andrei Gromyko’s allegation that Soviet missiles were sent to Cuba Cuba U.S. US Cuba Turkey
- ‘Whatever one may think of Cuba
- ‘Wilson’s predecessor, President Taft, had foreseen that ‘the day is not far distant’ when ‘the whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.’ Given the awesome power that the US Washington
- ‘faith in the benign intent that so miraculously serves self-interest.’ (160)
- ‘The military-run National Security States were a direct outcome of US World War II , US US US US Arnold US
- ‘The problem of combating ‘subversion’ had come to the fore in 1943, when Bolivian mine owners called on government troops to suppress striking tin miners, killing hundreds of them in the ‘Catavi massacre.’ There was no US US
- ‘Recall that aid to the military is standard operating procedure for overthrowing a civilian government. The device was also used effectively in Indonesia Chile Iran
- ‘Had the grim result been found in Eastern Europe it would have been a proof of the bestiality of the Communist enemy; since it is the normal situation in Western domains, it is only irony.’ (169)
- ‘Brazil also wins the prize for torture and murder of street children by the security forces – ‘a process of extermination of young people’ according to the head of the Justice Department in Rio de Janiero (Hélio Saboya), targeting the 7-8 million street children who ‘beg, steal, or sniff glue’ and ‘for a few glorious moments forget who or where they are’ (London Guardiancorrespondent Jan Rocha). In Rio , a congressional commission identified 15 death squads, most of them made up of police officers and financed by merchants. Bodies of children murdered by death squads are found outside metropolitan areas with their hands tied, showing signs of torture, riddled with bullet holes. Street girls are forced to work as prostitutes. The Legal Medical Institute recorded 427 children murdered in Rio alone in the first ten months of 1991, most by death squads. A Brazilian parliamentary study released in December 1991 reported that 7000 children had been killed in the past four years. Truly a tribute to our magnificence and the ‘modern scientific methods of development based solidly on capitalism’ in a territory as much ‘worth exploitation’ as any in the world. We should not underestimate the scale of this achievement. It took real talent to create a nightmare in a country as favored and richly-endowed as Brazil
- ‘From World War II, in Venezuela the US followed the standard policy of taking total control of the military ‘to expand U.S. political and military influence in the Western Hemisphere and perhaps help keep the U.S. arms industry vigorous’ (Rabe). As later explained by Kennedy’s Ambassador Allan Stewart, ‘U.S.-oriented and anti-Communist armed forces are vital instruments to maintain our security interests.’ He illustrated the point with the case of Cuba Washington Venezuela Saudi Arabia Iran
- ‘Other flaws in the miracle had been revealed in the report of an August 1991 Presidential Commission for the Rights of Children, not previously noticed, which found that ‘critical poverty, defined as the inability to meet at least one half of basic nutritional requirements,’ had tripled from 11 percent of the population in 1984 to 33 percent in 1991; and that real per capita income fell 55 percent from 1988 to 1991, falling at double the rate of 1980-1988.’ (171-172)
- ‘The terror began as soon as the US-run military coup succeeded in overthrowing the reformist capitalist democracy. Some 8000 peasants were murdered in two months in a terror campaign that targeted particularly United Fruit Company union organizers and Indian village leaders. The US Embassy participated with considerable fervor, providing lists of ‘Communists’ to be eliminated or imprisoned and tortured while Washington dedicated itself to making Guatemala ‘a show-case for democracy.’ At a comparable stage, the Khmer Rouge were condemned for genocide. Terror mounted again in the 1960s, with active US
- ‘An estimated two-thirds to six-sevenths of the Indian population in Central America and Mexico
- ‘A study released by the health ministers of the Central American countries in November 1991 estimated that 120,000 children under five die annually in Central America from malnutrition (one million are born annually), and that two-thirds of the survivors suffer from malnutrition.’ (176)
- ‘A leading Mexican journal reports a study by Victor Carlos García Moreno of the Institute for Law Research at the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), presented at a conference on ‘International Traffic in Children’ in Mexico City. He found that about 20,000 children are sent illegally to the United States
- ‘The United States has never been very happy with Costa Rica, despite its almost total subordination to the wishes of US corporations and Washington. Costa Rican social democracy and successes in state-guided development, unique in Central America , were a constant irritant. Concerns were relied in the 1980s, as the huge debt and other problems gave the US Costa Rica Costa Rica US US
- ‘ ‘The concentration of the best land into vast coffee, cotton and sugar estates owned by a small elite meant hundreds of thousands of peasants were forced to eke a living off steep, marginal land,’ Tom Gibb reports from El Salvador.’ (180)
- ‘In El Salvador
- ‘These basic truths and their meaning, which would be taught in elementary schools in free societies, must be kept far removed from consciousness as we advance towards Year 501.’ (182)
- ‘The world is still too harsh a place for us to ‘revert to form,’ slipping back unthinkingly to our role of world benefactor while ignoring ‘the national interest,’ bemused by ‘Wilsonian’ idealism. The latter concept has an interesting status; it does not refer to what Wilson Haiti Dominican Republic
- ‘The concept ‘our values’ is entirely independent of what we do or even profess.’ (184)
- ‘The term ‘economic miracle’ refers to a complex of nice macroeconomic statistics, great profits for foreign investors, and a life of luxury for local elites; and, in the small print, increasing misery for the general population, quite typically. It is no wonder that these miracles are so admired by commentators in the press and elsewhere. As long as the façade remains in place, such societies are ‘American success stories’ and ‘triumphs of capitalism and the free market.’ But when it collapses, the very same examples turn into a demonstration of the dread pitfalls of statism, socialism, Marxism-Leninism, and other sins.’ (184-185)
- ‘Thanks to the miracle, along with a little US help in ‘making the economy scream’ under the Allende government, the proportion of the population that feel below the poverty line (minimum income required for basic food and housing) increased from 20 percent to 44.4 percent from 1970 to 1987.’ (191)
- ‘Per capita income has fallen to the level of 1945; real wages amount to 13 percent of their 1980 value, still falling. Infant mortality and low birth weight are increasing, reversing earlier progress. The reduction of the health care budget by 40 percent in March 1991 has seriously affected the already insufficient supply of medicines. Hospitals for the general public barely function, though the rich can have what they need as the country returns to the ‘Central American mode.’ ‘The right to health care no longer exists in post-war Nicaragua
- ‘The huge debt accumulated through the partnership of domestic military-economic elites and foreign banks awash with petrodollars is to be paid by the poor. ‘Wage earners sacrificed the most in making available the surplus needed to make payments on the external debt,’ the UN World Economic Survey 1990 observed.’ (195)
- ‘ ‘Haiti was more than the New World’s second oldest republic,’ anthropologist Ira Lowenthal observed, ‘more than even the first black republic of the modern world. Haiti New World ’s two oldest republics for 200 years again illustrates the persistence of basic themes of policy, their institutional roots and cultural concessions. The Republic of Haiti January 1, 1804 , after a slave revolt expelled the French colonial rulers and their allies.’ (197)
- ‘The tree of liberty broke through the soil again in 1985, as the population revolted against the murderous Duvalier dictatorship. After many bitter struggles, the popular revolution led to the overwhelming victory of Haiti
- ‘Columbus Hispaniola was ‘perhaps the most densely populated place in the world,’ Las Cases wrote, ‘a beehive of people,’ who ‘of all the infinite universe of humanity,…are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity.’ Driven by ‘insatiable greed and ambition,’ the Spanish fell upon them ‘like ravening wild beasts,…killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples’ with ‘the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree’ that the population is barely 200 persons, he wrote in 1552, ‘from my own knowledge of the acts I witnessed.’ ‘It was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel,’ he wrote: ‘not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings.’ ‘As they saw themselves each day perishing by the cruel and inhuman treatment of the Spaniards, crushed to earth by the horses, cut in pieces by swords, eaten and torn by dogs, many buried alive and suffering all kinds of exquisite tortures,…[they] decided to abandon themselves to their unhappy fate with no further struggles, placing themselves in the hands of their enemies that they might do with them as they liked.’ As the propaganda mills ground away, the picture was revised to provide retrospective justification for what had been done. By 1776, the story was that Columbus
- ‘The Spanish effort to plunder the island’s riches by enslaving its gentle people were unsuccessful; they died too quickly, if not killed by the ‘wild beasts’ or in mass suicide. African slaves were sent from the early 1500s, later in a flood as the plantation economy was established. ‘Saint Dominique was the wealthiest European colonial possession in the Americas,’ Hans Schmidt writes, producing three-quarters of the world’s sugar by 1789, also leading the world in production of coffee, cotton, indigo, and rum. The slave masters provided France
- ‘Between 1849 and 1913, US Navy ships entered Haitian waters 24 times to ‘protect American lives and property.’ ’ (200)
- ‘Few words need to be wasted on the civilization left to 90 percent of the population by the French, who, as an ex-slave related, ‘hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars…, forced them to eat shit,…cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitos,…threw them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup’ – when not ‘flaying them with the last’ to extract the wealth that helped give France its entry ticket to the rich men’s club.’ (201)
- ‘Given the cultural climate of the day, the character of Wilson Dominican Republic Wilson US
- ‘In 1927, the State Department conceded that the US Haiti
- ‘In the 1980s, IMF Fundamentalism began to take its customary toll as the economy deteriorated under the impact of the structural adjustment programs, which caused agricultural production to decline along with investment, trade and consumption. Poverty became still more terrible. By the time ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier was driven out in 1986, 60 percent of the population had an annual per capita income of $60 or less according to the World Bank, child malnutrition had soared.’ (206)
- ‘Through the 1970s, thousands of boat people fled the ravaged island, virtually all forced to return by US officials with little notice here, the usual treatment of refugees whose suffering lacks propaganda value. In 1981, the Reagan Administration initiated a new interdiction policy. Of the more than 24,000 Haitians intercepted by the US Coast Guard in the next ten years, 11 were granted asylum as victims of political persecution, in comparison with 75,000 out of 75,000 Cubans.’ (206)
- ‘In June 1985, the Haitian legislature unanimously adopted a new law requiring that every political party must recognize President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier as the supreme arbiter of the nation, outlawing the Christian Democrats, and granting the government the right to suspend the rights of any party without reasons. The law was ratified by a majority of 99.98 percent.Washington US
- ‘With this popular base, [Aristide’s] government was committed to ‘the empowerment of the poor,’ a ‘populist model’ with international implications that frightened Washington, whose model of ‘democracy’ does not entertain popular movement committed to ‘social and economic justice, popular political participation and openness in all governmental affairs’ rather than ‘the international market or some other current shibboleth.’ Furthermore, Aristide’s balancing of the budget and ‘trimming of a bloated bureaucracy’ led to a ‘stunning success’ that made White House planners ‘extremely uncomfortable’: he secured over half a billion dollars in aid from the international lending community, very little of it from the US, indicating ‘that Haiti was slipping out of Washington’s financial orbit.’ ’ (209-210)
- ‘Following Aristide’s victory, US funding for political activities sharply increased, mainly through USAID. According to Kenneth Roth, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, the aid was intended to strengthen conservative groups that ‘could act as an institutional check on Aristide, in an effort to ‘move the country in a rightward direction.’ ’ (210)
- ‘The State Department is reported to have ‘circulated a thick notebook filled with alleged human rights violations’ under Aristide – ‘something it had not done under the previous rulers, Duvalierists and military men,’ who were deemed proper recipients for aid, including military aid, ‘based on unsubstantiated human-rights improvements.’ ’ (210-211)
- ‘Immediately after taking power on September 30, 1991, the army ‘embarked on a systematic and continuing campaign to stamp out the vibrant civil society that has taken root in Haiti since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship,’ Americas Watch reported in Decemer. At least 1000 people were killed in the first two weeks of the coup and hundreds more by December, ‘generally reliable Haitian human rights groups’ estimated, though they knew little about what is happening in the countryside, traditionally the locus of the worst atrocities. Terror increased in the months that followed, particularly after the reconstituted Macoutes were unleashed in late December. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands are in hiding.’ (211)
- ‘The press and air waves resound with impassioned proposals to increase ‘jobs,’ put forth by those who do what is in their power to send them to low-wage, high-repression regions, and to destroy what remains of meaningful work and workers’ rights, all in the interest of some unmentionable seven-letter word [profits].’ (215)
- ‘In 1978, US experts became concerned that swine fever in the Dominican Republic US US Haiti Haiti
- ‘The experience of Liberia Haiti Wilson
- ‘These regular features of the 500-year conquest will have growing significance in the years ahead as the ecological consequences of unsustainable capital-intensive agriculture reach a scale that cannot be neglected even by the rich. At that point, they will enter the agenda, like the ozone layer, which became ‘important’ when it seemed likely to endanger rich white folk. Meanwhile, the experiments will continue in the testing areas.’ (224)
- ‘The role of the federal government was to provide funds for ‘complete motorization and the crippling of surface mass transit’; this was the major thrust of the Federal Highway Acts of 1944, 1956, and 1968, implementing a strategy designed by GM chairman Alfred Sloan. Huge sums were spent on interstate highways without interference, as Congress surrendered control to the Bureau of Public Roads; about 1 percent of the sum was devoted to rail transit.’ (225-226)
- ‘The private sector operated in parallel: ‘Between 1936 and 1950, National City lines, a holding company sponsored and funded by GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil of California, bought out more than 100 electric surface-traction systems in 45 cities (including New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, and Los Angeles) to be dismantled and replaced with GM buses…In 1949 GM and its partners were convicted in U.S. district court in Chicago of criminal conspiracy in this matter and fined $5,000.’ (226)
- ‘It is a matter of logic that Commie-style systems of the kind that exist throughout the industrial world apart from the United States South Africa US
- ‘Another pertinent question was omitted from the deliberations on the aggression launched by Japan December 7, 1941 : How did we happen to have a military base at Pearl Harbor , or to hold our Hawaiian colony altogether? The answer is that we stole Hawaii from its inhabitants, by force and guile, just half a century before the infamous date, in part so as to gain the Pearl Harbor naval base.’ (242)
- ‘Similar concerns about the ‘rascal multitude’ and their innate stupidity and worthlessness have been voiced by the ‘men of best quality’ throughout the modern period, forming a major strand in democratic theory.’ (244)
- ‘The Republic of Hawaii July 4, 1894 . Each sip of Dole pineapple juice offers an occasion to celebrate another triumph of Western civilization.’ (245)
- ‘Congress passed a joint resolution for annexation in 1898, as the US went to war with Spain and Commander George Dewey’s naval squadron sank a decrepit Spanish fleet in Manila, setting the stage for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of thousands of Filipinos.’ (245)
- ‘In this manner, Pearl Harbor became a major military base in the colony of Hawaii, to be subjected to a half-century later to a scandalous ‘sneak attack’ by Japanese monsters setting forth on their criminal path.’ (246)
- ‘Conventional falsehoods commonly retain their appeal because they are functional, serving the interests of established authority. Weisman’s tales about the late ‘60s are a case in point: they buttress the view that the academy, the media, and intellectual life generally have been taken over by a left-wing onslaught, leaving only a few last brave defenders of simple truths and intellectual values.’ (247)
- ‘Weisman takes it as axiomatic that the US stance in the Persian Gulf and the Cold War is subject to no imaginable qualification, surely no questioning of ‘American motives.’ ’ (247)
- ‘This revision of history also has its functional utility: under the laws of Political Correctness, it is permissible to recognize our occasional lapses from perfection if they can be interpreted as an all-too-understandable overreaction to the evil deeds of selected malefactors.’ (249)
- ‘ ‘It is only a matter of locating which village has had a child recently maimed or killed by a ‘bomblet,’ a tiny bomb left hidden in the soil for the past 18 years’ in a region where ‘carpet bombing and dioxin spraying by U.S. aircraft…devastated the forests, leaving much of the countryside looking like a mountainous moonscape perforated with craters the size of Cadillacs,’ the soil ‘drenched with more than 200 liters [of chemical poisons] a square hectare,’ so that ‘the number of deformed children is much higher here than in the North where there was no spraying.’ In this isolated region alone, ‘more than 5,000 people have been injured and killed’ from unexploded bombs since 1975.’ Philip Smucker (258)
- ‘Morality comes from the barrel of a gun – and we have the guns.’ (258)
- ‘Newsweek Bureau Chief Kevin Buckley writes that My Lai was ‘a particularly gruesome application of a wider policy which had the same effect in many places at many times,’ for example, in one area of four villages where the population was reduced from 16,000 to 1,600, or another where the US military command’s location plots reveal that B-52 bombings were targeted precisely on villages, and where helicopters chased and killed people working in the fields. ‘Of course, the blame for that could not have been dumped on a stumblebum lieutenant.’ ’ (261)
- ‘By mid-1963, coercive measures appeared to be successful in the countryside, but internal repression had evoked large-scale urban protest. Furthermore, the client regime was calling for a reduction of the US US November 1, 1963 .’ (273)
- ‘The January 1968 Tet offensive revealed that the war could not be quickly won. By that time, internal protest and deterioration of the US US
- ‘In any system of governance, a major problem is to secure obedience. We therefore expect to find ideological institutions and cultural managers to direct and staff them. The only exception would be a society with an equitable distribution of resources and popular engagement in decision-making; that is, a democratic society with libertarian social forms.’ (276)
- ‘A different process is unthinkable: that in their unions, political clubs, and other popular organizations people should formulate their own plans and projects and put forth candidates to represent them. Even more unthinkable is that the general public should have a voice in decisions about investment, production, the character of work, and other basic aspects of life.’ (276)
- ‘In his study of media coverage of labor, Walter Puette provides ample evidence that in the movies, TV, and the press the portrayal of unions has generally ‘been both unrepresentative and virulently negative.’ Unions are depicted as corrupt, outside the mainstream, ‘special interests’ that are either irrelevant or actually harmful to the interests of workers and the general public, ‘un-American in their values, strategies, and membership.’ The theme ‘runs deep and long through the history of media treatment,’ and ‘has helped push the values and goals of the American labor movement off the liberal agenda.’ This is, of course, the historic project, intensified when need arises.’ (279)
- ‘When activism declines, the commissar class, which never falters in its task, regains command. While left intellectuals discourse polysyllabically to one another, truths that were once understood are buried, history is reshaped into an instrument of power, and the ground is laid for the enterprises to come.’ (286)
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