Chapter Five
Ruling the World
1. Adam Smith used the phrase "principal
architects" in decrying the mercantile system, which he argued benefited
those who designed it at the expense of the vast majority. See Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976
(original 1776). His exact words (Book
IV, ch. VII, pt. III, pp. 180-181):
It cannot be very difficult
to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not
the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely neglected; but
the producers, whose interest has been so carefully attended to; and among this
latter class our merchants and manufacturers have been by far the principal
architects. In the mercantile
regulations, which have been taken notice of in this chapter, the interest of
our manufacturers has been most peculiarly attended to; and the interest, not
so much of the consumers, as that of some other sets of producers, has been
sacrificed to it.
Smith's emphasis on the basic class conflict is
evident throughout his work, though this fact is grossly misrepresented and
falsified by contemporary ideology. See
for example the following (Book I, ch. XI, p. 278; Book IV, ch. VII, pt. III,
p. 133):
The interest of the dealers,
however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some
respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. . . . The proposal of any new law or regulation of
commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great
precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and
carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most
suspicious attention. It comes from an
order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public,
who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and
who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it. . .
. [The monopoly of Great Britain over
its colonies], I have endeavoured to show, though a very grievous tax upon the
colonies, and though it may increase the revenue of a particular order of men
in Great Britain, diminishes instead of increasing that of the great body of
the people.
For more on Smith, see chapter 6 of U.P. and its footnote 10;
and footnote 91 of chapter 10 of U.P. See also chapter 2 of U.P. and its footnote 58.
2. For more on anarchism, or libertarian
socialism, see Peter Marshall, Demanding
the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, London: HarperCollins, 1992
(valuable survey of anarchist thought and experiments, with detailed
bibliography). See also the text of
chapter 6 of U.P. and its footnote 18;
and chapter 10 of U.P. and its
footnote 16.
3. On Lenin's and Trotsky's destruction of
socialist initiatives in Russia and their guiding philosophies, see chapter 7
of U.P. and its footnote 3;
and footnote 21 of this chapter.
4. On Russia's Third World status prior to
1917, see for example, Teodor Shanin, Russia
as a "Developing Society" -- The Roots of Otherness: Russia's Turn of
the Century, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985, Vol. 1, pp. 103f,
123f, 187f. An excerpt (pp. 103-104,
124):
In 1900 the income
per capita in Russia was three times lower than in Germany, four times below
the U.K., one-third lower than even the Balkans. Because of the extreme diversity between the very rich and the
very poor these average figures still understate the poverty of Russia's poor.
. . . Much poorer than Western Europe,
Russia was not actually "catching up" in terms of the aggregate
income per capita, productivity or consumption.
D.S. Mirsky, Russia:
A Social History, London: Cresset/ New York: Century, 1952, p. 269
("by 1914, Russia had gone a good part of the way toward becoming a
semi-colonial possession of European capital"); Z.A.B. Zeman, The Making and Breaking of Communist Europe,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, ch. 1 and pp. 57-58.
On the history of Eastern Europe as an underdeveloped region, see for
example, John Feffer, Shock Waves:
Eastern Europe After the Revolutions, Boston: South End, 1992, ch. 1.
On
the East-West rift in the context of the Third World generally, see for
example, L.S. Stavrianos, Global Rift:
The Third World Comes of Age, New York: Morrow, 1981, chs. 3 and 16.
5. On comparative East and West European
economic development in the twentieth century, see for example, World Bank, World Development Report 1991: the Challenge
of Development, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 14. The World Bank's statistics indicate that
Eastern European per capita gross domestic product compared to that of the
O.E.C.D. (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is
composed of the rich Western countries) declined from 64 to 57 percent between
1830 and 1913, then rose to 65 percent by 1950; declined to 63 percent by 1973;
then fell to 56 percent by 1989. The
overall growth rate from 1913 to 1950 was higher for Eastern Europe than for
the O.E.C.D. countries (1.4 percent versus 1.1 percent), and higher from 1950
to 1989 for the O.E.C.D. countries than for Eastern Europe (2.3 percent versus
2.0 percent). The Bank's statistics
indicate that Eastern Europe's per capita gross domestic product was 15.7
percent higher than Latin America's in 1913, but 77.6 percent higher by
1989. Furthermore, none of these
figures take into account wealth distribution, which was far more skewed in
both the O.E.C.D. countries and Latin America than in Eastern Europe.
On
the catastrophic economic decline in the former Soviet Empire after 1989, see
footnote 10 of this chapter.
6. For the World Bank's assessment, see
"The World Bank and Development: An N.G.O. Critique and a World Bank
Response," in Trócaire Development
Review, Dublin: Catholic Agency for World Development, 1990, pp. 9-27. An excerpt (p. 21, ¶9):
The Soviet Union
and the People's Republic of China have until recently been among the most
prominent examples of relatively successful countries that deliberately turned
away from the global economy. But their
vast size made inward-looking development more feasible than it would be for
most countries, and even they eventually decided to shift policies and take a
more active part in the global economy.
Chomsky remarks (Year
501: The Conquest Continues, Boston: South End, 1993, pp. 73-74):
A more accurate rendition would be that their
"vast size" made it possible for [the Soviet Union and China] to
withstand the refusal of the West to allow them to take part in the global
economy on terms other than traditional subordination, the "active part in
the global economy" dictated to the [Third World] in general by the world
rulers.
See
also, Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic
Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1962, p. 150 (noting the Soviet Union's
"approximate sixfold increase in the volume of industrial output by the
mid-1950s"). And see footnotes 8 and
108
of this chapter.
7. Western planners' concern over Communism as
a form of economic independence is stated bluntly, for example, in an extensive
1955 study sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the National Planning
Association, conducted by a representative segment of the U.S. elite (including
the Chairman of the Board of the General American Investors Company, the
Associate Director of the Ford Foundation, the Dean of the Columbia Business
School, and the Dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Public
Administration). See William Yandell
Elliott, ed., The Political Economy of
American Foreign Policy: Its Concepts, Strategy, and Limits, New York:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1955. An
excerpt (p. 42; emphasis added):
The Soviet threat is total
-- military, political, economic and ideological. Four of its specific aspects are important for an understanding
of present and prospective international economic problems. It has meant:
(1) A serious reduction of the potential resource base and market
opportunities of the West owing to the subtraction of the communist areas from
the international economy and their economic transformation in ways which
reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial economies of
the West;
(2) A planned disruption of
the free world economies by means of Soviet foreign economic policy and
subversive communist movements;
(3) A long-term challenge to the economic pre-eminence of the West arising
from the much higher current rates of economic growth (particularly of heavy
industry) in the Soviet system;
(4) A source of major insecurity in the
international economy due to the fact that Soviet communism threatens not
merely the political and economic institutions of the West but the continued
existence of human freedom and humane society everywhere.
See
also footnotes 8, 32 and 108
of this chapter; and chapter 2 of U.P.
and its footnote 52.
8. On Western planners' fears of Soviet
developmental success, see for example, Record No. 55, June 12, 1956, Foreign Relations of the United States,
1955-1957, Vol. XXVI ("Central and Southeastern Europe"),
Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992, p. 116. In June 1956, Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles told German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that "the economic danger
from the Soviet Union was perhaps greater than the military danger." The U.S.S.R. was "transforming itself
rapidly . . . into a modern and efficient industrial state," while Western
Europe was still stagnating.
Similarly,
after speaking to President Kennedy in 1961, British Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan wrote in his diary that the Russians "have a buoyant economy and
will soon outmatch Capitalist society in the race for material
wealth." See Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1993, p. 174 [citing Alistair Horne, Harold Macmillan, Volume II: 1957-1986,
New York: Viking, 1989, p. 303].
Likewise,
a State Department Report from the period warned:
[T]he U.S.S.R., like Dr. Johnson's lady preacher,
has been able to do it all. We need
always reflect that for the less developed countries of Asia, the U.S.S.R.'s
economic achievement is a highly relevant one.
That the U.S.S.R. was able to industrialize rapidly, and as they see it
from scratch is, despite any misgivings about the Communist system, an
encouraging fact to these nations.
See Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: the United States and India's Economic
Development, 1947-1963, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1992, p.
123.
A
1961 memorandum from President Kennedy's Special Assistant, Arthur Schlesinger,
explained with respect to Latin America:
The
hemisphere['s] level of expectation continues to rise -- stimulated both by the
increase in conspicuous consumption and by the spread of the Castro idea of
taking matters into one's own hand. At
the same time, as living standards begin to decline, many people tend toward
Communism both as an outlet for social resentment and as a swift and sure
technique for social modernization. Meanwhile,
the Soviet Union hovers in the wings, flourishing large development loans and
presenting itself as the model for achieving modernization in a single
generation.
See "Report To The President On Latin American
Mission," March 10, 1961, Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Vol. XII ("The American
Republics"), Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996, Record No.
7, p. 13. See also footnotes 7 and
108
of this chapter.
On
U.S. Cold War policies, see for example, Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration,
and the Cold War, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992; Lynn Eden,
"The End of U.S. Cold War History?," International Security, Vol. 18, No. 1, Summer 1993, pp. 174-207
(discussing Leffler's study and the new consensus on the Cold War that it
helped to establish among diplomatic historians); Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States
Foreign Policy, 1945-1980, New York: Pantheon, 1988 (with further citations
to the internal government planning record on U.S. Cold War policies); Frank
Kofsky, Harry Truman and the War Scare of
1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation, New York: St. Martin's,
1993, Appendix A (showing that internal U.S. government estimates of Soviet
military capabilities and intentions after World War II were highly dismissive
of their capabilities, and were "virtually unanimous in concluding that
the Soviets currently had no wish to initiate hostilities with the
West"). On the role of economic
considerations in the Cold War, see also chapter 2 of U.P. and its footnotes 3,
4
and 5;
and chapter 3 of U.P. and its
footnotes 3, 4,
7,
8,
9,
10
and 11.
9. On profiteering from aid to the former
Soviet Empire, see for example, John Fialka, "Helping Ourselves: U.S. Aid to
Russia Is Quite a Windfall -- For U.S. Consultants," Wall Street Journal, February 24, 1994, p. A1. An excerpt:
The U.S. has
pledged $5.8 billion in aid to the former Soviet Union, most of it destined for
Russia; there is dancing in the streets -- though not the streets of
Russia. The chief celebrants? Hordes of U.S. consultants who are gobbling
up much of the U.S. aid pie . . . pocketing between 50% and 90% of the money in
a given aid contract. . . .
Nowhere is the
disappointment more acute than in the aid targeted for nuclear disarmament -- a
field where Russians have considerable unemployed expertise. There was much excitement in Russia when
Washington unveiled a $1.2 billion program to help dismantle Russia's aging
nuclear arsenal and re-employ its scientists in civilian research. The Russians thought much of the money was
coming to them, but it hasn't. So far,
the Pentagon, which runs the program, has contracted for $754 million of U.S.
goods and experts. Defense officials
say it was Congress's suggestion to use Americans where "feasible";
they have taken the admonition a step further by making it a "guiding
tenet."
Barry Newman, "Disappearing Act: West Pledged
Billions of Aid to Poland -- Where Did It All Go?," Wall Street Journal, February 23, 1994, p. A1. An excerpt:
Under conditions
attached by donors, more than half the country's potential [aid] credits must
be spent on Western exports -- from corn to economists -- a practice called
"tied aid" long frowned on in the Third World. . . . Just as aid for Western advice has mostly
aided Western advisers, Western business has been the biggest gainer from the
West's business loans. Aid agencies
have a pronounced preference for safe bets.
The money they are supposed to lend to inspire enterprise in the East
often goes to Westerners, or it goes nowhere at all.
Janine R. Wedel, Collision
and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, 1989-1998,
New York: St. Martin's, 1998.
See
also, "While the Rich World Talks," Economist (London), July 10, 1993, p. 13 (U.K. edition). An excerpt:
To the man in the street aid
is synonymous with charity, money doled out to alleviate poverty abroad and
guilt at home. But in the case of much
of the aid rich countries give to poorer ones, the main motive has not been to
end poverty but to serve the self-interest of the giver, by winning useful
friends, supporting strategic aims or promoting the donor's exports. One glaring example is that almost half of
America's aid budget over the past decade has been earmarked for Egypt and
Israel. Peace in the Middle East may be
worth a lot to America, and to the world, but neither Israel nor even Egypt is
among the world's neediest countries.
The cold war's end has not yet made the motives of aid givers any less
political. . . .
The richest 40% of the
developing world's population still gets more than twice as much aid per head
as the poorest 40%. Countries that
spend most on guns and soldiers, rather than health and education, get the most
aid per head. And about half of all aid
is still tied to the purchase of goods and services from the donor country.
This
regular practice concerning Western "aid" money certainly is not
new. See for example, Tom Barry and Deb
Preusch, The Soft War: The Uses and
Abuses of U.S. Economic Aid in Central America, New York: Grove, 1988,
especially Part One (on the role of U.S. economic aid as an interventionary
tool in Central America, focusing especially on U.S. A.I.D.); William Borden, The Pacific Alliance: United States Foreign
Economic Policy and Japanese Trade Recovery, 1947-1955, Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1984, pp. 182f (on the role of aid programs in East Asia).
For
an early statement of the underlying policy by the Deputy Administrator for the
U.S. Agency for International Development, see House of Representatives,
Hearings Before the Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements
of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Winning
the Cold War: The U.S. Ideological Offensive, Part VIII ("U.S.
Government Agencies and Programs"), January 15 and 16, 1964, 88th
Congress, 2nd Session, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964, pp.
954-960 (Frank M. Coffin outlined the "Objectives of the U.S. A.I.D.
Program" as being "not development for the sake of sheer
development," but the "fostering of a vigorous and expanding private
sector" in order "to open up the maximum opportunity for domestic
private initiative and enterprise and to insure that foreign private
investment, particularly from the United States, is welcomed and well
treated"). See also footnote 14
of this chapter; and footnote 28
of chapter 10 of U.P.
10. On some of the human costs of the capitalist
"reforms" in Russia and Eastern Europe, see for example, Stephen F.
Cohen, "Why Call It Reform?," Nation,
September 7, 1998, p. 6. An excerpt:
Russia's underlying problem is an unprecedented,
all-encompassing economic catastrophe -- a peacetime economy that has been in a
process of relentless destruction for nearly seven years. [Gross Domestic Product] has fallen by at
least 50 percent and according to one report by as much as 83 percent, capital
investment by 90 percent and, equally telling, meat and dairy livestock herds
by 75 percent. . . .
So great is Russia's economic and thus social
catastrophe that we must now speak of another unprecedented development: the
literal demodernization of a twentieth-century country. When the infrastructures of production,
technology, science, transportation, heating and sewage disposal disintegrate;
when tens of millions of people do not receive earned salaries, some 75 percent
of society lives below or barely above the subsistence level and at least 15
million of them are actually starving; when male life expectancy has plunged to
57 years, malnutrition has become the norm among schoolchildren,
once-eradicated diseases are again becoming epidemics and basic welfare
provisions are disappearing; when even highly educated professionals must grow
their own food in order to survive and well over half the nation's economic
transactions are barter -- all this, and more, is indisputable evidence of a
tragic "transition" backward to a premodern era.
On
the earlier U.N.I.C.E.F. report discussed in the text, see for example, Frances
Williams, "Unicef criticises economic reform's high human cost," Financial Times (London), January 27,
1994, p. 2. An excerpt:
Economic and social reforms
in central and eastern Europe have proved far more costly in human terms than
originally anticipated, with a massive rise in poverty and widespread social
disintegration, the United Nations Children's Fund says in a report [Public Policy and Social Conditions]
published yesterday. . . .
The report, which documents
the impact of the economic slump on living conditions in nine countries since
1989, points out that . . . the spread of poverty, surging death rates,
plunging birth rates, falling school enrollment and an unstoppable crime wave
have reached "truly alarming proportions." "These costs are not only the cause of unnecessary suffering
and waste of human lives but also represent a source of considerable
instability and social conflict that could threaten the entire reform
process," Unicef argues. Crude
death rates (for the population as a whole) were up 9 per cent in Romania, 12
per cent in Bulgaria and 32 per cent in Russia. Between 1989 and 1993 the yearly number of deaths in Russia rose
by more than 500,000.
The New York
Times's article on the topic -- a few months after this report from the
foreign press -- reviews some possible reasons for the growing death rate in
Russia, but with a curious omission: the economic "reforms" which the
paper so strongly advocated. See
Michael Specter, "Climb in Russia's Death Rate Sets Off Population
Implosion," New York Times,
March 6, 1994, section 1, p. 1.
See
also, Victoria Graham, "UNICEF Says Health Crisis Threatens Eastern
European Reforms," A.P., October 6, 1994 (Westlaw database # 1994 WL
10102786)("there were more than 800,000 avoidable deaths from 1989 through
1993 in Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania,
Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine"); Julie Corwin, "Russia in Crisis: The
Next Battle," U.S. News and World
Report, October 18, 1993, p. 47 (in June 1992, 43.2 percent of the Russian
population lived in poverty, compared to 2.5 percent from 1975 to 1980; per
capita G.N.P. has dropped to 65.4 percent of 1990 level); Martin Wolf,
"The Birth Pangs of a Capitalist Eastern Europe," Financial Times (London), September 28,
1992, p. 5 (from early 1989 through mid-1991, according to International
Monetary Fund and World Bank statistics, industrial output fell by 45 percent
and prices rose 40-fold in Poland; figures for the rest of Eastern Europe were
not much better); U.N.I.C.E.F., Public
Policy and Social Conditions: Central and Eastern Europe in Transition,
Florence (Italy), November 1993; Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia,
New York: Norton, 2000. And see Eve
Pell, "Capitalism Anyone?," San
Francisco Chronicle, August 21, 1994, p. 5/Z1 ("more Mercedes are sold
[in Moscow] than in New York").
For
some examples of how Eastern Europe is being "reintegrated" into its
traditional Third World service role, see for example, Kevin Done, "A new
car industry set to rise in the east," Financial
Times (London), September 24, 1992, p. 23 (commenting that General Motors
opened a $690 million assembly plant in the former East Germany, where workers
are willing to "work longer hours than their pampered colleagues in
western Germany," at 40 percent of the wage and with few benefits);
Anthony Robinson, "Green shoots in communism's ruins," Financial Times (London), October 20,
1992, "Survey of World Car Industry" section, p. VII (wages in Poland
are 10 percent of those demanded by West German workers, kept that way
"thanks largely to the Polish government's tougher policy on labour
disputes"); Alice Amsden, "Beyond Shock Therapy" [and related
articles under the heading "After the Fall"], American Prospect, Spring 1993, pp. 87f.
11. For an article attributing votes for
Communist Parties in the early 1990s to "nostalgia," see for example,
Celestine Bohlen, "Nationalist Vote Toughens Russian Foreign Policy,"
New York Times, January 25, 1994, p.
A6 ("As the elections showed, nostalgia for the old empire is a potent
issue in Russia these days, with many Russians disillusioned by what they see
as a string of unfulfilled promises from the West").
For other reports on public opinion in the former
Soviet Empire at the time, see for example, "Poll finds most East
Europeans have doubts about democracy," Chicago Tribune, February 25, 1993, p. 8 (a Gallup poll of ten East
bloc countries found that 63 percent of those questioned opposed what's known
as "democracy," an increase of 10 percent since 1991); Andrew Hill,
"Ex-Soviet citizens fear free market," Financial Times (London), February 25, 1993, p. 2 (a European
Community poll in February 1993 found that most Russians, Belarussians, and
Ukranians oppose the move to a free market and feel that "life was better
under the old communist system"); Steven Erlanger, "2 Years After Coup
Attempt, Yeltsin Warns of Another," New
York Times, August 20, 1993, p. A2 ("Relatively reliable polls
indicate that the number of Russians who believe that their lives will be
better under capitalism has dropped from 24 percent in 1991 to 18 percent"
in 1993); "Order disguised as chaos," Economist (London), March 13, 1993, p. 4 ("Surveys in nearly
all [former Soviet bloc] countries show a swing back towards socialist values,
with 70% of the population saying the state should provide a place to work, as
well as a national health service, housing, education, and other
services"). See also chapter 10 of
U.P. and its footnote 63.
12. For Schoultz's study, see Lars Schoultz,
"U.S. Foreign Policy and Human Rights Violations in Latin America: A
Comparative Analysis of Foreign Aid Distributions," Comparative Politics, January 1981, pp. 149-170. An excerpt (pp. 155, 157):
The correlations
between the absolute level of U.S. assistance to Latin America and human rights
violations by recipient governments are . . . uniformly positive, indicating
that aid has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments
which torture their citizens. In addition,
the correlations are relatively strong. . . .
United States aid tended to flow disproportionately to the hemisphere's
relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights.
Furthermore,
with regard to relative (i.e. per
capita) -- as opposed to absolute (i.e. per country) -- U.S. aid to Latin
American countries and human rights violations by the recipient governments,
Schoultz also found (p. 162):
As in the case of
absolute aid levels, these correlations are uniformly positive. Thus, even when the remarkable diversity of
population size among Latin American countries is considered, the findings
suggest that the United States has directed its foreign assistance to
governments which torture their citizens.
The study also demonstrates that this correlation
cannot be attributed to a correlation between aid and need.
See
also, Lars Schoultz, Human Rights and
United States Policy toward Latin America, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1981. And see footnote 14
of this chapter.
13. On rising U.S. aid to Colombia and its human
rights record, see for example, Human Rights Watch/Americas Watch, State of War: Political Violence and
Counterinsurgency in Colombia, Human Rights Watch, December 1993, at pp. 134,
131. In addition to documenting massive
human rights abuses, this report notes that for fiscal year 1994, the Clinton
administration requested that military financing and training funds for
Colombia be increased by over 12 percent -- reaching about half of proposed
military aid for all of Latin America -- and indicated that if Congressional
budget cuts for the Pentagon interfered with these plans, it "intend[ed]
to use emergency drawdown authority to bolster the Colombia account." From 1984 through 1992, 6,844 Colombian
soldiers were trained under the U.S. International Military Education and
Training Program, over two thousand of them from 1990 to 1992 as atrocities
were mounting. See also, Human Rights
Watch, War Without Quarter: Colombia and
International Humanitarian Law, New York: Human Rights Watch, 1998; Human
Rights Watch/Americas, Colombia's killer
networks: The military-paramilitary partnership and the United States, New
York: Human Rights Watch, 1996.
On
the slaughter of dissidents in Colombia, see for example, Douglas Farah,
"Leftist Politician Killed in Colombia," Washington Post, March 23, 1990, p. A15 (the Patriotic Union party
had "lost some ground," "in part because so many of its local
and regional leaders were killed," including at least eighty in the first
three months of 1990 alone); James Brooke, "A Colombian Campaigns Amid
Risks of Drug War," New York Times,
September 24, 1989, section 1, p. 1 ("political violence is believed to
have taken the lives of 4,000 people in Colombia last year"); Amnesty
International, Political Violence in
Colombia: Myth and reality, London: Amnesty International Publications,
March 1994. An excerpt (pp. 1, 3, 5,
16):
Since 1986, over
20,000 people have been killed for political reasons -- the majority of them by
the armed forces and their paramilitary protegés. . . . Perhaps the most dramatic expression of
political intolerance in recent years had been the systematic elimination of
the leadership of the left-wing coalition Patriotic Union (U.P.). Over 1,500 of its leaders, members and
supporters have been killed since the party was created in 1985. Anyone who takes an active interest in
defending human rights, or investigating massacres, "disappearances"
or torture, is in a similar position. . . .
Colombia's
backers, notably the United States of America, have also remained silent when
aid destined to combat drug-trafficking was diverted to finance
counter-insurgency operations and thence the killing of unarmed peasants. . . . [T]he perception of drug-trafficking as the
principal cause of political violence in Colombia is a myth. . . . Statistics compiled by independent bodies
and by the government itself clearly show that by far the greatest number of
political killings are the work of the Colombian armed forces and the
paramilitary groups they have created. . . .
In 1992 the Andean Commission of Jurists estimated that drug traffickers
were responsible for less than two per cent of non-combat politically motivated
killings and "disappearances"; some 20 per cent were attributed to
guerrilla organizations and over 70 per cent were believed to have been carried
out by the security forces and paramilitary groups.
The
report also describes so-called "social cleansing" programs in
Colombia (16, 18, 23-24):
The murder of
people designated "socially undesirable" -- homosexuals, prostitutes,
minor drug peddlers, petty criminals and addicts, vagrants, street children and
the mentally disturbed -- has become endemic in Colombia's major cities. These killings are known as "social
cleansing operations" and are generally attributed to, if not claimed by,
so-called "death squads" with fearsome names such as Terminator, Kan Kil, Mano Negra, Los Magnificos, Cali Limpia. . . .
[S]everal cases have produced evidence that the "death squads"
were drawn from the security forces, particularly the National Police, and were
often supported by local traders. . . .
The Catholic Church's Intercongregational Commission for Justice and
Peace documented over 1,900 "social cleansing" murders between 1988
and 1992, 500 of them in 1992. . . .
The Council of
State, Colombia's highest judicial administrative body . . . ordered the
Ministry of Defence to pay the equivalent of 500 grams of gold each to [one
victim's] parents. . . . The military
attitude towards "social cleansing" was illustrated by the Ministry
of Defence's response to the compensation claim: " . . .[t]here is no case
for the payment of any compensation by the nation, particularly for an
individual who was neither useful nor productive, either to society or to his
family, but who was a vagrant whose presence nobody in the town of Liborina
wanted."
On
the Colombian government's strikingly effective public relations campaign to
improve its image and justify continued massive U.S. aid, employing the P.R.
firm Sawyer/Miller, see John C. Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You!: Lies, Damn
Lies and the Public Relations Industry, Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1995,
pp. 143-148 ("the firm devised a multi-stage campaign: first, reposition
Colombia in the public mind from villain to victim. Then, turn the victim into a hero, and then a leader in the war
on drugs").
14. For other studies confirming Lars Schoultz's
findings, see for example, Michael Klare and Cynthia Arnson, Supplying Repression, Washington:
Institute for Policy Studies, 1981, at p. 6 (study concluding that the United
States provides "guns, equipment, training, and technical support to the
police and paramilitary forces most
directly involved in the torture, assassination, and abuse of civilian
dissidents"); Edward S. Herman, The
Real Terror Network: Terrorism in
Fact and Propaganda, Boston: South End, 1982, ch. 3 (showing that
U.S.-controlled aid has been positively related to investment climate and
inversely related to the maintenance of a democratic order and human rights);
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The
Washington Connection and Third World Fascism -- The Political Economy of Human
Rights: Volume I, Boston: South End, 1979; Michael T. Klare and Cynthia
Arnson, "Exporting Repression: U.S. Support for Authoritarianism in Latin
America," in Richard R. Fagen, ed., Capitalism
and the State in U.S.-Latin American Relations, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1979, pp. 138-168.
See also, Teresa Hayet, Aid As
Imperialism, New York: Penguin, 1971 (early work on the dominance of U.S.
economic and political interests in the decision-making processes of the
international financial and lending agencies, including their origination,
funding, and staffing); Michael Tanzer, The
Political Economy of International Oil and the Underdeveloped Countries,
Boston: Beacon, 1969, ch. 8 (same). For
Schoultz's study, see footnote 12 of
this chapter.
Chomsky
clarifies that this correlation between U.S. aid and human rights violations
does not imply that the United States is rewarding some ruling group for
torture, death squads, destruction of unions, elimination of democratic
institutions, etc. Instead, he explains
(Towards A New Cold War: Essays on the
Current Crisis and How We Got There, New York: Pantheon, 1982, pp.
206-207):
These
are not a positive priority for U.S. policy; rather, they are irrelevant to
it. The correlation between abuse of
human rights and U.S. support derives from deeper factors. The deterioration in human rights and the
increase in U.S. aid and support each correlate, independently, with a third
and crucial factor: namely, improvement of the investment climate, as measured
by privileges granted foreign capital.
The climate for business operations improves as unions and other popular
organizations are destroyed, dissidents are tortured or eliminated, real wages
are depressed, and the society as a whole is placed in the hands of a
collection of thugs who are willing to sell out to the foreigner for a share of
the loot -- often too large a share, as business regularly complains. And as the climate for business operations improves,
the society is welcomed into the "Free World" and offered the
specific kind of "aid" that will further these favorable
developments.
15. On systematic hideous abuses in regions of
greatest U.S. influence, see especially footnotes 23
and 24
of this chapter, and also its footnotes 12, 13
and 14. See also chapter 2 of U.P. and its footnotes 15
and 54;
footnotes 8 and 38
of chapter 4 of U.P.; footnote 11
of chapter 7 of U.P.; and chapter 8
of U.P. and its footnotes 32,
57
and 85.
16. For Truman's attitude towards Stalin, see
for example, Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Dear
Bess: the Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910-1959, New York: Norton,
1983. In letters to his wife, Truman
wrote (pp. 520-522):
I like Stalin.
He is straightforward. Knows
what he wants and will compromise when he can't get it. . . . Uncle Joe gave his dinner last night. There were at least twenty-five toasts -- so
much getting up and down that there was practically no time to eat or drink
either -- a very good thing. . . .
Since I'd had America's No. 1 pianist to play for Uncle Joe at my dinner
he had to go me one better. I had one
and one violinist -- and he had two of each. . . . The old man loves music. . . .
Stalin felt so friendly that he toasted the pianist when he played a
Tskowsky (you spell it) piece especially for him.
Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman, New York:
Penguin, 1980. Similarly, in his
private papers, Truman wrote (pp. 44, 53):
"A common everyday
citizen [in Russia] has about as much say about his government as a stock
holder in the Standard Oil of New Jersey has about his Company. But I don't care what they do. They evidently like their government or they
wouldn't die for it. I like ours so
let's get along." "I can deal
with Stalin. He is honest -- but smart
as hell."
For
discussion of the attitudes of Truman and other Washington officials towards
Stalin and his regime, see for example, Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration,
and the Cold War, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. An excerpt (pp. 15, 52-53):
At the end of the war, U.S.
officials . . . wanted to cooperate with the Kremlin. But they harbored a distrust sufficiently profound to require
terms of cooperation compatible with vital American interests. Truman said it pointedly when he emphasized
that the United States had to have its way 85 percent of the time. Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, the Republican
spokesman on foreign policy, was a little more categorical: "I think our
two antipathetical systems can dwell in the world together -- but only on a
basis which establishes the fact that we mean what we say when we say it. . .
."
Humanitarian impulses also
were a minor influence on U.S. policy.
Principles were espoused because they served American interests and
because they accorded with American ideological predilections and not because
top officials felt a strong sense of empathy with the peoples under former Nazi
rule and potential Soviet tutelage. . . .
[I]n Washington, top officials -- Truman, Byrnes, Leahy, Forrestal,
Patterson, Davies, Grew, Dunn, Lincoln -- rarely thought about the personal
travail caused by war, dislocation, and great power competition. . . . Suffering had to be relieved and hope
restored in order to quell the potential for revolution. Rarely does a sense of real compassion
and/or moral fervor emerge from the documents and diaries of high officials. These men were concerned primarily with
power and self-interest, not with real people facing real problems in the world
that had just gone through fifteen years of economic strife, Stalinist terror,
and Nazi genocide.
Perhaps nothing better
illustrates this moral obtuseness than the way top U.S. officials felt about
Stalin. Who could doubt his
barbarism? Although the full dimensions
of the Gulag were not known, the trials, purges, and murders of the 1930's were
a matter of public record. Yet far from
worrying about their inability to satisfy Stalin's paranoia, American
officialdom had great hope for Stalin in 1945.
He appeared frank and willing to compromise. Truman liked him. . . .
Lest one think these were the views of a naive American politician, it
should be remembered that crusty, tough-nosed Admiral Leahy had some of the
same feelings. And so did Eisenhower,
Harriman, and Byrnes. . . . What went
on in Russia, Truman declared, was the Russians' business. The president was fighting for U.S. interests,
and Uncle Joe seemed to be the man with whom one could deal. . . . Truman, among others, frequently voiced
concern for Stalin's health; it would be a "real catastrophe" should
he die. If "it were possible to
see him [Stalin] more frequently," Harriman claimed, "many of our
difficulties would be overcome."
See also, Frank Kofsky, Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to
Deceive the Nation, New York: St. Martin's, 1993.
17. On Churchill's attitude towards Stalin, see
for example, Lloyd C. Gardner, Spheres of
Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe, From Munich to Yalta,
Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1993, pp. 235, 207, 240 (Churchill praised Stalin as a
"great man, whose fame has gone out not only over all Russia but the
world"; he spoke warmly of his relationship of "friendship and
intimacy" with the bloodthirsty tyrant; "My hope," Churchill
said, "is in the illustrious President of the United States and in Marshal
Stalin, in whom we shall find the champions of peace, who after smiting the foe
will lead us to carry on the task against poverty, confusion, chaos, and
oppression"; during the war he signed his letters to Stalin, "Your
friend and war-time comrade"; in February 1945, after the Yalta
Conference, Churchill told his Cabinet that "Premier Stalin was a person
of great power, in whom he had every confidence," and that it was
important that he should remain in charge).
18. For Churchill's remark about the British
occupation of Greece, see Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 6, Triumph
and Tragedy, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1953. His exact words (p. 249):
Do not hesitate to
act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.
. . . We have to hold and dominate
Athens. It would be a great thing for
you to succeed in this without bloodshed if possible, but also with bloodshed
if necessary.
For
Churchill's praise of Stalin's restraint, see Lloyd C. Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers
Partition Europe, From Munich to Yalta, Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1993 (citing
declassified British cabinet records).
Churchill stated to the British Cabinet with regard to Stalin and Greece
that (p. 244):
[T]he Russian attitude [at the Yalta conference]
could not have been more satisfactory.
There was no suggestion on Premier Stalin's part of criticism of our
policy. He had been friendly and even
jocular in discussions of it. . . .
Premier Stalin had most scrupulously respected his acceptance of our
position in Greece. He understood that
the emissary sent to the U.S.S.R. by the Greek Communists had first been put
under house arrest, and then sent back. . . .
The conduct of the Russians in this matter had strengthened
[Churchill's] view that when they made a bargain, they desired to keep it.
See also, Lawrence S. Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943-1949, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982, pp. 6-9, 23-28; David F. Schmitz, Thank God They're On Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing
Dictatorships, 1921-1965, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1999, ch. 4. And see footnote 72
of this chapter.
19. On the U.S. government and business
community's support for Hitler and Mussolini before World War II, see for
example, Christopher Simpson, The
Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century,
Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1995, especially pp. 46-64; David F. Schmitz, Thank God They're On Our Side: The United
States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965, Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1999, chs. 1 and 3; David F. Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy,
1922-1940, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988; John P.
Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: the View
from America, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
The
reasons for the warm American response to Fascism and Nazism that are detailed
in these books are explained quite openly in the internal U.S. government
planning record. For instance, a 1937
Report of the State Department's European Division described the rise of
Fascism as the natural reaction of "the rich and middle classes, in
self-defense" when the "dissatisfied masses, with the example of the
Russian revolution before them, swing to the Left." Fascism therefore "must succeed or the
masses, this time reinforced by the disillusioned middle classes, will again
turn to the Left." The Report also
noted that "if Fascism cannot succeed by persuasion [in Germany], it must
succeed by force." It concluded
that "economic appeasement should prove the surest route to world
peace," a conclusion based on the belief that Fascism as a system was
compatible with U.S. interests. See
Schmitz, The United States and Fascist
Italy, 1922-1940, p. 140; see also, Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security
State, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977, p. 26 (U.S. Ambassador to Russia
William Bullitt "believed that only Nazi Germany could stay the advance of
Soviet Bolshevism in Europe").
At
the same time, Britain's special emissary to Germany, Lord Halifax, praised
Hitler for blocking the spread of Communism, an achievement that brought
England to "a much greater degree of understanding of all his [i.e.
Hitler's] work" than heretofore, as Halifax recorded his words to the
German Chancellor while Hitler was conducting his reign of terror in the late
1930s. See Lloyd Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers
Partition Europe, From Munich to Yalta, Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1993, p.
13. See also, Clement Leibovitz, The Chamberlain-Hitler Deal, Edmonton,
Canada: Les Éditions Duval, 1993 (fascinating 533-page study reproducing vast
documentation, largely from recently-declassified British government sources,
of the secret British deal allowing Hitler free rein to expand in Eastern
Europe; this deal was "motivated by anti-communism" and was "not
a sudden policy quirk but was the crowning of incessant efforts to encourage
Japan and Germany 'to take their fill' of the Soviet Union" [p. 6]. Leibovitz's study also establishes
conclusively, from a wide variety of sources, that there was great sympathy for
Hitler's and Mussolini's policies among the British establishment).
Furthermore,
although Hitler's rhetorical commitments and actions were completely public,
internal U.S. government documents from the 1930s refer to him as a
"moderate." For example, the
American chargé d'affaires in Berlin wrote to Washington in 1933 that the hope
for Germany lay in "the more moderate section of the [Nazi] party, headed
by Hitler himself . . . which appeal[s] to all civilized and reasonable
people," and seems to have "the upper hand" over the violent
fringe. "From the standpoint of
stable political conditions, it is perhaps well that Hitler is now in a
position to wield unprecedented power," noted the American Ambassador,
Frederic Sackett. See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy,
1922-1940, pp. 140, 174, 133, and ch. 9; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1933, Vol. II ("British
Commonwealth, Europe, Near East and Africa"), Washington: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1949, pp. 329, 209.
The
U.S. reaction to Fascist Italy before the war was similar. A high-level inquiry of the Wilson
administration determined in December 1917 that with rising labor militancy,
Italy posed "the obvious danger of social revolution and
disorganization." A State
Department official noted privately that "If we are not careful we will
have a second Russia on our hands," adding: "The Italians are like children"
and "must be [led] and assisted more than almost any other
nation." Mussolini's Blackshirts
solved the problem by violence. They
carried out "a fine young revolution," the American Ambassador to
Italy observed approvingly, referring to Mussolini's March on Rome in October
1922, which brought Italian democracy to an end. Racist goons effectively ended labor agitation with government
help, and the democratic deviation was terminated; the United States watched
with approval. The Fascists are
"perhaps the most potent factor in the suppression of Bolshevism in
Italy" and have much improved the situation generally, the Embassy
reported to Washington, while voicing some residual anxiety about the
"enthusiastic and violent young men" who have brought about these
developments. The Embassy continued to
report the appeal of Fascism to "all patriotic Italians,"
simple-minded folk who "hunger for strong leadership and enjoy . . . being
dramatically governed." See
Schmitz, The United States and Fascist
Italy, 1922-1940, pp. 14, 36, 44, 52; Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1919, Vol. I ("Paris Peace
Conference"), Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1942,
p. 47.
As
time went on, the American Embassy was well aware of Mussolini's totalitarian
measures. Fascism had "effectively
stifled hostile elements in restricting the right of free assembly, in
abolishing freedom of the press and in having at its command a large military
organization," the Embassy reported in a message of February 1925, after a
major Fascist crackdown. But Mussolini
remained a "moderate," manfully confronting the fearsome Bolsheviks
while fending off the extremist fringe on the right. His qualifications as a moderate were implicit in the judgment
expressed by Ambassador Henry Fletcher: the choice in Italy is "between
Mussolini and Fascism and Giolitti and Socialism, between strong methods of
internal peace and prosperity and a return to free speech, loose administration
and general disorganization. Peace and
Prosperity were preferred."
(Giolitti was the liberal Prime Minister, who had collaborated with
Mussolini in the repression of labor but now found himself a target as
well.) See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy,
1922-1940, pp. 76-77f.
On
the views of U.S. corporations towards Fascism, including details of
participation in the plunder of Jewish assets under Hitler's Aryanization
programs -- notably, the Ford Motor Company -- see for example, Christopher
Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money,
Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Monroe, ME: Common Courage,
1995, especially ch. 5 (on Ford's role in Aryanization of Jewish property, see
pp. 62-63). An excerpt (p. 64):
Many U.S. companies bought substantial interests in
established German companies, which in turn plowed that new money into
Aryanizations or into arms production banned under the Versailles Treaty. According to a 1936 report from Ambassador
William Dodd to President Roosevelt, a half-dozen key U.S. companies --
International Harvester, Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and
du Pont -- had become deeply involved in German weapons production. . . .
U.S. investment in Germany accelerated rapidly after
Hitler came to power, despite the Depression and Germany's default on virtually
all of its government and commercial loans.
Commerce Department reports show that U.S. investment in Germany
increased some 48.5 percent between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply
everywhere else in continental Europe.
U.S. investment in Great Britain . . . barely held steady over the
decade, increasing only 2.6 percent.
Bradford C. Snell, American Ground Transport: A Proposal for Restructuring the Automobile, Truck, Bus, and Rail Industries, Hearings Before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974, pp. 16-23 (discussing the major role that General Motors, Ford, and to a lesser extent Chrysler, played in the Nazi war effort); Edwin Black, I.B.M. and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation, New York: Crown, 2001; Reinhold Billstein et al., Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor in Germany during the Second World War, New York: Berghahn, 2000; Gerard Colby Zilg, Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain, Englewood Cliffs (NJ): Prentice-Hall, 1974, especially pp. 292-314, 353-354 (on corporate leaders' plans for a fascist coup in the U.S. in 1934, and on the Du Pont Company's arming of the rising Axis powers in the 1930s). For more on the fascist coup plot -- discussed in Zilg's outstanding study -- see Union Calendar No. 44, Report No. 153, "Investigation of Nazi and Other Propaganda," February 15, 1935, House of Representatives, 74th Congress, 1st Session, Washi