13 December 2009
Courtesy of The Khaleej Times Online
In the early days of the Vietnam War, according to the American author William Blum, the Vietcong captured an American officer and were interrogating him. “I want to ask you an important question,” the Vietcong soldier said.
“You were our heroes after the Second World War. We read American books and saw American films. We all wanted to be as rich and wise as Americans. What happened?”
Blum does not record the American officer’s answer but poses a further question of his own. How did the United States dissipate the remarkable international goodwill and credibility it enjoyed at the close of the war. His answer: the activities of the military-industrial complex were responsible. “The military and the CIA need enemies because that is their reason for being. Defense contractors because enemies are to be fought with increasingly sophisticated weaponry and aircraft systems because this makes these corporations wealthier than many countries in the world.” But the military-industrial complex needed an excuse for its constant interventions around the world. Blum advances the theory that communism provided the excuse. But he says that “communist” was often no more than the name ascribed to those people who for other reasons stood in the way of the realisation of its ambitions: “if communists did not exist, the United States would have had to have invented them”.
It is Blum’s thesis that the word communist has been so over-used and abused by American leaders as to be virtually meaningless. (The Left could also be accused of abusing the term “Fascist”.) So no land has been too small, too far away, or too poor to pose a communist threat to the United States. This has meant that virtually every case that has involved American intervention has been concerned with a desire of a country to make itself free from political and economic subservience to the US, to pursue an independent foreign policy. If this has involved a refusal to minimise relations with the Socialist bloc or to suppress the Left at home or welcome an American installation on their soil, this was interpreted as a hostile act to America.
It did not matter that the threat was minimal. The United States still felt it was necessary to stamp it out, to maintain the principle, and as a warning to others. “For what the US has always feared from the Third World is the emergence of a good example — a flourishing socialist independent of Washington.” Blum says that tied up with this, of course, was that old seducer of men and nations: the lust for power, the acquisition, maintenance, use and enjoyment of influence and prestige, “the incomparable elation that comes from molding the world in your own beloved image.” The end result of this was that the United States became known around the world for establishing or supporting the vilest tyrannies whose outrages against their own people confronted us in our daily newspapers.
Almost as bad was the attitude of the old Soviet Union. It stood by doing little as progressive movements and governments, even Communist Parties in Greece, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia and the Philippines went to the wall with American complicity.
I found the most interesting point Blum makes in his thesis concerns the one-time head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. In the 1960s the National Commission on the causes and prevention of violence found that Hoover had helped spread the view among police ranks that any kind of mass protest was due to a conspiracy promoted by agitators, often communists, “who misdirected an otherwise contented people”.
The idea that no people could be so miserable and discontented to resort to mass protest and that if they did it was because agitators had stirred them up reveals the conspiracy mentality of many of our leaders.
Phillip Knightley is a veteran London-based journalist and commentator. For feedback, write to opinion@khaleejtimes.com
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