A Condominium Empire: Neo-Imperialism,
The Empire Strikes Back Home,
The Mythology of Interventionism,
The Real Threat of Revolution
excerpted from the book
The Sword and the Dollar
Imperialism, Revolution, and the
Arms Race
by Michael Parenti
St. Martin's Press, 1989
A Condominium Empire: Neo-Imperialism
p63
US multinational corporations (along with the firms of other advanced
capitalist nations) control most of the wealth, labor, and markets
of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. (2) This control does much
to maldevelop the weaker nations in ways that are severely detrimental
to the life chances of the common people of the Third World. (3)
The existing class structure of the Third World, so suitable to
capital accumulation, must be protected from popular resistance.
Through the generous applications of force and terror and by cultural
and political domination, the / imperialist nation directly-or
through a client-state apparatus maintains "stability"
and prevents changes in the class structure of other nations.
*
The Empire Strikes Back Home
p72
... the "national" policies of an imperialist country
reflect the interests of that country's dominant socio-economic
class. Class rather than nation-state more often is the crucial
unit of analysis in he study of imperialism.
p77
For years now the poisonous pesticides and hazardous pharmaceuticals
that were banned in this country have been sold by their producers
to Third World nations where regulations are weaker or nonexistent.
In 1981, President Reagan repealed an executive order signed a
half-year before by President Carter that would have forced exporters
of such products to notify the recipient nation that the commodity
was banned in the USA.)
p78
Empire has a great many overhead costs, especially military ones,
that must be picked up by the people. The Vietnam War cost $168.1
billion in direct expenditures for US forces and military aid
to allies in Indochina. The war's indirect costs will come to
well over $350 billion (for veterans benefits and hospitals, interest
on the national debt, etc.). As the economist Victor Perlo pointed
out, by the end of the war inflation had escalated from about
1 percent a year to 10 percent; the national debt had doubled
over the 1964 level; the federal budget showed record deficits;
unemployment had doubled; real wages had started on their longest
decline in modern American history; interest rates rose to 10
percent and higher; the US export surplus gave way to an import
surplus; and US gold and monetary reserves had been drained. There
were human costs: 2.5 million Americans had their lives interrupted
to serve in Indochina; of these 58,156 were killed and 303,616
wounded (13,167 with a 100 percent disability); 55,000 have died
since returning home because of suicides, murders, addictions,
alcoholism, and accidents; 500,000 have attempted suicide since
coming back to the USA. Ethnic minorities paid a disproportionate
cost; thus while composing about 12 percent of the US population,
Blacks accounted for 22.4 percent of all combat deaths in Vietnam
in 1965. The New Mexico state legislature noted that Mexican Americans
constituted only 29 percent of that state's population but 69
percent of the state's inductees and 43 percent of its Vietnam
casualties in 1966.
Americans pay dearly for "our"
global military apparatus. The cost of building one aircraft carrier
could feed several million of the poorest, hungriest children
in America for ten years. Greater sums have been budgeted for
the development of the Navy's submarine-rescue vehicle than for
occupational safety, public libraries, and daycare centers combined.
The cost of military aircraft components and ammunition kept in
storage by the Pentagon is greater than the combined costs of
pollution control, conservation, community development, housing,
occupational safety, and mass transportation. The total expenses
of the legislative and judiciary branches and all the regulatory
commissions combined constitute little more than half of 1 percent
of the Pentagon's yearly budget.
*
The Mythology of Interventionism
p85
An American weekly magazine, the San Francisco Argonaut defended
the atrocities of American troops in the Philippines in 1902 by
exulting over the enormous riches and fertility of the islands,
then noted: "But unfortunately they are infested by Filipinos.
There are many millions of them there, and it is to be feared
that their extinction will be slow .... Let us all be frank. WE
DO NOT WANT THE FILIPINOS. WE WANT THE PHILIPPINES.
p86
In 1900, the irrepressible imperialist spokesman, Senator Albert
Beveridge, appropriately wove together the themes of God, dollar,
and sword:
We will not renounce our part in the mission
of our race, trustee under God, of the civilization of the world
.... We will move forward to our work ... with gratitude ... and
thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His Chosen
People, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.
The Pacific is our ocean .... Where shall
we turn for consumers of our surplus?... China is our natural
customer .... The power that rules the Pacific is the power that
rules the world. And, with the Philippines, that power is and
will forever be the American Republic."
It was President Woodrow Wilson who, sounding
much like Jefferson, announced that "our relationship to
the rest of mankind" and "our peculiar duty" was
to teach colonial peoples "order and self control" and
to "import to them, if it be possible ... the drill and habit
of law and obedience which we long ago got out of... English history."
On another occasion Wilson said: "I am going t1 teach the
South American republics to elect good men." He then proceeded
to intervene violently and frequently in Latin American affairs.
"We are the friends of Constitutional government in [Latin]
America," he announced just before he ordered the US bombardment
and occupation of Vera Cruz, a lesson in orderly constitutionalism
that cost the Mexicans dearly in lives.
p87
On occasion, the pretense of international altruism is dropped
and the interventionists talk about looking out for Number One,
protecting American wealth from the incursions of a have-not world.
Observe the crass utterances of President Lyndon Johnson before
a cheering junior Chamber of Commerce audience in 1966: "We
own half the trucks in the world. We own almost half of the radios
in the world. We own a third of all the electricity . . . ."
But the rest of the world, he added, wants the same things. "Now
I would like to see them enjoy the blessings that we enjoy. But
don't you help them exchange places with us, because I don't want
to be where they are." Rather than carry the standard of
democracy into the world, now our task was to protect our standard
of living from the world.
The Real Threat of Revolution
p98
The answer is Marxist and other leftist states do pose a real
threat, not to the United States as a national entity, nor to
the American people as such, but to the corporate and financial
interests of our country, to Exxon and Mobil, Chase Manhattan
and First National, Ford and General Motors, Anaconda and USX,
to billions and billions of dollars in direct investments and
loans.
But specific investments are not the only
concern. US capitalists owned little of value in Grenada when
the New jewel movement took power, yet Reagan invaded that country.
Similarly, the United States had relatively few investments in
Indochina, most of the money there being French, yet it waged
a bloody, protracted war against the revolutionary movements in
that region. In such instances US interventionists are less concerned
with protecting particular corporate investments than with safeguarding
capitalism as a world system.
A socialist Nicaragua or socialist Grenada,
as such, are hardly a threat to the survival of global capitalism.
The danger is not socialism in any one country but a socialism
that might spread to many countries. Multinational corporations
are just that, multinational. They need the world, or a very large
part of it, to exploit and expand in. There can be no such thing
as "capitalism in one country." A social revolution
in any part of the world may or may not hurt specific US corporations,
but more than that, it becomes part of a cumulative threat to
the entire global system. The domino theory (which argues that
if one country in a region "falls" to Communism, others
will follow like dominoes in a row) may not work as automatically
as its more alarmist proponents claim, but who can deny there
is a contagion, a power of example and inspiration, and sometimes
even direct encouragement and assistance from one revolution to
another. Henry Kissinger expressed his fear that the "contagious
example" of Allende's policies in Chile might "infect"
other countries in Latin America and Southern Europe.' At stake
in Grenada, as President Reagan correctly observed, was something
more than nutmeg: it was the entire Caribbean. The US invasion
of that country served notice to all the other nations in the
Caribbean that they were not free to chart a revolutionary course.
Those who control the lion's share of
the world's riches will defend at all costs their most favored
way of life. For them, freedom is experienced as a sense of well-being
closely connected to their social standing and their material
abundance. Revolution represents a genuine loss of that freedom:
the freedom to treat their employees as they choose and make money
from other people's labor, the freedom to monopolize a society's
scarce resources while being unaccountable to the public interest
and indifferent to the hardships thereby inflicted upon others,
the freedom to control public discourse and the communication
universe, and the freedom to tax poorer classes without having
to pay many taxes themselves. For them, "freedom" means
to be above the law in most respects, to have the government at
their personal service, to live in luxury, to be waited upon by
small armies of underpaid servants, to vacation in Paris and London,
to enjoy a range of goods, services, and life choices that are
available only to a few, and finally to see that their children
enjoy all these same good things.
As the owning classes view things, revolution
brings "tyranny," a world turned nightmarishly upside
down, in which the ignorant masses outrageously expect to dominate
the allocation of public resources at the expense of the well-bred
and wellborn, even daring to occupy the very estates and offices
of the rich and powerful. Thus, the privileged classes dread socialism
the way the rest of us might dread poverty, hunger, and death
itself. They are prepared to go to any length to defend all that
they have, all that makes life 'of to them. History provides no
examples of a dominant class voluntarily relinquishing its social
position so to better the lot of the downtrodden.
These privileged interests honestly see
themselves as deserving of all they have, just as they see the
poor as the authors of their own miserable existence. They embrace
a self-justifying class ideology. And they are readily assisted
by the publicists, commentators, and academics who advance their
own careers by propagating the ruling-class worldview, presenting
it as a concern for security, democracy, development, and peace.
These acolytes have a direct interest in seeing that their own
professional and class privileges are not threatened by any alternate
social order. And like the rich, they sincerely believe in the
virtue of the system they defend.
The real problem for the wealthy classes
is not that revolutionaries "grab" power but that they
use power to pursue policies that are unacceptable to ruling interests
in both the Western industrial world and the Third World. What
bothers American political leaders (and investment bankers, corporate
heads, militarists, and media moguls, and the Third World landowners,
large merchants, military chieftains, usurers, sweatshop bosses,
and top bureaucrats) is not the Left's supposed lack of political
democracy but its attempt to construct economic democracy, to
use capital and labor in a way that is inimical to the survival
of the capitalist social order at home and ... abroad.
Sometimes US officials will say they are
for social change just as long as it is peaceful and not violent.
But judging from the way they have helped to overthrow democratic
governments that were taking a nonviolent, gradualist, reformist
road (such as Guatemala, Indonesia, Greece, Brazil, and Chile),
it would seem they actually have a low tolerance for social changes
(even peaceful, piecemeal ones) that molest the existing class
structure. The admonition voiced by counterinsurgency liberals:
"If you don't carry out basic reforms in how the land, labor,
and resources are used, then the Communists will," makes
little sense to Third World economic elites for whom the voluntary
implementation of basic structural changes would be nothing less
than an act of class suicide, as fatal to their privileged existence
as any violent upheaval. It makes little difference to wealthy,
privileged interests if their favored stations in life were undone
by a peaceful transition rather than a violent one. The means
concern them much less than the end results. It is not the "violent"
in violent revolution they hate-being themselves quite able to
resort to violence; it is the "revolution." (Members
of the comprador class in Third World nations seldom actually
meet a violent end in revolutions; the worst of them usually manage
to make it to Miami, Madrid, Paris, or New York.)
Here we can appreciate the immense deceptions
that underlie US foreign policy. While professing a dedication
to peaceful, nonviolent change, US policymakers have committed
themselves to a defense of the status quo throughout the world
that regularly relies on violence. They sometimes seize upon the
revolutionary ferment that might exist in impoverished lands as
an excuse for not making economic changes. Not until the situation
in this or that country has been sufficiently stabilized, they
say, can we venture upon reforms. Until then, we must rely on
the police and military to restore order. But once "order"
and "stability" are reimposed, that is, once the democratic
agitation has been crushed or subdued, there is no longer any
J felt pressure for economic reform.
p102
By the late 1980s, in a number of former dictatorships of Latin
America, Asia, and Africa, the United States promoted the accoutrements
of political democracy without much of the substance. Elections
can be regularly held in these countries, just as long as no one
tampers with the class structure. The US is willing to change
regimes to preserve the pro-capitalist state. Electoral contests
are usually classic exercises in elite politics, as was, for instance,
the Filipino election of 1987, described by one observer as "a
superficial and trivial exercise" in which "no coherent
program or even serious issues were placed before the people by
Aquino's slate." It was an election heavily weighted by patronage
and personality images and tainted by a score of political assassinations,
almost all of which were perpetrated by the Right.
In some of these "demonstration democracies"
the situation is better than in others. In the 1980s, in the Philippines,
Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, there was a modest decline in
human-rights violations, exiles were allowed to return, and the
military remained strong but had to assume a lower profile. In
contrast, in places like Guatemala and El Salvador, "the
return to democracy" was accompanied by a continuation of
political murders and all other human rights violations. In the
several decades since the 1954 CIA coup, Guatemala has had no
really effective civilian rule. The new "democratic"
constitution adopted in 1986 exonerated the previous military
regime for its crimes against the people, giving an ominous signal
for the future. From 1978 to 1985, the Guatemalan military-trained,
financed, and advised by the US military-killed or "disappeared"
an estimated 50,000 to 75,000 people, mostly unarmed Indian peasants,
and destroyed 440 rural villages (by the army's own count), creating
100,000 orphans, 20,000 widows, and 150,000 refugees. The new
constitution also validated the military decrees that set up the
rural concentration camps (the infamous "model villages")
and put virtually the entire male population of the Western Highlands,
some 900,000, into military-controlled compulsory "civilian
patrols." Under Guatemala's new "democratic, civilian"
government, the army controlled all development and social-service
programs and all resources and aid throughout the countryside.
The army also established numerous new outposts in the most remote
villages of the highlands. In both Guatemala and El Salvador,
despite the "democratic civilian" facade, the military
continued to have a grip over the country, tolerating no interference
from the civilian government in its affairs, and enjoying a free
hand in waging counterinsurgency terror against the population.
Should popular forces in these client-state
"democracies" mobilize too successfully, developing
political parties, labor unions, and peasant organizations that
gain a real measure of power, there is a good chance that the
military, funded by the United States and waiting in the wings
to thwart the "Communist menace," will take over, suspend
the constitution, make the necessary arrests and executions, and
restore "stability."
p105
Can it be that US corporate investors and political leaders derive
some satisfaction from seeing millions of human beings in the
Third World suffer from poverty and political repression? Can
we really believe that each day they contrive new ways of contributing
to the misery of Third World peoples? No, but each day they ponder
how best to maintain their profitable holdings, and secure an
"investment climate" that allows the capital accumulation
process to do its thing. They do not particularly want to see
people suffer. Generally they are indifferent or removed from
the miseries of the poor, both in the Third World and in their
own countries. If pressed on the point they will insist that their
investments lessen misery by developing the economies of countries
inhabited by people who are presumed incapable of developing themselves.
And, in any case, they see even the worst of the repressive right-wing
regimes as far better than the dread scourge of class revolution.
p106
William Shirer
for "the last fifty years we've been supporting rightwing
governments, and that is a puzzlement to me... I don't understand
what there is in the American character ... that almost automatically,
even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships
or are tolerant towards them.
p107
It is not enough to complain about how bad things are, we must
also explain why such things persist. A half-century ago, President
Franklin Roosevelt attempted a partial answer when justifying
US support of Nicaragua's dictator, Anastasio Somoza: "He
may be a son-of-a-bitch, but at least he's our son-of-a-bitch.'
p107
During the 1980s, liberal critics complained of a lack of coherence
in US policy. They pointed to the "inconsistency" in
the Reagan administration's policy of (1) imposing trade embargoes
on Nicaragua in order to pressure that nation into becoming more
"democratic" and more "cooperative," while
(2) refusing to apply sanctions against South Africa, claiming
such measures would retard the development of democracy in that
country. But if we understand the class content of that policy,
it comes out to be quite consistent. Its purpose was to punish
leftist anti-imperialist governments and not punish rightist ones
that are a part of global capitalism.
p108
The US government is usually on the wrong side, against the poor
and downtrodden, because the wrong side is the right side, given
the class interests upon which the policy is fixed.
p108
... former CIA operative ... observed that though he had been
told he was battling Communism in Guatemala, in truth "Communism
was not the threat we were fighting. The threat was land reform."
But land reform is much of what Communism is about in the Third
World, taking the land from the rich and using it for social production
and common needs. That is what the big landowners hate about Communists-or
about any other reformers, even those who do not consider themselves
Marxists. Adlai Stevenson once commented: "We know... how
easy it is to mistake genuine local revolt for Communist subversion."
It is easy to mistake the two because they are one and the same.
Certainly for the industrialists and financiers, it makes little
difference whether their holdings are confiscated by "genuine
local" rebels or "Communist subversives." That
the owning classes hate Communism and fear its presence everywhere,
does not make the hatred irrational, even if their fears are often
exaggerated. They hate the economic changes that might obliterate
their class existence and so they label such changes "Communist"-which
they sometimes are and sometimes are not.
p111
Before the socialist revolution in 1959, there was chronic underemployment
in Cuba and massive unattended social needs; there was much work
that needed to be done and many underemployed people willing to
do it, but little was done because the land, labor, and capital
of the nation were used for the extraction of lucrative export
crops such as sugar, tobacco, rum and other such corporate enterprises.
After the revolution, however, there was suddenly a labor shortage
instead of a labor surplus. People were urged to volunteer for
work teams on their days off. There was more than enough work
because now the resources of the country were being dedicated
to the backlog of social needs created by centuries of maldevelopment.
When Cuba nationalized the holdings of
US companies, the United States retaliated with an economic boycott-demonstrating
one of the ways US foreign policy dedicates itself to the interests
of corporate investors. Before the embargo, the United States
absorbed more than half of Cuba's exports and supplied nearly
three-quarters of Cuba's imported goods. Deprived of US markets
and industrial goods, the Cuban revolutionary government-in order
to survive, turned to existing socialist countries, especially
the Soviet Union, for trade and aid in the 1960s (as did Nicaragua
in the 1980s). Over the years, the Cubans have repeatedly sought
to improve relations with the United States in order to benefit
from American trade, technology, and tourism. They would "prefer
not to be spending so much time and energy on national defense,"
as even the New York Times noted.
Still beset by many economic problems,
Cuba is no paradise on earth; but it stands in marked contrast
to the rest of Latin America. Cuban life expectancy rose from
fifty-five years in 1959 to seventy-three years by 1984. Infant
mortality has dropped to the lowest in Latin America, on a par
with developed countries. Cuba's per capita food consumption is
the second highest in Latin America. It has a free public-health
system (something Americans still do not have). The literacy rate
is over 95 percent, the highest in Latin America and ,\ higher
than in the USA; almost all children under sixteen are attending
school. In Cuba, the paint may be peeling off some of the buildings,
but unlike so many other Latin American countries, there are no
hungry children begging in the streets. And this is why many progressive
people look positively upon social revolutions. The children are
fed and the people are far better off than in nonrevolutionary
Third World countries.
The Sword and the Dollar
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