During its short history of over 200 years, the US has sent troops over
200 times in countries around the world. It has suppressed labor
movements, free speech and democracy at home and abroad. To quote the
words of Marine General Smedley Butler in 1933 —
I
suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of
it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a
thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties
remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of
higher-ups.
This
is typical with everyone in the military service.
I
helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil
interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for
the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the
raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits
of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify
Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in
1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to
the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In
China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way
unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a
swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al
Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket
in three districts. I operated on three continents."
In the late nineteenth century the Manifest Destiny was fulfilled, the
native Indians decimated, Alaska purchased from the Russians, with the
country extending from sea to shining sea. Then America looked
aggressively outward by taking over Hawaii, Cuba, Guam, Philippines,
Puerto Rico and several occupations of Caribbean and Central American
countries. Earlier Japan had been threatened to forced trading by the
fleet of Commodore Perry and forced selling of opium to China began by
the British. Hong Kong was taken over and Americans with other Europeans
sold opium and carved out controlled zones in the coastal cities of
China.
In troubled times immigrants were made scapegoats, discriminated against
and legally banned. Irish, Eastern Europeans and Jews early on and
Chinese, other Asians, Southern Europeans and Japanese later on. Palmer
raids, ban on Italian immigration, Japanese- American citizens’
internment in concentration camps during WW2 and the recent treatment of
Muslim legal immigrants after 9-11 are a litany of manipulations of the
law for politically racist reasons. Domestically, native American land
grabbing and banishment to reservations and suppression of black civil
rights and lynching continued.
David Margolick’s lyrics of the poem "Strange Fruit" were sung by Billie
Holiday and still brings sadness and tears to caring people.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
Some black American soldiers claimed that they got better treatment as
POWs in WW2 than at home in America as free men.
The stock market crash and the following depression caused unbelievable
privation to common people and President FDR started a host of programs
to give people work. The Supreme Court obstructed the president’s
attempts as it was ideologically part of the business community right
from its inception. The president threatened to pack the court with his
added political appointees and the public outcry forced the nine
buffoons to relent. Their justice is poll dominated as reversions on
capital punishment, abortion and homosexuality in recent times
conclusively prove. Deficit spending was not denting the miseries of the
depression. FDR’s policy had pushed the neo-imperialist racist Japanese
into a corner due to restricted access to energy supplies. The world
should take note of a similar situation brewing between America, China,
Europe, Japan and India presently. The Japanese wanted colonies just
like the Europeans and wished to exercise their cruelty on other Asians.
Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria were already their colonies. They now
desired Southeast Asia and Burma for its oil. FDR put a ban on selling
scrap metal and energy to Japan and it attacked Pear Harbor. FDR saw
this as a good reason to indulge in military spending Keynesianism and
it was adopted by Truman and has become US national policy with
bankrupting military budgets. Hitler used the same military Keynesianism
to bring Germany out of depression.
The policy of coups, invasions and interference continued in the
invasion of the Soviet Union, sending marines to Lebanon, overthrow of
the Mossadegh government in Iran, assassination of Lumumba in the Congo,
overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia with slaughter of a million
Indonesians and the Korean War to set up a government of right wing
former Korean collaborators with the Japanese (interested readers should
read the true history of the Korean War by I. F. Stone, Bruce Cummings
or Chalmers Johnson’s books "Blowback" and "Sorrows of Empire"). The
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia wars were begun under lies and millions were
murdered by American bombing and the Phoenix program to assassinate the
Viet Cong. Allende was murdered in a coup in Chile. These same policies
were pursued in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Brazil,
Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (interested
readers should read Alfred McCoy and Jennifer Harbury’s books on torture
as the American way, further substantiated currently by Abu Ghraib,
Bagram, Guantanamo Bay and CIA prisoner renditions to North Africa and
Eastern Europe). More recently, invasions of Granada, Panama, Kosovo,
Afghanistan, Iraq 1991 and 2003 and Iran possibly in the near future add
to the dismal historical record. Under Reagan, the US propped up and
collaborated with the racist apartheid regimes of South Africa and Ian
Smith’s Rhodesia. The support of corrupt kleptocratic dictatorships in
the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco,
Indonesia, Zaire, Pakistan, Azerbaijan and Central Asian states reveals
the lies about spreading democracy.
America has been benevolent only to Europeans and fortunately
disinterested in India until recently. It wanted India to be a part of
the anti-communist alliance but Nehru refused. He had only glimpses of
history without really studying it and thus knew nothing about the
conquest of the eastern territories by the Czars or the Soviet massacres
and gulags. Furthermore he was an impressionable man brainwashed by
Lasky and Fabian Socialism without an understanding of economics,
politics or human nature. The propaganda model of empires subtly
inculcates their distortions of truth into the people's value systems
and the abreaction to prior unpleasant experience channels the colonized
or brainwashed choices from outside while maintainig an illusion of free
will and choice. Thus America built up Pakistan to India’s detriment and
even sent a nuclear powered aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal during
the 1971 India Pakistan war. It sided with the genocidal Pakistani army
slaughtering and raping East Pakistanis( Bangladeshis), just as it sided
with the genocidal Pol Pot against the Vietnamese installed Cambodian
government and the genocidal Saddam against arch enemy Iran in the 1980s
war. So much for its human rights baloney.
On the other hand its grain aid under PL480 and subsequent conversion of
the debt to INRupees to be used in India averted a famine, a policy
distinctly contradictory to the unwashed of the British Raj that
nonchalantly ignored the death of the clean poor.
In all fairness, India has been generally well treated and it is the
strength of the tattered American democracy that has allowed curious and
sceptic cynics like me to learn the truth about US history. This would
not have been possible in a totalitarian society of the left or the
right and much more difficult in a politically correct, pandering and
corrupt democracy like India, where facts are replaced by rumors of
conspiracy theories or blind ideological lies and there is a dearth and
paucity of honest history scholars. The beauty of America is that
despite the dishonesty of its leaders, the stupidity of its electorate
and the craven connivance of its press, there are honest intelligent
academics unearthing the truth and a mechanism and a small platform to
spread it without being killed or imprisoned, especially if one is white
or of the upper strata as Chomsky honestly says.
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