When I first learned about the Nazi holocaust, years and years ago, I was sort of incredulous. Word must have gotten out, I thought—people must have known. Why weren’t thousands of people smashing in the doors of Auschwitz? I was naive—for one, I didn’t yet understand the efficacy of state terror in squashing rebellion. Today, though, we can resist without worrying about death squads “disappearing” us in the middle of the night.
So why aren’t we smashing in the doors of the U.S. consulate?
I’ll admit the analogy is imperfect, but is it that far off in terms of moral culpability? Despite the lovely policy paradigms that serve as rationalizations for U.S. maintenance of empire—the Cold Wars, the wars on drugs, the wars on terrorism and whatever other half-truths serve as colonialism’s new rationale—U.S. imperialism is far from benign.
When the United States emerged from the Second World War in a position of unparalleled wealth and power, it aimed to keep it that way. As the Director of Policy Planning for the State Department wrote in 1948, “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population…. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will allow us to maintain this position of disparity.… We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.… We should cease to talk about vague and—for the Far East—unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization.” Lucky for our deluded collective conscience, they’ve kept feeding us the niceties—evidently deeming them fit for public perception, if not as a basis for policy. Meanwhile, they’ve been forging an empire as brutal as it is lucrative.
As governments from Iran to Guatemala to Chile have attempted to use their resources to meet their own populations’ needs rather than to fill foreign bank accounts, the U.S. has engineered military coups and brutally crushed the anti-imperialist upheavals.
As puppet regimes from El Salvador to Nicaragua have encountered domestic resistance, the U.S. has trained military and paramilitary forces to carry out the counter-insurgency and terror campaigns needed to pacify social justice movements.
Add to the mix bombing campaigns, the use of proxy terrorist armies and outright invasion, and you have the recipe for post-World War II U.S. policy.
Keep in mind, of course, that the human misery these campaigns exacted is not limited to the “many more than 1 million” killed in the CIA-fomented Indonesian military coup of 1965, nor to the 200,000 East Timorese wiped out in the subsequent Indonesian invasion (for which 90% of the arms were supplied by the Carter Administration). Equally horrifying is the day-to-day realities of the world order such campaigns aim to maintain, the global economic system in which the richest 300 people have the same in wealth as the poorest 3 billion have in annual income.
A situation in which—despite the fact that there is presently enough food to feed the world’s population—a child dies every 2.7 seconds from the effects of malnutrition or related diseases is no morally ambiguous matter.
Through an effective propagandist sleight of hand, the world perspective I just briefly outlined is deemed “extremist” in the present intellectual climate—despite a thoroughly documented historical record of systematic U.S. aggression.
But whether one wants to call it radical or rational, anti-American or anti-colonialist, idealistic or practical, let’s recover a passion for resistance.
Let’s start building the sort of movement that can challenge established lies and rationalizations, that can stand in solidarity with those whose misery is perpetuated by our complacency. I think it’s time for us to start fighting back.
