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Title: Empire or Humanity? Author: Howard Zinn Date: April 2, 2008 Language: en Topics: war, anti-war, anti-imperialism Source: Retrieved on August 14, 2022 from https://www.commondreams.org/views/2008/04/02/empire-or-humanity-what-classroom-didnt-teach-me-about-american-empire
With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military
bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly
a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the
once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of
the idea.
However, the very idea that the United States was an empire did not
occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the
Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began
to have second thoughts about the purity of the "Good War," even after
being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own
bombing of towns in Europe, I still did not put all that together in the
context of an American "Empire." I was conscious, like everyone, of the
British Empire and the other imperial powers of Europe, but the United
States was not seen in the same way. When, after the war, I went to
college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took courses in U.S. history,
I usually found a chapter in the history texts called "The Age of
Imperialism." It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898
and the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that
American imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no
overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to the idea of a more
far-ranging empire -- or period of "imperialism."
I recall the classroom map (labeled "Western Expansion") which presented
the march across the continent as a natural, almost biological
phenomenon. That huge acquisition of land called "The Louisiana
Purchase" hinted at nothing but vacant land acquired. There was no sense
that this territory had been occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which
would have to be annihilated or forced from their homes -- what we now
call "ethnic cleansing" -- so that whites could settle the land, and
later railroads could crisscross it, presaging "civilization" and its
brutal discontents.
Neither the discussions of "Jacksonian democracy" in history courses,
nor the popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, told
me about the "Trail of Tears," the deadly forced march of "the five
civilized tribes" westward from Georgia and Alabama across the
Mississippi, leaving 4,000 dead in their wake. No treatment of the Civil
War mentioned the Sand Creek massacre of hundreds of Indian villagers in
Colorado just as "emancipation" was proclaimed for black people by
Lincoln's administration.
That classroom map also had a section to the south and west labeled
"Mexican Cession." This was a handy euphemism for the aggressive war
against Mexico in 1846 in which the United States seized half of that
country's land, giving us California and the great Southwest. The term
"Manifest Destiny," used at that time, soon of course became more
universal. On the eve of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the
Washington Post saw beyond Cuba: "We are face to face with a strange
destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the
taste of blood in the jungle."
The violent march across the continent, and even the invasion of Cuba,
appeared to be within a natural sphere of U.S. interest. After all,
hadn't the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere to be
under our protection? But with hardly a pause after Cuba came the
invasion of the Philippines, halfway around the world. The word
"imperialism" now seemed a fitting one for U.S. actions. Indeed, that
long, cruel war -- treated quickly and superficially in the history
books -- gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist League, in which William James
and Mark Twain were leading figures. But this was not something I
learned in university either.
Reading outside the classroom, however, I began to fit the pieces of
history into a larger mosaic. What at first had seemed like a purely
passive foreign policy in the decade leading up to the First World War
now appeared as a succession of violent interventions: the seizure of
the Panama Canal zone from Colombia, a naval bombardment of the Mexican
coast, the dispatch of the Marines to almost every country in Central
America, occupying armies sent to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As
the much-decorated General Smedley Butler, who participated in many of
those interventions, wrote later: "I was an errand boy for Wall Street."
At the very time I was learning this history -- the years after World
War II -- the United States was becoming not just another imperial
power, but the world's leading superpower. Determined to maintain and
expand its monopoly on nuclear weapons, it was taking over remote
islands in the Pacific, forcing the inhabitants to leave, and turning
the islands into deadly playgrounds for more atomic tests.
In his memoir, No Place to Hide, Dr. David Bradley, who monitored
radiation in those tests, described what was left behind as the testing
teams went home: "[R]adioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of
Bikini and its sad-eyed patient exiles." The tests in the Pacific were
followed, over the years, by more tests in the deserts of Utah and
Nevada, more than a thousand tests in all.
When the war in Korea began in 1950, I was still studying history as a
graduate student at Columbia University. Nothing in my classes prepared
me to understand American policy in Asia. But I was reading I. F.
Stone's Weekly. Stone was among the very few journalists who questioned
the official justification for sending an army to Korea. It seemed clear
to me then that it was not the invasion of South Korea by the North that
prompted U.S. intervention, but the desire of the United States to have
a firm foothold on the continent of Asia, especially now that the
Communists were in power in China.
Years later, as the covert intervention in Vietnam grew into a massive
and brutal military operation, the imperial designs of the United States
became yet clearer to me. In 1967, I wrote a little book called Vietnam:
The Logic of Withdrawal. By that time I was heavily involved in the
movement against the war.
When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me
by Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the
National Security Council. Explaining the U.S. interest in Southeast
Asia, they spoke bluntly of the country's motives as a quest for "tin,
rubber, oil."
Neither the desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft
riots of the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of
the century, nor the strong opposition to World War I -- indeed no
antiwar movement in the history of the nation reached the scale of the
opposition to the war in Vietnam. At least part of that opposition
rested on an understanding that more than Vietnam was at stake, that the
brutal war in that tiny country was part of a grander imperial design.
Various interventions following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam seemed to
reflect the desperate need of the still-reigning superpower -- even
after the fall of its powerful rival, the Soviet Union -- to establish
its dominance everywhere. Hence the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the
bombing assault on Panama in 1989, the first Gulf war of 1991. Was
George Bush Sr. heartsick over Saddam Hussein's seizure of Kuwait, or
was he using that event as an opportunity to move U.S. power firmly into
the coveted oil region of the Middle East? Given the history of the
United States, given its obsession with Middle Eastern oil dating from
Franklin Roosevelt's 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, and
the CIA's overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government in Iran in
1953, it is not hard to decide that question.
The ruthless attacks of September 11th (as the official 9/11 Commission
acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of U.S. expansion in the Middle
East and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense Department
acknowledged, according to Chalmers Johnson's book The Sorrows of
Empire, the existence of more than 700 American military bases outside
of the United States.
Since that date, with the initiation of a "war on terrorism," many more
bases have been established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the
desert of Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else
a compliant nation could be bribed or coerced.
When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and
France in the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple
and clear as to be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the
evil of fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on
another crew -- what we had in common was that we both read books --
that he considered this "an imperialist war." Both sides, he said, were
motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without
resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our
discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.
In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the
soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into
battle. My motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial
ambition. It was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world,
free of aggression, militarism, and racism.
The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I
knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry
Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as
the coming of "The American Century." The time had arrived, he said, for
the United States "to exert upon the world the full impact of our
influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see
fit."
We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial
design. It has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual
handmaidens of the Bush administration, but with assurances that the
motive of this "influence" is benign, that the "purposes" -- whether in
Luce's formulation or more recent ones -- are noble, that this is an
"imperialism lite." As George Bush said in his second inaugural address:
"Spreading liberty around the world... is the calling of our time." The
New York Times called that speech "striking for its idealism."
The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project -- Democrats
and Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying
it. President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914
(the year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used "her navy and her
army... as the instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of
aggression." And Bill Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: "The
values you learned here... will be able to spread throughout the country
and throughout the world."
For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the
world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The
rhetoric, often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by
horrors that can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the
torn limbs of American GIs, the millions of families driven from their
homes -- in the Middle East and in the Mississippi Delta.
Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture,
assaulting our good sense -- that war is necessary for security, that
expansion is fundamental to civilization -- begun to lose their hold on
our minds? Have we reached a point in history where we are ready to
embrace a new way of living in the world, expanding not our military
power, but our humanity?