The Mean Methods of Imperialism
I,
The Mean Methods of Imperialism II
excerpted from the book
The Sword and the Dollar
Imperialism, Revolution, and the
Arms Race
by Michael Parenti
St. Martin's Press, 1989
p41
Upon taking the Philippines from Spain in 1898, the US then had
to fight a bloody three-year war against Filipino rebels. In Luzon
alone over 600,000 people were killed by American troops or died
from war-related diseases and privations-as the war against the
guerrillas became a war against the people who supported the guerrillas.
US General Arthur MacArthur issued a proclamation renouncing "precise
observance of the laws of war." Among other things, MacArthur's
troops tortured and executed prisoners (civilians included), destroyed
crops, food stores, domestic animals, boats, and whole villages,
and forced tens of thousands of Filipinos into "relocation
camps." In 1901 the Philadelphia Ledger carried a dispatch
from its Manila correspondent:
Our men... have killed to exterminate
men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents
and suspected people from lads of 10 up .... Our soldiers have
pumped salt water into men to "make them talk," and
have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully
surrendered, and an hour later... stood them on a bridge and shot
them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down,
as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses."
A Republican member of Congress gave an
eyewitness report on the war:
You never hear of any disturbances in
Northern Luzon ... because there isn't anybody there to rebel.
That country was marched over and cleared out .... The good lord
in Heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under
the ground; our soldiers took no prisoners; they kept no records;
they simply swept the country and wherever or however they could
get hold of a Filipino they killed him."
The United States intervened repeatedly
in Latin America, killing large numbers of Haitians, Mexicans,
Nicaraguans, and others in the doing. In 1986, Bill Gandall, aged
seventy-seven, recalled how in 1928 he spent two years as a Marine
in Nicaragua fighting Augusto Cesar Sandino, the leader for whom
the Sandinistas are named: "We never caught him because no
matter how we tortured, we could never get people to inform."
He remembers how the Marine Corps spread democracy in Nicaragua:
"I shot a guy at the polls" in the fraudulent election
of 1928. In addition, he busied himself "taking part in rapes,
burning huts, cutting off genitals. I had nightmares for years.
I didn't have much of a conscience while I was in the Marines.
We were taught not to have a conscience."
During the Vietnam War US forces massacred
whole villages; murdered prisoners of war; set up "free fire
zones" in which all living things were subjected to annihilation;
systematically bombed all edifices, including hospitals, schools,
churches; and destroyed croplands and work animals. US forces
also trained and assisted South Vietnamese police and military
in the use of torture and the assassination of suspected National
Liberation Front (NLF) sympathizers.' The CIA director of that
day, Richard Helms, admitted that 20,500 persons were assassinated
in the CIA-sponsored Phoenix Program, an undertaking that used
death squads to destroy the NLF leadership. Others put the number
at twice that.
The total firepower used by the United
States in Vietnam "probably exceeded the amount used in all
previous wars combined."" In Vietnam, the US dropped
eight million tons of bombs (leaving 21 million bomb craters),
and nearly 400,000 tons of napalm. With a minor assist from troops
from other Western nations, the US military killed about 2.2 million
Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, maimed and wounded 3.2 million
more, and left over 14 million Indochinese homeless or displaced,
with over 300,000 missing in Vietnam alone. The US war effort
also left Vietnam with an estimated 83,000 amputees, 40,000 blind
or deaf, and hundreds of thousands of orphans, prostitutes, disabled,
mentally ill, and drug addicts."
The 18 million gallons of Agent Orange
and other such chemical defoliants dumped from US planes poisoned
hundreds of thousands of acres and worked their way into Vietnam's
food chain, dramatically increasing the number of miscarriages,
stillbirths, and birth deformities. The chemical warfare gave
Vietnam one of the world's highest rates of liver cancer, a disease
virtually unknown in that country in prewar days. The continuous
bombings and use of napalm and defoliants rendered two-fifths
of Vietnam's land unsuitable for forestry or agriculture.
To achieve this horrendous record of destruction,
the US military used B-52 bombers against combatants and civilian
populations alike. The "Daisy Cutter," a monster-sized
bomb weighing 7.5 tons, when dropped by parachute and detonated
above the ground, destroyed everything in an area equal to ten
football fields. The AC-47 helicopter gunship was armed with three
Gatling guns that together fired 18,000 rounds of 7.62 millimeter
ammunition per minute, killing in that time every living thing
in an area the size of a city block, and turning heavily vegetated
terrain into plowed-up fields.
The US military also used phosphorous
bombs, laser-guided bombs, and fragmentation bombs, the latter
designated to maximize internal body wounds with flying flechettes
that tear into the flesh. "When Vietnamese surgeons became
adept at removing the metal flechettes imbedded deeply in the
victims' bodies, American scientists redesigned the bombs to use
plastic flechettes that could not be detected by X-rays."
Those who claim the US military effort failed in Vietnam because
"we did not fight to win" are either ignorant of that
war's unparalleled savagery or they mean to say that nuclear bombs
should have been used.
The United States has extended military
aid to right-wing regimes fighting against popular resistance
movements in El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Zaire, to name some of the recipients.
Let us look at El Salvador. That country is wide open to multinational
investment; a small number of super-rich families control the
bulk of its domestic wealth, while most of its people live on
subsistence diets and have no access to medical care. The counterinsurgency,
funded and led by the US, is waged today against a broadly based
liberation movement. Of the more than 60,000 Salvadorans killed
in the war between 1979 and 1987, many thousands are believed
to have been murdered by rightwing death squads. Another 540,000
have fled into exile, and another 250,000 have been displaced
or forced into resettlement camps within El Salvador, a country
of only 4 million people.
The Salvadoran army massacred whole villages
suspected of being sympathetic to the guerrillas. On December
11, 1981, a US-trained elite battalion killed more than 1,000
people in the village of Mozote and some nearby hamlets. The survivors
fled into the forest and five years later they were still in hiding,
subjected to constant aerial attacks. Representative Barbara Mikulski
(now a US Senator) interviewed numerous victims; here is a typical
account, drawn from an interview with a peasant woman:
Many members of her family were killed.
She personally saw children around the age of eight being raped,
and then [the soldiers] would take their bayonets and make mincemeat
out of them. With their guns they would shoot at their faces .
The Army would cut people up and put soap and coffee in their
stomachs as a mocking, [the woman said]. They would slit the stomach
of a pregnant woman and take the child out, as if they were taking
eggs out of an iguana. That is what I saw."
By the early 1980s, the US was resorting
to an air war against the guerrilla-controlled zones in El Salvador,
with daily bombings that included the use of incendiary and fragmentation
bombs, and poison chemicals dropped into water streams. Some victims'
experiences were reported in the Christian Science Monitor:
We have holes dug in the ground outside
our villages to hide in when the planes come and we keep the children
near the holes or in them all day. At first the Air Force dropped
bombs that knocked down trees and houses, killed people, and made
a three-meter crater. Then they began to drop bombs that exploded
before hitting the ground and others that made craters eight meters
deep to kill us as we hid in our shelters.
Incendiary bombs were used to destroy
the soil itself. As one US-trained Salvadoran soldier told an
American reporter: "Usually we drop incendiary bombs before
we begin operations .... By the time we enter the area, the land
has been burned over and the subversives pretty well toasted."
The army moves in after the bombings to destroy surviving homes,
crops, domesticated animals, food stores, and anything else that
might sustain life.
The United States not only has funded
the Salvadoran war but has played an active role in it. US military
"advisors" sometimes have gone along on military forays
and directed artillery fire. American pilots have flown observation
planes from Honduras into El Salvador, radioed information from
their planes directly to a planning room in the Pentagon, near
Washington, D.C. There, two thousand miles away, computers analyze
the data and pick targets for the evening's bombing run. A teletype
from the Pentagon to Ilopango Air Force Base near San Salvador
provides that day's targets to the US-trained Salvadoran pilots
who then carry out their mission in the A37 bomber planes provided
by the US.
Another right-wing military regime supported
by the United States is the one in Indonesia. The recipients of
about $2 billion in US military and economic aid over the last
ten years, the Indonesian generals came to power in a coup that
took the lives of 500,000 to I million people in 1965. A decade
later, the generals conducted a war of attrition against East
Timor, a former Portuguese colony which upon independence had
chosen a populist socialist government. The Indonesian military
has killed an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 East Timorese, out
of a population of only 650,000. Tens of thousands of others have
been forcibly relocated into internment camps or have fled the
country.
Indonesia and El Salvador are only two
of many US client states. By "client state" I mean those
nations that are (1) open to US capitalist penetration under conditions
highly favorable to US corporate investors and unfavorable to
the people of that society; (2) open to US military and political
influence; (3) run by a privileged class that is friendly to the
US government, sharing Washington's interest in preserving the
client state's existing distribution of class power and wealth.
p48
After an extensive investigation, the US Senate Intelligence Committee
reported that (1) the CIA was involved with the group that assassinated
General Rene Schneider (a democratic constitutionalist) in an
effort to block the election of President Salvador Allende in
Chile, (2) that President Eisenhower authorized the poisoning
by the CIA of Congolese liberation leader Patrice Lumumba-although
Lumumba was supposedly killed by "rivals," and (3) the
CIA made at least eight assassination attempts against Fidel Castro
and other Cuban leaders, even using organized crime gangsters
as operatives.
p48
... the Latino military has been linked to death squads in just
about every Latin American client state. In a "democracy"
like Colombia, some 100,000 workers, peasants, and intellectuals
have died at the hands of US-trained security forces and death
squads since the late l940s. First utilized by the United States
in Vietnam to torture and murder tens of thousands of civilians,
death squads have enjoyed a wide use in US client states since
the 1960s; their growth closely correlates with US military aid
and training.
p52
Edward Herman
as human rights conditions deteriorate,
factors affecting the "climate of investment," like
the tax laws and labor repression, improve from the viewpoint
of the multinational corporation. This suggests an important line
of causation. Military dictatorships tend to improve the investment
climate .... The multinational corporate community and the U.S.
government are very sensitive to this factor. Military dictators
enter into a tacit joint venture arrangement with Free World leaders:
They will keep the masses quiet, maintain an open door to multinational
investment, and provide bases and otherwise serve as loyal clients.
In exchange, they will be aided and protected against their own
people, and allowed to loot public property.
Thus do US policymakers use fascism to
protect capitalism, while claiming they are saving democracy from
Communism.
*
The Mean Methods of Imperialism II
p55
In a number of countries, such as South Africa, Zaire, Guatemala,
Chile, Angola, and Haiti, where US policymakers have not always
felt politically comfortable about committing American military
personnel in noticeable numbers, Israel has been willing to do
the dirty work in return for large sums of US aid and other special
considerations. Likewise in countries such as Nicaragua (with
the contras), El Salvador, Namibia, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines,
and Bolivia, Israeli military personnel have worked as advisors
in counterinsurgency. According to one Israeli writer: "Consider
any third-world area that has been a trouble spot in the past
10 years and you will discover Israeli officers and weapons implicated
in the conflict-supporting American interests and helping in what
they call 'the defense of the West.'
p57
Another well-publicized instance of destabilization was Chile.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that President
Nixon had issued orders to the CIA to "play a direct role
in organizing a military coup d'etat in Chile to prevent Allende's
accession to the presidency." The CIA compiled lists of Chilean
leftists to be arrested, and disbursed millions of dollars to
antidemocratic opposition parties and media and to right-wing
paramilitary organizations. "Not a nut or bolt will be allowed
to reach Chile under Allende," said Edward Korry, US ambassador
to that country in 1973. "Once Allende comes to power we
shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and Chileans to
utmost deprivation and poverty." As Nixon himself remarked;
"Make the [Chilean] economy scream." In 1971, the United
States imposed economic sanctions, cut credits, and stopped aid
programs to Chile, but increased US aid to the military.
In Chile, American firms themselves played
an active role in destabilization, most notably the International
Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) which, along with several
other companies, contributed large sums to Allende's conservative
electoral opponent in 1970. A group of business executives organized
by David Rockefeller into the Council of the Americas, which included
Harold Geneen of ITT and Donald Kendall of Pepsico, proposed covert
action in Chile to defeat Allende and elect the right-wing candidate,
pledging $500,000 for the campaign. ITT also pressured the White
House to oust Allende from office when his government nationalized
the telephone company in October 1971.
The Pinochet military dictatorship that
murdered Allende and seized power in Chile in 1973 abolished all
political liberties, executed about 30,000 Chileans, and arrested,
tortured, or drove into exile many thousands more. Pinochet's
free-market policies, formulated by conservative economists from
the USA, brought runaway inflation, a drastic drop in real wages,
a sharp growth in unemployment, deep cuts in human services, and
a huge increase in the national debt. But the economy was not
a failure for everyone. There was a dramatic upward redistribution
of wealth; the top 5 percent doubled their share of the national
income in a few years under the US-supported dictatorship, while
workers saw their real wages cut almost by half. Big US corporations
and banks returned to Chile to recapture enterprises that had
been nationalized under Allende, and to enjoy profits and interest
payments that were fatter than ever..
Honduras is another imperialist dreamland-or
nightmare depending on your class perspective. While US investments
grew, the standard of living for the average Honduran declined
and Honduras sank deeper into foreign debt. Eighty percent of
the land in Honduras is owned by foreign companies, most of it
by United Brands and Standard Fruit which, backed by the US government,
were able to gradually squeeze out the few remaining British firms.
(Between 1911 and 1925, US Marines intervened in Honduras six
times to protect US investments.) The choice land is used to grow
cash export crops such as bananas and coffee, and raise cattle
for beef exports. In Honduras, forty children die every day of
hunger and disease; over two-thirds are malnourished. Half the
country's 4 million inhabitants live without electricity, running
water, or decent housing.
In the 1980s, along with a marked increase
in US military aid, there was a sharp escalation in state violence
against the Honduran people. Critics of the government were labeled
"subversivos" and "Sandinista sympathizers,"
and were treated to mass arrests, death squad assassinations,
and disappearances. Political prisoners who subsequently reemerged
from captivity gave dreadful accounts of torture. In Honduras
in the 1980s, while much of the economy deteriorated, the technology
of state repression made great advances.
The United States has been an active participant
in Honduras's maldevelopment, sending counterinsurgency experts
and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to bolster the Honduran
military. The US built a vast network of forward-deployment bases
and airfields for its own forces in Honduras and conducted joint
US-Honduran military exercises, transforming that country into
a launching pad and backup area for military actions throughout
Central America, especially against Nicaragua.
"The lowest priority for current
US policy toward Honduras is Honduras," writes Philip Shepherd.
The Honduran people seemed to agree with that conclusion. A 1986
survey conducted by the Honduran National Autonomous University
found that more than 80 percent of Hondurans rejected the presence
of US troops; 75 percent believed that Honduran foreign policy
was controlled by Washington.
US policies in Honduras are not without
their contradictions. To quote Shepard again:
The Reagan administration claims its goals
are to help consolidate Honduran democracy, reorganize its economy
for greater socioeconomic well-being, and promote social stability.
Yet the impact of its policies has been the opposite: democratic
institutions and practices have been undermined, human rights
abuses have spread, the economy is a shambles, and the stability
of Honduras is threatened.
p59
Elections
Washington has financed conservative political
parties in Italy, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Jamaica, the Dominican
Republic, Grenada, and other countries in Latin America, Asia,
and Europe. The United States has promoted and funded elections
in countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, El Salvador, Guatemala,
and Grenada, usually between carefully selected conservative or
reactionary candidates, for the purpose of lending a veneer of
popular legitimacy to client states.
Undercover Infiltration
CIA operations abroad have included the
infiltration of important political organizations in countries
such as Brazil, Ecuador, Italy, and Honduras, to name a few. The
CIA has maintained agents at the highest possible levels of various
governments, among heads of state, military leaders, and opposition
political parties.
Labor Unions
Along with infiltrating existing Third
World labor organizations, the United States has co-opted workers
into tame unions that are more anticommunist than antimanagement.
The American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), funded
by the US government and operated by the AFL-CIO, has played this
role throughout Latin America. The AIFLD board of trustees contains
a number of corporate executives with enormous holdings in Latin
America and the Caribbean. AIFLD graduates have been linked to
coups in Brazil, Guyana, and to counterinsurgency work in Cuba
(under Batista). A similar AFL-CIO enterprise is the African American
Labor Center (AALC) which has trained compliant union leaders
and organizers from over twenty countries in Africa, providing
them with millions of dollars to build organizations and buy followings.
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