The Mean Methods of Imperialism

by Michael Parenti

from his book The Sword and the Dollar

 

When imperial domination is imposed upon a people, they do not always remain passive victims. Contrary to the image of a mute and mindless multitude, they frequently organize, protest, strike, resist, sabotage, riot, and rebel in the hope of bettering their lot or preventing its further deterioration. In turn, the foreign colonizers and the collaborationist Third World rulers will exercise every measure of control to keep the people in tow-from the subtlest manipulation to the most dreadful violence.

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We need to be reminded that only by establishing military supremacy were theEuropean and North American colonizers able to eliminate the crafts and industries of Third World peoples, control their markets, extort tribute, undermine their cultures, destroy their villages, steal their lands and natural resources, enslave their labor, and accumulate vast wealth. Military supremacy was usually achieved after repeated and unspeakably brutal applications of armed violence.

Think of what the Spaniards did in South America; the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique; the British in China, India, and Ireland; the Belgians in the Congo; the Germans in Southwest Africa; the Dutch in the East Indies; the French in North Africa and Indochina, the Japanese in Korea, Manchuria, and China, the Italians in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Libya, and the Americans in the Philippines, Central America, and Indochina, and in North America itself (against Native American Indians, Mexicans, and African Americans). Actually it is difficult for most of us to think about it, since imperialism's terrible history is not regularly taught in our schools nor treated by our media.

The colonization of the Third World by European and North American powers is often treated as a "natural" phenomenon, involving "development" and "dependency" and "specialization of markets." But what is most impressive is imperialism's unnatural quality, its reliance upon force and violence to impose itself upon the world. Empires do not "naturally" develop, nor do they emerge innocently "in a fit of absentmindedness," as was said of the British empire. Rather they are welded together with deceit, fraud, blood, and sorrow. They are built upon the sword, the whip, and the gun.

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In some instances, the indigenous population is almost entirely exterminated or otherwise displaced, as in the Caribbean, North America, Australia, and Hawaii. When portions of the colonized population manage to survive, it is due to several things.

First, there is usually a need for native labor. A European colonizing nation that slaughters the entire indigenous population deprives itself of that most valuable productive force: human labor. It must then import migrant workers from other colonized lands or from Europe.

Second, in past colonizations, the missionaries who worked closely with the imperial authorities developed an interest in the survival of the native populations, as was the case in parts of Africa and Latin America. Policies of extermination, if allowed to go full course, would bring an end to missionary work and the termination of overseas missions for want of wards to whom God's word could be administered.

Third, there is the outrage that arises from anti-imperialists within the colonizing nation and abroad, as reports of atrocities seep back home. This opposition has seldom turned events around but it does sometimes cause the imperialists to act with greater circumspection. In some cases, protests throughout the world and within the imperialist country have exercised a measurable restraint upon policy.

Fourth, the valiant resistance of native peoples sometimes convinces the conquerors that, rather than trying to impose a policy of total extermination, it would be less costly to make some minimal allowances for surviving indigenous communities, usually in the least hospitable locales and on the poorest land. Of these various factors, I think the most important is the need for labor. The conquistador is inclined to put a swift sword to the natives; the capitalist finds it more profitable to work them slowly to death.

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Along with France and Great Britain, another democracy that has made war against weaker peoples is the United States. 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."

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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 ClA-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 troop from other Western nations, the US military killed about 2.2 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, maimed and wounded 32 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, mentaIly 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 scientlsts 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.

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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 right wing death squads. Another 540,000 have fled into exile, and an other 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 A 37 bomber planes provided by the US.

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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 1 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 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.

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Both client-state leaders and US leaders say that reforms in the Third World must take place within an orderly framework, without disruption of the ongoing social stability. Indeed, they often argue that before there can be any change, there must be stability. But for them, stability can only be preserved if change is confined to minor reforms that do not cut into the ubiquitous prerogatives of ruling interests and do not threaten the prevailing social order. Client-state leaders want "stability," equating it with orderly rule, easy access to graft, and secure possession of wealth. Western corporate investors also want "stability," equating it with acquiescent low-paid workers and safe high-profit investments. And the US government wants "stability," equating it with economic, ideological, and strategic dominance. So while they all might give lip service to the need for reform, US political and corporate leaders and client-state leaders strive mightily to solidify the existing social relations that make reform both unlikely and unworkable.

The one social interest in Third World nations that seldom suffers from underdevelopment is the military and police. Between 1973 and 1980, the US government sold $66.8 billion in arms to Third World countries. US technical assistance also plays a role in putting together the relocation camps. undercover intelligence and surveillance networks, detention sites, interrogation and torture centers, death squads and other such essentials of "Free World stability." The CIA has trained and supplied secret police and repressive security forces on every continent, in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Iran, Israel, South Korea, Japan, South Africa. Australia, West Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. At the CIA training facility in Camp Peary, Virginia, a large section of the base is devoted to training right-wing operatives from various countries in the methods of sabotage and terror bombings. The ClA's assassination program used with such murderous effect m Vietnam has been duplicated in El Salvador. The CIA has been linked directly or indirectly to various right-wing coups including the MSI in Italy, the Black April group of Vletnamese refugees, General Gehlen's BND in Germany, and organizations in Jamaica, Spain, Greece, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and elsewhere.

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.

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More than 80,000 foreign military officers have been trained by the United States at such places as Fort McNair in Virginia and Fort Gulick in Panama. Of these, scores have gone on to become heads of state, ambassadors, and other political leaders; hundreds have become chiefs of staff; and over a thousand have become top-ranking generals. During the 1960s and 1970s, most of the military leaders who were engaged in the coups at overthrew nine democratically elected governments in Latin America were American trained. All the troops were American equipped. Eighty percent of the top officers who conducted the 1964 coup in Brazil were US-trained (while only 20 percent of the officers who did not participate were trained in the United States). The entire Chilean junta was the beneficiary of US military training at one time or another. The US training schools help forge close links between Latin America's ruling officers and the US military and intelligence establishment, and among the officers themselves. The Panamanian newspaper, La Prensa, described the US school in that country as "the University of Assassins" where "soldiers are being prepared to go kill Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, Chilean, and Uruguayan brothers."

Assassins they are: 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 and intellectuals have died at the hands of US-trained security forces and death squads since the late 1940s. 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.

The right wing military do other things besides kill. In Uruguay, during the decade after the military takeover in 1973, one of every fifty inhabitants was imprisoned, one of every sixty-five tortured, and three of every twenty were driven into exile. As of 1987, half of all the political prisoners in South Korea were labor-union people who had agitated for better wages and work conditions. They had been subjected to repeated beatings, electric shock, and other forms of torture.

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Consider the fate of Manuel de Conceicao a peasant leader who lived in a region of Brazil where the best lands belong to big landowners and US corporations. Suffering a grinding poverty, working- when work was available-for barely subsistence wages on the latifundias, seeing their children die of malnutrition, the peasants decided to organize themselves and demand reforms. These efforts were summarily crushed by Brazilian army units that had been trained and equipped by US military-aid programs. Manuel was among those arrested in 1972 and brought before Brazilian security police who had been schooled at US army bases in the latest methods of counterinsurgency and interrogation. For his crime of protesting the economic conditions of his life, Manuel was treated as follows:

"For four months I was heavily tortured by the Army in Rio de Janeiro, and then in the Naval Information Center.... Near death, I was taken to the hospital for the sixth time. The beatings had been so severe that my body was one big bruise. The blood clotted under my skin and all the hair on my body fell out. They pulled out all my fingernails. They poked needles through my sexual organs and used a rope to drag me across the floor by my testicles. Right afterwards they hung me upside down.

They hung me handcuffed from a grating, removed my artificial leg, and tied my penis so l could not urinate. They forced me to stand on my one leg for three days without food or drink. They gave me so many drugs that my eardrums burst and I am impotent. They nailed my penis to a table for 24 hours. They tied me up like a pig and threw me into a pool so that I nearly drowned. They put me in a completely dark cell where I remained for 30 days urinating and defecating in the same place where I had to sleep. They fed me only bread soaked in water. They put me in a rubber box and turned on a siren. For three days I neither ate nor slept and I nearly went mad...."

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Manuel was not a solitary victim. After the Brazilian military junta overthrew the democratically elected Goulart government, it jailed an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 people, many of whom were subjected to systematic and protracted torture. During these years, the junta enjoyed friendly relations with Washington, and Brazil was hailed as a staunch US ally, a Free World bulwark against the threat of Communism.

The defenders of the West can be quite imaginative in their methods of torture and terror. Two women who opposed the Brazilian military were arrested by the infamous DOPS, the regime's special counterinsurgency police. Instead of being tortured, which was the usual procedure, they were brought to a hospital where they were subjected to plastic surgery:

"One of the women had her mouth taken away from her. The other lost half her nose. And they were released after several days with the gentle suggestion that they be sure to visit their comrades to show off their "cures." They had been turned into walking advertisements of terror, agents of demoralization and intimidation.... In the case of the woman whose mouth had been shut, the most sophisticated techniques of plastic surgery had been employed. Great care had been taken by her medical torturers to obliterate her lips forever, using cuts and stitches and folds that would frustrate even the best reconstructive techniques. [Luis, a Cuban plastic surgeon] even thought he could detect a "U.S. hand" in this macabre handiwork, or that of a Brazilian schooled in the United States. A small hole had been left in the face to allow the woman to take liquids through a straw and survive....

When Luis and the medical team reopened the hole where her mouth had been, the sight was far more sickening than they had expected: All of the teeth had been removed and two dog fangs- incisors-had been inserted in their place. A little surprise from the fascist madmen....

The other woman had had half her nose removed, skin, cartilage and all. A draining, raw, and frightening wound was her "treatment," the sign she was to carry around with her to warn people that rebellion was a "disease" and torture the "cure."

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El Salvador is another "Free World" bastion. In 1982, The Other Side, a religious magazine published in Philadelphia, ran an anonymous testimony from a young man who had deserted the Salvadoran Army and fled to Mexico. Part of his training by eight American Green Berets consisted of "teaching how to torture." He witnessed a boy of about fifteen, suspected of supporting the guerrillas, being subjected to a demonstration torture by the Green Berets They tore out the youth's fingernails, broke his elbows, gouged out his eyes, and then burned him alive. The author reports that the torture sessions continued into the next day and included a thirteen year-old girl. Another victim had various parts of his body burned and was then taken up in a helicopter while still alive and thrown out at 14,000 feet. The defector noted that "often the army goes and throws people out over the sea." The editors of The Other Side withheld the Salvadoran informant's name "for obvious reasons" but claimed that "the basic outline of his story has been corroborated by independent sources which we believe to be reliable."

Victims and survivors of the fascist coup in Chile in 1973 tell how the Chilean military-trained and financed by the United States-tortured people with electric shock, particularly on the genitals; forced victims to witness the torture of friends and relatives (including children); raped women in the presence of other family members; burned sex organs with acid or scalding water; placed rats in women's vaginas and into the mouths of other prisoners; mutilated, punctured, and cut off various parts of the body, including genitalia, eyes, and tongue; injected air into women's breasts and into veins (causing slow, painful death); shoved bayonets and clubs into the vagina or anus, causing rupture and death.

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Elba Vergara, secretary to President Allende (himself murdered by the Chilean generals), was made to witness repeated torture and rapes. At one point her tormentors told her they would show her their "theater."

"Four men came in, bearing a cot with a sheet-covered figure. "Sit down," one ordered. "You're going to see a performance by a bad actor, an actor who has forgotten his part. Help him remember it." They uncovered a body entirely purple, missing a foot. "Come closer," another ordered. "Look at him. You'll know him." And she did. It was 27-year-old "El Gordo" Toledo, with whom she had been 20 days before. He could hardly speak, or scream, any more. When Elba maintained that she did not know him, they said, "Let's see"-they pulled out his nails, cut off his remaining ear, cut out his tongue, gouged out his eyes, and killed him slowly as she watched, thinking, "He could be my son." Then they brought another "actor," 26-year-old Eduard Munoz. It took them five hours to kill him, under her eyes. It was worse than any pain they could have inflicted on her, she said. Later she was forced to watch while her cellmates-aged 16, 17, and 40, nude and drugged, were directed to perform an erotic dance before they were raped. Another girl, back from a dreaded torture center, and pregnant, was so crazy that each time she awoke she screamed that her only desire was for her child to be born so she could kill it."

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One could go on. Torture has been used on a systematic basis by US-sponsored autocracies in Guatemala, Greece, Uruguay, Argentina, Indonesia, Zaire, Ecuador, Bolivia, Iran (under the Shah), the Philippines, and dozens of other nations. A United Nations official who has talked to former torture victims from various countries in Latin America notes: "All of them . . . still feel the electric shocks, the octagonal beating sticks, the barrels of shit-filled water into which they were dunked, the psychedelic hoods to make them crazy, the lit cigarettes, the rats shoved up into their bodies, the humiliation and isolation. They still feel."

US support of police state terrorism and torture is not an irrational policy. It may foster and feed off irrational and even deranged acts but its goals are rooted in some very rational interests. Edward Herman marshals a great deal of evidence to show that

"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.


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