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.
*****
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.
*****
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.
*****
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."
*****
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.
*****
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.
*****
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.
*****
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.
*****
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.
*****
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...."
*****
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."
*****
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.
*****
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."
*****
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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