[R-G] Zinn: What schools didn't teach about empire

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JD04Aa02.html

  Apr 4, 2008
	
	
What schools didn't teach about empire
By Howard Zinn

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 GI Bill of  
Rights and took courses in US 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 US  
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 US 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 US 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.

The "sole superpower" comes into view
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 WWII -  
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 US intervention, but the desire of the US 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 US 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 US 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 anti- 
war 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 US 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 US 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.

Justifying empire
The ruthless attacks of September 11, 2001, (as the official 9/11  
Commission acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of US 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 WWII, 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 US 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 US 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?

Howard Zinn is the author of A People's History of the United States  
and Voices of a People's History of the United States, now being  
filmed for a major television documentary. His newest book is A  
People's History of American Empire, the story of America in the  
world, told in comics form, with Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle in the  
American Empire Project book series. An animated video adapted from  
this essay with visuals from the comic book and voiceover by Viggo  
Mortensen, as well as a section of the book on Zinn's early life, can  
be viewed by clicking here. Zinn's website is HowardZinn.org.

(Copyright 2008 Howard Zinn.)

(Published with permission of TomDisptach.com )
		


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7. The day the US declared war on Iran

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10. The age of the immigrant spy

11. Tibet, the 'great game' and the CIA

12. Anti-Chinese cracks in Philippine rice bowls

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