Post War America 1945-1971. Howard Boone's Zinn
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for war. About once in each century the United States has fought a war in such a fire of idealistic benevolence as to shroud in smoke not only that war’s own sins and ambiguities, but all other wars and foreign policies for the next several decades. The self-glorification accompanying the Revolutionary War for independence lasted long enough to blur the expansionist sentiment behind the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. The half-truth that the Civil War was a noble war to end slavery made it easier for Americans to believe that their war with Spain over Cuba, and the accompanying seizure of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii, were untainted.
Similarly, World War II gave to the United States such a powerful feeling of righteousness as a fighter for “the free world” that Americans came to think fondly of themselves for the next twenty-five years as the saviors of oppressed peoples on every continent. The American interventions in Korea in the fifties and Vietnam in the sixties were both justified by the need to “stop communism.” The slogan was similiar to that used in World War II. The names were switched, the language and uniform of yesterday’s “enemy” were modified, but “Stopping the Russians” was an easy substitute for “Stopping the Germans”; “Stopping the Chinese” readily replaced “Stopping the Japanese.” In none of these uses of substitute enemies was any attention paid to the possibility that the older, unquestionable crusade may have been at least half-questionable.
The historian Frederick Merk says that the various acts of American expansionism in the nineteenth century were “never true expressions of national spirit” but “traps into which the nation was led in 1846 and 1899, and from which it extricated itself as well as it could afterward.” Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has spoken similarly of the Vietnam War. Is Vietnam another act of expansion that does not express America’s normal benevolence, its real “national spirit”? Is Vietnam the momentary aberration of the modern liberal democratic capitalist state? Or are expansionism and aggression persistent characteristics of America as of other states, whether liberal or illiberal, capitalist or socialist? Is it possible that Vietnam was not a deviation but a particularly blatant manifestation of power seeking, of which the American nation is as guilty as any other nation?
The liberal tradition educates us to think well of the modern liberal state, to think that this new phenomenon in world history emerging out of the British, French, and American revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with its widespread educational opportunities, its technical proficiency, its parliamentary government and constitutional rights, its long history of “reform,” would be free of that accusation Plutarch made of ancient societies: “The poor go to war to fight and to die for the delights, riches, and superfluities of others.” But why should the modern liberal state be different? Is not war in good part the result of a fragmented, chaotic world, in which constellations of nations vie, jostle, and kill for territory, wealth, and power? The rise of nation-states in the world, to replace city-states and feudal kingdoms, did not change this fact. Indeed, international chaos has heightened considerably through the centuries, because the newer constellations became larger, more fearsome, more aggressive, and commanded greater and greater resources than the older ones. Liberalism and nationalism both came into the world at roughly the same time in the modern epoch; and nationalism creates both the right geographical boundaries and the right spirit for barbarous warfare.
A simple economic explanation for wars need not be accepted, but it is hard to deny that the quest for profit—even in so flamboyantly religious a military venture as the Crusades—has played a considerable part in international warfare. The advent of capitalism—which, like nationalism, accompanied the birth of liberalism, and paid for the delivery—only added the fierce libido of profit seeking to other factors and thereby increased the probability of war. This is not to absolve noncapitalist countries of aggressive nationalism, but to point to the special impetus of business profit. And if liberalism is accompanied by the machine age, should it not be expected that wars would be more destructive than ever before through man’s sheer technical competence for mass murder?
Also, if liberalism is accompanied by mass education and mass communication, should it not be expected that the age-old method of getting people to war by enticing slogans and symbols would be improved enormously in the modern era? The beauty of Helen of Troy seemed a sufficient symbol to justify the ten-year war between Greece and Troy. By 1914, a world war costing ten million lives required a bigger public-relations budget and a more grandiose symbol: Woodrow Wilson’s war to make the world “safe for democracy.” Only an insistent probing beneath the symbols might lead to the conclusion of Demokos, in Jean Giraudoux’s Tiger at the Gates, that “war has two faces”—that of Helen, but also “the bottom of a baboon: scarlet, scaly, glazed, framed in a clotted, filthy wig.”
That the modern liberal state means voting and representative government, and bills of rights and constitutions—that it grants certain formal rights to its citizens—has obscured the nature of its deportment abroad. The history of Western civilization is clear on this point: it was the liberal democratic nations of the West, with their bills of rights and voting procedures, that enslaved and exploited Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans to a degree unparalleled in world history; it was these Western liberal nations that made the imperialism of Greece and Rome seem piddling and kindly by comparison.
The democracy of liberal states, embodied in their constitutions, bills of rights, and representative assemblies, is reserved for certain constituencies at home, not for peoples abroad. For the United States this restriction is recognized explicitly in its constitutional arrangement, which denies any voice to those abroad affected by its foreign policy. Furthermore, its constitutional arrangement denies a voice to those at home on external matters. De Tocqueville saw this fact back in the 1840s when he wrote:
We have seen that the Federal Constitution entrusts the permanent direction of the external interests of the nation to the President and the Senate, which tends in some degree to detach the general foreign policy of the Union from the control of the people. It cannot therefore be asserted with truth that the external affairs of State are conducted by the democracy.
In the 1930s, the distinction between democracy as applied to domestic affairs and democracy as applied to foreign affairs was underscored by the United States Supreme Court. The Court ruled in the Curtiss-Wright case that whereas in domestic policy the powers of government were limited by the Constitution, in foreign policy it was different:
The broad statement that the federal government can exercise no powers except those specifically enumerated in the Constitution, and such implied powers as are necessary and proper to carry into effect the enumerated powers, is categorically true only in respect of our internal affairs. …
The modern liberal capitalist state, by its essential economic and political characteristics, tends to intensify and expand aggressive warfare. It justifies its actions with its own appealing rhetoric, finding successive, specific epithets for “the enemy,” and decorating its objectives with talk of liberty, democracy, and, above all, peace.
American intervention in Greece was the first important postwar instance in which rhetoric was used by the United States to defend large-scale interference in another nation’s internal affairs. It was accomplished without dispatching troops. It was accompanied by economic aid, and it was justified as anti-communism. Greece exemplified the working creed of liberal America’s postwar policy: the drive to extend the national power of the United States into other parts of the world, the compulsion to make the capitalist dollar profitable and secure everywhere, the insistence that Americans know what is best for other people, and the willingness to use mass violence to accomplish these purposes. Technically, American military intervention in Greece was successful; ultimately, it was disastrous not only for democracy in Greece but for any faith in the proposition that American foreign policy was truly devoted to its own stated ideals. In many ways, Greece was the model of the later American intervention in Vietnam.
Before World War II, Greece had been a right-wing monarchy and dictatorship. Its wartime occupation by Hitler stimulated several resistance movements, the strongest of which was the left-wing EAM (National Liberation Front), a coalition dominated by Communists. With the Germans gone, civil war broke out in 1944 between the EAM and the reassembled monarchist Greek army. By the end of that year, the EAM had liberated