-Caveat Lector-
Well, he sure is alot smarter than his cousin Al isn't he?
Joshua2
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William Hugh Tunstall wrote:
>
> -Caveat Lector-
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Citation: The Progressive May 1998, v62, n5, p18(4)
> Author: Vidal, Gore
> Title: The menopause of empire. (postwar American foreign policy)
> by Gore Vidal
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> COPYRIGHT 1998 Progressive Inc.
> Before we get down to the really serious stuff about Monica and Kathleen, I
> plan just a little foreplay here about the origins of the American empire and
> the meaning of the Cold War, how it started, who started it, who benefited.
> The twentieth century and the second Christian millennium are heading hand in
> hand for the exit. Personally, I thought they'd never go without taking us
> with them.
> We all know that centuries and millennia are just arbitrary markings--a bit
> like the bookkeeping at Paramount Pictures. But symbolically, they mean a lot.
> This goes particularly for the one indisposable--or does the President say
> indispensable?--nation on Earth, and the last self-styled global empire,
> loaded down with nukes, bases, and debts.
> I have now lived through nearly three-quarters of this century. I enlisted
> in the Army of the United States at seventeen, went to the Pacific, did
> nothing useful--I was just there, as Richard M. Nixon says, when the bombs
> were falling. Actually, the bombs were not really falling on either one of us.
> I was writing a novel, and he was making a fortune playing poker.
> Now, suddenly, it's 1998. Last year, we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary
> of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Also, more ominously, last July
> 26 was the fiftieth anniversary of the National Security Act that, without any
> national debate or the people's consent, replaced the old American republic
> with a national security state very much in the global empire business. Let us
> get into the time machine.
> It is the ides of August 1945. Germany and Japan have surrendered, and some
> thirteen million Americans are headed home. Home turned out to be a sort of
> fairground where fireworks go off, and the band plays "Don't Sit Under the
> Apple Tree," and an endlessly enticing fun house flings open its doors, and we
> file through. We enjoy halls and mirrors where everyone is comically
> distorted, ride through all the various tunnels of love, and take scary tours
> of horror chambers, where skeletons and cobwebs and bats push past us. And
> suitably chilled and thrilled, we're ready for the exit and everyday life.
> But, to the consternation of some and the apparent indifference of the
> rest, we were never really allowed to leave the fun house. It has become a
> permanent part of our world, as were those goblins sitting under the apple
> tree.
> Officially, the United States was at peace. Much of Europe and most of
> Japan were in ruins, often literally, certainly economically. We alone had all
> our cities and a sort of booming economy--sort of, because it depended on war
> production and there was, as far as anyone could tell, no war in the offing.
> Briefly, the arts flourished. It looked like it was going to be a golden age.
> The Glass Menagerie was staged, Copland's Appalachian Spring was played, a
> film called The Lost Weekend--not a bad title for what we'd gone through--won
> an Academy Award. And the as-yet-unexiled Richard Wright published the
> much-admired work Black Boy, while Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County
> was banned for obscenity in parts of the country, though it would be allowed
> out today in Washington.
> Quaintly, each city had at least three or four daily newspapers, while New
> York, as befitted the world's capital, had seventeen newspapers. But a
> novelty, television, had begun to appear in household after household, its
> cold, gray, distorting eye relentlessly projecting a fun house view of the
> world.
> Those who followed the ugly new minted word "media" began to note that
> often while watching television we kept fading in and out of the chamber of
> horrors. Our ally in the recent war, Uncle Joe Stalin, as the Accidental
> President Harry S. Truman called him, was growing horns and fangs that dripped
> blood. On Earth we were the only great unruined power with atomic weapons, and
> we were somehow at terrible risk.
> Why? How?
> The trouble appeared to be over Germany, which on February 11, 1945, had
> been split at the Yalta Summit meeting into four zones--American, Soviet,
> British, and French. As the Russians had done the most fighting and suffered
> the greatest losses, it was agreed that they should have an early crack at
> reparations from Germany to the extent of $20 billion.
> At a later meeting at Potsdam, the new President Truman, with Stalin and
> Churchill, reconfirmed Yalta and opted for the unification of Germany under
> the four victorious powers. But something had happened between the euphoria of
> Yalta and the edginess of Potsdam.
> As the meeting progressed, the atom bomb was tried out successfully in a
> New Mexico desert. We were now able to incinerate Japan, or the Soviets for
> that matter, and we no longer needed Russia's help to defeat Japan. We started
> to renege on our agreements with Stalin, particularly reparations from
> Germany. We also quietly shelved the notion agreed upon at Yalta of a united
> Germany under four-power control. Our aim now was to unite the three western
> zones of Germany and integrate them into our Western Europe, restoring in the
> process Germany's economy, hence fewer reparations.
> Then, as of May 1946, we began to rearm Germany. Stalin went up the wall at
> this betrayal. The Cold War was on.
> At home, the media were beginning to prepare the attentive few for
> disappointment. Suddenly we were faced with the highest personal income taxes
> in American history to pay for more and more weapons, among them the world
> killer hydrogen bomb. Why? Because the Russians were coming. No one knew quite
> why they were coming or with what. Weren't they still burying twenty million
> dead?
> Official explanations for all this made very little sense. But then, as
> Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson narrowly observed, "In the State
> Department we used to discuss how much time that mythical average American
> citizen put in each day listening, reading, and arguing about the world
> outside his country. It seemed to us that ten minutes a day would be a high
> average." So why bore the people? Secret bipartisan government is best for
> what, after all, is or should be a society of docile workers, enthusiastic
> consumers, obedient soldiers who will believe just about anything for at least
> ten minutes.
> The national security state, the NATO alliance, the forty years Cold War,
> were all created without the consent, much less the advice, of the American
> people. Of course, there were elections during the crucial time, but
> Truman-Dewey, Eisenhower-Stevenson, Kennedy-Nixon were of a single mind as to
> the desirability of inventing first a many-tentacled enemy--communism, the
> star of the chamber of horrors--then, to combat so much evil, install a
> permanent wartime state at home, with loyalty oaths, the national peacetime
> draft, and secret police to keep watch over homegrown traitors, as the few
> enemies of the national security state were known.
> Then followed forty years of mindless wars, which created a debt of $5
> trillion that hugely benefited aerospace companies and firms like General
> Electric, whose longtime TV spokesman, Ronald Reagan, eventually retired to
> the White House.
> Why go into all of this now? Have we not done marvelously well? Certainly,
> European bankers envy our powerless labor unions (only 14 percent of the lucky
> funsters are privileged to belong to a union), and our industries (lean, mean,
> down-sized). There is no particular place for the redundant to go, except into
> the hell of sizzle and fry and burn.
> Today, we give orders to every country on our globe--tell them with whom to
> trade and to which of our courts they must show up for indictment should they
> disobey. Yet we have come to what Tennessee Williams once called a "moon of
> pause."
> I asked him, "What on Earth does that mean, Tennessee?"
> "It is," he said loftily, "the actual Greek translation of menopause."
> I said that the word "moon" did not come from "menses"--Latin, not Greek,
> for month.
> "Then what," he asked suspiciously, "is the Latin for moon?"
> And I told him it was "luna," and all the fun he might have with the word
> "lunatic."
> He sighed and cut.
> But "a moon of pause" seems a nice dotty phrase for the change of life that
> our empire is now going through with no enemy and no discernible function.
> While we were at our busiest in the fun house, no one ever tot us what the
> North Atlantic Treaty Organization was really about. On March 17, 1948, the
> Treaty of Brussels called for a military alliance of Britain, France, and
> Benelux to be joined by the U.S. and Canada. The impetus behind NATO was the
> United States, whose principal foreign policy since the Administration of
> George Washington was to avoid entangling alliances. Now, as the Russians were
> supposed to be coming, we replaced the old republic with a newborn national
> security state and set up shop as the major European power west of the Elbe.
> We were now hell-bent on the permanent division of Germany between our Western
> zone (plus the French and British zones) and the Soviet sector to the East.
> Serenely, we broke every agreement that we had made with our former ally, the
> now horrendous communist enemy. For those interested in the details, Carolyn
> Eisenberg's Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany,
> 1944-1949, is a masterful survey of an empire, sometimes blindly, sometimes
> brilliantly assembling itself.
> Although the Soviets still wanted to live by our original arrangements at
> Yalta, and even Potsdam, we had decided unilaterally to restore the German
> economy in order to enfold a rearmed Germany into Western Europe, thus
> isolating the Soviet Union, a nation which had not recovered from the Second
> World War and had no nuclear weapons.
> It was Dean Acheson again who elegantly explained all the lies that he was
> obliged to tell Congress in the ten-minute attention span of the average
> American. This is gorgeous stuff. "If we did make our points clearer than
> truth," says Acheson, writing in his memoirs, "we did not differ from most
> other educators and could hardly do otherwise."
> Qualification must give way to simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance
> to bluntness--almost brutality--in carrying home a point. Thus for two
> generations, Americans have been conditioned by their overlords so that at the
> word "communism" there is a Pavlovian reflex as the brain goes totally dead.
> U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Walter Bedell Smith wrote in December 1947, "The
> difficulty under which we labor is that in spite of our announced position we
> really do not want, nor intend to accept, German unification in any terms the
> Russians might agree to, even though they seem to meet most of our
> requirements." This is higher diplomacy.
> Stalin's frustration led to the famous blockade of the Allied section of
> Berlin, overcome by General Lucius Clay's successful airlift. As Eisenberg
> writes, with the inception of the Berlin blockade, President Truman
> articulated a simple story that featured the Russians trampling the wartime
> agreements in their ruthless grab of the former German capital. The President
> did not explain that the United States had abandoned Yalta and Potsdam, that
> it was pushing the formation of a West German state against the misgivings of
> many Europeans, and that the Soviets had launched the blockade to prevent
> partition. This was fun-house politics at its most tragical.
> On March 12, 1947, Truman addressed Congress to proclaim what would be
> known as the Truman Doctrine, in which he targeted our ally of two years
> earlier as the enemy. The subject at hand was a civil war in Greece,
> supposedly directed by the Soviets. We could not tolerate this as
> suddenly--this is his quotation--"the policy of the United States is to
> support free people." Thus Truman made the entire world the specific business
> of the United States. Although Greek insurgents were getting some help from
> Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, the Soviets gave none. They still hoped that the
> British, whose business Greece had been, would keep order. But as Britain had
> neither the resources nor the will, they called on the U.S. to step it
> Behind the usual closed doors, Acheson was stirring up Congress with
> Iago-like intensity. "Russian pressure of some sort," he said, "has brought
> the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might
> open three continents to Soviet penetration."
> Senators gasped, grew pale, wondered how to get more defense contracts into
> their states.
> Of the major politicians, only former Vice President Henry Wallace dared
> answer Truman's clearer-than-truth version of history. Wallace said,
> "Yesterday, March 12, 1947, marked a turning point in American history. For it
> is not a Greek crisis that we face; it is an American crisis. Yesterday,
> President Truman proposed, in effect, that America police Russia's every
> border. There is no regime too reactionary for us, provided it stands in
> Russia's expansionist path. There is no country too remote to serve as a scene
> of a contest which may widen until it becomes a world war."
> Nine days after Truman declared war on communism, he installed a federal
> loyalty oath program. All government employees had to now swear allegiance to
> the new order. Henry Wallace struck again: "The President's Executive Order
> creates a master index of public servants from the janitor in the village post
> office to the Cabinet members. They are to be sifted and tested and watched
> and appraised."
> Truman was nervously aware that many regarded Wallace as the true heir to
> Roosevelt's New Deal. Wallace was also likely to enter the Presidential race
> of 1948. Truman now left truth behind in the dust. Here is his quote: "The
> attempt of Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin et al. to fool the world--and the American
> Crackpots Association, represented by Joe Davies, Henry Wallace, Claude
> Pepper, and the actors and artists in immoral Greenwich Village--is just like
> Hitler's and Mussolini's so-called socialist states." Give 'em hell, Harry.
> In the wake of Truman's cuckoo-like emergence from the old-fashioned
> closets of the republic, a new American state was being born in order to save
> the nation and the great globe itself from communism. The nature of this
> militarized state was from the beginning beyond rational debate.
> Characteristically, Truman and Acheson insisted on closed hearings of the
> Senate Committee on Foreign Relations--these matters were too important to
> share with the people whose spare ten minutes was now more and more filling up
> with television. The media spoke with a single voice. Time-Life publisher
> Henry Luce said it loudest: "God has founded America as a global beacon of
> freedom." (He once said to me the great task for the United States in the
> American century is the Christianization of China. I remember thinking then we
> were really in trouble.)
> Dissenters like Wallace were labeled communists and ceased to engage
> meaningfully in public life. An ancestral voice in his own time, Wallace spoke
> again on May 21, 1947: "Today, in blind fear of communism, we are turning
> aside from the United Nations. We are approaching a century of fear." And thus
> far he has proved to be half right. On July 26, 1947, Congress enacted the
> National Security Act, which created the National Security Council, still
> going strong, and the Central Intelligence Agency, still apparently hung over
> a cliff as the result of decades of bad intelligence, not to mention all those
> cheery traitors for whom the country club at Langley, Virginia, was once an
> impenetrable cover.
> When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created, only Charles De
> Gaulle got the point of what we were doing. He took France out of our Cosa
> Nostra and developed his own atomic bomb. But France was still very much
> linked to the empire, through the CIA and other secret forces.
> Political control was exerted within the empire, not only driving the Labor
> prime minister, Harold Wilson, around a bend too far, but preventing Italy
> from ever having a cohesive government by not allowing the historic
> compromise, a government of Christian Democrats and Communists.
> The Soviets promptly cracked down on their client states--Czechoslovakia,
> Hungary, East Germany--and the wall went up in Berlin.
> From 1950 to 1990, Europe was dangerously divided and armed to the teeth.
> But as American producers of weapons were never richer, all was well for their
> world.
> At Yalta, Roosevelt wanted to break up the European colonial empires,
> particularly that of the French. Of Indochina, FDR said France has milked it
> for 100 years. For the time being, he proposed a U.N. trusteeship. Then he
> died.
> Unlike Roosevelt, Truman was not a philatelist. Had he been a stamp
> collector, he might have known where the various countries in the world were
> and who lived in them. Like every good American, he knew he hated communism;
> he also hated socialism, which may or may not have been the same thing--no one
> was ever quite sure.
> Yet as early as the American election of 1848, socialism--imported by
> comical German immigrants with noses always in books--was an ominous spectre
> calculated to enrage a raw capitalist society with labor unions, health care,
> and other devil's work. It is still being fiercely resisted a century and a
> half later.
> In 1946, when Ho Chi Minh asked the United States to take Indochina under
> its wing, Truman said, No way, you are some kind of Fu Manchu Communist--the
> worst. In August 1945, Truman told De Gaulle that the French could return to
> Indochina--we were no longer FDR anti-imperialists. As Ho had his northern
> republic, the French installed Bao Dai in the South. On February 1, 1950, the
> State Department came to this extraordinary conclusion: "The choice
> confronting the United States is to support the French in Indochina or face
> the extension of communism over the remainder of the continental area of
> Southeast Asia, and possibly further westward." Thus without shepherds or even
> a napalm star, the domino theory was born in a humble State Department manger.
> On May 8, 1950, Acheson recommended economic and military aid to the French
> in Vietnam. By 1955, the U.S. was paying 40 percent of the French costs for
> that war. For a quarter century, the United States was to fight in Vietnam
> because our ignorant leaders and their sharp-eyed financiers never realized
> that the game is not dominoes but chess.
> Happily, nothing ever stays the same. During the last days of the waning
> moon, a haphazard Western European Union was being cobbled together. Then the
> Soviet Union, demonstrating its pure viciousness, abruptly folded. The two
> Germanys that we had so painstakingly kept apart reunited. Washington was
> suddenly adrift, and in the sky, the moon of empire paused.
> Neither Reagan nor Bush had much knowledge of history or geography;
> nevertheless, orders still kept coming from the White House, but they were
> less and less heeded because everyone knew that the oval one had a bank
> overdraft of $5 trillion, and he could no longer give presents to good clients
> or wage war without first passing the hat to the Germans and the Japanese, as
> he was obliged to do when Ted Turner had his light show for CNN in the Persian
> Gulf.
> Gradually, it is now becoming evident to even the most distracted funster
> that there is no longer any need for NATO because there is no enemy. One might
> say there never really was one, even when NATO was started. But over the
> years, we did succeed in creating a pretty dangerous Soviet funhouse-mirror
> version of ourselves. Although the United States may yet, in support of
> Israel, declare war on one billion Muslims, the Europeans will stay out of
> that one. They recall 1529, when the Turks besieged Vienna, not as obliging
> guest workers, but as world conquerors. The time has now come for the
> Europeans to free themselves of their American masters.
> Our motive for hanging on to empire is obvious. With an expanded NATO, our
> arms makers, if not workers, are in for a bonanza. As it is, American sales of
> weapons went up 23 percent last year while restrictions on sales to Latin
> America are being lifted. Chile, ever menaced by Ecuador, plans to buy
> twenty-four F-16 jet fighters.
> But it is an expanded NATO that causes true joy in the boardrooms. Upon
> joining NATO, the lucky new club member is obliged to buy expensive weapons
> from the likes of Lockheed Martin. Since the new members have precarious
> economies and the old ones are not exactly booming, the American taxpayer--a
> wan goose that lays few eggs--will have to borrow even more money to foot the
> bill, which the Congressional Budget Office says should come to $125 billion
> over fifteen years, with the U.S. paying most of it. Yeltsin correctly sees
> this as a hostile move against Russia, not to mention an expensive renewal of
> the Cold War.
> There comes a moment when empires cease to exert energy and become symbolic
> or existential, as we used to say back in the 1940s. The current wrangling
> over NATO demonstrates what a quandary a symbolic empire is in when it wants
> to maintain its view of itself at home and abroad and yet lacks the mind, much
> less the resources, to impose its hegemony upon its former client states.
> In the absence of money and common will, nothing much will probably happen.
> Meanwhile, there's a new and better world ready to be born. The optimum
> economic unit in the world is now the city-state. Thanks to technology,
> everyone knows or can know something about everyone else on the planet. The
> message now pounding in over the Internet is the irrelevancy, not to mention
> the sheer danger, of the traditional nation-state, much less empire.
> The common Euro Market will evolve not so much into a union of ancient
> bloodstained states as a mosaic of homogeneous regions like the Spanish-French
> Basques or city-states like Milan, each loosely linked in trade with a
> clearinghouse information center at Brussels. People who want to be rid of
> onerous nation-states should be left to go in order to pursue (and even--why
> not?--overtake) happiness, the goal, or so we Americans have always pretended
> to believe, of the human enterprise.
> So, on that predictably sententious American note, I am tempted to enjoin
> the movers and shakers of this world to recall the Greek doctor's oath: "Above
> all, do no harm." Hippocrates also wrote--and this goes for the moved and the
> shaken of the world--"Life is short, but the art is long, the opportunity
> fleeting, the experiment perilous, the judgment difficult."
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