Chalmers Johnson - moving to the left
By Walter Lippmann, November 15, 2005

The familiar story of former leftists moving to the right in middle age is one we've all heard a zillion times. More encouraging are the movements of former establishment figures to the left. The reasons such people make such moves vary widely, but they should be seen as reflecting better possibilities for the days ahead, just as we can see the movement of former leftists to the right as reflecting what could happen if movements and struggles don't reverse the course of social and political development as it now appears headed. I have made copies here of several pages from two recent books by one of these figures whose thinking should encourage us all. Please forgive any typos because I copied this material by hand.

Chalmers Johnson was what is known as a cold-war liberal who signed up for the national security establishment after World War II and remained a part of the intelligence world for many years. Like others in his part of the intellectual milieu, he's become so worried about the consequences of Bush's foreign policy movies and their domestic political and economic consequences, he's taken the time to look back over the history of the twentieth century in an effort to grasp the full dimensions of what has taken place.

In his wonderful 2000 book BLOWBACK, The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, Chalmers Johnson explained how he began to realize that all of his academic training and book-learning had led him to misunderstand what was happening in the world around him and so he talked himself into being a supporter of the US war on Vietnam, doomed to failure as he finally realized, some years later. He'd been one of those professors opposed to the anti-war movement which had swept the campuses in the 1960s and 70s. He wrote this:

"I knew too much about the international Communist movement and not enough about the United States government and its Department of Defense. I was also in those years irritated by campus antiwar protesters, who seemed to me self-indulgent as well as sanctimonious and who had so clearly not done their homework. One day at the height of the protests, I went to the university library to check out what was then available to students on Vietnamese communism, the history of communism in East Asia, and the international Communist movement. I was surprised to find that all the major books were there on the shelves, untouched. The conclusion seemed obvious to me then: these students knew nothing about communism and had no interest in remedying that lack. They were defining the Vietnamese Communists largely out of their own romantic desires to oppose Washington's policies. As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulses of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something essential about the nature of America's imperials role in the world that I had failed to perceive. In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naivete and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong."

Johnson's thinking has deepened in the aftermath of September 11 and the policies of aggressive international unilateral interventionism which were unleashed by the Bush administration in its aftermath. This has caused many thoughtful people in the business of advising the government to look more deeply into the causes and consequences of Washington's imperialist approach to the world. Johnson doesn't blame the rightist republicans, either, as those who think simply reforming the Democratic Party is what's needed. Quite the opposite. In Johnson's next book, THE SORROWS OF EMPIRE: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (2004) Johnson traces US interventionism back over a century. His main interest isn't Cuba, so he provides detailed case histories of other areas where US military interventionism has resulted in deeper hostility toward the United States, which I won't try to trace here. He does devote a few short pages to Cuba and you'll find it of interest as an indication of how he approaches such issues. In addition to the general opposition to imperialism which he lays out, the racist aspect, that is, Washington's decision not to annex Cuba was linked, in part, to not wanting to absorb the island's black population, was particularly striking, it seemed to me.

"In the United States, the first militarist tendencies appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Before and during the Spanish-American War of 1898, the press was manipulated to whip up a popular war fever, while atrocities and war crimes committed by American forces in the Phi8lippines were hidden from public view. As a consequences of the war the United States acquired its first colonial possession and created its first military general staff. American "jingoism" of that period -- popular sentiment of boastful, aggressive chauvinism -- too its cue from similar tendencies i imperial England. Even the term JINGOISM derived from the refrain of a patriotic British music-hall song of 1878, taken up by those who supported sending a British fleet into Turkish waters to counter the advances of Russia.

On the night of February 15, 1898, in Havana harbor, part of the Spanish colony of Cuba, a mysterious explosion destroyed and sank the battleship USS MAINE. The blast killed 262 of its 374 crew members. The MAINE had arrived in Havana three weeks earlier as part of a "friendly" mission to rescue Americans caught up on an ongoing Cuban insurrection against Spanish rule. Its unspoken missions, however, were to practice "gunboat diplomacy" against Spain on behalf of the Cuban rebels and to enforce the Monroe Doctrine by Warning other European powers like Germany not to take advantage of the unstable situation.

The official navy investigations concluded that an external blast, probably caused by a mine, had ignited both of the battleship's powder magazines, though Spain maintained that it had nothing to do with the sinking of the MAINE. Later analysts, including Admiral Hyman Rickover, have suggested that spontaneous combustion in a coal bunker may have been the cause of what was likely an accidental explosion. Though the navy raised and subsequently scuttled the MAINE in 1911, what happened to it in 1898 remains a puzzle to this day.

But there was no puzzle about the reaction to the news back in the United States. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt instantly declared the sinking to be "an act of dirty [Spanish] treachery." The French ambassador to Washington advised his government that a "sort of bellicose fury has seized the American nation." William Randolph Hearst's NEW YORK JOURNAL published drawings illustrating how Spanish saboteurs had attached a mine to the MAINE and detonated it from the shore. Hearst then sent the artist Fredric Remington to Cuba to report on the Cuban revolt against Spanish oppression. "There is no war," Remington wrote to his bosses. "Request to be recalled." In a famous reply, Hearst cabled, "Please remain. You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war." And so they both did. Thanks to Hearst's journalism and that of Joseph Pulitzer in his NEW YORK WORLD, the country erupted into righteous anger and patriotic fervor. An April 25, 1898, Congress declared war on Spain.

On May 1, Admiral George Dewey's Asiatic Squadron, forced to leave the British colony of Hong Kong because of the declaration of war, attacked the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay and won and easy victory. With Filipino nationalist help, the American's occupied Manila and began to think about what to do with the rest of the Philippine Islands. President William McKinley declared that the Philippines "came to us as a gift from the gods," even though he acknowledged tha he did not know precisely where they were.

During the summer of 1898, Theodore Roosevelt left the government and set out for Cuba with his own personal regiment. Made of of cowboys, Native Americans, and polo-playing members of the Harvard class of 1880, Roosevelt's Rocky Mountain Riders (known to the press as the Rough Riders) would be decimated by malaria and dysentery on the island, but their skirmishes with the Spaniards at San Juan Hill, east of Santiago, would also get their leader nominated for a congressional Medal of Honor and propel him into the highest elected political office.

Peace was restored by the Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, 1898, a treaty that launched the United States into a hitherto unimaginable role as an explicitly imperialist power in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

The treaty gave Cuba its independence, but the Platt Amendment passed by the U.S. Congress in `901 actually made the island a satellite of the United States, while establishing an American naval base at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba's south coast. Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut had attached an amendment to the Army Appropriations Bill, specifying conditions under which the United States would intervene in Cuban domestic affairs. His amendment demanded that Cuba not sign any treaties that could impair its sovereignty or contact any debts that could to be repaid by normal revenues. In addition, Cuba was forced to grant the United States special privileges to intervene at any time to preserve Cuban independence or to support a government "adequate for the protection of life, property , and individual liberty." The marines would land to exercise these self-proclaimed rights in 1906, 1912, 1917, and 1920.

In 1901, the United States forced Cuba to incorporate the Platt Amendment into its own constitution, where it remained until 1934 -- including an article that allowed the United States a base at Guantanamo until both sides should "agree" to its return, a stipulation the American government insisted upon on the grounds that the base was crucial to the defense of the Panama Canal. The Platt Amendment was a tremendous humiliation to all Cubans, but its acceptance was the only way they could avoid a permanent military occupation.

Even though the Canal Zone is no longer an American possession, Guantanamo Bay remains a military colony, now used as a detention camp for people seized in the U.S.-Afghan war of 2001-02 and he Iraq war of 2003. (Because Guantanamo is outside the United States, these prisoners are said to be beyond the protection of American laws, and because the Bush administration has dubbed them "unlawful combatants," a term found nowhere in international law, it is argued that they are also not subject to the Geneve Copnpventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. On October 9, 2002, the U.S. government dismissed the comandant at Guantanamo, Brigadier General Rick Baccus, for being "too soft" on the inmates.") The United States did not directly annex Cuba in 1989, only because of its pretensions to bein an anti-imperialist nation, its desire to avoid assuming Cuba's $400 million debt as well as Cuba's largely Afro-American population, and Florida's fears that, as part of the country, the island might compete in agriculture and tourism.
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There is plenty in the world to occupy our military radicals and empire enthusiasts for the time being. But there can be no doubt that the course on which are are launched will lead us into new versions of the Bay of Pigs and updated, speeded-up replays of Vietnam War scenarios. When such disasters occur, as they--or as-yet-unknown versions of them--certainly will, a world disgusted by the betrayal of the ideealism associated with the United States will welcome them, jjst as most pdople did when the former USSR came apart. Like other empires of the past centure, the United States has chosedn to live not prodently, in peace and prosperity, but as a massive military power athward an angry, resistant globe.

There is one development that could conceivably stop this process of overreaching: the people could retake controlf of Congress, reform its along with the corrupted elections laws that have made it into a forum for special interests, turn it into a genuine assmbly of democratic representatives, and cut off the supply of money to the Pentagon and the secre intelligence agencies. We have a strong civil society that could, in theory, overcome the entrenched interests of the armed forces and the military-industrial complex. At this late date, however, it is difficult to imagine how Congress, must like the Roman senate in the last days of the republic, could be brought back to life and cleansed of its endemic corruption. Failing such a reform, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impaitiently for her meeting with us.
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Let's hope that there are more people like this who are
re-thinking their own world view in light of recent events.

Walter Lippmann, CubaNews
http://www.walterlippmann.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews