8. "Our Nature and Traditions"

There are many other "success stories" in the Caribbean and Central America, the Philippines, Africa, in fact wherever Western power and capitalist ideology have reached. The few partial exceptions, mostly in the Japanese orbit, have escaped by radically violating the prescribed rules of the game, under special circumstances that are not likely to recur.³⁵ These basic truths and their meaning, which would be taught in elementary schools in free societies, must be kept far removed from consciousness as we advance towards Year 501 of the Old World Order.

And so they are. Merely to take the case closest to hand, the US-run charnel house in Central America in the 1980s, we find that cultivated opinion takes pride in what we have wrought. Typical is a report by Washington Post Central America correspondent Lee Hockstader on a meeting in Guatemala of the new breed of conservative Presidents, freely elected at last without a trace of foreign influence. This "new wave of democracy" has "shifted politicians' priorities" from the days when they "traditionally represented the established order." The proof is that they have now dedicated themselves to serving the poor with an imaginative new approach: "Central Americans to use Trickle-down Strategy in War on Poverty," the headline reads. "Committed to free-market economics," the Presidents have abandoned vapid rhetoric about land reform and social welfare programs, adopting at last a serious idea: "a trickle-down approach to aid the poor." "The idea is to help the poor without threatening the basic power structure," a regional economist observes. This brilliant and innovative conception overturns the "preferential option for the poor" of the Latin American Bishops. Now that we have driven this naive idea from the heads of our little brown brothers by Pol Pot-style terror, we can return to our traditional vocation of serving the poor, somehow not drowning in our own hypocrisy -- the one truly memorable achievement.

Barbara Crossette reports in the New York Times that Central America illustrates "what Bush Administration officials regard as one of their most successful foreign policy initiatives: to bring peace, disarmament and economic development to this tormented region"; she wastes no words on how and why it was tormented, and by whom. "The strategy was immeasurably assisted by the collapse of the Soviet Union," she continues, repeating the convenient fairy tale that the US assault was undertaken in defense against the Evil Empire. El Salvador is "the most violent theater of East-West conflict in the hemisphere," Tim Golden proclaims on the front page; perhaps some Soviet counterpart wrote in 1956 that Hungary is "the most violent theater of East-West conflict in Eastern Europe" -- however shameful, a claim that would have been far more plausible, in the irrelevant real world.

For the larger picture, we naturally turn to New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman, who takes as his text Congressman Les Aspin's proclamation that "The emerging world is likely to lack the clarity of the cold war... The old world was good guys and bad guys. The new world is gray guys." Developing this theme, Friedman observes that "Normally, Washington gets rather exercised about the toppling of freely elected presidents." But now life is harder. Some of those elected may not be clean upstanding folk as in the past, and we may have to make sharper discriminations. It won't be as easy as when Washington got "exercised about the toppling of" Goulart, Arbenz, Allende, Bosch ....

Even before, we did not always support only good guys, Friedman recognizes, recalling such unpleasant folk as the Shah and Marcos. But that deviation from high principle is easily handled: "During the cold war the United States did not really have the luxury or burden of choosing its friends," but "simply had to identify who was with it in the grand struggle with the `Evil Empire' led by Moscow." Our real values were demonstrated by the "fact" that "Washington did press for democracy, free markets and other ideals" -- a declaration of some audacity, but safe enough in the reigning intellectual culture.

The "Soviet threat" forced on us "a degree of cynicism in foreign affairs, which was contrary to our nature and traditions," a senior Administration policymaker adds with the Times imprimatur. Neither tarries on some questions that come to mind. To mention a few: How are "our nature and traditions" illustrated by our practice before the Soviet Union threatened our existence in 1917? Or by the regular pattern of concocting "Soviet threats" on the most ludicrous pretexts to justify atrocities undertaken to preserve "stability" in our special sense of the term? Nor do they trouble to explain exactly what the Soviet threat had to do with our support for genocidal monsters from Indonesia to Guatemala, or how it explains the close correlation between torture and US aid.

The same official warns that we should not revert to our traditional stand "of granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy." The world is still too harsh a place for us to "revert to form," slipping back unthinkingly to our role of world benefactor while ignoring "the national interest," bemused by "Wilsonian" idealism. The latter concept has an interesting status; it does not refer to what Wilson did -- for example, his murderous interventions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic -- or even what he said, when push came to shove. The same holds, more generally, of the concept "our values." Thus, Friedman quotes Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, who expresses his concern that we will persist in past practices instead of rising to the current challenge. "For years we have just pressed a shorthand version of our values -- free elections and free markets -- without realizing that the fullest expression of our values required more" than the limited mission of righteousness that has guided us heretofore. As in the case of Wilsonianism, the concept "our values" is entirely independent of what we do or even profess, except before the cameras.

With the global enemy out of the way, "the emerging yardstick is one of democratic values," Friedman concludes, doubtless thinking of George Bush's attitude towards Suharto, the Gulf emirates and Saddam Hussein (before his unfortunate error of August 2, 1990), and other attractive figures whose appeal has outlasted the Cold War -- and had little to do with it in the first place.

"No satire of Funston could reach perfection, because Funston occupies that summit himself," Mark Twain wrote, referring to one of the heroes of the Philippine slaughter: he is "satire incarnated."³⁶

The device of eliminating history by a wave at the Cold War, no matter how foolish the pretense, is one that is to be highly recommended to the aspiring servant of power, given what history actually tells us. This is only the most recent application of the technique of "change of course," regularly invoked when some ugliness finally breaks through the elegant and smoothly functioning mechanisms of suppression: Yes, there was an unfortunate lapse, but now we can march on behind the banner of our high ideals.

³⁵ Ch. 4.2. See DD, ch. 1, n. 19; ch. 7.7. Also Bello and Rosenfeld, Dragons.

³⁶ Hockstader, WP, June 20, 1990; Crossette, NYT, Jan. 18; Tim Golden, NYT, Jan 17; Friedman, NYT, Jan. 12, 1992. Aid-torture, p. 120. Zwick, Twain, 111.