Harry Targ
Post-modernists talk about “discourses,”
“narratives,” “tropes,” and verbal “deconstructions.” They should be commended
for suggesting how words are used to mobilize, inspire, deceive, promote
self-interest, and, too often, justify killing everywhere. Former Arkansas
Senator, J. William Fulbright in describing how he was tricked by his old
friend President Lyndon Baines Johnson to support a resolution authorizing
escalating war in Vietnam said: “A lie is a lie. There is no other way to put
it.”
The story can begin any time. As World War Two was
ending, the Greek government constructed by Great Britain after the Nazis were
defeated was engaged in an effort to crush a rebellion by activists who
objected to their newly imposed rulers. The Greek rebels included former
anti-fascists freedom fighters, some of whom were Communists or Socialists. The
British, no longer able to support the repression of the Greek Left in what was
a civil war, called on the Americans for help.
In February, 1947, Truman foreign policy advisers
met to discuss what to do about the Greek civil war and the threat of “Communism”
spreading along the Mediterranean. The Republican Chair of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg, attending the meeting. said he would
support U.S. military and economic aid for the unpopular Greek government. But,
he said, tell the President he better “scare hell out of the American people.”
One month later, President Truman gave his famous
Truman Doctrine speech to the Congress and the American people. He warned the
American people, who until that time still had positive feelings toward the
Soviet people, that the United States and the “free world” were going to be
engaged in a long-term struggle against the forces of “international communism.”
The Truman Doctrine was not about nations and movements with different
interests and ideologies but rather a global struggle between the forces of
good threatened by the forces of evil.
United States administrations ever since have justified
aggressive foreign policies by lying and distorting the realities behind
complex international relationships. In addition, when a politician, a
journalist, a scholar, or a whole peace movement criticizes targeting nations
and movements as diabolical and security threats, these critics are challenged
as weak, indecisive, cowardly, and, even worse, stalking horses for the vile
enemy or enemies.
Campaigns of propaganda masquerading as truth have
been a constant feature of international relations, particularly since World
War Two. The reality of U.S. struggles against demonized enemies tells a
sobering story. Deaths in wars and interventions in which the United States
participated from 1945 until 1995 totaled about ten million people. These figures,
extracted from the valuable research of Ruth Sivard, (World Military and Social Expenditures, 1996) do not include
injuries and forced migrations of millions of people fleeing combat zones. Nor
do these figures include the wasteful trillions of dollars of military
expenditures and environmental damage resulting from a war system.
And now, in 2014, the United States and its allies
in NATO are presenting scenarios justifying war based upon a new round of lies
and distortions. In the Persian Gulf whole nations were constructed by European
colonial powers after World War One. As the next World War ended, the United
States agreed to provide arms and protection to the Saudi monarchs in exchange
for oil. The U.S. identified client regimes to support its interests in the
region, from the former Shah of Iran, to the state of Israel, to various
so-called Islamic Fundamentalist groups including what became Al Qaeda, to
leaders the U.S. once supported such as Saddam Hussein and Nouri al-Maliki in
Iraq. In the twenty-first century, the stability of whole countries, Iraq and
Libya for example, was destroyed by United States interventions costing many
million deaths and injuries and many more people fleeing violence.
Now the latest enemy, ISIS, the Islamic State of
Iraq and Syria, is portrayed as a monster movement that beheads its prisoners
and murders masses of people who do not share its religious ideology. While
there is enough data to suggest that ISIS is engaging in cruel violence against
its enemies, that violence is being used to justify bombing campaigns against
alleged enemy targets. War-hungry hawks inside the beltway particularly those
with ready access to mainstream media demand that President Obama expand
bombing, transfer more arms to so-called friends, and recruit militant
opponents of ISIS to even the score. Since this new enemy, even more scary than
the Communists of the twentieth century, includes a handful of Americans, they
claim, the territory of the United States is threatened by global terror. The
rhetoric calling for a global war against this presumably global threat is
escalating. Those who raise questions about why ISIS is as popular as it is,
what its grievances are, why there is hatred for the West, particularly the
United States, in the region, and whether the application of military force
would make matters better or worse, are drowned out by those who built careers
based on arguments about the inevitability of war and violence and the need to
kill for the greater good.
The other apocryphal narrative of the day comes from
Eastern Europe. The United States participated covertly in the overthrow of a
dictatorial but elected regime in Ukraine. After the elected leader fled, those
with ties to historic fascist parties gained influence in a newly created
government. Ukrainians from the eastern part of the country with ties of
politics, culture, and language to Russia rebelled against the new central
government in Kiev which wants to join western military and economic
organizations. Kiev has launched a brutal assault on the separatists in the
East. The dominant narrative in Washington and the mainstream media is not
about the coup in Kiev, the descendants of fascists in the government, but the
Russians who want to move westward across Central Europe, reestablishing the
old Soviet Bloc.
Indeed, Russia is giving material aid to the
separatists, although information about what kind comes only from Washington
and Kiev. Little attention is given to the NATO vision of expanding its
military alliance eastward, ultimately to besiege a threatened Russia. Even
less attention is given to the fact that Kiev oligarchs wish to incorporate
Ukraine into the European Union. In other words, a country with a divided
population in terms of culture and politics engaged in a violent civil war has
been transformed by politicians, pundits, and media sources into a narrative of
a struggling Ukraine democracy challenged by an aggressive Russia, the
descendent of the twentieth century demon, the former Soviet Union. (For a more detailed discussion of United
States/Russian/ Ukraine relations in 2013-2014 see Harry Targ, “Pushing for
Starvation at Home and War Abroad: A Time to Resist,” Diary of a Heartland Radical. www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com,
March 28, 2014).
Getting back to Senator Vandenberg’s advice to
President Truman about how to gain support of the American people for
moral/military crusades, leaders and media are warning about a new global
terrorist threat and a renewed
post-Soviet threat from Russia, a new Cold War. The intensity of the selling
job is testament to the good sense of the American people who continue to say
“no more wars.”
