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 charged with being weak, indecisive, cowardly, or,
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 since
the dawn of the new century, the United States and its allies in NATO make
arguments justifying war based upon a new round of lies and distortions. The
Persian Gulf is a region where whole nations were constructed by colonial
powers after World War One. After the next World War, the United States agreed
to provide arms and protection to the Saudi monarchs in exchange for oil. The
U.S. also identified client regimes and movements to support its interests in
the region. They included the former Shah of Iran, the state of Israel, various
so-called Islamic Fundamentalist groups including those fighting in Afghanistan,
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 thousands of deaths and injuries
and many more people fleeing violence.
As The
Real News analysis below suggests, the American people have been lied to
concerning Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, and as history suggests, virtually every case
of United States military intervention, covert operations and/or economic
sanctions.
Getting back to Senator
Vandenberg’s advice to President Truman (“scare hell out of the American
people”) about how to gain support for moral/military crusades, leaders and
media are warning about a new global terrorist threat and renewed threats
from Russia, China, and Iran. The intensity of the selling jobs, the perpetual
lies, are testament to the good sense of the American people who continue to
say “no more wars.”
