The Cold War as Western Aggression

excerpted from the book

Beyond Hypocrisy

by Edward S. Herman

published by South End Press, 1992

With the fall of the Soviet bloc and triumph of capitalism, we may be sure that the traditional view of the Cold War as western defense and containment of an aggressive and expansionist system will be even more firmly institutionalized. This will constitute acceptance of a special and mythical history, comparable, ironically, to the famed Stalinist construction of a Soviet history in accord with ongoing political demands.

The truth of the history of the Cold War must be traced back to the western invasion of Russia during and immediately after World War I to prevent a Bolshevik victory in a civil conflict. These were "active measures" that occurred even before the Communists had taken power. Western actions to isolate, weaken, and destroy the Soviet state were incessant from 1917 onward. A strenuous effort was made to turn Hitler toward the Soviet Union in the late 1930s and, following World War II, fascists were quickly rehabilitated in country after country to shore up the old order, boycotts and other forms of economic warfare were employed against the Soviet Union and its allies, and a policy of armed encirclement and destabilization was put into place. ... this was clearly recognized in U.S. official (but unpublicized) documents to be offensive activity, while at the same time the public posture - transmitted without bothersome dissent by the ideological institutions was that we were strictly on the defensive in crises of "containment."

Under the cover of the "Soviet threat, the United States and other western states fought against social revolution and independent development globally, but especially in the Third World. The incessant war against the Soviet Union was paralleled by a war against the Chinese revolution before and after 1949, against social revolution in Indochina from 1945 onward, against threatening social change in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in the years 1947-54, Brazil in the early 1960s, Chile in the early 1970s, Nicaragua after July 19, 1979, among many other cases. These were independent nationalist revolts against elite and foreign rule, but perceived as contrary to the interests of the United States and western corporate institutions, and therefore vilified, transformed into Moscow-led threats, and destabilized and attacked. In brief, the conventional view of the West as on the defensive against "aggression", in its interventionism in the Third World is straightforward mythology ...

The fall of communism, like the defeat of Allende in Chile and the successful undermining of the Nicaraguan revolution in the 1980s, is therefore in some substantial measure a victory of superior power and systematic use of coercion and violence. The Soviet Union, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, throughout their years of control by elements deemed hostile to western interests, had to contend with real security threats, continuous economic warfare, and periodic active military attack. In the context of pre-conditions of economic backwardness, each of these countries developed command economies and less than democratic political systems that weakened their ability to cope with and meet their citizens' demands. It is possible that without systematic western attacks these states would still have faltered, but this will never be known. It is clear, however, that western aggression put them under extreme stress and damaged their ability to succeed

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Who Will Contain Us as We Strive to Keep the Third World Masses in their Place?

The question of "who will contain us" is an oxymoron in the United States. By patriotic assumption, we have no interests that might conflict with legitimate interests of other peoples, and would not impose them by force if we did. But this perspective reflects the fact that citizens of every imperial power live in a closed and protective intellectual environment which bathes imperial policies in a benevolent light. In reality, from the vantage point of Third World majority interests and our role as Globocop enforcing the status quo, the United States badly needs to be contained.

With the retreat and dissolution of the Soviet Union, the problem has become even more serious because that country, whatever its very serious flaws and imperialism, did offer some aid and protection to Third World revolutions and deterrence to the United States. The problem is worsened by the antidotes recently developed against the dreaded Vietnam syndrome. The U.S. leadership has now found that a short war with few U.S. casualties brings a political bonanza to those leading the country into war. We are proud to beat up countries ranging from one-fortieth to one-thirty-six thousandth of our size (as measured by relative GNPs). The government has mastered the art of war-making propaganda, and the mass media have lost the capacity to challenge it by raising salient issues and forcing debate, so that matters like the nurmber of enemy victirns, the subsequent failure to pick up the pieces within the victim states, and matters of justice and law are kept out of public view.

As a result, the United States and its western allies should now have a freer hand in keeping the Third World masses in their place. Where traditional forms of subversion, the support of suitable "leaders,". and IMF discipline won't suffice, contra armies and direct attacks on newly demonized Little Satans should be easier to deploy in the future.

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The End of History?

We have arrived at another historical Juncture where there is prophesied an "end of history." It is reminiscent of 1815, following the defeat of Napoleon and the crushing of the various rebellions of the post-French revolution era, when Prince Metternich and the rulers of the newly consolidated anti-liberal and anti-national regimes of elite rule felt comfortable that stability would prevail, and that the "police operations of the Holy Alliance" would keep revolutionary movements from below in check.

Things didn't work out that way-history failed to stop. Great power rivalries, upheavals by the excluded and exploited majorities, and pressures for liberalization and more basic reforms could not be contained.

In the current version of end of history triumphalism, "police operations of the Holy Alliance" are downplayed but remain important. The role of these operations in undermining social democracy and socialism in the period from 1917 into 1992 has been greatly underrated, ... It is evident that the U.S. Globocop is rarin' to go in its role of keeping the Third World safe for market occupancy and further penetration. Western Europe is readying its own counterrevolutionary force to enable it to compete with the United States in the role of global enforcer of freedom (i.e., open markets).

Francis Fukuyama and others who have pronounced the end of history claim that democracy, free choice, and the market have triumphed over the forces of political constraint and coercion. In their view, this is no victory of a holy alliance, rather it is the triumph of the free individual. This claim is given plausibility by the rush of the Soviet bloc states to join the market throng. But the "free individual" has not triumphed in the West itself, where democracies have become steadily more constrained, market-dominated, and largely nominal. Outside of the dominant western capitalist world, it is the transnational corporate system rather than the "free individual" that has been victorious, based in good part on the use of force. Many Third World revolutions have been aborted, badly damaged, or destroyed by externally instigated violence. Elsewhere, Third World peoples have been kept in such a terrible state of impoverishment and repression, helped along by joint venture arrangements between western and Third World elites, that needed revolutionary changes have not yet been able to materialize.

A number of analysts of the French revolution, most notably Alexis de Tocqueville, stressed that, contrary to the common view that the severe abuses of the French masses led to the revolution, in fact the French masses were far more prosperous and less repressed than those in Germany and Russia, and this relative prosperity was a necessary condition for successful revolution. The German and Russian peasants were too thoroughly crushed and oppressed to be able to revolt. A comparison of western Third World client states and the struggling, now rejected state socialist countries of the Soviet bloc, in terms of the material and social condition of the masses, shows that the latter look relatively quite well off.'' If their peoples have risen to throw off their oppressors, this suggests that they had progressed to a point where a better and freer life seemed possible. And they had been repressed with less ferocity than those in revolt against U.S. clients in Latin America.

This suggests, finally, that not only has history not ended, but that the next phase of mass upheaval and the throwing off of the f esters of institutional oppression is also likely to come from the hundreds of millions of landless and marginalized people in the shantytowns and countrysides of the Free World. The "Cry of the People" in the Third World has not been heard in the West; but the explosive uprising, when it comes, may be beyond the repressive capabilities of Globocop and its public relations system. The unshackling of the "mere gooks" and "mere Arabs" is the future task of historical change. which brings its own surprises.

Edward Herman page

Beyond Hypocrisy