End of History ?
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
*****
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.
*****
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.
Beyond
Hypocrisy