A Condominium Empire: Neo-Imperialism,
The Empire Strikes Back Home,
The Mythology of Interventionism,
The Real Threat of Revolution

excerpted from the book

The Sword and the Dollar

Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race

by Michael Parenti

St. Martin's Press, 1989

A Condominium Empire: Neo-Imperialism

p63
US multinational corporations (along with the firms of other advanced capitalist nations) control most of the wealth, labor, and markets of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. (2) This control does much to maldevelop the weaker nations in ways that are severely detrimental to the life chances of the common people of the Third World. (3) The existing class structure of the Third World, so suitable to capital accumulation, must be protected from popular resistance. Through the generous applications of force and terror and by cultural and political domination, the / imperialist nation directly-or through a client-state apparatus maintains "stability" and prevents changes in the class structure of other nations.

*

The Empire Strikes Back Home

p72
... the "national" policies of an imperialist country reflect the interests of that country's dominant socio-economic class. Class rather than nation-state more often is the crucial unit of analysis in he study of imperialism.

p77
For years now the poisonous pesticides and hazardous pharmaceuticals that were banned in this country have been sold by their producers to Third World nations where regulations are weaker or nonexistent. In 1981, President Reagan repealed an executive order signed a half-year before by President Carter that would have forced exporters of such products to notify the recipient nation that the commodity was banned in the USA.)

p78
Empire has a great many overhead costs, especially military ones, that must be picked up by the people. The Vietnam War cost $168.1 billion in direct expenditures for US forces and military aid to allies in Indochina. The war's indirect costs will come to well over $350 billion (for veterans benefits and hospitals, interest on the national debt, etc.). As the economist Victor Perlo pointed out, by the end of the war inflation had escalated from about 1 percent a year to 10 percent; the national debt had doubled over the 1964 level; the federal budget showed record deficits; unemployment had doubled; real wages had started on their longest decline in modern American history; interest rates rose to 10 percent and higher; the US export surplus gave way to an import surplus; and US gold and monetary reserves had been drained. There were human costs: 2.5 million Americans had their lives interrupted to serve in Indochina; of these 58,156 were killed and 303,616 wounded (13,167 with a 100 percent disability); 55,000 have died since returning home because of suicides, murders, addictions, alcoholism, and accidents; 500,000 have attempted suicide since coming back to the USA. Ethnic minorities paid a disproportionate cost; thus while composing about 12 percent of the US population, Blacks accounted for 22.4 percent of all combat deaths in Vietnam in 1965. The New Mexico state legislature noted that Mexican Americans constituted only 29 percent of that state's population but 69 percent of the state's inductees and 43 percent of its Vietnam casualties in 1966.

Americans pay dearly for "our" global military apparatus. The cost of building one aircraft carrier could feed several million of the poorest, hungriest children in America for ten years. Greater sums have been budgeted for the development of the Navy's submarine-rescue vehicle than for occupational safety, public libraries, and daycare centers combined. The cost of military aircraft components and ammunition kept in storage by the Pentagon is greater than the combined costs of pollution control, conservation, community development, housing, occupational safety, and mass transportation. The total expenses of the legislative and judiciary branches and all the regulatory commissions combined constitute little more than half of 1 percent of the Pentagon's yearly budget.

*

The Mythology of Interventionism

p85
An American weekly magazine, the San Francisco Argonaut defended the atrocities of American troops in the Philippines in 1902 by exulting over the enormous riches and fertility of the islands, then noted: "But unfortunately they are infested by Filipinos. There are many millions of them there, and it is to be feared that their extinction will be slow .... Let us all be frank. WE DO NOT WANT THE FILIPINOS. WE WANT THE PHILIPPINES.

p86
In 1900, the irrepressible imperialist spokesman, Senator Albert Beveridge, appropriately wove together the themes of God, dollar, and sword:

We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee under God, of the civilization of the world .... We will move forward to our work ... with gratitude ... and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His Chosen People, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.

The Pacific is our ocean .... Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus?... China is our natural customer .... The power that rules the Pacific is the power that rules the world. And, with the Philippines, that power is and will forever be the American Republic."

It was President Woodrow Wilson who, sounding much like Jefferson, announced that "our relationship to the rest of mankind" and "our peculiar duty" was to teach colonial peoples "order and self control" and to "import to them, if it be possible ... the drill and habit of law and obedience which we long ago got out of... English history." On another occasion Wilson said: "I am going t1 teach the South American republics to elect good men." He then proceeded to intervene violently and frequently in Latin American affairs. "We are the friends of Constitutional government in [Latin] America," he announced just before he ordered the US bombardment and occupation of Vera Cruz, a lesson in orderly constitutionalism that cost the Mexicans dearly in lives.

p87
On occasion, the pretense of international altruism is dropped and the interventionists talk about looking out for Number One, protecting American wealth from the incursions of a have-not world. Observe the crass utterances of President Lyndon Johnson before a cheering junior Chamber of Commerce audience in 1966: "We own half the trucks in the world. We own almost half of the radios in the world. We own a third of all the electricity . . . ." But the rest of the world, he added, wants the same things. "Now I would like to see them enjoy the blessings that we enjoy. But don't you help them exchange places with us, because I don't want to be where they are." Rather than carry the standard of democracy into the world, now our task was to protect our standard of living from the world.

 

The Real Threat of Revolution

p98
The answer is Marxist and other leftist states do pose a real threat, not to the United States as a national entity, nor to the American people as such, but to the corporate and financial interests of our country, to Exxon and Mobil, Chase Manhattan and First National, Ford and General Motors, Anaconda and USX, to billions and billions of dollars in direct investments and loans.

But specific investments are not the only concern. US capitalists owned little of value in Grenada when the New jewel movement took power, yet Reagan invaded that country. Similarly, the United States had relatively few investments in Indochina, most of the money there being French, yet it waged a bloody, protracted war against the revolutionary movements in that region. In such instances US interventionists are less concerned with protecting particular corporate investments than with safeguarding capitalism as a world system.

A socialist Nicaragua or socialist Grenada, as such, are hardly a threat to the survival of global capitalism. The danger is not socialism in any one country but a socialism that might spread to many countries. Multinational corporations are just that, multinational. They need the world, or a very large part of it, to exploit and expand in. There can be no such thing as "capitalism in one country." A social revolution in any part of the world may or may not hurt specific US corporations, but more than that, it becomes part of a cumulative threat to the entire global system. The domino theory (which argues that if one country in a region "falls" to Communism, others will follow like dominoes in a row) may not work as automatically as its more alarmist proponents claim, but who can deny there is a contagion, a power of example and inspiration, and sometimes even direct encouragement and assistance from one revolution to another. Henry Kissinger expressed his fear that the "contagious example" of Allende's policies in Chile might "infect" other countries in Latin America and Southern Europe.' At stake in Grenada, as President Reagan correctly observed, was something more than nutmeg: it was the entire Caribbean. The US invasion of that country served notice to all the other nations in the Caribbean that they were not free to chart a revolutionary course.

Those who control the lion's share of the world's riches will defend at all costs their most favored way of life. For them, freedom is experienced as a sense of well-being closely connected to their social standing and their material abundance. Revolution represents a genuine loss of that freedom: the freedom to treat their employees as they choose and make money from other people's labor, the freedom to monopolize a society's scarce resources while being unaccountable to the public interest and indifferent to the hardships thereby inflicted upon others, the freedom to control public discourse and the communication universe, and the freedom to tax poorer classes without having to pay many taxes themselves. For them, "freedom" means to be above the law in most respects, to have the government at their personal service, to live in luxury, to be waited upon by small armies of underpaid servants, to vacation in Paris and London, to enjoy a range of goods, services, and life choices that are available only to a few, and finally to see that their children enjoy all these same good things.

As the owning classes view things, revolution brings "tyranny," a world turned nightmarishly upside down, in which the ignorant masses outrageously expect to dominate the allocation of public resources at the expense of the well-bred and wellborn, even daring to occupy the very estates and offices of the rich and powerful. Thus, the privileged classes dread socialism the way the rest of us might dread poverty, hunger, and death itself. They are prepared to go to any length to defend all that they have, all that makes life 'of to them. History provides no examples of a dominant class voluntarily relinquishing its social position so to better the lot of the downtrodden.

These privileged interests honestly see themselves as deserving of all they have, just as they see the poor as the authors of their own miserable existence. They embrace a self-justifying class ideology. And they are readily assisted by the publicists, commentators, and academics who advance their own careers by propagating the ruling-class worldview, presenting it as a concern for security, democracy, development, and peace. These acolytes have a direct interest in seeing that their own professional and class privileges are not threatened by any alternate social order. And like the rich, they sincerely believe in the virtue of the system they defend.

The real problem for the wealthy classes is not that revolutionaries "grab" power but that they use power to pursue policies that are unacceptable to ruling interests in both the Western industrial world and the Third World. What bothers American political leaders (and investment bankers, corporate heads, militarists, and media moguls, and the Third World landowners, large merchants, military chieftains, usurers, sweatshop bosses, and top bureaucrats) is not the Left's supposed lack of political democracy but its attempt to construct economic democracy, to use capital and labor in a way that is inimical to the survival of the capitalist social order at home and ... abroad.

Sometimes US officials will say they are for social change just as long as it is peaceful and not violent. But judging from the way they have helped to overthrow democratic governments that were taking a nonviolent, gradualist, reformist road (such as Guatemala, Indonesia, Greece, Brazil, and Chile), it would seem they actually have a low tolerance for social changes (even peaceful, piecemeal ones) that molest the existing class structure. The admonition voiced by counterinsurgency liberals: "If you don't carry out basic reforms in how the land, labor, and resources are used, then the Communists will," makes little sense to Third World economic elites for whom the voluntary implementation of basic structural changes would be nothing less than an act of class suicide, as fatal to their privileged existence as any violent upheaval. It makes little difference to wealthy, privileged interests if their favored stations in life were undone by a peaceful transition rather than a violent one. The means concern them much less than the end results. It is not the "violent" in violent revolution they hate-being themselves quite able to resort to violence; it is the "revolution." (Members of the comprador class in Third World nations seldom actually meet a violent end in revolutions; the worst of them usually manage to make it to Miami, Madrid, Paris, or New York.)

Here we can appreciate the immense deceptions that underlie US foreign policy. While professing a dedication to peaceful, nonviolent change, US policymakers have committed themselves to a defense of the status quo throughout the world that regularly relies on violence. They sometimes seize upon the revolutionary ferment that might exist in impoverished lands as an excuse for not making economic changes. Not until the situation in this or that country has been sufficiently stabilized, they say, can we venture upon reforms. Until then, we must rely on the police and military to restore order. But once "order" and "stability" are reimposed, that is, once the democratic agitation has been crushed or subdued, there is no longer any J felt pressure for economic reform.

p102
By the late 1980s, in a number of former dictatorships of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the United States promoted the accoutrements of political democracy without much of the substance. Elections can be regularly held in these countries, just as long as no one tampers with the class structure. The US is willing to change regimes to preserve the pro-capitalist state. Electoral contests are usually classic exercises in elite politics, as was, for instance, the Filipino election of 1987, described by one observer as "a superficial and trivial exercise" in which "no coherent program or even serious issues were placed before the people by Aquino's slate." It was an election heavily weighted by patronage and personality images and tainted by a score of political assassinations, almost all of which were perpetrated by the Right.

In some of these "demonstration democracies" the situation is better than in others. In the 1980s, in the Philippines, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, there was a modest decline in human-rights violations, exiles were allowed to return, and the military remained strong but had to assume a lower profile. In contrast, in places like Guatemala and El Salvador, "the return to democracy" was accompanied by a continuation of political murders and all other human rights violations. In the several decades since the 1954 CIA coup, Guatemala has had no really effective civilian rule. The new "democratic" constitution adopted in 1986 exonerated the previous military regime for its crimes against the people, giving an ominous signal for the future. From 1978 to 1985, the Guatemalan military-trained, financed, and advised by the US military-killed or "disappeared" an estimated 50,000 to 75,000 people, mostly unarmed Indian peasants, and destroyed 440 rural villages (by the army's own count), creating 100,000 orphans, 20,000 widows, and 150,000 refugees. The new constitution also validated the military decrees that set up the rural concentration camps (the infamous "model villages") and put virtually the entire male population of the Western Highlands, some 900,000, into military-controlled compulsory "civilian patrols." Under Guatemala's new "democratic, civilian" government, the army controlled all development and social-service programs and all resources and aid throughout the countryside. The army also established numerous new outposts in the most remote villages of the highlands. In both Guatemala and El Salvador, despite the "democratic civilian" facade, the military continued to have a grip over the country, tolerating no interference from the civilian government in its affairs, and enjoying a free hand in waging counterinsurgency terror against the population.

Should popular forces in these client-state "democracies" mobilize too successfully, developing political parties, labor unions, and peasant organizations that gain a real measure of power, there is a good chance that the military, funded by the United States and waiting in the wings to thwart the "Communist menace," will take over, suspend the constitution, make the necessary arrests and executions, and restore "stability."

p105
Can it be that US corporate investors and political leaders derive some satisfaction from seeing millions of human beings in the Third World suffer from poverty and political repression? Can we really believe that each day they contrive new ways of contributing to the misery of Third World peoples? No, but each day they ponder how best to maintain their profitable holdings, and secure an "investment climate" that allows the capital accumulation process to do its thing. They do not particularly want to see people suffer. Generally they are indifferent or removed from the miseries of the poor, both in the Third World and in their own countries. If pressed on the point they will insist that their investments lessen misery by developing the economies of countries inhabited by people who are presumed incapable of developing themselves. And, in any case, they see even the worst of the repressive right-wing regimes as far better than the dread scourge of class revolution.

p106
William Shirer
for "the last fifty years we've been supporting rightwing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me... I don't understand what there is in the American character ... that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them.

p107
It is not enough to complain about how bad things are, we must also explain why such things persist. A half-century ago, President Franklin Roosevelt attempted a partial answer when justifying US support of Nicaragua's dictator, Anastasio Somoza: "He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but at least he's our son-of-a-bitch.'

p107
During the 1980s, liberal critics complained of a lack of coherence in US policy. They pointed to the "inconsistency" in the Reagan administration's policy of (1) imposing trade embargoes on Nicaragua in order to pressure that nation into becoming more "democratic" and more "cooperative," while (2) refusing to apply sanctions against South Africa, claiming such measures would retard the development of democracy in that country. But if we understand the class content of that policy, it comes out to be quite consistent. Its purpose was to punish leftist anti-imperialist governments and not punish rightist ones that are a part of global capitalism.

p108
The US government is usually on the wrong side, against the poor and downtrodden, because the wrong side is the right side, given the class interests upon which the policy is fixed.

p108
... former CIA operative ... observed that though he had been told he was battling Communism in Guatemala, in truth "Communism was not the threat we were fighting. The threat was land reform." But land reform is much of what Communism is about in the Third World, taking the land from the rich and using it for social production and common needs. That is what the big landowners hate about Communists-or about any other reformers, even those who do not consider themselves Marxists. Adlai Stevenson once commented: "We know... how easy it is to mistake genuine local revolt for Communist subversion." It is easy to mistake the two because they are one and the same. Certainly for the industrialists and financiers, it makes little difference whether their holdings are confiscated by "genuine local" rebels or "Communist subversives." That the owning classes hate Communism and fear its presence everywhere, does not make the hatred irrational, even if their fears are often exaggerated. They hate the economic changes that might obliterate their class existence and so they label such changes "Communist"-which they sometimes are and sometimes are not.

p111
Before the socialist revolution in 1959, there was chronic underemployment in Cuba and massive unattended social needs; there was much work that needed to be done and many underemployed people willing to do it, but little was done because the land, labor, and capital of the nation were used for the extraction of lucrative export crops such as sugar, tobacco, rum and other such corporate enterprises. After the revolution, however, there was suddenly a labor shortage instead of a labor surplus. People were urged to volunteer for work teams on their days off. There was more than enough work because now the resources of the country were being dedicated to the backlog of social needs created by centuries of maldevelopment.

When Cuba nationalized the holdings of US companies, the United States retaliated with an economic boycott-demonstrating one of the ways US foreign policy dedicates itself to the interests of corporate investors. Before the embargo, the United States absorbed more than half of Cuba's exports and supplied nearly three-quarters of Cuba's imported goods. Deprived of US markets and industrial goods, the Cuban revolutionary government-in order to survive, turned to existing socialist countries, especially the Soviet Union, for trade and aid in the 1960s (as did Nicaragua in the 1980s). Over the years, the Cubans have repeatedly sought to improve relations with the United States in order to benefit from American trade, technology, and tourism. They would "prefer not to be spending so much time and energy on national defense," as even the New York Times noted.

Still beset by many economic problems, Cuba is no paradise on earth; but it stands in marked contrast to the rest of Latin America. Cuban life expectancy rose from fifty-five years in 1959 to seventy-three years by 1984. Infant mortality has dropped to the lowest in Latin America, on a par with developed countries. Cuba's per capita food consumption is the second highest in Latin America. It has a free public-health system (something Americans still do not have). The literacy rate is over 95 percent, the highest in Latin America and ,\ higher than in the USA; almost all children under sixteen are attending school. In Cuba, the paint may be peeling off some of the buildings, but unlike so many other Latin American countries, there are no hungry children begging in the streets. And this is why many progressive people look positively upon social revolutions. The children are fed and the people are far better off than in nonrevolutionary Third World countries.


The Sword and the Dollar

Michael Parenti page

Authors page

Home Page