War and Myth XI

The world we remembered from before 1939 had just seemed so much safer and reliable. The French controlled those North African Berbers who used to send pirates after our ships. British ships kept Malay pirates at bay.
Africa and the Middle East gave no one any problems because various European Colonial Affairs offices kept things quiet there. Central Americans picked bananas peacefully and sent the receipts to either London or Washington. From Suez to Hanoi, the underbelly of Asia was safely in the reliable hands of people like the French, the British, the Dutch and even the Portuguese. No problems there to speak of.
We could and did make preachments about the evils of imperialism (ignoring our own) and watch breathlessly to see if the next hunger strike might really kill Gandhi (I’m old enough to recall his last one). But it was a quiet, safe neighborhood. You could walk down the street with minimal fear of getting mugged.
The planet got a lot rowdier when the imperialists went home. It was fashionable to say that we had somehow “lost” all those places—that the Communists were doing this all, with no serious help from the native populations, just to spite us.
Who lost China? Silly question. An indigenous group of Chinese Communists who allied themselves very momentarily with the Soviet Union won it. The strength of their appeal was that they were not seen to be allied with ANY of the former imperialist powers who had dabble in Chinese affairs and claimed zones of interest for over a century.
Memories of imperialism, memories of days when China stood alone as the technology giant whose goods were coveted all over the Asian, European, African land mass, unhappy memories of a weakened giant being bullied by half a dozen European powers all much smaller than she was—that’s what cost us China.
Throw into the mix the fact that China’s basically pro-Western “Democratic” government between 1911 and 1949 became hopelessly corrupt and ineffective and I can imagine no way we could possibly have hung on to China.
But the myth that we had lost it—that something illegitimate, something that didn’t really speak for China, had taken it away from us would haunt our policies for decades. We wouldn’t even recognize the fact that Mao’s government existed for over twenty years.
Experiences like we had in China, Indo-China (Vietnam/Cambodia /Laos), the southern Philippines, Cuba, Iran, Iraq (I’m talking the 1950s), or Egypt all worked to convince us that any revolutionary, anywhere—anyone who wanted economic, military or political independence for his nation was de facto a very bad person.
This assurance, rising out of the myth that we had lost all of these places, led to our belief that it was our mission to wage war against any uprising of any sort. This became a reflex. We were no longer capable of sitting down rationally and deciding: What are our true interests here? What’s best for the US in the long run?
(We came a horrible cropper in Vietnam when we failed to take into account that Ho Chi Minh LIKED America. He based his whole revolution on our Declaration of Independence. In any case, he hated China far more than he did us!
We had to bomb the living daylights out of him to make an enemy out of him. If we had played our hand more sanely, the worst that might have happened is that we would have had an Asian Tito to annoy and worry the Chinese. And no dead G.I.s.)
Myth is a dreadful thing to build a foreign policy on. Especially if you are trying to hold down the potentially bloodthirsty exuberance of a newly liberated planet.
A few more words on myth next.