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.

War and Myth X

Another huge postwar myth is that somebody in Washington “lost” China. It was just one step further in the line of myths that began with the idea that Roosevelt deliberately attacked Japan to disable Russia’s main Pacific adversary.
Communism had as powerful a capacity to unsettle the “decent sort of folk” in the 20th Century as Democracy had had in the 19th. Both were seen as totally detrimental to the natural and Christian order of things; it was the firm conviction of most Western governments that, first Democracy and, later, Communism ought to be stamped out.
Democracy’s 19th Century champion was England; Russia took on that role for Communism in the 20th. It was a firm conviction that no rational citizenry chose Democracy—they were “lost” to it and needed to be rescued. Ditto for Communism in the 20th.
So, when France, Britain, Germany and Russia had all dropped out of the race to take over China, when we had militarily defeated Japan—our only remaining rival—it seemed incomprehensible to most Americans when, only four years after the war, China went Communist.
Somebody must have cheated. There was treason somewhere. This was a perfectly reasonable set of beliefs—if you were willing to blind yourself to a couple of realities. The first reality was something few Americans were willing to admit out loud until the last couple of decades—we had become a world empire.
That’s what “super power” is all about. To be super, a power most control the areas from which she gains her raw materials, to which she sells her own wares and the sea and land lanes by which these goods travel. That’s called an empire.
If Britain was an empire in 1900, we certainly have been one since 1945. (Actually our move to become one began long, long before that. It was, after all, Benjamin Franklin who predicted, “We shall be an empire of liberty, from sea to sea and pole to pole.”)
In the minds of every other nation on earth, our being an empire put us in the same class as England, France, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany and Japan—all empire builders. Take a look at a 1939 world map.
Those countries controlled everything on the planet except Russia, Eastern Europe, the US, Antarctica, Liberia, Afghanistan, Thailand and Iceland. (Latin America was still sort of divied up between Britain and the US. By 1945, US control would be pretty absolute there.)
By 1945 the European imperialists had been so badly knocked about by World War II that their grip was loosening on their imperial holdings all over the globe. All sorts of colonies just wanted to be free. Gandhi’s India, for one. Ho Chi Minh’s Indo-China for another. Nasser’s Egypt. Mossadegh’s iran, Kenya’s Mau Mau, Castro’s Cuba—the list could go on forever.
All colonies. (Yes, Cuba and Iran were colonies; let’s not kid ourselves.) If you wanted to start a revolution to make your country independent, you had two choices to go to for support. (Remember when we fought in 1776, 90% of our bullets came from a foreign power that hated England.)
There was the United States and there was the Soviet Union. The US had an instinctive rapport with its fellow imperialists (especially since they were no longer a threat to us). They were fellow Europeans; they were mostly anti-Communist (that designation covered a host of sins in our minds)—so very few would-be revolutionaries found comfort—or weapons—from us.
That left only one other place for a pro-independence minded revolutionary to turn—Russia. She was happy to destabilize any of our allies (and sometimes us) at the low risk and cost of a few boatloads of guns.
We didn’t “lose” China. China had long and bitter memories of European incursions—with a US flag always among the others. If we “lost” China, we probably did so in the 1800s. Let’s look some more myths next time.

War and Myth I

People need to believe that wars are fought for some noble, even spiritual, cause. This is especially true if you are dealing with someone who has invested a son, a husband or some other relative or friend in the war in question.
The French with their wonderful, if somewhat cynical acuity, understood this perfectly when they created the Foreign Legion back in the 1840s. They were about to embark on a series of colonial wars in North Africa.
They had good and sufficient reason to do so—Algerian pirates, “Barbary pirates—named after the red bearded Muslim admiral who created them in the Sixteenth Century—had made shipping along the southern coast of France a misery for centuries.
Fleet units of several “Christian” nations had been stationed along North African shores for almost as long. We had a squadron there from 1800 to the 1840s ourselves. The French were finally ready to end it—and pick up any goodies lying around at the same time.
But the French knew that “colonial wars” (like Vietnam, Iraq, etc.) are a hard sell to the mothers of dead soldiers. It gets very messy when parents of maimed and wounded troops can vote. So the French created a foreign force with no mothers in France to grieve. Very, very smart.
American mothers are no different. During the Civil War, can you imagine how many American moms would have urged their sons to go down and fight to help New York bankers gain financial hegemony over the rest of the United States?
No, no, no, it would never work. So we created the mythology that we were fighting to free the slaves, a much more noble cause to die for. Problem: only a tiny percentage of northerners had ANY interest in that happening at all). When reality hit myth after the war, we backed out in a hurry and allowed southerners to impose Jim Crow laws that more accurately reflected what the nation felt.
But the myth worked for recruitment purposes.
It was more true that we were fighting to preserve the Union. After all, how could we compete with Britain and other industrialized nations if we split in two? But it still sounded better to sing, “As He died to make men holy let us die to make men free … .”
The Civil War made us money. Up until that war, we were basically a commodity producing economy—our biggest national source of income in 1860 was cotton. The war allowed industry and banking to develop. By the 1870s we were one of the largest industrial producers and exporters in the world—flooding European markets with admittedly shoddy goods.
(Both Japan and China would take a page out of that book in the Twentieth Century. Vietnam and Korea are coming on fast. At a dollar a day wages in the 1800s, we made ‘em cheap and dirty.)
So—we invested in the Civil War, and we WON it. The agricultural South and West would never have an effective veto over the economy again. At least if you’re from the industrialized part of the US, you won it.
But our history books prefer Julia War Howe’s version of events. It was all about “grapes of wrath”, “trampling”, and “terrible swift swords”—fighting to make men free. Certainly sounds better. But it flies in the face of a century of actual history.
Let’s look at a few more myths tomorrow.

Lincoln--We Are Still Coming, Father Abraham

Today is Lincoln’s birthday. It used to be a holiday—until the old Confederacy made it clear that celebrating it would be like asking Jews to celebrate Waffen SS Day. So we’ve combined it with Washington’s Birthday, and now we have “President’s Day”.
Lincoln is still worthy of his own day. Even if most of us honor—or loath—him for all the wrong reasons. He preserved the Union, yet he was as much a sectionalist as Robert E. Lee. In this government hating era, we must remember that he was—above all—a brilliant politician.
He “emancipated” the slaves, almost literally over his own dead body. He told us in his First Inaugural Address that his primary interest was to preserve the Union—to that end he would free “some of the slaves, all of the slaves or none of the slaves”.
He fully understood that ending slavery was high on the list of very, very few Northerners. His famed Emancipation Proclamation was strictly an appeal to the anti-slavery sentiments of the British electorate—to keep England from entering the war on the Confederacy’s side. It was carefully crafted to free no actual slaves whatsoever.
Throughout much of the war he had to calculate every move based on keeping Europe at bay while imposing what they felt was an illegal blockade on an independent Confederacy. England remained a serious threat until the Russian Navy arrived and parked itself in New York harbor throughout the winter of 1863-4. By late winter we were strong enough to make a serious threat of war ourselves—and England backed off.
But Britain and the Confederacy were only two of Lincoln’s major problems. New York—and its big banks—may have been his biggest. A very good argument can be made that, for both North and South, the largest war issue may have been New York’s desire to impose financial hegemony over the entire federal union.
From the outset, the outsider from the western farm states, had to battle to keep the New Yorkers in his cabinet at bay. His war aims and their war aims were quite different. In the end it can be argued that the New York banking and business interests won the war—and Wall Street became the dominant American power base (don’t forget, during the Cold War, the Communist block always spoke of the enemy as being—not America or Washington—but Wall Street).
Lincoln steadfastly rejected Seward’s appeal for open war with our chief commercial rival, Great Britain, but he was forced to move toward Seward’s radical abolitionism when he lost most other support for the war. It was a constant see-saw.
He never forgot that Prairie states like Illinois had historically depended on their uneasy political alliance with the Plantation South to defend their interests against the eastern banks. In a last desperate move to protect western farmers, Lincoln offered the South an opportunity to lay down its arms, re-enter Congress and vote down the 13th Amendment.
A secret conference was held, no agreement was reached—and a month later Lee surrendered. A week after that Lincoln was dead, and with him went the last obstacle to New York control over American finance. (The South, incidentally, had no sane reason to kill Lincoln—he was their last hope in defeat, and many southerners at the time recognized it.)
So much for the political Lincoln—who accomplished his primary goal to pass on to his successor a United States with as many stars in its flag as it had when he took office. Despite Britain, despite the Confederacy; even despite New York City. His primary monument is a flag with fifty stars on it.
(Think of World War I or II with two mutually hostile Americas carrying on their animosity by taking different sides. Life would be unimaginably different for the entire planet without Lincoln.)
But it is as a symbol—as he had already become during the Civil War—that Lincoln is most remembered and loved or hated. The Northern Armies marched singing, “We Are Coming, Father Abraham”. That can be more important than reality. Let’s look at the symbol, the iconic Lincoln tomorrow.