War and Myth XII

One huge American myth—that most of seem to believe with all of our being—is that we all have hundreds if not thousands of friends. (Check Face book.) Everybody’s a friend. If you met him once, last year, he’s a friend.
I very deliberately try to use the word “acquaintance”. I have very few friends. My neighbor and I have known and cooperated with each other for twenty years. We are just reaching the point where we might become actual friends.
But “everybody’s a “friend”—remains a fervently held myth among many, many Americans. It’s something they seem to NEED to believe. I remember substituting in one of the lower grades a few years ago. A little girl came up to me with tears streaming down her cheeks, “Susie says she does not like me!”
She obviously expected me to deal with Susie—make Susie like her. Most teachers would have pulled Susie aside and had a long, soulful discussion on the necessity of liking one another. I startled the little girl very much by saying something quite other.
“It is Susie’s democratic right not to like you. She doesn’t have to like anyone. You don’t have to like anyone. She may not hurt you. She may not say bad things about you or damage your property, but there is no reason why she must like you.”
She went back to her seat. (Fifteen minutes later she and Susie were chattering together like magpies.) She typifies much of what is and has been wrong with American foreign policy. We want to get our own way (completely understandable in a great power), and we go into paroxysms of self-recrimination if some nation says it doesn’t like us.
We view Britain’s Prime Minister Palmerston as a cynic because he made the sensible observation that “Great Powers have no friends, only interests”. But I doubt very much that he would have wept if “Susie” had told him she didn’t like him. He ran a very successful foreign policy.
It goes deep into the heart of American mythology to believe that we must be liked by everyone we meet—and that, ideally, we must like them.
Why?
This need to be liked reached the height of silliness in the last Presidential Election. We were actually judging our candidates on which one of them was better liked by the Susie’s of the world! Obama won a pot full of votes by appearing—as a CANDIDATE!!—with crowds of cheering Europeans. (Do they vote?)
(We saw what that was worth when he tried to move the Olympics to Chicago and when he tried to paste together an agreement in Copenhagen. His outreach to the Muslim world from Cairo didn’t amount to all that much, either. Susie has to respect—and even fear—you before she gets cooperative. Lord Palmerston understood that.)
A comedian has to worry whether audiences like him enough to laugh; a politician has to worry whether or not his constituents like him enough to keep him in office—but someone making foreign policy and deciding on peace and war should not have likeability as his highest priority.
As any salesman can tell you, once you’ve got the prospective buyer concerned over whether or not you like him—whether or not the buyer is concerned about the salesman’s good will and friendship, he’s GOT him. The poor chap can be manipulated by his own needs into buying almost anything. It’s an effective tool, playing on someone’s need to be liked.
Let’s let neither our friends nor our enemies play us like that. It’s nice if you do—it’s perfectly all right if you choose not to. We can live without Susie’s friendship when necessary. We don’t have, and we don’t need to have, a thousand friends. None of us do.

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 V

When we talk about the 1920s, the Depression and World War II, we resolutely live in a land of almost total myth. We were on the make—our statesmen as much as any businessman. We had been quarreling over who would control the British Empire since the 1750s when Franklin wrote, “in one century, the center of English speaking power will be North America”.
Britain tried desperately to prevent this—at places like Bunker Hill and Saratoga. She lost. She tried to hang onto the Great Lakes after the Revolution; she lost again. She tried to keep us out of Oregon and Washington—she gave up and ceded them.
She tried to keep us out of Texas and Cuba; we told her we would take either or both whenever we were able (Monroe Doctrine). We did. She tied to limit our control over a Central American transcontinental canal. She failed. She finally conceded the Caribbean to us in 1903.
When France and Russia made an alliance—and Germany, Italy and Austria allied, all in the 1890s—England realized she could no longer govern the planet from a position of splendid isolation. She turned to allies. She began talking to France; she allied with Japan and, very much, she turned her eyes toward her feistiest commercial rival, the North American colossus.
(When Napoleon sold Louisiana to the US he predicted, “I have created a colossus on the North American continent that will one day bring England to her knees.” In World War II we carried out the prophecy.)
We waited until England (and France) were nearly on their knees (and Russia was destroyed) before coming in and rescuing England in 1917. England was tottering on the brink of bankruptcy; we were fabulously rich.
We allowed Britain to go on spending money she did not have, keeping the Muslims quiescent, preventing the slave trade in Africa, and holding the line against our most formidable planetary rival, the new Soviet Union. We stayed home, needed to spend almost nothing for defense, and concentrated on making money.
At Versailles (1919) and after we helped force central Europe into bankruptcy and near starvation. Our markets went up and up and up. We paid no attention while the supposedly democratic (and even Christian) new government of revolutionary China became more and more corrupt, turning even to the Nazis for training and support.
With withering contempt we thwarted every aspiration of the newly prominent Asiatic power, Japan. We forced her to sink a large part of her navy to keep at only 60% of our fleet. We denied her access to funds and raw materials. We forced England to end her treaty with her.
We were a bit like an obliviously drunken man staggering through a room full of delicate china, crystal and bric-a-brac. We refused to acknowledge our own strength—or the responsibility that came with it. We kept up the myth that we were just a little fellow (like the United States of the early 19th Century) and there was nothing we could do or were obligated to do about anyone else.
This lay at the core of American economic, political and military isolationism. We firmly refused to accept that we had become the biggest kid on the block—that whatever we did affected everyone else. We hid behind the British Empire as we always had done—pretending it had not become an empty shell that a single blast would completely blow away.
Finally the whole rest of the planet went into economic heart failure. This brought us down too—although we refused again to acknowledge a correlation. We ignored Hitler. We ignored Stalin. One thing we could not ignore—and we owe FDR for this.
He came out of that small group of East Coast Imperialist who saw clearly we were an Empire—and must act like one. He recognized that our historic interest in controlling China (going back before Jamestown) was at risk because of the new Japanese power.
In 1934, he began a ten year navel building program—a fleet that could and would crush Japan. At long last the American giant was stirring—but still not seeing clearly through the fog of myth. But at least it was stirring a bit.

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.