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.