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Modern American Imperialism -
02-19-2003, 06:42 PM
Enjoy this interview with an actual historian.
Howard Zinn, now a professor emeritus in Boston University's history department, has been one of the most influential US historians of his generation. On the day before George Bush was inaugurated as president, BS editors Joe Lockard and Joel Schalit talked with Zinn to listen to the observations of an academic activist concerning this juncture in American history.
BS: Since George W. Bush seems so much the emblem of commerce and the privileging of capital in the US, how might he also speak to an older history of robber barons and 19th century capitalism?
Zinn: Let's go back to President McKinley and the age of the robber barons, and ask who was the original cause of people like George Bush? In 1896, McKinley beats the populist candidate William Jennings Bryan and represents corporate wealth. It's a time when monopolies are being created. A few years after McKinley's election, US Steel is formed from a merger of two major steel companies. The railroads are consolidating, and the Supreme Court is making all sorts of decisions in favor of big business and corporations.
So sure, you can go back to the era of the robber barons in the late 19th century and say here we have Bush again, representing robber barons. But it would be deceptive to pretend that this is a departure from what we have had under Clinton or Carter, just as McKinley wasn't a tremendous departure from Grover Cleveland. Grover Cleveland was a Democrat -- and McKinley was a Republican. And although McKinley was more in tune with corporate power than Cleveland, Cleveland was certainly a friend of big business and not a friend of labor. It was Grover Cleveland who brought out the troops in 1894 to break the Pullman Strike. The point I'm making is that whether you have a Republican or a Democrat in power, the robber barons are still there. If you look at Clinton, his administration was very good to the corporations. The Dow Jones average during the Clinton years went up from four thousand to ten thousand. Well, whom did it go up for? Who benefited mostly from that? The great stockholders of the nation are the ones who benefited the most. Under the Clinton administration, more mergers of huge corporations took place -- more than any others that had ever taken place before under any administration. I'm saying this not to soften the impact of Bush's alliance with the rich -- only to say that the Democrats have made a similar alliance with the rich, except that they cover this over with a lot of different kinds of rhetoric and a softer approach because the Democrats need the votes of the labor unions, women and black people. Nevertheless, whether you have Republicans or Democrats in power, big business is the most powerful voice in the halls of Congress and in the ears of the president of the United States. So Bush is more of the same, only more so.
BS: You mention primarily domestic policy and the internal organization of capital in the US. How about any comparison between the old-fashioned imperialism of William McKinley, and the questions surrounding the WTO today? Are they comparable?
Zinn: Well, they're generally comparable, although they look different. Under McKinley, we were engaging in blatant military occupation of foreign territories and blatant imperialism. Under McKinley we go into Cuba in 1898, drive the Spaniards out, and put ourselves in -- including our banks, our railroads, our corporations. We take Puerto Rico, Hawaii, we send an army to take the Philippines. It's blatant imperialism at it's height in those years.
What we have in our time with the WTO and the power of the World Bank and the power of the IMF and the reach of American corporations around the world is a more sophisticated kind of imperialism in which we don't have to send armies into other countries. We send corporations instead. We send Disney and McDonalds into other countries. When we think we have to, we're certainly ready to send a military force abroad. The elder Bush sent a military force into Iraq ten years ago in 1991. I would call that 'imperialism'. Imperialism always has an excuse. The elder Bush's excuse was that the Iraqis had invaded Kuwait. And we had the excuse with Cuba -- if not us, then it's the Spaniards. We had an excuse in the Philippines. If we don't take it, somebody else will. We had an excuse in the Persian Gulf in 1991 with Kuwait, but it was oil. President Bush was not weeping tears over the Kuwaitis. He didn't weep tears over the fate of any other countries which were invaded by other powers. Oil was the consideration. When you're sending a military force halfway across the world to engage in a war for oil, that's imperialism. What we have is a more sophisticated form of imperialism, which is economic. But lurking in the background, always ready to go, is an armed force. That's why, even though the Soviet Union is gone, the politicos -- not just the Republicans, but the Democrats -- wanted a huge military budget. As huge as it was during the Cold War. Why did they want it? So they could use our military power, if necessary, to reach into far corners of the world and extend our political and economic power through military bases. Imperialism is the factor in American policy, not just since 1898, but in fact long before it when we were expanding across this continent and taking away Indian lands in order to enlarge the territory of the United States. We have been an imperial power and an expansionist power for a very long time. It will continue regardless of whether we have Republican or Democratic administrations in power. In fact, it's hard to tell who would be more likely to further the ends of imperialism. The Democrats or the Republicans, Bush or Gore? I mean yes, in domestic policy you can find some differences among them. Look at the appointments to the Attorney General, environmental affairs, and so on....but in foreign policy, it's very hard to find a difference. And I think that characteristic of not imitating the British style but following a new American style of keeping a kind of nominal independence for a government in the Third World but at the same time insuring economic control and maintaining the option of military intervention when that economic control was threatened--that became a common characteristic.
RL: Maybe you could give some other examples of that.
HZ: In the early part of the 20th century, after the Spanish-American War, that's exactly what the United States did again and again in the Caribbean, in Guatemala, in Honduras, in Nicaragua: overthrowing a government in Nicaragua when a liberal government threatened American domination; occupying Haiti and the Dominican Republic when it seemed that governments would arise which would not play ball with the United States--long occupations of those two countries.
And then of course, coming down to our time, that is, to the post-World War 2 period, I think of Chile. Nobody would refer to Chile as a colony of the United States. But the United States corporations--Anaconda Copper, ITT--they had very important financial interests in Chile. And when a kind of moderately left, moderately Marxist government came to power--they kept referring to it as a Marxist government, which it really wasn't, that is, Allende's government [elected in 1970] was more I would say like a left New Deal government--but it was a government that might threaten the interests of ITT and Anaconda Copper. First the United States worked hard to try to make sure that the elections in Chile did not go towards Allende. And they failed. The popular decision of the Chilean people went against that. Then the United States worked on their next option, which was a military coup.
Official American government documents that were brought forth to the Church Committee [in the U.S. Senate] in 1975 investigating the CIA showed very clearly what the role of Henry Kissinger and the American government were in establishing Pinochet in power [the Chilean general who led a fascist coup in 1973], therefore putting back corporateinterests in Chile.
You see this pattern again and again in various parts of the world: the maintenance of economic interests and the maintaining in power, or the putting in power, of governments which, however tyrannical and dictatorial, would play ball with the United States interests. The overthrow of the Arbenz government in 1954 in Guatemala is another example of that. The United Fruit Company very, very clearly worked with the American CIA to overthrow a democratically elected government which dared to expropriate the lands of United Fruit. And expropriation is not even the word, because they weren't going to do what a revolutionary government would really do, and that is take over United Fruit lands without compensation--they were going to compensate the United Fruit Company. But that certainly was not acceptable, and so the CIA, the U.S. government, worked to overthrow it. And that's been the pattern in so many places of the world. Along with this kind of new imperialism, this neocolonialism, comes a kind of cultural imperialism in which American media, American television, American press--and of course American products--appear all over the world and in many cases effectively destroy indigenous cultures in various parts of the world...bring so-called "civilization'' to people who are"backwards,'' which means bringing corruption.
RL: Another way U.S. imperialism functions is through international or multilateral organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank, which conceal the actual imperialist interests of the U.S.
HZ: I think the operations of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are a very good example of neo-imperialism. Because under the cover of international organizations, similar to using the United Nations as a cover for military action in Korea or in Iraq, these international organizations dominated by the United States act really to deplete the resources of Third World countries--by creating huge debts for them and forcing them to pay, in many cases like half of their national budget, to pay off the interest on these debts. And in return for the loans they demand that these governments cut down on whatever social services they are giving to their people. You might say they are creating in these countries a kind of mirror image of what is happening in the United States, where under the pretense of just trying to balance the budget, they cut down on social services while maintaining money for the military. So the IMF and the World Bank play a very nefarious role in the world. I think that is certainly part of what I would call neocolonialism.
RL: And there's the whole global network of U.S. military bases and staging areas.
HZ: Oh, yes. Think of the number of military bases we have in Japan, the number of military bases in Korea. When the people of the Philippines protested against military bases there, the United States was forced to withdraw, not completely of course, and then it became even more important for the United States to maintain military bases in Korea and Japan. And here we are still maintaining a huge number of troops in Germany when there is no longer an East Germany and WestGermany--refusing to give up our base in Cuba, the Guantanamo base. So it's a very far-flung network of American military and economic power.
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Modern American Imperialism
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