What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_the_classroom_didnt_teach_me_about_
the_american_empire_20151005/
Posted on Oct 5, 2015
By Howard Zinn, TomDispatch
A portrait of Zinn. (cdsessums / CC BY-SA 2.0)
This article by the late Howard Zinn is a reprint from the archives of
TomDispatch. Read Tom Engelhardt's introduction here.
With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military
bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a
question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once
fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.
However, the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to
me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force
in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second
thoughts about the purity of the "Good War," even after being horrified by
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in
Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American
"Empire."
I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial
powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When,
after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took
courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts
called "The Age of Imperialism." It invariably referred to the
Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that
followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few
years. There was no overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to
the idea of a more far-ranging empire-or period of "imperialism."
I recall the classroom map (labeled "Western Expansion") which presented the
march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That
huge acquisition of land called "The Louisiana Purchase" hinted at nothing
but vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been
occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or
forced from their homes-what we now call "ethnic cleansing"-so that whites
could settle the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging
"civilization" and its brutal discontents.
Neither the discussions of "Jacksonian democracy" in history courses, nor
the popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, told me
about the "Trail of Tears," the deadly forced march of "the five civilized
tribes" westward from Georgia and Alabama across the Mississippi, leaving
4,000 dead in their wake. No treatment of the Civil War mentioned the Sand
Creek massacre of hundreds of Indian villagers in Colorado just as
"emancipation" was proclaimed for black people by Lincoln's administration.
That classroom map also had a section to the south and west labeled "Mexican
Cession." This was a handy euphemism for the aggressive war against Mexico
in 1846 in which the United States seized half of that country's land,
giving us California and the great Southwest. The term "Manifest Destiny,"
used at that time, soon of course became more universal. On the eve of the
Spanish-American War in 1898, the Washington Post saw beyond Cuba: "We are
face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of
the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle."
The violent march across the continent, and even the invasion of Cuba,
appeared to be within a natural sphere of U.S. interest. After all, hadn't
the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere to be under our
protection? But with hardly a pause after Cuba came the invasion of the
Philippines, halfway around the world. The word "imperialism" now seemed a
fitting one for U.S. actions. Indeed, that long, cruel war-treated quickly
and superficially in the history books-gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist
League, in which William James and Mark Twain were leading figures. But
this was not something I learned in university either.
The "Sole Superpower" Comes into View
Reading outside the classroom, however, I began to fit the pieces of history
into a larger mosaic. What at first had seemed like a purely passive
foreign policy in the decade leading up to the First World War now appeared
as a succession of violent interventions: the seizure of the Panama Canal
zone from Colombia, a naval bombardment of the Mexican coast, the dispatch
of the Marines to almost every country in Central America, occupying armies
sent to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As the much-decorated General
Smedley Butler, who participated in many of those interventions, wrote
later: "I was an errand boy for Wall Street."
At the very time I was learning this history-the years after World War
II-the United States was becoming not just another imperial power, but the
world's leading superpower. Determined to maintain and expand its monopoly
on nuclear weapons, it was taking over remote islands in the Pacific,
forcing the inhabitants to leave, and turning the islands into deadly
playgrounds for more atomic tests.
In his memoir, No Place to Hide, Dr. David Bradley, who monitored radiation
in those tests, described what was left behind as the testing teams went
home: "[R]adioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of Bikini and its
sad-eyed patient exiles." The tests in the Pacific were followed, over the
years, by more tests in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, more than a thousand
tests in all.
When the war in Korea began in 1950, I was still studying history as a
graduate student at Columbia University. Nothing in my classes prepared me
to understand American policy in Asia. But I was reading I. F. Stone's
Weekly. Stone was among the very few journalists who questioned the
official justification for sending an army to Korea. It seemed clear to me
then that it was not the invasion of South Korea by the North that prompted
U.S. intervention, but the desire of the United States to have a firm
foothold on the continent of Asia, especially now that the Communists were
in power in China.
Years later, as the covert intervention in Vietnam grew into a massive and
brutal military operation, the imperial designs of the United States became
yet clearer to me. In 1967, I wrote a little book called Vietnam: The
Logic of Withdrawal. By that time I was heavily involved in the movement
against the war.
When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me by
Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the
National Security Council. Explaining the U.S. interest in Southeast Asia,
they spoke bluntly of the country's motives as a quest for "tin, rubber,
oil."
Neither the desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft riots
of the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the
century, nor the strong opposition to World War I-indeed no antiwar movement
in the history of the nation reached the scale of the opposition to the war
in Vietnam. At least part of that opposition rested on an understanding that
more than Vietnam was at stake, that the brutal war in that tiny country was
part of a grander imperial design.
Various interventions following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam seemed to reflect
the desperate need of the still-reigning superpower-even after the fall of
its powerful rival, the Soviet Union-to establish its dominance everywhere.
Hence the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the bombing assault on Panama in
1989, the first Gulf war of 1991. Was George Bush Sr. heartsick over Saddam
Hussein's seizure of Kuwait, or was he using that event as an opportunity to
move U.S. power firmly into the coveted oil region of the Middle East? Given
the history of the United States, given its obsession with Middle Eastern
oil dating from Franklin Roosevelt's 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi
Arabia, and the CIA's overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government in
Iran in 1953, it is not hard to decide that question.
Justifying Empire
The ruthless attacks of September 11th (as the official 9/11 Commission
acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of U.S. expansion in the Middle
East and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense Department
acknowledged, according to Chalmers Johnson's book The Sorrows of Empire,
the existence of more than 700 American military bases outside of the United
States.
Since that date, with the initiation of a "war on terrorism," many more
bases have been established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the
desert of Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else a
compliant nation could be bribed or coerced.
When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in
the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to
be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I
was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew-what we had in
common was that we both read books-that he considered this "an imperialist
war." Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and
conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not
long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a
mission.
In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers
and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My
motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to
help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression,
militarism, and racism.
The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I
knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry
Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the
coming of "The American Century." The time had arrived, he said, for the
United States "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for
such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit."
We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial design.
It has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual handmaidens of the
Bush administration, but with assurances that the motive of this "influence"
is benign, that the "purposes"-whether in Luce's formulation or more recent
ones-are noble, that this is an "imperialism lite." As George Bush said in
his second inaugural address: "Spreading liberty around the world is the
calling of our time." The New York Times called that speech "striking for
its idealism."
The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project-Democrats and
Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it.
President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the
year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used "her navy and her army. as the
instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression." And
Bill Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: "The values you learned
here will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the
world."
For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the
world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric,
often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that
can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of
American GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes-in the Middle
East and in the Mississippi Delta.
Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting
our good sense-that war is necessary for security, that expansion is
fundamental to civilization-begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we
reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living
in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?
Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote
the classic A People's History of the United States and A People's History
of American Empire, told in comics form, with Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle.
He taught at Spelman College, a black women's college in Atlanta, where he
became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for
his support of student protesters, Zinn became a professor of political
science at Boston University. He was the author of many books, including an
autobiography, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. He received the
Lannan Foundation Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Eugene V. Debs award
for his writing and political activism.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2008 Howard Zinn
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_the_classroom_didnt_teach_me_about_
the_american_empire_20151005/
Posted on Oct 5, 2015
By Howard Zinn, TomDispatch
A portrait of Zinn. (cdsessums / CC BY-SA 2.0)
This article by the late Howard Zinn is a reprint from the archives of
TomDispatch. Read Tom Engelhardt's introduction here.
With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military
bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a
question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once
fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.
However, the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to
me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force
in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second
thoughts about the purity of the "Good War," even after being horrified by
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in
Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American
"Empire."
I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial
powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When,
after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took
courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts
called "The Age of Imperialism." It invariably referred to the
Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that
followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few
years. There was no overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to
the idea of a more far-ranging empire-or period of "imperialism."
I recall the classroom map (labeled "Western Expansion") which presented the
march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That
huge acquisition of land called "The Louisiana Purchase" hinted at nothing
but vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been
occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or
forced from their homes-what we now call "ethnic cleansing"-so that whites
could settle the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging
"civilization" and its brutal discontents.
Neither the discussions of "Jacksonian democracy" in history courses, nor
the popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, told me
about the "Trail of Tears," the deadly forced march of "the five civilized
tribes" westward from Georgia and Alabama across the Mississippi, leaving
4,000 dead in their wake. No treatment of the Civil War mentioned the Sand
Creek massacre of hundreds of Indian villagers in Colorado just as
"emancipation" was proclaimed for black people by Lincoln's administration.
That classroom map also had a section to the south and west labeled "Mexican
Cession." This was a handy euphemism for the aggressive war against Mexico
in 1846 in which the United States seized half of that country's land,
giving us California and the great Southwest. The term "Manifest Destiny,"
used at that time, soon of course became more universal. On the eve of the
Spanish-American War in 1898, the Washington Post saw beyond Cuba: "We are
face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of
the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle."
The violent march across the continent, and even the invasion of Cuba,
appeared to be within a natural sphere of U.S. interest. After all, hadn't
the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere to be under our
protection? But with hardly a pause after Cuba came the invasion of the
Philippines, halfway around the world. The word "imperialism" now seemed a
fitting one for U.S. actions. Indeed, that long, cruel war-treated quickly
and superficially in the history books-gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist
League, in which William James and Mark Twain were leading figures. But this
was not something I learned in university either.
The "Sole Superpower" Comes into View
Reading outside the classroom, however, I began to fit the pieces of history
into a larger mosaic. What at first had seemed like a purely passive foreign
policy in the decade leading up to the First World War now appeared as a
succession of violent interventions: the seizure of the Panama Canal zone
from Colombia, a naval bombardment of the Mexican coast, the dispatch of the
Marines to almost every country in Central America, occupying armies sent to
Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As the much-decorated General Smedley
Butler, who participated in many of those interventions, wrote later: "I was
an errand boy for Wall Street."
At the very time I was learning this history-the years after World War
II-the United States was becoming not just another imperial power, but the
world's leading superpower. Determined to maintain and expand its monopoly
on nuclear weapons, it was taking over remote islands in the Pacific,
forcing the inhabitants to leave, and turning the islands into deadly
playgrounds for more atomic tests.
In his memoir, No Place to Hide, Dr. David Bradley, who monitored radiation
in those tests, described what was left behind as the testing teams went
home: "[R]adioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of Bikini and its
sad-eyed patient exiles." The tests in the Pacific were followed, over the
years, by more tests in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, more than a thousand
tests in all.
When the war in Korea began in 1950, I was still studying history as a
graduate student at Columbia University. Nothing in my classes prepared me
to understand American policy in Asia. But I was reading I. F. Stone's
Weekly. Stone was among the very few journalists who questioned the official
justification for sending an army to Korea. It seemed clear to me then that
it was not the invasion of South Korea by the North that prompted U.S.
intervention, but the desire of the United States to have a firm foothold on
the continent of Asia, especially now that the Communists were in power in
China.
Years later, as the covert intervention in Vietnam grew into a massive and
brutal military operation, the imperial designs of the United States became
yet clearer to me. In 1967, I wrote a little book called Vietnam: The Logic
of Withdrawal. By that time I was heavily involved in the movement against
the war.
When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me by
Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the
National Security Council. Explaining the U.S. interest in Southeast Asia,
they spoke bluntly of the country's motives as a quest for "tin, rubber,
oil."
Neither the desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft riots
of the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the
century, nor the strong opposition to World War I-indeed no antiwar movement
in the history of the nation reached the scale of the opposition to the war
in Vietnam. At least part of that opposition rested on an understanding that
more than Vietnam was at stake, that the brutal war in that tiny country was
part of a grander imperial design.
Various interventions following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam seemed to reflect
the desperate need of the still-reigning superpower-even after the fall of
its powerful rival, the Soviet Union-to establish its dominance everywhere.
Hence the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the bombing assault on Panama in
1989, the first Gulf war of 1991. Was George Bush Sr. heartsick over Saddam
Hussein's seizure of Kuwait, or was he using that event as an opportunity to
move U.S. power firmly into the coveted oil region of the Middle East? Given
the history of the United States, given its obsession with Middle Eastern
oil dating from Franklin Roosevelt's 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi
Arabia, and the CIA's overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government in
Iran in 1953, it is not hard to decide that question.
Justifying Empire
The ruthless attacks of September 11th (as the official 9/11 Commission
acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of U.S. expansion in the Middle
East and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense Department
acknowledged, according to Chalmers Johnson's book The Sorrows of Empire,
the existence of more than 700 American military bases outside of the United
States.
Since that date, with the initiation of a "war on terrorism," many more
bases have been established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the
desert of Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else a
compliant nation could be bribed or coerced.
When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in
the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to
be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I
was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew-what we had in
common was that we both read books-that he considered this "an imperialist
war." Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and
conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not
long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a
mission.
In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers
and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My
motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to
help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression,
militarism, and racism.
The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I
knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry
Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the
coming of "The American Century." The time had arrived, he said, for the
United States "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for
such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit."
We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial design.
It has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual handmaidens of the
Bush administration, but with assurances that the motive of this "influence"
is benign, that the "purposes"-whether in Luce's formulation or more recent
ones-are noble, that this is an "imperialism lite." As George Bush said in
his second inaugural address: "Spreading liberty around the world is the
calling of our time." The New York Times called that speech "striking for
its idealism."
The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project-Democrats and
Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it.
President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the
year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used "her navy and her army. as the
instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression." And Bill
Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: "The values you learned here
will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world."
For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the
world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric,
often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that
can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of
American GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes-in the Middle
East and in the Mississippi Delta.
Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting
our good sense-that war is necessary for security, that expansion is
fundamental to civilization-begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we
reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living
in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?
Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote
the classic A People's History of the United States and A People's History
of American Empire, told in comics form, with Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle.
He taught at Spelman College, a black women's college in Atlanta, where he
became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for
his support of student protesters, Zinn became a professor of political
science at Boston University. He was the author of many books, including an
autobiography, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. He received the
Lannan Foundation Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Eugene V. Debs award
for his writing and political activism.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2008 Howard Zinn
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