Nowtopian

Recent mural in San Francisco

There’s a lot of hand-wringing these days over the likelihood of Trump’s return to power. I find it hard to imagine that a majority of voters would choose him. Then again, I find it hard to believe that anyone thinks well of Joe Biden or the Democrats, given their blind support for the fascistic Netanyahu and their active participation in the genocidal campaign in Gaza, and their belligerent expansion of hostilities across the Middle East in the past months. The cash cow of arms expenditures unleashed by the Ukraine-Russia war is yet another example of the Democratic Party’s dependence on “military Keynesianism,” an economic program going back to WWII. I wrote about the war-mongering reality of the United States a couple of years ago, but I’m taking it up again after a few recent books I read.

In The Jakarta Method, Vince Bevins does a great job of summarizing the wholesale mass murder that was at the heart of U.S. Cold War policies.

…in the years 1945-1990, a loose network of US-backed anticommunist extermination programs emerged around the world, and they carried out mass murder in at least twenty-three countries. There was no central plan, no master control room where the whole thing was orchestrated, but I think that the extermination programs in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Taiwan, Thailand, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Vietnam should be seen as interconnected, and a crucial part of the US victory in the Cold War. (p. 238) …this loose network of extermination programs, organized and justified by anticommunist principles, was such an important part of the US victory [in the Cold War] that the violence profoundly shaped the world we live in today. (p. 239)

It’s a gripping claim and I think it’s indisputable. What Bevins does not try to do, but his book provides an important piece of foundational continuity for, is to show how the extermination campaigns under the aegis of “anti-communism,” while barbaric and largely ignored, denied, or immediately forgotten, were built on the same logic that has been running through U.S. history since its founding. The genocidal slaughter of American Indians begins well before the founding of the country in the late 18th century (not to mention the role of slavery in providing the capital to launch the industrial revolution). But as the post-Civil War wars were unleashed by the newly victorious and industrializing federal government, systematic extermination was the result in California and elsewhere.

There’s a wonderful exhibit of Bonnie Ora Sherk’s work at Fort Mason right now.

Jonathan M. Katz’s 2021 book on General Smedley Butler, Gangsters of Capitalism, fills in another chapter in this sordid history. Butler started out a teenage Quaker anxious to earn his manhood by going to a “good war” to “liberate” Cuba from Spain in 1898. From there his life as a Marine goes on, most immediately being sent to the Philippines where a war of national liberation that the United States had initially claimed to support soon became an extended counterinsurgency effort for the U.S. military. During the next three decades, Smedley Butler climbed the ranks of the Marines while being put in the middle of one horrifying U.S. intervention after another. He was in Panama when with U.S. support they broke away from Colombia and became a separate nation just in time to sign a treaty giving the United States sovereign control over the Canal Zone (where they then built the Panama Canal). He was among the troops invading Nicaragua in the 1910s and installing a U.S.-friendly leader. He participated in the attack and invasion of Mexico in 1915, he became the defacto military leader of Haiti in the late 1910s and early 1920s. He was in China a couple of times, first to protect U.S. businesses during the Boxer Rebellion in early 1900s, then in 1927 as the forces under Chiang Kai-Shek unleashed a force of criminal gangs to carry out a wave of mass murder against the Communist Party of China in Shanghai. He even helped set the stage for the militarization of domestic policing during a stint as the head of Philadephia’s police. And there’s more (but you’ll have to read the book).

Katz sums up Butler’s role:

Smedley Butler had led troops on the bankers’ behalf to overthrow presidents in Nicaragua and Honduras, and gone on a spy run to investigate regime change on behalf of the oil companies in Mexico. He had risked his Marines’ lives for Standard Oil in China and worked with Murphy’s customs agents in an invasion that helped lead to a far-right dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. In Haiti, Butler had done what even the Croix de Feu and its French fascist allies could not: shut down a national assembly at gunpoint. (p. 325)

Butler’s most lasting mark on Haiti was the Gendarmerie. Following the example Trujillo set with the expansion of his Guardia Nacional in the Dominican Republic, near the end of the occupation the Gendarmerie was reorganized into a new national army, the Garde d’Haiti. “We cannot overemphasize the fundamental political difference between the Garde and the army that was dismantled by the Marines,” [Haitian historian] Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote. While Haiti’s original army “saw itself as the offspring of the struggle against slavery and colonialism. . . the Haitian Garde was specifically created to fight against other Haitiians. It received its baptism of fire in combat against its countrymen. And the Garde, like the [new] army it was to sire, has indeed never fought against anyone but Haitians. (p. 250)

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