Year 501 (35 page)

8. “Our Nature and Traditions”

There are many other “success stories” in the Caribbean and Central America, the Philippines, Africa, in fact wherever Western power and capitalist ideology have reached. The few partial exceptions, mostly in the Japanese orbit, have escaped by radically violating the prescribed rules of the game, under special circumstances that are not likely to recur.
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These basic truths and their meaning, which would be taught in elementary schools in free societies, must be kept far removed from consciousness as we advance towards Year 501 of the Old World Order.

And so they are. Merely to take the case closest to hand, the US-run charnel house in Central America in the 1980s, we find that cultivated opinion takes pride in what we have wrought. Typical is a report by
Washington Post
Central America correspondent Lee Hockstader on a meeting in Guatemala of the new breed of conservative Presidents, freely elected at last without a trace of foreign influence. This “new wave of democracy” has “shifted politicians' priorities” from the days when they “traditionally represented the established order.” The proof is that they have now dedicated themselves to serving the poor with an imaginative new approach: “Central Americans to use Trickle-down Strategy in War on Poverty,” the headline reads. “Committed to free-market economics,” the Presidents have abandoned vapid rhetoric about land reform and social welfare programs, adopting at last a serious idea: “a trickle-down approach to aid the poor.” “The idea is to help the poor without threatening the basic power structure,” a regional economist observes. This brilliant and innovative conception overturns the “preferential option for the poor” of the Latin American Bishops. Now that we have driven this naive idea from the heads of our little brown brothers by Pol Pot-style terror, we can return to our traditional vocation of serving the poor, somehow not drowning in our own hypocrisy—the one truly memorable achievement.

Barbara Crossette reports in the
New York Times
that Central America illustrates “what Bush Administration officials regard as one of their most successful foreign policy initiatives: to bring peace, disarmament and economic development to this tormented region”; she wastes no words on how and why it was tormented, and by whom. “The strategy was immeasurably assisted by the collapse of the Soviet Union,” she continues, repeating the convenient fairy tale that the US assault was undertaken in defense against the Evil Empire. El Salvador is “the most violent theater of East-West conflict in the hemisphere,” Tim Golden proclaims on the front page; perhaps some Soviet counterpart wrote in 1956 that Hungary is “the most violent theater of East-West conflict in Eastern Europe”—however shameful, a claim that would have been far more plausible, in the irrelevant real world.

For the larger picture, we naturally turn to
New York Times
chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman, who takes as his text Congressman Les Aspin's proclamation that “The emerging world is likely to lack the clarity of the cold war...The old world was good guys and bad guys. The new world is gray guys.” Developing this theme, Friedman observes that “Normally, Washington gets rather exercised about the toppling of freely elected presidents.” But now life is harder. Some of those elected may not be clean upstanding folk as in the past, and we may have to make sharper discriminations. It won't be as easy as when Washington got “exercised about the toppling o
f
” Goulart, Arbenz, Allende, Bosch...

Even before, we did not always support only good guys, Friedman recognizes, recalling such unpleasant folk as the Shah and Marcos. But that deviation from high principle is easily handled: “During the cold war the United States did not really have the luxury or burden of choosing its friends,” but “simply had to identify who was with it in the grand struggle with the ‘Evil Empire' led by Moscow.” Our real values were demonstrated by the “fact” that “Washington did press for democracy, free markets and other ideals”—a declaration of some audacity, but safe enough in the reigning intellectual culture.

The “Soviet threat” forced on us “a degree of cynicism in foreign affairs, which was contrary to our nature and traditions,” a senior Administration policymaker adds with the
Times
imprimatur. Neither tarries on some questions that come to mind. To mention a few: How are “our nature and traditions” illustrated by our practice before the Soviet Union threatened our existence in 1917? Or by the regular pattern of concocting “Soviet threats” on the most ludicrous pretexts to justify atrocities undertaken to preserve “stability” in our special sense of the term? Nor do they trouble to explain exactly what the Soviet threat had to do with our support for genocidal monsters from Indonesia to Guatemala, or how it explains the close correlation between torture and US aid.

The same official warns that we should not revert to our traditional stand “of granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy.” The world is still too harsh a place for us to “revert to form,” slipping back unthinkingly to our role of world benefactor while ignoring “the national interest,” bemused by “Wilsonian” idealism. The latter concept has an interesting status; it does not refer to what Wilson did—for example, his murderous interventions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic—or even what he said, when push came to shove. The same holds, more generally, of the concept “our values.” Thus, Friedman quotes Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, who expresses his concern that we will persist in past practices instead of rising to the current challenge. “For years we have just pressed a shorthand version of our values—free elections and free markets—without realizing that the fullest expression of our values required more” than the limited mission of righteousness that has guided us heretofore. As in the case of Wilsonianism, the concept “our values” is entirely independent of what we do or even profess, except before the cameras.

With the global enemy out of the way, “the emerging yardstick is one of democratic values,” Friedman concludes, doubtless thinking of George Bush's attitude towards Suharto, the Gulf emirates and Saddam Hussein (before his unfortunate error of August 2, 1990), and other attractive figures whose appeal has outlasted the Cold War—and had little to do with it in the first place.

“No satire of Funston could reach perfection, because Funston occupies that summit himself,” Mark Twain wrote, referring to one of the heroes of the Philippine slaughter: he is “satire incarnated.”
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The device of eliminating history by a wave at the Cold War, no matter how foolish the pretense, is one that is to be highly recommended to the aspiring servant of power, given what history actually tells us. This is only the most recent application of the technique of “change of course,” regularly invoked when some ugliness finally breaks through the elegant and smoothly functioning mechanisms of suppression: Yes, there was an unfortunate lapse, but now we can march on behind the banner of our high ideals.

9. Some Tools of the Trade

The doctrine of “change of course” is only one of the devices that must be mastered by those who hope to attain respectability and prestige; several others have been mentioned, and we turn to other handy procedures below. The preceding discussion has touched upon a more subtle array of notions that are essential for the aspiring intellectual: “economic miracle,” “American success story,” “free market triumph,” etc. These are elusive, and require a bit of care.

The term “economic miracle” refers to a complex of nice macroeconomic statistics, great profits for foreign investors, and a life of luxury for local elites; and, in the small print, increasing misery for the general population, quite typically. It is no wonder that these miracles are so admired by commentators in the press and elsewhere. As long as the façade remains in place, such societies are “American success stories” and “triumphs of capitalism and the free market.” But when it collapses, the very same examples turn into a demonstration of the dread pitfalls of statism, socialism, Marxism-Leninism, and other sins.

The Brazilian case illustrates the doctrinal pattern. Gerald Haines was not alone in celebrating the triumph of capitalism and American know-how in Brazil, though his timing—1989—was a bit off. The brilliant achievements of the Generals and their right-thinking technocratic advisers made Brazil “the Latin American darling of the international business community,”
Business Latin America
reported in 1972. Arthur Burns, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, was full of praise for Delfim's “miraculous” work. As the “Chicago boys” were invited in by another collection of fascist killers after the overthrow of Allende in Chile a year later, Chicago school economist Arnold Harberger held up Brazil “as the exemplar of a glowing future under economic liberalism,” David Felix recalls. A few years later, in a 1980 interview, he was to applaud Pinochet's successes under the same model: “Santiago has never looked better. Consumer goods from all over the world are readily available at cheap prices”; there are even jobs for people with the right qualifications, like police torturers. True, real wages had collapsed, but the real value of imports was up 38 percent by 1980, thanks to the increase of 276 percent in luxury goods while capital imports fell sharply. Foreign debt skyrocketed (to be paid off later by the poor), and unions and peasant movements had been crushed in a wave of terror. But the rich were doing just fine; everything was on course in Chile, as in Brazil, thanks to proper application of economic theory.

By the early ‘80s, the Brazilian economy was spinning towards disaster, and the tune changed. Brazil was dropped from the list of “neoliberal successes,” Felix observed in 1986, though some had not heard the message. In a 1989 discussion of the Brazilian military regime, Harvard Government professor Frances Hagopian, like Haines, still admired “the impressive extent to which the military succeeded in its economic objectives,” while expressing doubts as to whether this “extraordinary economic success” really required the repression and torture.
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While the “economic miracle” was churning merrily along, Brazil's achievements were heralded as a demonstration of the marvels of free-market capitalism, the happy result of American guidance and kind assistance. After the collapse, Brazil demonstrates the
failure
to follow US advice and the sound principles of economic liberalism. Brazil's plight is attributed to its state socialist deviation from economic orthodoxy. We thus derive yet another proof of the superiority of capitalism and the free market. To account for Brazil's sorry state, we may now invoke the very measures that brought about the “free market triumph” while it was still possible to be dazzled by the “economic miracle”: the indefinite wage controls instituted by the much-praised neoliberal economist Delfim, the state corporations established to overcome the severe recession caused by monetarist strategies and to prevent a complete takeover of the economy by foreign corporations, and the import-substitution strategy that kept the economy afloat in the mid-1980s.

It all goes to show, once again, how supple an instrument ideology can be, in well-trained hands.

A great sigh of relief accompanied the victory in 1989 of the attractive representative of the Brazilian elite, Fernando Collor de Mello, in an election in which the two candidates could actually be distinguished without a microscope, the other being the labor leader Luís Inácio da Silva (“Lula”). With “the playing field levelled” by Collar's huge financial resources and clear warnings by those who own the country that they would sink it down the tube if the elections came out the wrong way, Collor was able to eke out a victory. There was great enthusiasm in the doctrinal institutions as he set forth on the approved neoliberal path, with expectations for yet another “success story for American-style capitalism.” Briefly, however. The economy fell from 3.3 percent growth in 1989 to -4.6 percent in 1990. Per capita income fell by 6 percent from 1990 to 1992 as production continued to decline, health spending was cut by 33 percent, education spending sank further, and the tax burden on wage earners rose 60 percent. By mid-1992, James Brooke reports, “Mr. Collar's failed economic policies” were “feeding national discontent.” And to top it off, Collor was facing impeachment after exposure of a corruption scandal that also set new records.
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As in the case of Brazil, “success stories of capitalism and democracy” achieve this status irrespective of the means employed. The import substitution strategy that saved Brazil from utter ruin was also an essential component of the “economic miracles” of the Pacific Rim. These miracles came into being under harsh authoritarian regimes that intervened massively in economic planning and kept tight control (by terror if necessary, as at Kwangju), not only of labor, as is the norm, but of capital as well (see chapter 4.2). The achievements of the NICs, constituting an “economic miracle,” thereby illustrate the virtues of democracy and the free market. Thus the
New York Times
cites South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong to teach the lesson that “as an economic mechanism, democracy demonstrably works.” And democratic socialist Dennis Wrong writes admiringly of the “striking capitalist successes” of the same grand democracies “under capitalist economies free from control by rickety authoritarian governments”—correct, in that the authoritarian state capitalist governments were efficient, powerful, and interventionist, not “rickety” (in contrast, he explains, Cuba, Nicaragua, and other officially designated enemies demonstrate the failure of Marxist-Leninist dogma, no other factor in their travail being detectable to the properly blinkered eye).
Washington
Quarterly
editor Brad Roberts writes that “Nondemocratic governments have on the whole shown themselves incapable of providing the framework necessary for economic adaptation...,” thinking perhaps of the NICs, or in earlier years, Hitler Germany—though in this case, we have to ask just what he means by “democratic,” given his faith in “the US commitment to democracy abroad” and to the “protection of human rights,” particularly in the 1980s.
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