Year 501 (52 page)

The US had achieved only a partial victory. On the negative side, the client regimes had fallen. On the positive side, the entire region was in ruins, and there was no fear that the “virus” of successful independent development might “infect” others. Improving the picture further, the region was now insulated from any residual danger by murderous military regimes that the US helped install and strongly supported. Another consequence, predictable years earlier, was that the indigenous forces in South Vietnam and Laos, unable to resist the US onslaught, had been decimated, leaving North Vietnam as the dominant force in Indochina.
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As to what would have happened had these forces survived and the countries allowed to develop in their own ways, one can only speculate. The press and journals of opinion are happy to serve up the desired formulas, but these, as usual, reflect doctrinal requirements, nothing more.

Basic policy remained constant in essentials: disentanglement from an unpopular and costly venture as soon as possible, but after the virus was destroyed and victory assured (by the 1970s, with increasing doubt that US client regimes could be sustained). Tactics were modified with changing circumstances and perceptions. Changes of Administration, including the Kennedy assassination, had no large-scale effect on policy, and not even any great effect on tactics, when account is taken of the objective situation and how it was perceived.

The scale of these colonial wars and their destructiveness was extraordinary, and the long-term import for international and domestic society correspondingly great. But in their essentials, the Indochina wars fall well within the history of the 500-year conquest, and more specifically, within the framework of the period of US hegemony.

Chapter 11

The Third World at Home

1. “The Paradox of ‘92”

The basic theme of the 500-year conquest is misread if it sets Europe—broadly construed—against the subject domains. As Adam Smith stressed, the interests of the architects of policy are not those of the general population; the internal class war is an inextricable element of the global conquest. One of the memories that reverberates through the 500 years is that “European societies were also colonized and plundered,” though the “better-organized” communities with “institutions for economic regulation and political self-government” and traditions of resistance were able to retain basic rights and even extend them through continuing struggle.
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The end of the affluent alliance and the onset of the “new imperial age” have intensified the internal class war. A corollary to the globalization of the economy is the entrenchment of Third World features at home: the steady drift towards a two-tiered society in which large sectors are superfluous for wealth-enhancement for the privileged. Even more than before, the rabble must be ideologically and physically controlled, deprived of organization and interchange, the prerequisite for constructive thinking and social action. “The paper has taken us one at a time and convinced us ‘how good the times' are,” Wobbly writer T-Bone Slim commented: “We have no opportunity to consult our neighbor to find out if the press speaketh the truth.”
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A large majority of the population regard the economic system as “inherently unfair,” look back at the Vietnam war as not a “mistake” but “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” favored diplomacy not war as the US prepared to bomb Iraq, and so on. But these are private thoughts; they do not raise the dread threat of democracy and freedom as long as there is no systematic way “to consult our neighbor.” Whatever the individual thoughts may be, collectively we march in the parade. No presidential candidate, for example, could possibly say “I opposed the Vietnam war on principled grounds and honor those who refused to obey the order to fight a war that was ‘fundamentally wrong and immoral'.”

In any system of governance, a major problem is to secure obedience. We therefore expect to find ideological institutions and cultural managers to direct and staff them. The only exception would be a society with an equitable distribution of resources and popular engagement in decision-making; that is, a democratic society with libertarian social forms. But meaningful democracy is a remote ideal, regarded as a danger to be averted, not a value to be achieved; the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” must be reduced to their spectator status, as Walter Lippmann phrased the theme that has long been common coin. The current mission is to ensure that any thought of controlling their destiny must be driven from the minds of the rascal multitude. Each person is to be an isolated receptacle of propaganda, helpless in the face of two external and hostile forces: the government and the private sector, with its sacred right to determine the basic character of social life. The second of these forces, furthermore, is to be veiled: its rights and power must be not only beyond challenge, but invisible, part of the natural order of things. We have travelled a fair distance on this path.

The rhetoric of the 1992 election campaign illustrates the process. The Republicans call for faith in the entrepreneur, accusing the “other party” of being the tool of social engineers who have brought the disaster of Communism and the welfare state (virtually indistinguishable). The Democrats counter that they only intend to improve the efficiency of the private sector, leaving its dictatorial rights over most of life and the political sphere unchallenged. Candidates say “vote for me,” and I will do so-and-so for you. Few believe them, but more important, a different process is unthinkable: that in their unions, political clubs, and other popular organizations people should formulate their own plans and projects and put forth candidates to represent them. Even more unthinkable is that the general public should have a voice in decisions about investment, production, the character of work, and other basic aspects of life. The minimal conditions for functioning democracy have been removed far beyond thought, a remarkable victory of the doctrinal system.

Toward the more totalitarian end of the spectrum, self-styled “conservatives” seek to distract the rascal multitude with jingoist and religious fanaticism, family values, and other standard tools of the trade. The spectacle has elicited some bemused commentary abroad. Observing the 1992 Republican convention, from the pre-Enlightenment God and Country Rally on opening day to the party platform crafted by evangelical extremists, and the fact that the Democratic candidate “mentioned God six times in his acceptance speech” and “quoted from scriptures,” the
Economist
wondered at a society “not ready yet for openly secular leaders,” alone in the industrial world. Others watched with amazement as a debate between the Vice-President and a TV character occupied center stage. These are signs of the success in defanging democratic forms, to eliminate any threat to private power.
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Contemporary right-wing discourse can hardly fall to bring to mind earlier denunciations of “liberalism,” with its call “for women's equality” and denial of the ancient truth that a woman's “world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home” (Adolf Hitler). Or the warning, from the same voice, that it is “a sin against the will of the Almighty that hundreds upon thousands of his most gifted creatures should be made to sink in the proletarian swamp while Kaffirs and Hottentots are trained for the liberal professions”—however the current version may be masked in code words. The resort to “cultural” themes and religious-jingoist fervor revives the classic fascist technique of mobilizing the people who are under assault. The encouragement of religious “enthusiasm,” in particular, has a long history within what E.P. Thompson called “the psychic processes of counter-revolution” used to tame the masses, breeding “the chiliasm of despair,” the desperate hope for some other world than this one, which can offer little.
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Studies of public opinion bring out other strands. A June 1992 Gallup poll found that 75 percent of the population do not expect life to improve for the next generation of Americans—not too surprising, given that real wages have been dropping for 20 years, with an accelerated decline under Reaganite “conservatism,” which also managed to extend the cloud over the college-educated. Public attitudes are illuminated further by the current popularity of ex-presidents: Carter is well in the lead (74 percent) followed by the virtually unknown Ford (68 percent), with Reagan at 58 percent, barely above Nixon (54 percent). Dislike of Reagan is particularly high among working people and “Reagan Democrats,” who gave him “the highest unfavorable rating [63 percent] of a wide range of public officials,” one study found. Reagan's popularity was always largely a media concoction; the “great communicator” was quickly dismissed when the farce would no longer play.
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The Harris polling organization has been measuring alienation from institutions for 25 years. Its latest survey, for 1991, found the numbers at an all-time high of 66 percent. Eighty-three percent of the population feel that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer,” saying that “the economic system is inherently unfair,” Harris president Humphrey Taylor comments. The concerns of the overwhelming majority, however, cannot be addressed within the political system; even the words can barely be spoken or heard. The journalist who reports these facts sees only people who are angry at “their well-paid politicians” and want “more power to the people,” not “more power to the government.” We are not allowed to think that government might be of and by the people, or that they might seek to change an economic system that 83 percent regard as “inherently unfair.”
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Another poll revealed that “faith in God is the most important part of Americans' lives.” Forty percent “said they valued their relationship with God above all else”; 29 percent chose “good health” and 21 percent a “happy marriage.” Satisfying work was chosen by 5 percent, respect of people in the community by 2 percent. That this world might offer basic features of a human existence is hardly to be contemplated. These are the kinds of results one might find in a shattered peasant society. Chiliastic visions are reported to be particularly prevalent among blacks; again, not surprising, when we learn from the
New England Journal of Medicine
that “black men in Harlem were less likely to reach the age of 65 than men in Bangladesh.”
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Also driven from the mind is any sense of solidarity and community. Educational reform is designed for those whose parents can pay, or at least are motivated to “get ahead.” The idea that there might be some general concern for children—not to speak of others—must be suppressed. We must make “the true costs of bearing a child out of wedlock clear” by letting “them be felt when they are incurred—namely at the child's birth”; the teenage high-school dropout must realize that her child will get no help from us (Michael Kaus). In the rising “culture of cruelty,” Ruth Conniff writes, “the middle-class taxpayer, the politician, and the wealthy upper class are all victims” of the undeserving poor, who must be disciplined and punished for their depravity, down to future generations.

When the Caterpillar corporation recruited scabs to break a strike by the United Auto Workers, the union was “stunned” to find that unemployed workers crossed the picket line with no remorse, while Caterpillar workers found little “moral support” in their community. The union, which had “lifted the standard of living for entire communities in which its members lived,” had “failed to realize how public sympathy had deserted organized labor,” a study by three
Chicago Tribune
reporters concludes—another victory in an unremitting business campaign of many decades that the union leadership refused to see. It was only in 1978 that UAW President Doug Fraser criticized the “leaders of the business community” for having “chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country—a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society,” and having “broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress.” That was far too late, and the tactics of the abject servant of the rich who soon took office destroyed a good bit of what was left.
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The
Tribune
study sees the defeat of the union as “the end of an era, the end of what may be the proudest creation of the American labor movement in the 20th century: a large blue-collar middle class.” That era, based on a corporation-union compact in a state-subsidized private economy, had come to an end 20 years earlier, and the “one-sided class war” had been underway long before. Another component of the compact was “the exchange of political power for money” by the union leaders (David Milton), a bargain that lasted as long as the rulers found it to their advantage. Trust in the good faith and benevolence of the masters will yield no other outcome.

A crucial component of the state-corporate campaign is the ideological offensive to overcome “the crisis of democracy” caused by the efforts of the rabble to enter the political arena, reserved for their betters. Undermining of solidarity with working people is one facet of that offensive. In his study of media coverage of labor, Walter Puette provides ample evidence that in the movies, TV, and the press the portrayal of unions has generally “been both unrepresentative and virulently negative.” Unions are depicted as corrupt, outside the mainstream, “special interests” that are either irrelevant or actually harmful to the interests of workers and the general public, “un-American in their values, strategies, and membership.” The theme “runs deep and long through the history of media treatment,” and “has helped push the values and goals of the American labor movement off the liberal agenda.” This is, of course, the historic project, intensified when need arises.
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