Nowtopian

Among my earliest memories in the late 1960s are anti-Vietnam war protests that I mostly experienced on TV. There was a cloud of teargas that wafted into my 6th grade classroom in North Oakland from the Governor Reagan-ordered National Guard assault on People’s Park protesters in Berkeley in 1969, but most of the upheavals of that era took place before I really came of age. By the time I was 15 in 1972, wondering if I would be drafted, the Vietnam War was winding down and the draft was soon abolished. During that time I had a class that focused for a month or two on “military justice,” emphasizing it as a quintessential oxymoron. I also heard about the U.S. role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile by way of FM radio newscasts that were great alternatives to the mainstream media (and exemplary of a time when the media’s hegemony and “truth” was being challenged from the grassroots left, not the aggrieved, resentful white right).

Here’s a collage from 2003 just before the attack on Iraq, attributed to the Committee for Full Enjoyment. (Yes that’s me when I still had hair!)

My political evolution through the 1970s into my early adulthood led me through anarchism (by way of the Spanish Civil War), anti-nuclear and pro-farmworker politics, and a consistent antipathy to the military. A bumper sticker of the era (that I had on my various vehicles) was white type on black background that mimicked the look of a contemporary ad for the U.S. Army: “Join The Army. Travel to exotic distant lands, meet exciting unusual people, and kill them.” When Reagan shockingly became president (surely he was too dumb and right-wing to be elected? Well, no), fired the Air Traffic Controllers and fired up the wars in Central America (and Grenada and Panama, plus backing Saddam Hussein in the 8-year Iran-Iraq war), local anti-war efforts focused on stopping arms shipments and halting the home-porting of the USS Missouri. When the Cold War collapsed in 1989, base closures followed, including nearly all the military properties in San Francisco and many around the bay. For a brief moment it seemed like maybe there was going to be a “peace dividend” and the long post-WWII slide into a military-industrial dominated society would begin to turn around.

The bumper sticker of my 1970s

As several of the books I look at here (see end for links) help to make clear, that didn’t happen, and it took a good deal of obfuscation and ideological gymnastics to ensure the continuity of the massive military budget when all the ostensible reasons for its maintenance were publicly disintegrating. David Vine in The United States of War has given us a detailed history of U.S. expansionism and empire from the pre-revolutionary colonial attacks on indigenous North America all the way to the recent offensive against ISIS in Syria (the book was published before the final collapse of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, now being carried on by Biden’s executive seizure of $7 billion in Afghan national assets, and ongoing punitive sanctions). Vine’s book is replete with informative maps that show each era of military-led expansion, first by building forts in other nation’s lands across the North American continent to facilitate western expansion and colonial subjugation of the first peoples, then seizing 1/3 of Mexico in the 1840s, and eventually the Philippines and a variety of islands in the Pacific and Caribbean by the turn of the 20th century, ending with a detailed look at the dramatic expansion of the U.S. military across the planet after WWII, with a less-known expansion of bases and hostilities across Africa since 2001.

It’s easy to imagine that the U.S. took a serious turn for the worse at various moments in history. A favorite of historians of a certain era was the seizure of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898, ostensibly the first time the country became imperial in the manner of European states. But Vine is clear that that is a false understanding, and that there was never a period of U.S. history that wasn’t expansionist and covetous of neighboring (or far-flung) lands. Another moment some historians emphasize is World War II, and the fact that the U.S. was the only power physically stronger at the end of the war than at its outset. From its orchestration of a new world order in the post-war era, the United States embraced its new role as a pre-eminent superpower, though the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union became its explanation and rationale for its own militarism and incessant meddling. I never imagined the U.S. was anything but venal and ruthless in the 1950s, but Vine brought some statistics forward I hadn’t previously heard:

In a single year, 1958, the CIA led the government’s efforts to train more than five hundred thousand police officers in twenty-five nations, creating secret police units in nearly half and “strengthening repressive capacity” of undemocratic governments in particular. . . During his eight years in office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized 170 major covert operations in forty-eight nations.

p. 201 and 202

Alfred McCoy in his latest To Govern the Globe: World Orders & Catastrophic Change offers a parallel list:

Between 1945 and 2000, the US intervened in 81 consequential elections worldwide, including eight times in Italy, five in Japan, and many more in Latin America. Between 1958 and 1975, military coups, many of them American-sponsored, changed governments in three dozen nations—a quarter of the world’s sovereign states—fostering a distinct “reverse wave” in the global trend toward democracy.

p. 227

I’ll come back to Vine a bit later when I return to the sheer madness of the economic side of this imperial project. But before that, it’s important to delve into its twisting self-justifications, which from the early days of the Cold War went through an Orwellian rebranding from war to defense, using deeply rooted definitions of the liberal self to render the brutal truth of a militarized empire largely invisible.

Joseph Darda has a great book called Empire of Defense—Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War. It’s probably one of the best treatments of the logic of U.S. militarism and foreign policy I’ve read (even though I just went through the eight books listed at the end during the past six weeks—along with several others!—there are dozens of books on these topics that have been published in the past few years). I would put Darda’s book as a bookend with Stephen Mexal’s book on 19th century western liberalism that I discussed way back in 2014. Darda lays out how President Truman reorganized the military establishment in 1948, changing the Department of War to the Department of Defense, creating the National Security Council and the NSA, the CIA, and the foundations for the expansive spook bureaucracies we now have (though we have little conscious idea of what they do with the hundreds of billions of secret money they spend every year). But the U.S. was inheriting the role of defending a colonial world order, but knew it had to do it while seeming to be anticolonial. The deep Jim Crow racism of WWII-era US life was a problem internationally, and when prominent Black activists submitted a document to the United Nations called “We Charge Genocide” against the United States, it set off urgent efforts to reframe the US role in the world. Here’s Darda’s main argument in a nutshell:

There is nothing aberrational about racism in the United States. It is woven into the American creed. Liberalism defines the human by universalizing the characteristics of white Western man and valuing all others based on their adoption of, or failure to adopt, his characteristics. It defines humanity through inclusion but also through the violence of assimilation and exclusion, securing the liberal freedoms of some by looting the land and labor of others . . . The liberal state, facing a rising anticolonial tide, constructed a color-blind color line through the idea of defense…. But defense also means defining who does and doesn’t count as mankind. Defense is a racial regime through which the state distinguishes between the human with the right to self-defense, the deferred human to be assimilated, and the nonhuman to be killed . . . The collapse of colonialism and the erosion of Jim Crow threatened to undo a world long governed by white Western men. The empire of defense contained the emerging crisis by criminalizing those threatening to change that world, turning Asia and Africa into a crime front and black and brown America into a war front. It policed the crisis through repression but also by reform and, by preaching anticolonialism and antiracism, made it difficult to tell the difference.

p. 12, 13, and 23

And Darda is clear that from Truman onward, the line between war and policing has been blurring continuously. Both the Korean and Vietnam Wars were defined as “police actions” at the start. Eventually the efforts to police drugs turned into the War on Drugs. Essentially policing and war-making are two sides of a process whereby elites create boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate ways of living. By the time the Cold War ended in 1989, the Drug War had been a major activity for the military in Central America and the heavily militarized police inside the U.S. itself. Darda shows how the first Gulf War (and the ensuing bombings of Somalia and Serbia in the 1990s) were framed as “humanitarian wars,” a rationale trotted out on behalf of the women of Afghanistan and the suffering masses of Iraq, too, in the first decades of the 21st century.

One of many images on our Democracy Wall on the former police station on Valencia Street.

Continue reading Refusing to be an Imperial Subject