Submitted by Larry Craig
By Howard ZinnThe Progressive
April 2006 Issue
Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer
trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has
become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late,
have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people
were so easily fooled?
The question is important because it might help us understand why
Americans--members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen--rushed to
declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the
world to Iraq.
A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the
press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell's presentation in February 2003 to
the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set
a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell
confidently rattled off his "evidence": satellite photographs, audio records,
reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this
and that existed for chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with
admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled "Irrefutable" and
declared that after Powell's talk "it is hard to imagine how anyone could
doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction."
It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture,
and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to
outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people.
If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against
being deceived.
One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical
perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to
think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant
idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous,
admirable, superior.
If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians
and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not
speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our
political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of
recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don't
know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of
microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for
challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and
liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to
destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.
But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made
similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we
will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never
fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress
our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials.
We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about
the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that Mexico "shed
American blood upon the American soil," but that Polk, and the slave-owning
aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.
We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for
invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control,
but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island
could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied
about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to
"civilize" the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of
real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands
of Filipinos to accomplish that.
President Woodrow Wilson--so often characterized in our history books as an
"idealist"--lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it
was a war to "make the world safe for democracy," when it was really a war to
make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.
Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima
because it was "a military target."
Everyone lied about Vietnam--Kennedy about the extent of our involvement,
Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia,
all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but
really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the
Asian continent.
Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a
threat to the United States.
The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of
thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.
And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991--hardly to
defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq's
taking of
Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.
Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone
listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for
invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the sacrifice of lives
for oil?
A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being
deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a
profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the
United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against
everything we have been taught.
We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding Fathers
put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was "we the people" who
established the new government after the Revolution. When the eminent
historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago, that the Constitution
represented not the working people, not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the
merchants, the bondholders, he became the object of an indignant editorial in
The New York Times.
Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of
interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn't talk about classes. Only
Marxists do that, although James Madison, "Father of the Constitution," said,
thirty years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in
society between those who had property and those who did not.
Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like
"national interest," "national security," and "national defense" as if all of
these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor,
as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of
us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends
to war.
Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest
lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the
biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this
country. To ignore that--not to know that the history of our country is a
history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation
against worker, rich against poor--is to render us helpless before all the
lesser lies told to us by people in power.
If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up
there--the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions
pretending to be "checks and balances"--do not have our interests at heart, we
are on a course towards the truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless
before determined liars.
The deeply ingrained belief--no, not from birth but from the educational
system and from our culture in general--that the United States is an
especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government
deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to
"pledge allegiance" (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim
that we are a nation with "liberty and justice for all."
And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere,
where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the
"Star-Spangled Banner," announcing that we are "the land of the free and the
home of the brave." There is also the unofficial national anthem "God Bless
America," and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect
God to single out this one nation--just 5 percent of the world's
population--for his or her blessing.
If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm belief
that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that
make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then you are not
likely to question the President when he says we are sending our troops here
or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values--democracy,
liberty, and let's not forget free enterprise--to some God-forsaken
(literally) place in the world.
It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow
citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for other people
but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb the idea of a
uniquely virtuous nation.
These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest. We
must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians
were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And
our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We
must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the
Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam,
Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud.
Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the minds of
many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to
dominate the world. At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, with an arrogance
appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, pronounced this "the
American century," saying that victory in the war gave the United States the
right "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."
Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion. George
Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that spreading
liberty around the world was "the calling of our time." Years before that, in
1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point commencement, declared:
"The values you learned here . . . will be able to spread throughout this
country and throughout the world and give other people the opportunity to live
as you have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities."
What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our behavior
toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on how well people in
the United States live? The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked countries
in terms of overall health performance, and the United States was
thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per capita for health care
than any other nation. One of five children in this, the richest country in
the world, is born in poverty. There are more than forty countries that have
better records on infant mortality. Cuba does better. And there is a sure sign
of sickness in society when we lead the world in the number of people in
prison--more than two million.
A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the
next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our
power on some other part of the world. It might also inspire us to create a
different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars and
killers who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can
join the rest of the human race in the common cause of peace and justice.
Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of "Voices of a People's
History of the United States."
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