In his quest to understand “anti-Americanism”, Webb journeyed
variously to France — “where”, we were informed, “it all began” — and
to Venezuela and Egypt. Webb noted of Venezuela that “the nation's
leader Hugo Chavez compares George W Bush to Hitler”. Unmentioned was
the fact that Chavez had been responding in kind to then US secretary
of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, who had himself likened +Chavez+ to
Hitler. (‘
Julia Buxton responds to Times article')
In setting the scene, Webb described a strain of French thought that regards the upstart American nation with disdain:
“The kind of anti-Americanism fostered by French intellectuals down the
centuries revolves around intense dislike of what America "is" — not
what it "does". (Original emphasis)
Webb was then ready to base his task on the following assumption:
“It is time that we understood that this attitude, this contempt for
what democracy can do, is at the heart of at least some of the
anti-Americanism we see in the world today.”
A Smokescreen Of Ignorance
Turning to the United States’ neighbours to the South, Webb observed:
“Latin American dislike of the United States and its leaders is a
grittier substance than the smooth and heady French cocktail... This is
not metaphysical hoity — toityness. Latin America’s brew contains real
sweat, real tears. Tears from a past where the southerners were the
servants; the northerners, the masters. This is, after all,
Washington’s backyard.”
Note the familiar cliché of Latin America as “Washington’s backyard”.
This homely description nestles comfortably into the establishment
presumption that the region is rightfully part of the US sphere of
influence: an ideology that extends back to the imperialist Monroe
Doctrine of 1823. And while Webb was careful to mention “real sweat,
real tears”, no mention was made of the real +blood+ spilled under US —
sponsored wars, tyranny and oppression. (For details see our Media
Alert, ‘Vision of the Damned,’
June 10 and
15, 2004:
Webb continued:
“You've got to wonder if there is any end to the capacity of the rest
of the world to blame the United States for its problems. Nowhere is
that more the case than in Latin America, where out of roughly 500
million people, 200 million live on less than $2 a day.
“Is it all the fault of the imperialists from the north? Or is just a
little of it the result of local attitudes to poverty, local attitudes
to honesty in government, and local attitudes to the rule of law?"
“In other words, in Latin America as elsewhere in the world, is
anti-Americanism a smoke screen, a very convenient smoke screen, whose
noxious fumes hide the reality of local failure?” (Webb, ‘Anti-Americanism in Venezuela,’ BBC news online, April 20, 2007)
In an email to one of our readers, Webb emphasised the same point:
namely that the “failure of Latin economies cannot just be the result
of US intervention”. (Email from Justin Webb to Neil Laurenson, April
25, 2007)
There has certainly been a “failure of Latin economies” for the bulk of
the population, but not for the US — based corporations that have long
exploited the region for private profit — an issue we will examine in
detail in Part Two of this article.
Webb bulldozed through decades of horror and misery in stating glibly:
“The US has behaved badly” in the past, but it is still “a shining city
on the hill” and “in their heart of hearts, everyone here knows that.”
In contrast to this remarkable comment, consider the testimony of John Pilger who has also recently visited Venezuela:
"Chavez and the rise of popular social movements, from Colombia down to
Argentina, represent bloodless, radical change across the continent,
inspired by the great independence struggles that began with Simon
Bolivar, born in 1783 in Venezuela." (Pilger, 'America's new enemy,'
New Statesman, November 14, 2005)
Bolivar understood the nature and intentions of the new colonial master to the north who had kicked out the Spanish:
"The USA," Bolivar said in 1819, "appears destined by fate to plague America with misery in the name of liberty." (Ibid.)
The plague rampaged for the next two centuries with popular, reforming
governments stamped out and replaced with US client states — torture
regimes — in Chile, Argentina and elsewhere in the region. By the end
of Ronald Reagan's two terms of office there were 300,000 corpses in El
Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala as a result of US — sponsored wars
and oppression. In a recent interview about the making of his new film,
'The War on Democracy', set in Latin America, Pilger said:
“Our filming was concentrated in the barrios where the continent’s
‘invisible people’ live in hillside shanties that defy gravity. It
tells, above all, a very positive story: that of the rise of popular
social movements that have brought to power governments promising to
stand up to those who control national wealth and to the imperial
master. Venezuela has taken the lead... This is not to suggest that
complete independence has been won. Venezuela’s economy, for example,
is still very much a ‘neo — liberal’ economy that continues to reward
those with capital. The changes made under Chavez are extraordinary —
in grassroots democracy, health care, education and the sheer uplifting
of people’s lives — but true equity and social justice and freedom from
corruption remain distant goals.” (‘
The U.S.’ War on Democracy,’ interview with John Pilger, Pablo Navarette, May 1, 2007)
The BBC correspondent next travelled to the Middle East. This is a
region that has long been coveted by US power. In 1945, State
Department officials described Saudi Arabian energy resources as “a
stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material
prizes in world history”, with the Gulf Region considered:
“...probably the
richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign
investment”. (Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, Hamish Hamilton,
2003, p.150)
"In the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, a war fought to maintain control of
this “prize”, a United Nations team visited Iraq and reported that “the
recent conflict has wrought near — apocalyptic results upon the
infrastructure... Most means of modern life support have been destroyed
or rendered tenuous...” (Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United
States, HarperCollins, p.599)
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser for Jimmy Carter,
declared that the “benefits” of the war were “undeniably impressive”:
“First, a blatant act of aggression [by Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait]
was rebuffed and punished... Second, U.S. military power is henceforth
likely to be taken more seriously... Third, the Middle East and Persian
Gulf region is now clearly an American sphere of preponderance.”
(Ibid., p.599)
In the 1990s, Iraq was further brutalised by a cruel regime of US — UK
— led sanctions that led to the deaths of over one million Iraqis, half
a million of them children under five. Denis Halliday, the senior UN
diplomat in Baghdad, resigned in disgust in 1998, describing the impact
of the sanctions as “genocidal”. His successor, Hans von Sponeck,
similarly resigned 18 months later.
For Justin Webb, none of this merited a mention. As Harold Pinter put it in his Nobel acceptance speech:
“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening
it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The
crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious,
remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You
have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical
manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for
universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of
hypnosis.” (
Pinter, ‘Art, truth and politics,’ The Guardian, December 8, 2005)
Instead, Webb began his final radio programme from the Middle East thus:
June 2005. US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice flies to Cairo and at
the American University makes a speech that will go down in history:
“‘For sixty years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at
the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East; and
we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are
supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.’”
Webb then told his listeners in all seriousness:
“I believe the Bush administration genuinely wanted that speech to be a turning point; a new start.”
One simply has to ask: On the basis of what evidence, exactly? That
Webb could simply take at face value — with no evidence required —
Rice’s claims of a massive, unprecedented U-turn in US foreign policy;
that Washington would now engage in “supporting the democratic
aspirations of all people” when the whole drive of American policy has
been precisely in the opposite direction since the end of the Second
World War, is truly breathtaking. And that he could blithely pass over
what US-supported “stability” in the Middle East has actually entailed
— such as the suffering of the Iraqis, and the appalling treatment of
the Palestinians under an Israeli state massively supported by the US —
tells us precisely where Webb stands.
In truth, Webb is the latest in a long line of journalists who
periodically announce the great ‘change of course’. No matter the
consistent depredations of state power, no matter the essentially
unchanging structures of power and privilege dominating foreign policy,
mainstream commissars are only too happy to declare a revolutionary and
humanitarian change in direction based on nothing more than the words
of the current Dear Leader.
Birth Of A Myth
Webb continued with his superficial analysis and loaded questions:
“So who are the Middle East anti-Americans?”, he asked. The tone was
measured, reassuring, almost magisterial; echoing the style of John
Simpson, the BBC’s veteran world affairs editor, perhaps deliberately
so.
He answered his own question:
“They do exist, of course, and some of them, particularly those
motivated by religion, are potential mass murderers. Most Americans
would put them at the top of the list of threats to their nation and to
them as individuals. Yet, in many ways, it’s the others, those who’ve
not said goodbye to reason and humanity, who pose the bigger long —
term threat [sic]. The bombers, after all, are a tiny minority and they
can be arrested or suppressed or killed. These men and women, the
peaceful haters you could call them, deny American legitimacy and deny
too the fundamental decency of the American ideal; and they carry those
thoughts on into future generations. They do so with a vehemence that
takes the breath away.”
What followed was an Egyptian academic’s critical but articulate
observations about US history and that country’s role in world affairs.
But, for Webb, such radical views constituted “vehemence”: a familiar,
pejorative framing whereby incisive critics such as Noam Chomsky,
Howard Pinter and others are dismissed as angry, self-hating, or
otherwise lacking in reason and relevance. (See our
Media Alert, Brilliant Fools, December 19, 2005)
Webb spoke glowingly of America’s “core values”, about how it
represents “a set of ideas about human conduct”, and of how “the heart
of America’s unique status as a great power whose legitimacy, at least
in theory, rests on the freely — given support of its own citizens and
of those it assists.”
It has long been a standard convention in the mainstream to assert that
the United States was forged as a nation dedicated to the democratic
ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. US
political leaders have long made reference to this ideology.
Consider, for example, a high — level internal document written in
1950, National Security Council 68, which grandly proclaimed the
“system of values which animates our society” and which includes “the
principles of freedom, tolerance, the importance of the individual and
the supremacy of reason over will.” “The essential tolerance of our
world outlook, our generous and constructive impulses, and the absence
of covetousness in our international relations are assets of
potentially enormous influence.” (Quoted in Chomsky, Hegemony or
Survival, pp.10 — 11)
Academics have also played a useful role in preaching this doctrine of
US benevolence and grand ideals. According to Michael Howard, then
Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford:
“For 200 years the United States has preserved almost unsullied the
original ideals of the Enlightenment: the belief in the God — given
rights of the individual, the inherent rights of free assembly and free
speech, the blessings of free enterprise, the perfectibility of man,
and, above all, the universality of these values.” (Chomsky, Deterring
Democracy, Vintage, 1992, p.16).
Respected media commentators have also done their bit. James Reston of the New York Times, for example:
“I don’t think there’s anything in the history of the world to compare
with the commitments this country has taken in defense of freedom.”
(Ibid., p.18)
And Matt Frei — like Justin Webb, a senior BBC correspondent based in the US:
“America encapsulated the principles of the Enlightenment — Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity — wrapped them in the pursuit of happiness,
underpinned them with an inalienable right and turned an IDEA into a
country. It took the missteps of the French and the English revolutions
and it made them work.” (Matt Frei, ‘Washington diary: Land of ideas,’
BBC news online, May 2, 2007)
This was the ideological framework into which Webb’s radio series snugly fitted.
But the assumption of a benevolent state historically founded on a deep
commitment to equality and freedom collapses under scrutiny. Consider,
for example, what actually happened when the United States gained its
independence from Britain. Historian Edmund Morgan summed it up:
“The fact that the lower ranks were involved in the contest should not
obscure the fact that the contest itself was generally a struggle for
office and power between members of an upper class: the new against the
established.” (Zinn, op. cit., p.84)
And to what extent did the revolution, and the founding of this new
nation, respect the equality and freedom of the original inhabitants,
the native American Indians? Howard Zinn answers:
“They had been ignored by the fine words of the Declaration, had not
been considered equal, certainly not in choosing those who would govern
the American territories in which they lived, nor in being able to
pursue happiness as they had pursued it for centuries before the white
Americans arrived. Now, with the British out of the way, the Americans
could begin the inexorable process of pushing the Indians off their
lands, killing them if they resisted. (Ibid., p.86)
Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville observed bluntly that the United States
was able "to exterminate the Indian race... without violating a single
great principle of morality in the eyes of the world". (Noam Chomsky,
Failed States, Hamish Hamilton, 2006, p.4)
As for the much -vaunted US Constitution itself, Zinn observes:
“When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the
Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men
trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of
certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just
enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular
support.” (Zinn, op. cit., p.97)
All this, recall, is the “shining city upon a hill”.
Part II coming soon...