First let's just set the scene with a quotation from George Kennan, one of the most influential of US policymakers of the 20th century. Now Chomsky uses this quotation a lot, and people bang on about how it's always taken out of context. So what I've done is find it in full. There are two paragraphs in particular that bear attention, and there is a sizeable gap between them. If you want to find the whole thing, I'll link it below:
Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.
I've omitted a paragraph that talks about the Far East.
In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to "be liked" or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and -- for the Far East -- unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
The same year Kennan wrote this, he attended a conference of the OAS and basically laid down the same kind of deal for Latin America, reinforcing the Monroe doctrine.
In case you didn't notice, this means
- no human rights
- no decent living standards
- no democracy
This might explain the prevalence of death squads backed by the US everywhere from Colombia to Chile to Indonesia to Iran and, latterly, since the US invasion, to Iraq.
If you can still believe the US is a beacon of democracy, good luck.
Source for the Kennan quote
Bottom lune: the US has, for over a century (it was going on long before Kennan) using its power to get access to raw materials and cheap labour, and to ensure that, wherever possible, US companies operating outside the US weren't bothered with cumbersome things like having to pay local taxes.
To justify this to the folks at home and to the poor saps out there fighting to maintain US economic supremacy, the usual imperial excuses are trotted out - "we have to subdue the Visigoths or they'll sack Rome!" Of course, after enough attempts, the Visigoths, who hitherto might have cared less, really wanted to sack Rome.
Take the recent illegal invasion of Iraq. Motivated not solely by oil, but so that Monsanto could force Iraqis to use its products, and so that, above all, Iraqi oil would be sold in dollars. If you click on my sig for "the real history of oil", you'll find a funny and instructive lecture about why that's so important. The analogy with Salvador Dali is brilliant.
Originally posted by Frankidealist35
What have we benefited the world with?
Science. The space race. We landed the first man on the moon. We created NASA.
Yup. That's put food on millions of families.
And it wouldn't have happened so quickly without those wacky Nazis that were smuggled over through Operation Paperclip... others, of not such a scientific bent, were brought over to South America to help run puppet governments there. This is all in the books. Not the kind of books you'd have read in school though. I know this because I picked up a school textbook on Latin America when I was in Florida, and it seemed to think the deposition of Allende (on September 11, no less) wasn't done by the CIA. Which, as we know, it was.
We created the FDA. Without the FDA your foods wouldn't probably be as healthy.
Are you NUTS? Sorry, that was a bit rude, but... did you know, for example, that the head of the FDA wanted to ban NutraSweet, I think it was. He got sacked and replaced by a guy who immediately certified it... then went on to take a nice job with the corporation that manufactured it. Likewise, when a scientist in Britain published experimental results that showed that feeding GM food to rats caused brain lesions, Monsanto called Clinton, who called Bliar, who called the Royal Society, who convened a kangaroo court to rubbish the results.
Meanwhile a bunch of schoolkids, in proper scientific style, were duplicating those results and publishing them on the internet.
We in the UK don't have GM food. In the US, I think, you're not allowed to know whether it's in your food or not.
Next!
We gave you CNN.
Is this the best you can do? Corporate News Network? (Known, hilariously, in Texas - of course - as "communist news network".) It is, as Bugs would say, to laugh. We gave the world the BBC but it's not something I'd boast about.
A lot of your products in your culture come from us. Many of your goods that you get from us are exported from our country.
For example: Americans prefer to eat the white meat from chickens. This creates a glut of legs and wings, which are then dumped in places like Jamaica, destroying the local poultry industry completely. Thanks, Uncle Sam! I found that out on the BBC, not CNN.
Good things to come out of the US include jazz, rock and roll, funk, and hip-hop. I don't count blues, not because I don't like it but because it's almost indistinguishable from certain African folk music.
These art forms are actually the product of slavery, which caused a collision between white European cultural forms and black African ones.
Oh yeah, Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes. Some of the funniest stuff ever, I reckon.
The US is basically an empire though. We have naval superiority. Our navy is basically everywhere.
But what else have we given to the rest of the world?
Cars and aeroplanes, believe it or not, were not invented solely in the US. Neither were movies, although it became a huge industry in the US unlike in other countries. The US is good at selling its myth, both to itself and others.
The US has given the world modern business culture. Whether that's something thw world will survive is for the future.
We have jump started your economies after World War II during the cold war...
Reading more of Kennan, you'll find out that that was done so the US would have markets for its exports. THAT'S why US products have been successful. Europe had to rebuild. America didn't even have to retool, because the military-industrial complex still pumped out many, many weapons during the post-WWII period.
Now, what has the UK done for the world?
The UK was an empire and of course justified its police actions round the world with a lot of patronising guff about exporting British ideas, just as the US is doing now. I'm not interested in justifying that period of UK history, it doesn't seem particularly defensible to me.
However, because our empire was overt, not commercial, when we left, we left our infrastructure behind. I was also surprised to discover in my travels in the Caribbean that some people there are really glad of the educational system we set up, which survives today (well, 5 years ago at least, haven't been back in a while) rather better than it has done here, where standards have really dropped.
A unionist I met in Belize expressed this to me, to my surprise. He also told me about an instance of genuine altruism about which I had not previously heard: the US-backed government in Guatemala was massing troops on the Belize border and making invasion noises: the Brits moved a couple of warships into place and they thought better of it.
Which of course, really made me wonder how we dropped the ball so completely on the Falklands.
Especially as one of the things I was taught in history, VERY early on, was that if you're ruling a country and you have trouble at home, a foreign war is just what you need to pull the country together right behind you. And God knows that c**t Thatcher was in trouble - rising unemployment, rioting, popularity at an all-time low...
Anyway, I'm really only trying to correct the delusional antics of those Americans who don't quite understand the real nature of America's role in the world. Not ruling it, exactly: just being a massive bully for other kids' lunch money.
Hope that clears things up.
[edit on 23-1-2009 by rich23]
[edit on 23-1-2009 by rich23]
