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April
29, 2003
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April 30,
2003
Under Uncle Sam's Thumb
The
History of Washington's Occupations
By ASHLEY SMITH
Early in the 20th century, the U.S. socialist
journalist John Reed explained the drive for plunder, profit
and geopolitical domination that lay behind U.S. military interventions.
"Uncle Sam never gives something for nothing," Reed
said in a speech. "He comes along with a sack stuffed with
hay in one hand and a whip in the other. Anyone who accepts Uncle
Sam's promises at face value will find that they must be paid
for in sweat and blood."
The U.S. government established itself
as an imperial power at the turn of the 20th century with the
Spanish-American War--when it grabbed colonies in the Caribbean
and Pacific. The U.S. "liberated" the Philippines from
Spain by killing close to 1 million Filipinos in order to seize
the country as a beachhead for U.S. ambitions in Asia.
Most of the time, the U.S. preferred
enforcing its dominion by quick military strikes to squelch popular
movements for democracy and install friendly dictators. But Washington
didn't hesitate to become a colonial occupier. It invaded and
ruled over Panama (1901 to 1911), Nicaragua (1912 to 1933), Haiti
(1914 to 1934), the Dominican Republic (1916 to 1924) and Cuba
(1917 to 1933).
And where the U.S. military went in Latin
America, U.S. big business was intimately involved. As Marine
Corps Gen. Smedley Butler famously explained his role during
this era: "I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle
man for big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In
short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism...Looking
back on it, I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best
he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated
on three continents."
America's rulers have tried to bury this
bloody history. Like every power before it, the U.S. government
claims lofty principles as the justifications for its wars. In
recent months, Bush and the right-wing ideologues who serve him
have turned to the mythology of the Second World War to find
a cover story for their war on Iraq.
The U.S. fought the Second World War,
they claim, not for imperialist motives, but to liberate Germany
and Japan from totalitarianism and bring democracy. And "after
defeating enemies," Bush recently boasted, "we did
not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and
parliaments."
This simply isn't true. The U.S. still
maintains massive military bases in both Japan and Germany--bases
that it has used ever since the war to manipulate politics in
the two countries. In Japan, far from liberation, the U.S. waged
a racist and barbaric war--and from 1945 to 1952, it presided
over an occupation.
During the fighting, the U.S. ruling
class had whipped up frenzy of hatred. Time magazine, for example,
raved, "The ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps
he is human. Nothing...indicates it." President Franklin
Roosevelt interned 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration
camps.
After defeating Japanese forces across
the Pacific, the U.S. closed out the war by firebombing civilian
neighborhoods in Tokyo and other major cities. Forty percent
of Japan's urban areas were burned to the ground, killings tens
of thousands and making millions more homeless.
The final act in this campaign of terror
was the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--two
civilian targets. The bombs and radiation poisoning killed more
than 340,000 people.
Once Japan surrendered, the U.S. occupied
the country with 430,000 troops--who went on a crime spree. In
the Kanagawa prefecture, for example, Japanese historian Takemae
Eiji documents that U.S. soldiers committed 1,336 rapes in the
first 10 weeks of the occupation. The invading army took over
the only standing buildings in some areas--and built themselves
luxurious new homes amid a Japanese population that was destitute.
Unlike its occupations of undeveloped
countries, the U.S. was taking over an advanced capitalist society
that it hoped to reintegrate into the world order as a junior
partner. In the initial phase of the occupation until 1947, the
U.S. aimed to rehabilitate a section of the old guard, while
granting reforms that would head off a revolution.
U.S. officials imposed a new Peace Constitution,
granted both men and women the right to vote, conducted war crimes
tribunals, purged hundreds of thousands of militarists from public
life and broke up the power of the Japanese military. But these
measures were all designed to stabilize the country under a conservative
leadership that would serve U.S. interests.
First of all, this was no real democracy.
An American general, Douglas MacArthur, decided all of the important
questions. With the threat of hundreds of thousands of soldiers
under his command, MacArthur would issue orders to the Japanese
government, which had no choice but to obey.
Moreover, the U.S. poured old wine into
new bottles. Instead of abolishing the monarchy, MacArthur decided
to retain Emperor Hirohito--provided he would help convince the
Japanese to obey the U.S.
The U.S. also relied on the reactionary,
elitist and undemocratic bureaucracy of the old state. In Japan's
new electoral politics, the U.S. backed a section of the old
guard led by Yoshida Shigeru, who, after initially resisting
many reforms, collaborated with the U.S. in controlling the country
as standing prime minister for all but one year of the occupation.
Even with the emperor, bureaucracy and
reformed old guard ruling the country, the U.S. was still suspicious
of the Japanese people. So it set up the Civil Censorship Detachment
to muzzle the media and monitor private phone conversations and
personal letters.
Even limited democracy was denied to
oppressed populations in Japan. The U.S. disenfranchised Koreans--and
scapegoated them as unreliable elements who might be agents of
Communist North Korea. On the strategically located island of
Okinawa, off the southwest coast of Japan, the U.S. set up a
dictatorship that robbed peasants of the best farmland to build
military bases.
While the U.S. cared only to strengthen
its grip on power, the masses of Japan took their limited democratic
rights seriously. Driven by hunger and economic crisis, workers--often
led by the Japanese Communist Party--struck for higher wages
and benefits, occupied workplaces to keep them from closing,
and prepared for a general strike against the Yoshida government,
set for February 1, 1947. Okinawans, Koreans and other oppressed
groups fought for democratic rights.
The whole of Japan was in rebellion a
year into occupation. Washington began to fear that it would
lose Japan and the rest of Asia to Russia. Already by 1947, in
China, Mao's Communists were beating the U.S. puppet Chiang Kai-shek
in the country's civil war.
U.S. policymakers feared that the countries
of Asia would fall to Russia like dominos--maybe even their super-domino,
Japan. To prevent this, the U.S. abandoned the democratic gloss
of the first phase of the occupation. As in the U.S., Japan's
Communist Party was witch-hunted.
Using the cover of the witch-hunt, U.S.
forces repressed the working-class uprising, banning the planned
general strike, attacking workers' protests and taking away union
rights from more than half of public-sector workers.
In 1950, the U.S. imposed an austerity
budget called the Dodge Plan that threw the country into a depression--and
Japanese companies took advantage, firing hundreds of thousands
of unionized employees.
With the social rebellion suppressed,
"conservative political forces within Japan joined with
their American sponsors to rebuild the nation in ways that bore
an uncanny resemblance to the prewar order," wrote historian
Michael Schaller.
The U.S. "de-purged" hundreds
of thousands of war criminals, built a new Japanese army led
by officers from the old Imperial Army and aided the economic
revitalization of the old monopolies. Japan would serve as the
main base for Washington's wars to maintain its influence in
Asia and the Pacific--in Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and
elsewhere.
The U.S. granted Japan independence in
1952, but it was able to control the country like a puppetmaster
for years afterward. Washington used its military bases as a
stick to bully Japan into line--and old pre-war bureaucracy had
grown so powerful during the U.S. occupation that it, and not
the elected government, decided most important economic and political
questions. For these reasons, author Chalmers Johnson calls Japan
not a democracy, but an authoritarian regime "remarkably
similar to that of the former East Germany."
Washington and the
Nazis
WHAT HAPPENED to the other conquered
enemy in the Second World War? Unlike Japan, which the U.S. controlled
outright, Germany was partitioned into eastern and western halves
by the U.S., Britain and France on one side, and Russia on the
other.
The U.S. set up a direct government to
rule over its section of occupied Germany. The civilian administrator
was John McCloy, who played a key role in the decision to drop
the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Nuremberg war crimes trials punished
the top layer of the former Nazi regime. But the U.S. feared
another wave of revolution, similar to the one that exploded
in Russia and the rest of Europe following the First World War.
So Washington hired Nazis for the core
of a new state. As a representative from the U.S. spy agency
explained: "They say, 'Why did you use the Nazis?' That
is a stupid question. It would have been impossible for us to
operate in southern Germany without using Nazis...Who knew Germany
better than anyone else? Who were the most organized? Who were
the most anti-Communist? Former Nazis."
As the Cold War standoff with Russia
became the U.S. government's top priority, plans to try leading
industrialists from major companies like Krupps--who had bankrolled
the Nazis--were abandoned.
The U.S. quickly rebuilt the West German
economy--as a counterweight to Russia's Eastern European empire.
A new conservative party, the Christian Democrats, was put together
to rule West Germany in accordance with U.S. demands.
The Marshall Plan to reconstruct Western
Europe was introduced for two reasons--to stabilize the crisis-torn
societies in order to prevent revolution, and to rebuild a market
for U.S. products and investments.
Under the cover of
"humanitarianism"
BETWEEN THE two Gulf Wars against Iraq
in 1991 and 2003, the U.S. government carried out a number of
"humanitarian" interventions. But the reality was different
behind the rhetoric.
--"Operation Restore Hope,"
the 1992 mission that sent 30,000 Marines into Somalia to help
feed starving people by protecting food convoys blocked by local
warlords, won the support of many liberals. But Somalis rightly
came to view the U.S. as an occupier, not a liberator. The CIA
estimates that some 10,000 Somalis were killed during the U.S.
intervention. Those who survived were left with a country steeped
in even worse violence.
--"Operation Restore Democracy,"
launched less than a year later in Haiti, promised to reinstall
the elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been overthrown
by the military in 1991. But instead of going after the coup
leaders, U.S. troops went after the Haitian people. While Raul
Cedras and fellow death squad leaders escaped the country to
live on millions stowed away in Swiss bank accounts, Haiti's
people were terrorized by the former dictatorship's police, who
patrolled the streets with U.S. troops as part of the interim
police force.
--In 1999, the U.S. led a NATO bombing
campaign against Serbia with the stated aim of stopping "ethnic
cleansing" of Albanians in Kosovo. Not only did the air
war wreck Serbia's civilian infrastructure, but it caused a refugee
crisis in Kosovo--which Washington cynically used as an excuse
for the occupation to come. After the war, Albanians carried
out ethnic cleansing in reverse against Serbs in Kosovo--under
the noses of "peacekeeping" troops.
Washington isn't just a failure at bringing
democracy abroad. It's utterly incapable of it.
Ashley Smith
writes for the Socialist
Worker.
Today's
Features
Gary
Leupp
Disorder and Opportunity: the Results
of the Iraq War
Uri
Avnery
Don't Envy Abu-Mazen
Anthony
Gancarski
Brush with the Law
Mickey
Z.
POWs: Then and Now
CounterPunch
Wire
How to Spin Israel on the Hill: Internal Lobbying Documents
Robert
Fisk
Did the US Murder Journalists?
Chris
Floyd
Bush Telegraphs His Punches on Syria
Wayne Madsen
About Those Iraqi Intelligence Documents
Wallace
Gagne
Pilgrimage or Demolition Derby?
Eliot Katz
Playing Catch with Cracked Globes
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/29
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