"Grandin's more distinctive contribution lies in documenting Latin America's role as a staging ground for the rise of militaristic idealists within the Republican Party."
"With its vivid depiction of neocon militarists, religious evangelicals, and neoliberal economists coming together, Empire's Workshop offers a cogent analysis of how past interventions in Latin America provide the Bush administration with a troubling model for present policy."
The ideology behind current US Middle Eastern policy was shaped close to home.
Empire's Workshop: Latin America and the Roots of U.S. Imperialism. By Greg Grandin. Henry Holt: Metropolitan Books, May 2006, 320 pp., $25,00
In October 2004, during his debate with John Edwards, Vice President Dick Cheney made a comparison that seemed surreal even by the standards of the present administration. He was looking for an example of past U.S. intervention that could be cited as a model for "democracy building" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Where did he turn? El Salvador.
In the Vice President's soliloquy, the bad old days of "dirty war" in the 1980s in Central America--the death squads and "Made in U.S.A." weapons, the raped nuns and Jesuit professors murdered on campus--were recast as a noble crusade. "A guerilla insurgency" fell, Cheney said, "terrorists" were defeated, and El Salvador today is "a lot better" because the U.S. stepped in. Of course, a few facts went unmentioned: That a U.N.-sponsored truth commission held the U.S.-backed regime responsible for massive atrocities; that the civil war stretched on for over a decade after American arms and advisors arrived; and that half of the country lives in poverty today.
Cheney's warped use of Latin American history is not an isolated case. The region appears to hold a special place in the conservative imagination. In recent years, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol has cited Central America as "an amazing success story" for the U.S. The National Review has depicted Reagan-era policy in Central America as "a spectacularly successful fight to introduce and sustain Western political norms in the region." And personalities from the dirty wars--John Negroponte, Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, John Poindexter--have reappeared to take posts in the Bush administration, rejoining the effort to spread "freedom" throughout the globe.
In Empire's Workshop: Latin America and the Roots of U.S. Imperialism, Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American History at New York University, raises such examples as signs that the ideology behind current U.S. intervention the Middle East was actually shaped much closer to home. "In their search for historical precedents for our current imperial moment," he writes, "intellectuals invoke postwar reconstructions of Germany and Japan, ancient Rome, and nineteenth-century Britain but consistently ignore the one place the United States has projected its influence for more than two centuries."
Posted by proutist-universal on June 14, 2006 7:57 PM | TrackBack
|
"In economic life there is extreme inequality and exploitation. Although colonialism no longer exists openly in the political and economic sphere, still it persists indirectly, and this should not be tolerated... In this respect you should remember that in economic life, we will have to guarantee the minimum requirements of life to one and all... There cannot be any sort of adjustment as far as this point is concerned. The minimum purchasing requirement must be guaranteed to all. Today these fundamental essentialities are not being guaranteed. Rather, people are being guided by deceptive economic ideas like outdated Marxism, which has proven ineffective in practical life and has not been successfully implemented in any corner of the world. Why do people still believe in such a theory, which has never been proved successful? The time has come for people to make a proper assessment of whether they are being misguided or not." |
|
"Human beings have still not been able to form a human society, and have still not learned to move with the spirit of a pilgrim. Although many small groups, motivated by self-interest, work together in particular situations, not even a small fraction of their work is done with a broader social motive. By strict definition, shall we have to declare that each small family unit is a society in itself? If going ahead in mutual adjustment only out of narrow self-interest or momentary self-seeking is called society, then in such a society, no provision can be made for the disabled, the diseased or the helpless, because in most cases nobody can benefit from them in any way... in that case there always remains the possibility of some people getting isolated from the collective. All human beings must attach themselves to others by the common bond of love and march forward hand in hand; then only will I proclaim it a society." |