What schools didn't teach about empire
By Howard Zinn
With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases
and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question
any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent
denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.
However, the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me
until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the
Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about
the purity of the "Good War", even after being horrified by Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in
Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American
"Empire".
I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial
powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When,
after the war, I went to college under the GI Bill of Rights and took courses
in US history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called "The Age
of Imperialism". It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and
the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American
imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view
of US expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire - or
period of "imperialism".
I recall the classroom map (labeled "Western Expansion") which presented the
march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That
huge acquisition of land called "The Louisiana Purchase" hinted at nothing but
vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been occupied
by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or forced from
their homes - what we now call "ethnic cleansing" - so that whites could settle
the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging "civilization" and
its brutal discontents.
Neither the discussions of "Jacksonian democracy" in history courses, nor the
popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr, The Age of Jackson, told me about
the "Trail of Tears", the deadly forced march of "the five civilized tribes"
westward from Georgia and Alabama across the Mississippi, leaving 4,000 dead in
their wake. No treatment of the Civil War mentioned the Sand Creek massacre of
hundreds of Indian villagers in Colorado just as "emancipation" was proclaimed
for black people by Lincoln's administration.
That classroom map also had a section to the south and west labeled "Mexican
Cession". This was a handy euphemism for the aggressive war against Mexico in
1846 in which the United States seized half of that country's land, giving us
California and the great Southwest. The term "Manifest Destiny", used at that
time, soon of course became more universal. On the eve of the Spanish-American
War in 1898, the Washington Post saw beyond Cuba: "We are face to face with a
strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the
taste of blood in the jungle."
The violent march across the continent, and even the invasion of Cuba, appeared
to be within a natural sphere of US interest. After all, hadn't the Monroe
Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere to be under our protection?
But with hardly a pause after Cuba came the invasion of the Philippines,
halfway around the world. The word "imperialism" now seemed a fitting one for
US actions. Indeed, that long, cruel war - treated quickly and superficially in
the history books - gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist League, in which William
James and Mark Twain were leading figures. But this was not something I learned
in university either.
The "sole superpower" comes into view Reading outside the classroom, however, I began to fit the pieces of
history into a larger mosaic. What at first had seemed like a purely passive
foreign policy in the decade leading up to the First World War now appeared as
a succession of violent interventions: the seizure of the Panama Canal zone
from Colombia, a naval bombardment of the Mexican coast, the dispatch of the
Marines to almost every country in Central America, occupying armies sent to
Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As the much-decorated General Smedley Butler,
who participated in many of those interventions, wrote later: "I was an errand
boy for Wall Street."
At the very time I was learning this history - the years after WWII - the
United States was becoming not just another imperial power, but the world's
leading superpower. Determined to maintain and expand its monopoly on nuclear
weapons, it was taking over remote islands in the Pacific, forcing the
inhabitants to leave, and turning the islands into deadly playgrounds for more
atomic tests.
In his memoir, No Place to Hide, Dr David Bradley, who monitored
radiation in those tests, described what was left behind as the testing teams
went home: "[R]adioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of Bikini and
its sad-eyed patient exiles." The tests in the Pacific were followed, over the
years, by more tests in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, more than a thousand
tests in all.
When the war in Korea began in 1950, I was still studying history as a graduate
student at Columbia University. Nothing in my classes prepared me to understand
American policy in Asia. But I was reading I F Stone's Weekly. Stone was among
the very few journalists who questioned the official justification for sending
an army to Korea. It seemed clear to me then that it was not the invasion of
South Korea by the North that prompted US intervention, but the desire of the
US to have a firm foothold on the continent of Asia, especially now that the
communists were in power in China.
Years later, as the covert intervention in Vietnam grew into a massive and
brutal military operation, the imperial designs of the US became yet clearer to
me. In 1967, I wrote a little book called Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal.
By that time I was heavily involved in the movement against the war.
When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me by
Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the National
Security Council. Explaining the US interest in Southeast Asia, they spoke
bluntly of the country's motives as a quest for "tin, rubber, oil".
Neither the desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft riots of
the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the century, nor
the strong opposition to World War I - indeed no anti-war movement in the
history of the nation reached the scale of the opposition to the war in
Vietnam. At least part of that opposition rested on an understanding that more
than Vietnam was at stake, that the brutal war in that tiny country was part of
a grander imperial design.
Various interventions following the US defeat in Vietnam seemed to reflect the
desperate need of the still-reigning superpower - even after the fall of its
powerful rival, the Soviet Union - to establish its dominance everywhere. Hence
the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the bombing assault on Panama in 1989, the
first Gulf war of 1991. Was George Bush Sr, heartsick over Saddam Hussein's
seizure of Kuwait, or was he using that event as an opportunity to move US
power firmly into the coveted oil region of the Middle East? Given the history
of the United States, given its obsession with Middle Eastern oil dating from
Franklin Roosevelt's 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, and the
CIA's overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government in Iran in 1953, it is
not hard to decide that question.
Justifying empire
The ruthless attacks of September 11, 2001, (as the official 9/11
Commission acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of US expansion in the
Middle East and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense Department
acknowledged, according to Chalmers Johnson's book The Sorrows of Empire,
the existence of more than 700 American military bases outside of the United
States.
Since that date, with the initiation of a "war on terrorism", many more bases
have been established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the desert of
Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else a compliant
nation could be bribed or coerced.
When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and France in
WWII, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be beyond
discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was therefore
startled to hear from a gunner on another crew - what we had in common was that
we both read books - that he considered this "an imperialist war". Both sides,
he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without
resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our discussion,
this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.
In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and
the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive, like
that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to help defeat
fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism and
racism.
The motive of the US establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was
of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce,
multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life and Fortune magazines, as the coming of
"The American Century". The time had arrived, he said, for the United States
"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".
We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial design. It
has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual handmaidens of the Bush
administration, but with assurances that the motive of this "influence" is
benign, that the "purposes" - whether in Luce's formulation or more recent ones
- are noble, that this is an "imperialism lite". As George Bush said in his
second inaugural address: "Spreading liberty around the world ... is the
calling of our time." The New York Times called that speech "striking for its
idealism".
The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project - Democrats and
Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it.
President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year
he bombarded Mexico) that the US used "her navy and her army ... as the
instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression". And Bill
Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: "The values you learned here ...
will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world."
For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the world,
those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric, often
persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that can no
longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American
GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes - in the Middle East and
in the Mississippi Delta.
Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting our
good sense - that war is necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental
to civilization - begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we reached a
point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the
world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?
Howard Zinn is the author of A
People's History of the United States and Voices of a People's History
of the United States, now being filmed for a major television documentary. His
newest book is A People's History of American Empire,
the story of America in the world, told in comics form, with Mike Konopacki and
Paul Buhle in the American Empire Project book series. An animated video
adapted from this essay with visuals from the comic book and voiceover by Viggo
Mortensen, as well as a section of the book on Zinn's early life, can be viewed
by clicking
here. Zinn's website is HowardZinn.org.
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