[Peace] Presentation by Carl Estabrook at SEE & AWARE's Anti-War Teach In

[Karen Aram]

Remarks for the ANTI-WAR TEACH-IN sponsored by
Students for Economic Empowerment (SEE) and the
Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana
(AWARE), September 23, 2017

U.S. WAR-MAKING SINCE WORLD WAR II:
WHAT HAVE WE DONE, AND WHY?

[Q: Why have US presidents killed more than 20 million people since 1945?
A: Ask Halford Mackinder*.]

1. When the Second World War ended, in 1945, the US was the only major undamaged country, among the victors or the vanquished. It’s a US propaganda myth that it was the US who won the war against Germany (and an even greater myth that we did it to save Jews). The war in Europe was won by the Soviet Union, which lost 27 million citizens; the US in comparison lost less than a half million in the entire war. Even German casualties were less than a third of the Russian dead.

2. Even after the US belatedly joined the war in Europe by invading France in 1944, the great majority of German troops remained on the eastern front, against Russia. The US government attitude toward the war had been candidly expressed by the unlikely man who became the 33rd president of the US, Harry Truman: when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, Truman said, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible...”

3. But with the ending of the war in 1945, US government planners - who, in the State Department and the Council of Foreign Relations, had been planning for US economic control of the post-war world since before Pearl Harbor - had a serious problem: the Great Depression, that had produced the Roosevelt administration and the economic reforms of the New Deal, had been ended, not by those reforms, but by war-time production; that is what bought back the jobs lost in the 1930s. But with the ending of the war, there was every indication that the Depression would come back.

4. Military production was the answer, but with the defeat of Germany and Japan, the US public was happy to see the end of war. The US public is historically anti-war: they had to be tricked, propagandized, and forced into both the First and Second World Wars, by the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations, respectively. They wanted no more war in 1945.

5. The solution was offered to President Truman by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Arthur Vandenberg, who urged the president to present the threat of Soviet expansionism to Congress and the nation in the starkest of terms. The only way to get renewed military spending Vandenberg advised, was to “make a personal appearance before Congress and scare the hell out of the American people.” On March 12, 1947, Truman, before a joint session of the House and Senate, did just that, painting the picture of a world teetering toward communist domination. In articulating a set of principles—later known as the Truman Doctrine—the president declared: "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

6. That may remind you of a presidential comment from this past week, 70 years after Truman’s, but it was nonsense then: At that time, half of the mechanized divisions of the exhausted Russian army were horse-drawn - but that mattered little: the Cold War was launched, and the US government had a cover story for becoming what ML King called it - “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

7. Truman “governed the country with the cooperation of a small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers" - so said Samuel Huntington, professor of the Science of Government [sic] at Harvard (Huntington was called ‘Mad Dog’ long before the present Secretary of Defense, General Mattis), but Truman and his successors also had a way to control the only enemy modern American presidents really fear - American public opinion. Australian social scientist Alex Carey wrote, ”The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance : the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."

8. The Cold War propaganda of 70 years ago was new, but the goal of US foreign policy was not; it remains the same today. We sometimes regard US foreign policy as “blundering attempts to do good,” as the NYT’s liberal columnist said about the Vietnam war, after it ended. But the truth is that at least since the Open Door policy of 1899, the cynosure of American planners has been Eurasia. The bedrock of US foreign policy since the 19th century has been the prevention of the economic integration of Eurasia, under whatever auspices, for fear that it would delimit the world-wide profits of the American economic elite, the 1%.

9. That’s what the Second World War in the Pacific was about - the defeat of Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” And America’s vicious wars in Korea and Vietnam were in aid of maintaining the economic control that the US had won in Asia in WWII.

10. That is today at the heart of the Obama and Trump administration’s war provocations against the Russia-China-Iran triad, who threaten once again the American bete noire, the economic integration of Eurasia, now most clearly in China’s Belt and Road initiative.

11. Since the Second World War, American presidents have killed between 20 and 30 million people in pursuit of that goal. And a subsidiary goal has been the control of world energy flows, principally from the Mideast, which has provided the US with a chokehold over competing economies in Europe and Asia, most notably over China. The US has shown itself willing to kill a lot of people for that.

12. The Nuremberg trials at the end of the Second World War (and even more obviously the parallel Tokyo Trials), in which officials of the defeated governments, Germany and Japan, were tried and hanged by the US and allied governments, were of course ‘victors’ justice’: one can easily imagine a reversed scenario, had the war ended differently. But in order to execute enemy officials, the US had to create law - law which also condemned the future behavior of the principal victor of the war, the US government.

13. The ‘International Military Tribunal for Germany,’ as it was called, declared at Nuremberg in 1946 (Sep. 30) that “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

14. Wars of aggression - that is, not out of self-defense nor sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council - are thus wars without international legality - indeed, the are “the supreme international crime.” And under that standard, the supreme international criminal in our lifetimes is the government of the United States.

15. It has been pointed out that all post-WWII US presidents would have been hanged, if they had been tried by a Nuremberg Tribunal, because they all launched aggressive war.

16. That most of America’s violence across the world has been perpetrated not by Republicans, or mutants like Trump, but by liberal Democrats, remains a taboo [subject].

17. Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record, including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama’s overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia’s western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941.

18. Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2011 signalled the transfer of the majority of America’s naval and air forces to Asia and the Pacific for no purpose other than to confront and provoke China. The Nobel Peace Laureate’s worldwide campaign of assassinations is arguably the most extensive campaign of terrorism since 9/11.

19. What is known in the US as ‘the left’ has effectively allied with the darkest recesses of institutional power, notably the Pentagon and the CIA, to see off a peace deal between Trump and Vladimir Putin and to reinstate Russia as an enemy, on the basis of no evidence of its alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.

20. The poets often get there first. The playwright Harold Pinter said, when he received the Nobel Prize in 2005, “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them...

21. ”The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people. We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death ... [and we] call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’...

22. “The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile.

23. “The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven. Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries ...
The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.

24. “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.”

25. That’s Harold Pinter, a dozen years ago. At this moment the US is making war and killing people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Thousands of U.S. troops are fighting in these WARS, although most Americans are not aware of it.

26. In addition, the 70,000-members of the U.S. ‘Special Operations Command’ are active in three-quarters of the countries of the world. Their activities include kidnapping (‘rendition’), torture, and murder. As the rest of the world recognizes - but Americans don’t - they are nothing less than American death squads.

27. Why is our government terrorizing the world to the point that international polls show the US is by far the most feared country in the world - not Russia, China, N. Korea, or Iran? The answer is simple and horrible. The US is killing people to protect the profits of the 1%, the American economic elite.

28. The US government used the crimes of 9-11 as an excuse to carry on its wars in the Mideast. The US government says it is fighting terrorism, but it is in fact killing people in order to control Mideast oil - what the US State Department called in 1945 “the world’s greatest material prize.”

29. The US doesn’t need Mideast oil - what we use here comes principally from the US, Canada, Venezuela, and Nigeria - but control of oil from SW Asia and N Africa gives the US a choke-hold over economic rivals, from Germany to China.

30. Most Americans are not aware of how much of the world is appalled at what the US government has done in our lifetimes. It is a triumph of the American system of propaganda and intellectual control - the most effective in history - that Americans are able to ignore it...

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* Sir Halford John Mackinder PC (1861-1947) was an English academic, a founder of geopolitics and geostrategy. His 1904 article, "The Geographical Pivot of History," proposed his ‘Heartland Theory’:

According to Mackinder, the Earth's land surface consists of

~ the world-island, the interlinked continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa - the largest, most populous, and richest of all possible land combinations;
~ the offshore islands, including the British Isles and the islands of Japan; and
~ the outlying islands, including North America, South America, and Australia.

The Heartland lay at the center of the world-island, stretching from the Volga to the Yangtze and from the Himalayas to the Arctic. In 1919, Mackinder summarized his theory as
"Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
who rules the World-Island commands the world."
(He may have been wrong about East Europe: it seems now that the command of the Heartland may be coming from the other direction.)

The bedrock of US foreign policy, at least since the Open Door Policy (1899), has been to prevent the economic integration of the ‘Heartland,’ under whatever auspices, which was seen as a threat to the profits of the US economic elite.

That’s what the unpleasantness with the Japanese in the 1940s was all about - and why the greatest set-back to the American ruling elite (and at the very moment of its complete triumph) was the ‘loss of China,’ in 1949, which accomplished the much-feared exclusion of US economic exploitation from Eurasia. (US wars in Korea and Indochina were attempts to maintain that exploitation, at least in east and southeast Asia; as such, those wars were successful, even if the US did not attain its maximum war aims.)

Most modern US foreign policy (including the generations-long attempt to control energy flows from the Mideast, as a choke-hold on Asian economies) can be inferred from a Mackinderesque outlook.

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