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by
Suzy Hansen
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September 14 - October 4, 2017
one region about which Americans know their imperial history, it’s likely Latin America: the United Fruit Company; Coca-Cola and Del Monte working with Latin American death squads; David Rockefeller’s Business Group for Latin America conspiring with the CIA to bring about coups; the School of the Americas, an American military college in Fort Benning, Georgia, which trained seemingly every Latin American dictator in, among other things, torture techniques. There is no place of such thoroughgoing capitalist-imperialist horror as Latin America.
As in Greece, there wasn’t as great a Communist threat throughout most of Latin America as the Americans believed. Most Latin Americans were religious, unlikely to be swayed by godless communism;
The Americans supported monsters like Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, as well as military regimes throughout South America, political eras from which those countries still have not recovered. “Do nothing to offend the dictators,” said the American secretary of state John Foster Dulles. “They are
the only people we can depend on.” Years later, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would admit
eventually stage or support six more military coups: Argentina in 1962, Guatemala again in 1963, Brazil in 1964, Bolivia in 1964, Uruguay and Chile in 1973.
President Kennedy, so embarrassed by the Bay of Pigs invasion, needed to show that U.S. power was credible. And so from Greece to Latin America and across Asia, the Americans searched for the vulnerable country where they could forever prove their authority. Kennedy’s adviser, the modernization theorist Walt Rostow, told the president: “Vietnam is the place.”
perception of the Truman Doctrine had been mostly all benevolence and protection. It is one of our origin stories. Even after the invasion of Iraq, there are few things that happen militarily, politically, or economically—the IMF hammering Greece, the many American-sponsored dictatorships whose brutality inspired the revolts of the Arab Spring—that do not recall this very illusion of largesse, this language of virtue and progress, and this iron core of cold, imperial self-interest.
The economist’s name was Yanis Varoufakis. Over the years, he developed a theory about the worldwide financial crisis that showed how the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan years of the 1940s and ’50s had long ago set the calamity in motion. “The story
“The first phase is Bretton Woods—I call it the Global Plan, because it’s not just Bretton Woods, it’s bigger. Bretton Woods was the monetary system the Americans established—a system of fixed exchange rates and the IMF and all that.
“But they did something else, too: the United States tried to augment the fixed exchange rate with something quite remarkable, which I call a surplus recycling mechanism.
At the time of the Bretton Woods conference, a New York World-Telegram editorial put it this way: “The kid who owns the ball is usually captain and decides when and where the game will be played and who will be in the team.”
America had a historic duty to reset the scene and rebuild global capitalism.
The economic minds behind the Marshall Plan needed the Marshall Plan to create this surplus recycling mechanism. American factories were overproducing at that time. They needed the Europeans to buy their goods, but the Europeans had no money. So they put two and two together and said, Okay, we’ll give them money. That’s surplus recycling. And this worked brilliantly, until a very important linchpin fell off this global plan.”
“Paul Volcker? The financial crisis guy? Seriously?” I said. Paul Volcker assisted President Obama in regulating Wall Street after the 2008 financial crisis. Varoufakis laughed. “Americans tend to have a memory that spans a maximum of ten years. Volcker said: What are we going to do now? How will we retain our hegemony if we don’t have surpluses to recycle? Then he said: If we can’t recycle our surpluses, we’ll recycle everyone else’s surpluses. And this is the second phase of the global plan.”
Varoufakis wrote in his book The Global Minotaur that Volcker would later give a speech in which he admitted that the Americans had unleashed “a controlled disintegration of the world economy.”
“So the Americans unpegged the dollar from gold,” Varoufakis continued. “Then Volcker comes in in the late 1970s, and pushes interest rates up. Suddenly, there is a complete reversal of the old plan. Before the 1970s, you had America being the surplus country: exporting products to Europe and Japan, importing a surplus of capital, and then taking this money and loaning it back to them. When these surpluses ended, they engineered something else. American consumers were now buying products from Europe and Japan and later China. What was financing America’s deficits? German and Chinese profits.
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anti-Communist military coup. Some of the colonels had been educated at the War College in the United States, and some had been torturers in the Greek internment camps.
“This smells like Indonesia. American stuff.” He was referring to the coup of 1965 against Indonesia’s President Sukarno, a nationalist who sympathized with his country’s Communist
1968, it is known that CIA officers and embassy officials supplied the army with a target list.
Did Karousos also think of Arbenz in Guatemala? Did he think of Mossadegh in Iran? Did he think of Lumumba in the Congo? Was there an archipelago of shared memory—experiences strung together with news from across the world?
victims and their relatives, he discovered that the United States’ “involvement in torture went beyond simply moral support.” In his book Barbarism in Greece, he writes, “If American support is obvious to the Greeks, it is vital to the torturers”:
“Polytechnic,” it turned out, was the night that Greek college students rose up and eventually brought down the Greek dictatorship, in 1974.
To write about Greece in 2010 as a basket case of its own making was an abnegation of responsibility and even accuracy; to pronounce the ways in which it was “behind” was to parrot the language of modernization theory, and to belittle it as such without awareness of the political intervention and military coup my own country instigated, and which arguably, if anything, set the country “back,” was to be disrespectfully disconnected from the historical experience of my own subjects and indeed from
Greece was where my country’s concept of “counterterror” found its first violent home. I left beautiful Athens haunted by the palliative effects of my own ignorance.
Americans have viewed their own “unpleasantness” during the Cold War as necessary evils foisted upon innocent souls desperate to defeat a truly evil foe. The state of innocence Americans constantly
Turkey in the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine. After helping the Americans fight the Koreans in 1950, the Turks had welcomed admission to NATO; some of them, like I had, even viewed the Truman Doctrine as a rescue operation. By the mid-1950s, the United States had erected its own army, navy, air force, and intelligence stations all over Turkey; Incirlik Air Base, near the southern Turkish city of Adana, was to be America’s Middle Eastern outpost, and the place where America kept many of its nuclear weapons.
Within a decade, some thirty thousand Americans, mostly military personnel, came to live on Turkish soil.
Turkish leftists began to believe that NATO membership did not guarantee security as much as ensure that Turkey would remain a capitalist country.
President Lyndon B. Johnson intervened by threatening both the Greeks and Turks with a loss of U.S. weapons and aid, which effectively paralyzed the Turkish military and prevented a war.
was widely believed that the military, the prime minister, and everyone beneath him were US puppets,” Freely wrote later in her novel Enlightenment. “In the popular imagination, it was CIA pulling their strings.”
There, the Americans would become so terrified of the rise of communism that they would soon encourage the Turkish government to use an unlikely force against it: Islam.
“He who earns money is God’s beloved servant.”
We’re a very young country.
In fact, in the eyes of policy makers and journalists, Erdoğan’s Turkey had gone from being the secular model for Iraq before the invasion to an Islamic-democratic model for the entire Arab world: some religion, some democracy, some investment-fueled economic growth. Pundits called it the Turkish model, an example of an Islamic country that managed to become democratic.
But feminists I sat with in Cairo said that Suzanne had not been a champion of women. In a country where women lacked basic rights, Suzanne always stuck to a conservative platform of “family values.” (The phrase was championed by Erdoğan as well,
One evening in Cairo, Nawal El Saadawi, one of Egypt’s foremost feminist activists, sat with her long, white braid in the middle of a modest apartment, surrounded by fellow activists, and told me that the Mubarak regime in fact sidelined, banned, and harassed feminist NGOs. “They really fragmented the feminist movement,” she said. The mandate of the National Council for Women—Suzanne’s organization—was to be the only representative of Egyptian women.
it is this whole system that caters to godlike people—that caters to people who are worshipped. “There’s only so much you can do to resist that, and in thirty years you cannot, so you become so isolated, you become literally insane.
Privilege comes with a wide range of people who feed it. I have never seen so much corruption and audacity, or such a widening of the gap between rich and poor, or such a horrific police state, one that only cares about the privileged, like I have seen during this regime.
began to know what people were about to say before they said it. Implicit in all of these statements was a recognition of American power.
even without the minorities that contributed to such cosmopolitanism—you could feel the pulse of a divine city. And yet something had happened to Cairo, the worst kind of neglect and contempt for its people—an entire country of promise left to decay. Forty percent of the population lived on two
How could this couple, the Mubaraks, any couple, any leader, have allowed their country to suffer this way? How had they stayed in power? The Mubaraks had not been clever people.
“We are facing a very dangerous counterrevolution. Who is the counterrevolution and who is against women? It is the United States of America, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Mubarak regime, and some of the military class inside the country. All these powers internal and external are working to abort the revolution.”
Nawal El Saadawi once wrote that she was often invited to conferences in the United States and asked to talk about her Egyptian identity. “It makes me turn your question round and round,” she said. “Why does no one ask you, what is your ‘identity’? Is it that American ‘identity,’ American culture, does not require any questioning, does not need to be examined, or studied or discussed in conferences like this?”
The American missionaries did not believe they
needed to understand a culture before attempting to wrest someone
Recognizing that their efforts to convert Arabs to Christianity were failing, the Protestants instead began to sell them on the idea of America.
But Nimr and Sarruf quickly realized that the Americans were not entirely open to every aspect of the Arabs’ modernization. The missionaries excluded Arabs from professorships and high positions. “Sarruf
The Arab intellectuals of the time were outraged that the American president would betray his own American ideals. They felt “Roosevelt should act as an American, not as an imperialist European.”
“Here was the man of the Fourteen Points, among them the right to self-determination, denying the Egyptian people its right to self-determination,” Haykal writes. “Is this not the ugliest of treacheries?!”
But the ultimate test of the Western-Arab relationship was whether the West would force Palestinians from their land so that the Jewish people who suffered during the Holocaust might have a refuge: “To place the brunt of the burden upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole of the civilized world,” Antonius said. “It is also morally outrageous. No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an
