Year 501 (14 page)

The public is not unaware of what is happening, though with the success of the policies of isolation and breakdown of organizational structure, the response is erratic and self-destructive: faith in ridiculous billionaire saviors, myths of past innocence and noble leaders, religious and jingoist fanaticism, conspiracy cults, unfocused skepticism and disillusionment—a mixture that has not had happy consequences in the past.

Chapter 3

North-South/East-West

1. An Oversize “Rotten Apple”

In the broader framework just reviewed, the Cold War can be understood, in large measure, as an interlude in the North-South conflict of the Columbian era, unique in scale but similar to other episodes in significant respects.

Even in the pre-Columbian era, Eastern and Western Europe were diverging, with a fault line dividing Germany, East and West. “From the middle of the fifteenth century,” Robert Brenner writes, “in much of western Europe, the conditions for crisis finally receded, and there was a new period of economic upturn.” The “long-established and better-organized” peasant communities of Western Europe, “with established traditions of (often successful) struggle for their rights” and “an impressive network of village institutions for economic regulation and political self-government,” were able to “break feudal controls over their mobility and to win full freedom,” while in the East, “serfdom rose with a vengeance,” opening the way to the “development of underdevelopment.” In Poland, for example, national output appears to have reached a mid-16th century peak that was not attained again for 200 years. “The relative absence of village solidarity in the east...appears to have been connected with the entire evolution of the region as a colonial society,” under “the leadership of the landlords.”

The Third World, Leften Stavrianos observes, “made its first appearance in Eastern Europe,” which began to provide raw materials for the growing textile and metal industries of England and Holland as far back as the 14th century, and then followed the (now familiar) path towards underdevelopment as trade and investment patterns took their natural course, superimposed on the divergent social patterns. The process soon left “the East as perhaps Europe's first colonial territories, a Third World of the 16th century providing raw materials for the industrialists back west, a testing ground for bankers and financiers to practice what they would later perfect in more distant lands” (John Feffer). Russia itself was so vast and militarily powerful that its subordination to the economy of the West was delayed, but by the 19th century it was well on the way towards the fate of the South, with deep and widespread impoverishment and foreign control of key sectors of the economy.

A late 19th century Czech traveller to Russia described the fading of Europe as one travels East, narrowing finally down to the railway and a few hotels: “The aristocratic landowner would furnish his country house in the European way; similarly, the continuously multiplying factories in the countryside are European oases. All technical and practical equipment is European: railways, factories, and banks...; the army, the navy and partly the bureaucracy as well.” Foreign capital participation in Russian railways reached 93 percent by 1907, capital for development was mostly foreign, largely French, and debt was rising rapidly, as Russia settled into the typical Third World pattern. By 1914, Russia was “becoming a semi-colonial possession of European capital” (Teodor Shanin).

“Many Russians, whatever their political beliefs, resented the semi-colonial status accorded to their country in the West,” Z.A.B. Zeman writes: “The Bolshevik revolution was, in a critical sense, the reaction of a developing, essentially agrarian society against the West: against its political self-absorption, economic selfishness and military wastefulness. The present North-South divide between the rich and the poor countries, and the tensions it has created in the twentieth century, had its European, East-West antecedents.” Beyond Russia itself, “contrasts between the East and the West of Europe...became sharper than they had ever been” in the 19th and early 20th centuries, he adds, remaining so for much of Eastern Europe through the interwar period.
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The Bolshevik takeover in October 1917, which quickly aborted incipient socialist tendencies and destroyed any semblance of working-class or other popular organization, extricated the USSR from the Western-dominated periphery, setting off the inevitable reaction, beginning with immediate military intervention by Britain, France, Japan, and the US. These were, from the outset, basic elements of the Cold War.

The logic was not fundamentally different from the case of Grenada or Guatemala, though the scale of the problem surely was. Bolshevik Russia was “radical nationalist.” It was “Communist” in the technical sense, unwilling “to complement the industrial economies of the West”; in contrast, it was not in the least “Communist” or “socialist” in the literal sense of these terms, socialist elements of the pre-revolutionary period having been quickly demolished. Furthermore, though no conceivable military threat, the Bolshevik example had undeniable appeal elsewhere in the Third World. Its “very existence...constituted a nightmare” to US policymakers, Melvyn Leffler observes: “Here was a totalitarian country with a revolutionary ideology that had great appeal to Third World peoples bent on throwing off Western rule and making rapid economic progress.” US and British officials feared that the appeal extended to the core industrial countries, as discussed earlier.

The Soviet Union was, in short, a gigantic “rotten apple.” Adopting the basic logic and rhetoric of the North-South conflict, one may therefore justify the Western invasion after the revolution as a defensive action “in response to a profound and
potentially
far-reaching intervention
by the new Soviet government in the internal affairs, not just of the West, but of virtually every country in the world,” namely, “the Revolution's challenge...to the very survival of the capitalist order.” “The security of the United States” was “in danger” already in 1917, not just in 1950, and intervention was therefore entirely warranted in defense against the change of the social order in Russia and the announcement of revolutionary intentions (diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis; my emphasis).
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The “rapid economic growth” aroused particular attention in the South—and corresponding concerns among Western policymakers. In his 1952 study of late development, Alexander Gerschenkron describes the “approximate sixfold increase in the volume of industrial output” as “the greatest and the longest [spurt of industrialization] in the history of the country's industrial development,” though this “great industrial transformation engineered by the Soviet government” had “a remote, if any” relation to “Marxian ideology, or any socialist ideology for that matter”; and was, of course, carried out at extraordinary human cost. In his studies 10 years later of long-term trends in economic development, Simon Kuznets listed Russia among the countries with the highest rate of growth of per capita product, along with Japan and Sweden, with the US—having started from a far higher peak—in the middle range over a century, slightly above England.
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The ultranationalist threat was greatly enhanced after Russia's leading role in defeating Hider left it in control of Eastern and parts of Central Europe, separating these regions too from the domains of Western control. The rotten apple was so huge—and after World War II, so militarily powerful as well—and the virus it was spreading so dangerous, that this particular facet of the North-South conflict took on a life of its own from the outset. Long before Lenin and Trotsky took power, the threat of “Communism” and “anarchism” had regularly been invoked by the business-government-press complex to justify the violent suppression of attempts by working people to organize and to gain elementary rights. The Wilson Administration was able to extend these techniques, exploiting the Bolshevik takeover as an opportunity to crush the labor movement and independent thought, with the backing of the press and business community; the pattern has been standard since. The October revolution also provided the framework for Third World intervention, which became “defense against Communist aggression,” whatever the facts might be. Avid US support for Mussolini from his 1922 March on Rome, later support for Hitler, was based on the doctrine that Fascism and Nazism were understandable, if sometimes extreme, reactions to the far more deadly Bolshevik threat—a threat that was internal, of course; no one thought the Red Army was on the march. Similarly, the US had to invade Nicaragua to protect it from Bolshevik Mexico, and 50 years later, to attack Nicaragua to protect Mexico from Nicaraguan Bolshevism. The supple character of ideology is a wonder to behold.

Facts are commonly reshaped to establish that some intended target of attack is an outpost of the Kremlin (later, Peiping). On deciding in 1950 to support France's effort to quell the threat of independent nationalism in Vietnam, Washington assigned to the intelligence services the task of demonstrating that Ho Chi Minh was a puppet of Moscow or Peiping (either would do). Despite diligent efforts, evidence of “Kremlin-directed conspiracy” could be found “in virtually all countries except Vietnam,” which appeared to be “an anomaly.” Nor could links with China be detected. The natural conclusion was that Moscow considers the Viet Minh “sufficiently loyal to be trusted to determine their day-to-day policy without supervision.” Lack of contact therefore proves the enormity of the designs of the Evil Empire. There are numerous other examples.

A variant is illustrated by the case of Guatemala. As the US prepared to overthrow its government, an Embassy officer advised that a planned OAS resolution to bar arms and Communist agents would “enable us to stop ships including our own to such an extent that it will disrupt Guatemala's economy,” thus leading to a pro-US coup or increased Communist influence, which would in turn “justify...the U.S. to take strong measures,” unilaterally if necessary. In accord with such reasoning, a routine foreign policy procedure is to use embargo, terror, and the threat of greater violence to compel the target to turn to the Russians for support, thus revealing itself to be a tentacle of the Soviet conspiracy, reaching out to strangle us. The technique was used against Guatemala and Nicaragua with extreme clumsiness, but great success in a highly conformist intellectual culture.
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2. “Logical Illogicality”

As Russia absorbed the major blows of Nazi force, Stalin became an ally, the admired “Uncle Joe”; but with ambivalence. Roosevelt's wartime strategy, he confided to his son in private, was for the US to be the “reserves,” waiting for the Russians to exhaust themselves in the combat against the Nazis, after which the Americans would move in for the kill. One of the preeminent Roosevelt scholars, Warren Kimball, concludes that “aid to the Soviet Union became a presidential priority” on the assumption that Red Army victories would allow the President to keep US soldiers out of a land war in Europe. Truman went much further. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, he commented that “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.” By 1943, the US began to reinstate Fascist collaborators and sympathizers in Italy, a pattern that extended through the world as territories were liberated, reinstating the tolerance for fascism as a barrier to radical social change. Recall that Soviet aggression was not an issue prewar, nor anticipated postwar.
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The problem of the enormous rotten apple led to some odd contortions in policymaking. In an important study of July 1945, transmitted by Secretary of War Stimson to the Secretary of State, military planners tried to put a satisfactory gloss on the US intention to take control of the world and surround Russia with military force, while denying the adversary any rights beyond its borders. “To argue that it is necessary to preserve a unilateral military control by the U.S. or Britain over Panama or Gibraltar and yet deny a similar control to Russia at the Dardanelles may seem open to the criticism of being illogical,” they worried, particularly since the Dardanelles provided Russia with its only warm water access and was, in fact, to be kept firmly under unilateral US-British control. But the criticism is only superficially plausible, the planners concluded: the US design is “a logical illogicality.” By no “stretch of the imagination” could the US and Britain be thought to have “expansionist or aggressive ambition.” But Russia

has not as yet proven that she is entirely without expansionist ambitions...She is inextricably, almost mystically, related to the ideology of Communism which superficially at least can be associated with a rising tide all over the world wherein the common man aspires to higher and wider horizons. Russia must be sorely tempted to combine her strength with her ideology to expand her influence over the earth. Her actions in the past few years give us no assured bases for supposing she has not flirted with the thought.

In short, the burden is upon the Russians to prove that they have no intention of associating with the rascal multitude who “aspire to higher and wider horizons,” with the “poor who have always wanted to plunder the rich” (Dulles). Until they do so convincingly, it is only logical for responsible men who do not consort with criminal elements bent on plunder, and flirt with no such subversive thoughts as higher aspirations, to establish their unilateral control over the world. Russia must demonstrate that it is not a potential threat to “the very survival of the capitalist order” (Gaddis). Once it has clearly accepted the principle that Churchill's rich men must have their way everywhere, it may be allowed to enter the servants' quarters.