Who Rules the World? (2 page)

John Dewey was impressed by the great “psychological and educational lesson” of the war, which proved that human beings—more precisely, the “intelligent men of the community”—can “take hold of human affairs and manage them … deliberately and intelligently” to achieve the ends sought.
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(It took Dewey only a few years to shift from responsible intellectual of World War I to “anarchist of the lecture-platform,” denouncing the “un-free press” and questioning “how far genuine intellectual freedom and social responsibility are possible on any large scale under the existing economic regime.”
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)

Not everyone toed the line so obediently, of course. Notable figures such as Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debs, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht were, like Zola, sentenced to prison. Debs was punished with particular severity—a ten-year prison term for raising questions about President Wilson’s “war for democracy and human rights.” Wilson refused him amnesty after the war ended, though President Harding finally relented. Some dissidents, such as Thorstein Veblen, were chastised but treated less harshly; Veblen was fired from his position in the Food Administration after preparing a report showing that the shortage of farm labor could be overcome by ending Wilson’s brutal persecution of unions, specifically the Industrial Workers of the World. Randolph Bourne was dropped by the progressive journals after criticizing the “league of benevolently imperialistic nations” and their exalted endeavors.
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The pattern of praise and punishment is a familiar one throughout history: those who line up in the service of the state are typically praised by the general intellectual community, and those who refuse to line up in service of the state are punished.

In later years, the two categories of intellectuals were distinguished more explicitly by prominent scholars. The ridiculous eccentrics are termed “value-oriented intellectuals,” who pose “a challenge to democratic government which is, potentially at least, as serious as those posed in the past by aristocratic cliques, fascist movements, and communist parties.” Among other misdeeds, these dangerous creatures “devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority,” and even confront the institutions responsible for “the indoctrination of the young.” Some sink so far as to doubt the nobility of war aims, like Bourne. This castigation of the miscreants who defy authority and the established order was delivered by the scholars of the liberal internationalist Trilateral Commission—the Carter administration was largely drawn from their ranks—in their 1975 study
The Crisis of Democracy
. Like the
New Republic
progressives during the First World War, they extend the concept of “intellectual” beyond Brunetière to include the “technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals,” responsible and serious thinkers who devote themselves to the constructive work of shaping policy within established institutions, and to ensuring that indoctrination of the young proceeds on course.
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What particularly alarmed the Trilateral scholars was the “excess of democracy” during the time of troubles, the 1960s, when normally passive and apathetic parts of the population entered the political arena to advance their concerns: minorities, women, the young, the old, working people … in short, the population, sometimes called “the special interests.” They are to be distinguished from those whom Adam Smith called the “masters of mankind,” who are the “principal architects” of government policy and who pursue their “vile maxim”: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people.”
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The role of the masters in the political arena is not deplored, or discussed, in the Trilateral volume, presumably because the masters represent “the national interest,” like those who applauded themselves for leading the country to war “after the utmost deliberation by the more thoughtful members of the community” had reached its “moral verdict.”

To overcome the excessive burden imposed on the state by the special interests, the Trilateralists called for more “moderation in democracy,” a return to passivity on the part of the less deserving, perhaps even a return to the happy days when “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” and democracy therefore flourished.

The Trilateralists could well have claimed that they were adhering to the original intent of the Constitution, “intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period,” by delivering power to a “better sort” of people and barring “those who were not rich, well born, or prominent from exercising political power,” in the words of the historian Gordon Wood.
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In Madison’s defense, however, we should recognize that his mentality was precapitalist. In determining that power should be in the hands of “the wealth of the nation,” “the more capable set of men,” he envisioned those men on the model of the “enlightened statesman” and “benevolent philosopher” of the imagined Roman world. They would be “pure and noble,” “men of intelligence, patriotism, property, and independent circumstances” “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” So endowed, these men would “refine and enlarge the public views,” guarding the public interest against the “mischiefs” of democratic majorities.
10
In a similar vein, the progressive Wilsonian intellectuals might have taken comfort in the discoveries of the behavioral sciences, explained in 1939 by the psychologist and education theorist Edward Thorndike:
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It is the great good fortune of mankind that there is a substantial correlation between intelligence and morality including good will toward one’s fellows.… Consequently our superiors in ability are on the average our benefactors, and it is often safer to trust our interests to them than to ourselves.

A comforting doctrine, though some might feel that Adam Smith had the sharper eye.

REVERSING THE VALUES

The distinction between the two categories of intellectuals provides the framework for determining the “responsibility of intellectuals.” The phrase is ambiguous: Does it refer to their moral responsibility as decent human beings, in a position to use their privilege and status to advance the causes of freedom, justice, mercy, peace, and other such sentimental concerns? Or does it refer to the role they are expected to play as “technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals,” not derogating but serving leadership and established institutions? Since power generally tends to prevail, it is those in the latter category who are considered the “responsible intellectuals,” while the former are dismissed or denigrated—at home, that is.

With regard to enemies, the distinction between the two categories of intellectuals is retained, but with values reversed. In the old Soviet Union, the value-oriented intellectuals were perceived by Americans as honored dissidents, while we had only contempt for the apparatchiks and commissars, the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals. Similarly, in Iran we honor the courageous dissidents and condemn those who defend the clerical establishment. And so on elsewhere generally.

In this way, the honorable term “dissident” is used selectively. It does not, of course, apply, with its favorable connotations, to value-oriented intellectuals at home or to those who combat U.S.-supported tyranny abroad. Take the interesting case of Nelson Mandela, who was only removed from the official State Department terrorist list in 2008, allowing him to travel to the United States without special authorization. Twenty years earlier, he was the criminal leader of one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” according to a Pentagon report.
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That is why President Reagan had to support the apartheid regime, increasing trade with South Africa in violation of congressional sanctions and supporting South Africa’s depredations in neighboring countries, which led, according to a UN study, to 1.5 million deaths.
13
That was only one episode in the war on terrorism that Reagan declared to combat “the plague of the modern age,” or, as Secretary of State George Shultz had it, “a return to barbarism in the modern age.”
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We may add hundreds of thousands of corpses in Central America and tens of thousands more in the Middle East, among other achievements. Small wonder that the Great Communicator is worshipped by Hoover Institution scholars as a colossus whose “spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost.”
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The Latin American case is revealing. Those who called for freedom and justice in Latin America are not admitted to the pantheon of honored dissidents. For example, a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, six leading Latin American intellectuals, all Jesuit priests, had their heads blown off on the direct orders of the Salvadoran high command. The perpetrators were from an elite battalion armed and trained by Washington that had already left a gruesome trail of blood and terror.

The murdered priests are not commemorated as honored dissidents, nor are others like them throughout the hemisphere. Honored dissidents are those who called for freedom in enemy domains in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—and those thinkers certainly suffered, but not remotely like their counterparts in Latin America. This assertion is not seriously in question; as John Coatsworth writes in the
Cambridge History of the Cold War
, from 1960 to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.” Among the executed were many religious martyrs, and there were mass slaughters as well, consistently supported or initiated by Washington.
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Why then the distinction? It might be argued that what happened in Eastern Europe matters far more than the fate of the global South at our hands. It would be interesting to see that argument spelled out, and also to see the argument explaining why we should disregard elementary moral principles in thinking about U.S. involvement in foreign affairs, among them that we should focus our efforts on where we can do the most good—typically, where we share responsibility for what is being done. We have no difficulty demanding that our enemies follow such principles.

Few of us care, or should, what Andrei Sakharov or Shirin Ebadi says about U.S. or Israeli crimes; we admire them for what they say and do about those of their own states, and this conclusion holds far more strongly for those who live in more free and democratic societies, and therefore have far greater opportunities to act effectively. It is of some interest that, in the most respected circles, the practice is virtually the opposite of what elementary moral values dictate.

The U.S. wars in Latin America from 1960 to 1990, quite apart from their horrors, have long-term historical significance. To consider just one important aspect, they were in no small measure wars against the Catholic Church, undertaken to crush a terrible heresy proclaimed at Vatican II in 1962. At that time, Pope John XXIII “ushered in a new era in the history of the Catholic Church,” in the words of the distinguished theologian Hans Küng, restoring the teachings of the gospels that had been put to rest in the fourth century when the emperor Constantine established Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire, thereby instituting “a revolution” that converted “the persecuted church” to a “persecuting church.” The heresy of Vatican II was taken up by Latin American bishops, who adopted the “preferential option for the poor.”
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Priests, nuns, and laypersons then brought the radical pacifist message of the gospels to the poor, helping them organize to ameliorate their bitter fate in the domains of U.S. power.

That same year, 1962, President John F. Kennedy made several critical decisions. One was to shift the mission of the militaries of Latin America from “hemispheric defense” (an anachronism from World War II) to “internal security”—in effect, war against the domestic population, if they raised their heads.
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Charles Maechling Jr., who led U.S. counterinsurgency and internal defense planning from 1961 to 1966, describes the unsurprising consequences of the 1962 decision as a shift from toleration of “the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct complicity” in their crimes, to U.S. support for “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.”
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One major initiative was a military coup in Brazil, backed by Washington and implemented shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, that instituted a murderous and brutal national security state there. The plague of repression then spread through the hemisphere, encompassing the 1973 coup that installed the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and later the most vicious of all, the Argentine dictatorship—Ronald Reagan’s favorite Latin American regime. Central America’s turn—not for the first time—came in the 1980s under the leadership of the “warm and friendly ghost” of the Hoover Institution scholars, who is now revered for his achievements.

The murder of the Jesuit intellectuals as the Berlin Wall fell was a final blow in defeating the heresy of liberation theology, the culmination of a decade of horror in El Salvador that opened with the assassination, by much the same hands, of Archbishop Óscar Romero, the “voice for the voiceless.” The victors in the war against the Church declared their responsibility with pride. The School of the Americas (since renamed), famous for its training of Latin American killers, announced as one of its “talking points” that the liberation theology initiated at Vatican II was “defeated with the assistance of the US army.”
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Actually, the November 1989 assassinations were
almost
a final blow; more effort was yet needed. A year later Haiti had its first free election, and to the surprise and shock of Washington—which had anticipated an easy victory for its own candidate, handpicked from the privileged elite—the organized public in the slums and hills elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a popular priest committed to liberation theology. The United States at once moved to undermine the elected government and, after the military coup that overthrew it a few months later, lent substantial support to the vicious military junta and its elite supporters who took power. Trade with Haiti was increased, in violation of international sanctions, and increased further under President Clinton, who also authorized the Texaco oil company to supply the murderous rulers, in defiance of his own directives.
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I will skip the disgraceful aftermath, amply reviewed elsewhere, except to point out that in 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, France and the United States, joined by Canada, forcefully intervened once more, kidnapped President Aristide (who had been elected again), and shipped him off to central Africa. Aristide and his party were then effectively barred from the farcical 2010–11 elections, the most recent episode in a horrendous history that goes back hundreds of years and is barely known among those responsible for the crimes, who prefer tales of dedicated efforts to save the suffering people from their grim fate.