The Sword & the Dollar by Michael J. Parenti

Author:Michael J. Parenti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

I dream that someday the United States will be on the side of the peasants in some civil war. I dream that we will be the ones who will help the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about land reform and education and health facilities for everyone, and that when the Red Cross or Amnesty International comes to count the bodies and take the testimony of women raped, that our side won’t be the heavies.11

Why are we always on the wrong side? asks Cohen. It is a good question; too bad liberal critics never get around to answering it. It is not enough to complain about how bad things are, we must also explain why such things persist. A half-century ago, President Franklin Roosevelt attempted a partial answer when justifying US support of Nicaragua’s dictator, Anastasio Somoza: “He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but at least he’s our son-of-a-bitch.”12 But what exactly is the community of interest between US leaders and right-wing dictatorships that make them “ours” as opposed to the left-wing governments that also want to maintain friendly relations with us? Is there just some strange contest between two indistinguishable global cults, one that calls itself “the Left” and the other “the Right”? Or is there not a social content to the labels?

As already noted, people such as Somoza are “ours” because they open their countries to capital investment on the most favorable terms for the investor (and for themselves); they are essential cogs in the struggle to make the world safe for capitalism. For this reason they are called “rightists” and “anticommunists” and “staunch allies.” And when reformists come to power, with the intent of using the resources and labor of the country for the collective benefit of the people, they are called “leftists,” “Marxists,” and “Communists,” whether they think of themselves that way or not.

During the 1980s, liberal critics complained of a lack of coherence in US policy. They pointed to the “inconsistency” in the Reagan administration’s policy of (1) imposing trade embargoes on Nicaragua in order to pressure that nation into becoming more “democratic” and more “cooperative,” while (2) refusing to apply sanctions against South Africa, claiming such measures would retard the development of democracy in that country. But if we understand the class content of that policy, it comes out to be quite consistent. Its purpose was to punish leftist anti-imperialist governments and not punish rightist ones that are a part of global capitalism.

The Reagan-appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams argued in 1984 that El Salvador’s right-wing regime could not be expected to institute a democracy while in the midst of a civil war. He noted that popular government could not be implanted overnight, that it took a hundred years for democracy to develop in the West, and that we cannot expect to impose our standards on a Latin American country.13 Yet he and the administration he served demanded nothing less than a perfect democracy from Nicaragua, while that country was immersed in a violent war promoted by the United States.

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