Anti-Americanism - a humanitarian
imperative?
Alternating between "with us or against us", "bring 'em on" snarling or
"why do they hate us?" whining, George W. Bush
and Dick Cheney characterize Americanism at its most crass and banal.
The suave barbarism of Condoleezza Rice, John
Negroponte or Robert Zoellick offers a more inisidious version, but one
no less repugnant.
Based on crude US chauvinism, a facilitating medium for
empire, Americanism is inherently
anti-humanitarian and anti-democratic. The Bush regime's trashing of
domestic and international legal and human rights norms is Americanism
rampant. Americanism deliberately confounds the undeniable
contributions of the
United States' peoples to human development with itself. Individuals
like John Negroponte and Robert
Zoellick exploit that confusion to camouflage their corporate
imperialist assault on the interests of the majority of people in the
United
States.
Americanism affirms that the United States is all that really counts of
the Americas, North, Central or South. It regards everything about and
in Latin America as inferior, as it does all the Americas' indigenous
peoples. Americanism presumes that the lives of United States
citizens - except for the impoverished and the non-white - are worth
more than the lives of people in other
countries. Americanism skims glibly over multiple mass-murder on the
basis that the United States is accountable to no one. It glosses
over its historical crimes -
slavery, the genocide of North American indigenous peoples and the
invasion and/or occupation of many other peoples and their lands. Those
crimes are treated at most as regrettable blemishes, past and, bar Iraq
and
Afghanistan, no longer relevant.
Applying even rudimentary notions of Edward Said's concept of
Orientalism helps render more clearly not just the obnoxious folly
Americanism engenders but also its well-calculated political and
economic consequences. Americanism still encourages people to view
Latin America as
a conquered physical and conceptual space - a ready victim for
demeaning US and European superimposed caricatures
of impotence, cruelty, stupidity, inefficiency. Europe's
intimidating illusions of presumptuous superiority reinforce
Americanism's racist patrimony. As the US comes to terms with its
incipient imperial decline, Americanism may be mutating. But
it remains the basis for the never-ending attacks on alternatives that
reject US domination.
Resistance leaders from Jose Marti and Augusto Sandino to Fidel
Castro and Hugo Chavez have consistently turned the caricatures on
their heads. Ever diminishing differences between competing United
States, European and Pacific imperialisms have acted upon corresponding
divergences among the varieties of resistance they have provoked. ALBA
- the
Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas - is the most recent
self-definition of Latin American resistance and necessarily entails an
emphasis on integration. Peoples united are much harder to defeat.
Since
current conditions demand different strategies, Americanism's
proponents develop often shifting but singularly purposeful policies -
consolidating alliances with existing elites, most obviously in Mexico
and Colombia, and co-opting emergent
political and economic actors wherever possible, as in Brazil and
Uruguay.
A large part of the superiority Americanism assigns itself resides
in what Said wrote about the Orient
"The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader or the soldier
was in or thought about the Orient because he could be there or could
think about it with very little resistance on the Orient's part." (1)
Corporate globalization - dominated by US, European and Pacific
multinationals and the politicians who front for them - is an effort
to make permanent that ability
to be wherever Americanism deems necessary with relatively little
resistance. Americanism insists the United States and its allies must
be able to be in target victim-countries
as they please, while migration from those countries must be
policed ever more rigidly. The proposed anti-migrant border wall
between Mexico and the United States is Americanism's concrete
and razor wire apotheosis.
Cutting at the apparently seamless texture presented by would-be
dominant
versions of reality, like Americanism, exposes their discontinuities,
their
constructedness, and the fluidity of their production processes. Up
against it, the
understandable tendency, a kind of intellectual and moral
fight-or-flight, is to veer between critical incisiveness and
iconoclastic
clearance towards a way out into open ground. The impulse tends
both to challenge and
to escape
illegitimate authority's insincere or downright mendacious workings,
the
sadistic criminality of its military invasions and occupations and its
persistently destructive hypocritical economic interventions.
A crucial contest with the delinquent authority appropriated by
suffocating
orthodoxies like Americanism is over the
construction of events and memories and their representations. However
diffuse the spoken, textual or visual record of events,
these still seep across time and memory. Their presences and absences
stain, colour and mark what we
are able to think and what we do in fact think, what we say or
write, what images we produce, what music we make. In Christian
scriptural studies, the 19th century theologian Franz Overbeck argued
the
historical
role of apocryphal texts was to define the canon - marginality and
heresy defining order.
Control of the
various sieves and filters of information has always been as
essential as military force in imposing political and economic control.
Authorised versions and
imprimaturs have never gone away. They include current attempts to
harrass
dissenting academics, cases like those of Ward Churchill or
Norman Finkelstein. Fierce distortion of the recovery
from the local big business oligarchy by the Venezuelan State of
RCTV's broadcasting frequency for use as a public service channel is another. Yet another is the
suppression of information about the five Cuban
anti-terrorists unjustly imprisoned in high security jails while
super-terrorist Luis Posada
Carriles walks free.
Just as egregious is the mass censorship
by the corporate media of events in Mexico and Haiti over the last
couple of years. In Mexico the routine use of torture by the police,
mass rape
and assault in Atenco, lawless repression in Oaxaca, the electoral
fraud of July 2006 all have been handled with kid gloves, if at all, by
international corporate news outlets. In Haiti the massacres of
civilians by UN
mercenaries have gone deliberately under-reported by the world's
corporate media. They slavishly perpetuate
Americanism's perception-management chokehold on what constitutes, or
not, international news.
The various elites obsessed with power, control, status and
prestige that promote Americanism use these means
and many more to transmit, protect and promote their
excuses, rationalizations, self-justifications and
prejudices. Corporate European and US media coverage of events in Iraq,
Palestine,
Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Somalia, Haiti or Afghanistan shows clearly how
in an unequal relation,
the interpretations and versions of the less
powerful are restricted, their expression intimidated, crushed. The
constantly
accumulating hoard of dominant interpretations of the
historical record
and their management create a vast, dense archive of intimidation
deployed by powerful elites to face
down
critical questioning and scepticism.
With regard to Americanism, the latest
battleground for Latin American autonomy is the resurgence of the role
of the State following the failure of the neo-liberal
model on its ostensibly argued terms, if not its encrypted purpose
- the consolidation of power and concentration of wealth. Ideas about
or discussion and analysis of Latin America are certainly greatly
determined
by the fact
of its colonial and neo-colonial subordination to the US and Europe.
But
that fact is diffused through a plethora of activities and divisions of
labour which demand a persistent state of alert and resistance to the
ways
Americanism transmits and reproduces itself.
John Negroponte's recent visit to Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador
confirmed that the US State Department is re-jigging its diplomatic
machinery to the hum of a less crudely debilitating white noise. The
effort is to see if changing the tone and dynamic of the psychological
stress might
not still be effective in reducing Latin American subjects to putty in
US hands. For his part, Thomas Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State
for Western Hemisphere
Affairs uses a mellow style that superficially supplants traditional "do
what we want or else..." US diplomatic argot.
But one has only to remember the
"ham-and-eggs" diplomacy of Ambassador Dwight D. Morrow dealing with
President Calles during the Cristero War in Mexico to realise that
talking softly regularly accompanies the traditional big
stick. Modernising the workings of Americanism will remain central to
US government and allied efforts to recoup lost ground for corporate
imperialism in Latin
America. Current continuing US efforts with local allies to destabilize
Cuba,
Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua demonstrate that challenging
and exposing Americanism will be a constant
and crucial task to defend and preserve fundamental rights of the
majority in Latin America.
Notes
1. Introduction p7 "Orientalism" Edward Said Penguin 1995