leaders claim when they use force. The major recent academic study of
humanitarian intervention is by Sean Murphy, Humanitarian Intervention: The UN
in an Evolving World Order. He’s now an editor of the American Journal of
International Law. He points out, correctly, that before the Second World War,
there was the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928 that outlawed war. Between the
Kellogg-Briand Pact and the U.N. Charter in 1945, there were three major
examples of humanitarian intervention. One was the Japanese invasion of
Manchuria and north China. Another was Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and a
third was Hitler’s takeover of the Sudetenland. They were accompanied by quite
exalted and impressive humanitarian rhetoric, which as usual was not entirely
false. Even the most vulgar propaganda usually has elements of truth. In fact,
the propaganda was similar in its rhetoric to other so-called humanitarian
interventions, and about as plausible. Furthermore, here you have to look
elsewhere. What you have to do is look and see what was the U.S. reaction. Some
of it is public, but parts of it are from the internal record, which is now
partially declassified. The reaction is commonly called appeasement. But
that’s a little misleading, because that makes it seem as if you’re
groveling before the tyrants. It doesn’t convey the fact that the reaction was
actually approval and was rather supportive. When it was critical, it was on
very narrow grounds. So in the case of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and
north China these are things I wrote about over thirty years ago, because these
were public records the official U.S. reaction was, We don’t like it, but we
don’t care, really, as long as American interests in China, meaning primarily
economic interests, are guaranteed. The U.S. Ambassador, Joseph Grew, who was a
very influential figure in Asian policy in the Roosevelt Administration, in
1939, pretty late, ridiculed the idea that the Japanese were big bullies and the
Chinese were oppressed people. By then there had been huge atrocities, the
Nanking massacre and on and on. Grew said the only real problem was that the
Japanese were not protecting U.S. interests in China. If they did that, it would
be OK. At the same time Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, said
that we could reach a modus vivendi with Japan if they were to protect U.S.
commercial interests in China. If they wanted to massacre a couple of hundred
thousand people in Nanking, its another story.
Same
with Mussolini. There was extreme support. The State Department hailed Mussolini
for his magnificent achievements in Ethiopia and also, incidentally, for his
astonishing accomplishments in raising the level of the masses in Italy. This is
the late 1930s, several years after the invasion. Roosevelt himself described
Mussolini as that admirable Italian gentleman. In 1939 he praised the fascist
experiment in Italya’s did almost everyone, its not a particular criticism of
Roosevelt and said it had been corrupted by Hitler, but other than that it was a
good experiment. How about Hitler’s taking over the Sudetenland in 1938? One
of Roosevelt’s major advisors was A.A. Berle. He said that there’s nothing
alarming about the takeover. It was probably necessary for the Austrian Empire
to be reconstituted under German rule, so its all right. The State Department,
internally, was much more supportive of Hitler, on interesting grounds. He was a
representative of the moderate wing of the Nazi Party, standing between the
extremes of right and left. In 1937 the European Division of the State
Department held that fascism must succeed or the dissatisfied masses, with the
example of the Russian Revolution before them, will swing to the Left, joined by
the disillusioned middle classes. That would be the real tragedy. Notice this is
the late 1930s. There’s no concern about Russian aggression. That’s a
typical remark. That’s the way every monster is described, a moderate standing
between the extremes of right and left, and we have to support him, or too bad.
That’s a famous remark of John F. Kennedy’s about Trujillo reported by
Arthur Schlesinger, the liberal historian and Kennedy aide. Kennedy said
something like, We dont like Trujillo. Hes a murderous gangster. But unless we
can be assured that there wont be a Castro, well have to support Trujillo. We
can never be assured that there wont be a Castro. Remember how Castro was
regarded at the time. We know that from declassified records. Kennedy was going
to focus on Latin America. He had a Latin American mission, including Arthur
Schlesinger, who transmitted the conclusions of the mission to Kennedy. Of
course they discussed Cuba. Schlesinger said the problem of Cuba is the spread
of the Castro idea of taking matters into your own hands. He later explained
that its an idea that has a lot of appeal to impoverished and oppressed people
all over Latin America who face similar difficulties, oppression and misery and
might be inspired by the example of the Cuban revolution. So thats the Cuban
threat. Schlesinger also mentioned the Soviet threat. He said, Meanwhile the
Soviet Union hovers in the wings, offering development loans and presenting
itself as a model for achieving modernization in a single generation. So
that’s the Cuban threat and the Soviet threat. You have to stop that. It was
the same reason that the State Department gave for supporting Hitler in the
1930s, and in fact just about every other case. Case after case after case. The
threat of a good example, or its sometimes called the virus effect. The virus of
independent nationalism might succeed and inspire others. Actually, the war in
Vietnam started the same way.
DB,
I think; maybe check: There was a comment attributed to FDR about a Latin
American dictator, I think it was the elder Somoza. He may be an SOB, but he’s
our SOB.
Thats
falsely attributed, but it’s the right idea.
DB:
Speaking of Nazi Germany, Goebbels once said, It would not be impossible to
prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people
concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can
be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.
It’s
worth remembering where he got that idea. We ought to come back to humanitarian
intervention, because of course the fact that Hitler and Mussolini and the
Japanese fascists called it humanitarian intervention is not enough to prove
that other cases are not humanitarian intervention. It just raises some
questions that a serious person would want to look at.
Goebbels
got that idea, as did Hitler, from the practice of the democracies. They were
very impressed. Hitler in particular talked about the successes of
Anglo-American propaganda during World War I and felt, not without reason, that
that’s partly why Germany lost the war. It couldn’t compete with the
extensive propaganda efforts of the democracies. Britain had a Ministry of
Information, or some Orwellian term, the purpose of which, as its leaders put
it, was to control the thought of the world, and in particular to control the
thought of liberal American intellectuals. Remember the circumstances. Britain
had to get the U.S. into the war somehow, or it wasn’t going to win. That
meant it had to appeal to the educated sectors in the U.S. and get them on its
side, and they did. If you read back, John Dewey’s circle, I’m sorry to say,
what they produced about the First World War is very similar to the chorus of
self-adulation that similar circles produced during the bombing of Yugoslavia
last year, full of praise for their own enlightenment. They were very
pro-Wilson’s war, and the population wasn’t. Wilson in fact was elected on a
kind of pacifist program. Peace without victory, was his slogan. He immediately
tried to turn the country into raving warmongers, which they did, through
propaganda. But the educated sectors, especially the progressives, the liberal,
educated sector took great pride publicly, in The New Republic, for example, the
main journal, that this was the first war in history, as they said, which was
not due to military conquest or crass economic motives but just for values and
that had been led by the educated sectors who understood this and brought the
population to war. It was a new era in human history. Incidentally, this is the
same thing we heard last year in Yugoslavia. The first war ever fought for
principles and values. We are an enlightened state. There was a huge chorus of
self-praise. Not at all new, very similar to the First World War. At that time
the educated sectors here were transmitting tales about Hun atrocities, tearing
arms off Belgian babies. Like most propaganda, there was some element of truth
to it, but it turned out that it was mostly fabrication. In fact the picture
wasn’t pretty, but it was not what was being presented. One of very few people
who resisted was Randolph Bourne. He had been in Dewey’s circle and was more
or less thrown out, barred from participation, because he was telling the truth,
what later was recognized to be the truth, about what the war was really about
and why Wilson was trying to get us into it. That was not acceptable just as its
not acceptable here, right now. In fact, the similarities are very striking, as
is the style, and intellectual and moral level, of the defense of orthodoxy. For
people who want to think about humanitarian intervention, its worth looking at.
So
the British had the Ministry of Information. The U.S. had the Committee on
Public Information, the Creel Commission, which was mostly liberals like Walter
Lippmann and Edward Bernays. The latter went on to found the public relations
industry. They succeeded. They were very impressed with their success in turning
a pacifist population very quickly into raving anti-German fanatics. It was real
hysteria about the Germans. It happened pretty effectively. A number of groups
were impressed. One group was the progressive intellectuals. Tha’s the
background for the influential social and political theories that developed in
the 1920s, mostly from progressive circles. Its part of the founding of modern
political science and the public relations industry and the media. The new
insight the new art of democracy, in Lippmann’s phrase is that we have ways,
as Bernays put it, of regimenting the minds of men just as an army regiments
their bodies, and we should do it. Because were the good guys and smart guys and
they’re stupid and dumb, and therefore we have to control them for their own
good. And we can do it because we have these marvelous new techniques of
propaganda. It was honestly called propaganda in those days. Bernays’ book is
called Propaganda. Lippmann’s the same. Harold Lasswell, Reinhold Niebuhr, it
goes on and on. That’s one group that was impressed. Another group that was
impressed was business leaders. That’s where you’d have the real explosion
of the huge advertising and public relations industry. And their leaders were
again pretty frank. We have to impose on people a philosophy of futility and
ensure that they’re focused on the superficial things of life, like
fashionable consumption. They have to try to pursue what were called fancied
wants, invented needs. We create the needs and then get them to focus their
attention on it. Then they don’t bother us, they’re out of our hair. Its not
hard to see the consequences years later. This wasn’t new. These ideas start
with the Industrial Revolution, but there was a real upsurge in the 1920s and
since. These are the huge industries of domination and control. Another group
that was impressed was what became the Nazis, who recognized, Hitler discusses
this, I think it must be in Mein Kampf, that the Germans simply couldn’t
compete with the Anglo-American propaganda. And next time, he says, well be
ready with our own propaganda. That’s the background of the Goebbels quote. So
yes, they recognized it and they got it from a good source, the democracies.
Incidentally,
its not in the least surprising. It should be expected that its in the
democracies that these ideas would develop. Because in a democracy you have to
control peoples minds. You can’t control them by force. There’s a limited
capacity to control them by force, and since they have to be controlled and
marginalized, be spectators of action, not participants, as Lippmann put it, you
have to resort to propaganda. This was well understood and very self-conscious.
It was a very reasonable reaction. You can trace it right back to the
seventeenth century, the first democratic revolution.