So this book does not rely on guessing. In the moments when my colleagues and I stumbled onto what seemed like big coincidences—seemingly too big, perhaps—or connections we couldn’t explain, we stopped there and discussed them; we didn’t just pick our own theory as to what caused them.
And we certainly did stumble onto some connections.
1
A New American Age
THE UNITED STATES, A WESTERN European settler colony in North America, emerged from World War II as by far the most powerful state on Earth. This was a surprise to most Americans, and to most of the world.
It was a young country. It was only about a hundred years previously that the government set up in former British colonies finished incorporating former French and Spanish territories into the new country, giving its leaders dominion over the middle strip of the continent. In comparison, their cousins back in Europe had been conquering the globe for almost five centuries. They had sailed around the planet, carving it up for themselves.
To say that the United States is a settler colony means that the land was overtaken by white Europeans over the course of several centuries in a way that differed from the way that most countries in Africa and Asia were conquered. The white settlers came to stay, and the native population was excluded, by definition, from the nation they built. In order for the new white and Christian country to take form, the indigenous population had to get out of the way.
As every American boy and girl learns, there was a strong element of religious fanaticism involved in the founding of the United States. The Puritans, a group of committed English Christians, did not travel across the Atlantic to make money for England. They sought a place for a purer, more disciplined version of the Calvinist society they wanted to build. One way to put this is that they wanted religious freedom. Another is that they wanted a society that was even more homogeneous, fundamentalist, and theocratic than the one that existed in seventeenth-century Europe.1
In the late 1700s, the leaders of the British colonies expelled the monarchy in a revolutionary war and created a remarkably effective system of self-governance that exists in slightly modified form today. Internationally, the country came to represent and champion revolutionary, democratic ideals. But internally, things were much more complicated. The United States remained a brutally white supremacist society. The consequence of the a priori dismissal of the native population was genocide.
Throughout the Americas, from Canada down to Argentina, European colonization killed between fifty million and seventy million indigenous people, around 90 percent of the native American population. Scientists recently concluded that the annihilation of these peoples was so large that it changed the temperature of the planet.2 In the new United States of America, the destruction of the local peoples continued long after the declaration of independence from British rule. US citizens continued to buy, sell, whip, torture, and own persons of African descent until the middle of the nineteenth century. Women were only given the right to vote nationwide in 1920. They could actually do so, however, while the theoretical voting rights granted to black Americans were beaten back by racist terror campaigns and laws that were meant to exclude them from real citizenship. When the United States entered World War II, it was what we would now consider an apartheid society.3
In that war, however, the better angels of American nature came to the fore. It wasn’t always clear that would be the case. In the 1930s, some Americans even sympathized with the Nazis, a hyper-militaristic, genocidal, and proudly racist authoritarian party governing Germany. In 1941, a senator from Missouri named Harry S. Truman said, “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”4 But when the US did join World War II, in an alliance with the British, French, and Russians against the Germans and Japanese, its troops fought to liberate prisoners from death camps and save Western Europe’s limited democracies from tyranny. Apart from five hundred thousand who tragically lost their lives, a generation of American boys came back from that war rightfully proud of what they had done—they had looked an entirely evil system in the face, stood up for the values their country was built on, and they had won.
The end of World War II was the beginning of a new global order. Europe was weakened, and the planet was broken into pieces.
Three Worlds
The second most-powerful country in the world in 1945, the Soviet Union, also emerged as a victor in that war. The Soviets were intensely proud too, but their population had been devastated. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party, despised their left-wing ideology and led a brutal invasion into their territory. Before the Soviets finally pushed them back—at Stalingrad in 1943, probably the turning point in the war, a year before the Americans landed in Europe—they had already suffered catastrophic losses. By the time the Red Army reached Berlin in 1945, occupying much of Central and Eastern Europe in the process, at least twenty-seven million Soviet citizens had died.5
The Soviet Union was an even younger country than the United States. It was founded in 1917 by a small group of radical intellectuals inspired by German philosopher Karl Marx, after a revolution overthrew a decrepit Russian monarchy ruling over an empire that largely consisted of impoverished peasants, and that was considered backward compared to the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe, where Marx—and Vladimir Lenin, the first Soviet leader—actually thought the world socialist revolution was supposed to start.
These revolutionaries faced a civil war from 1918 to 1920, and employed what the Bolsheviks themselves called “terror” to defeat the White forces, a loose coalition of conservatives, Russian nationalists, and anticommunists, who were also engaging in mass murder. After Lenin died in 1924, his ruthless successor, Joseph Stalin, forcefully collectivized agricultural production, built a centrally planned economy, and used mass imprisonment and execution to deal with his real and perceived enemies. Millions died as a result in the 1930s, including some of the original architects of the revolution, and Stalin shifted the official ideology of the international Communist movement back and forth to suit his own political needs. But much of the worst of this remained secret. Instead, the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization and subsequent defeat of the Nazis—as well as the fact that it was communists who often resisted both fascism and colonialism earliest and most forcefully around the world—gave it significant global prestige in 1945.6
The Soviets became the world’s second “superpower,” but they were far weaker than the United States in every way that counts. By the late 1940s, the US produced a full half of the world’s manufactured goods. By 1950, the US economy was probably as big as all of Europe and the Soviet Union combined.7 As for military strength, the Soviet population had been decimated, and this was especially true for those who could be called on to fight in any war. Even though hundreds of thousands of Soviet women bravely fought the Nazis, the gender imbalance in 1945 drives home the devastation. By 1945, there were only seven men for every ten women between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine.8 The US had superior military power, and demonstrated the apocalyptic damage it could unfurl from the air when it dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That is what we are talking about when we discuss the “First World” and the “Second World” in the years after 1945. The First World consisted of the rich countries in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan, all of which had gotten wealthy while engaging in colonialism. Their leading power, the United States, was late to that game, at least outside North America, but it certainly played. The young United States took control of the Louisiana territories, Florida, Texas, and the Southwest by waging war or threatening to attack.9 Then, Washington took over Hawaii after a group of businessmen overthrew Queen Liliuokalani in 1893, and gained control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The Philippines, the second-largest country in Southeast As
ia, remained a formal colony until 1945, while Cuba moved into the informal US sphere of influence in Central America and the Caribbean—where US Marines intervened a dizzying twenty times, at least, by 1920—and Puerto Rico remains in imperial limbo to this day.10
The “Second World” was the Soviet Union and the European territories where the Red Army had set up camp. Since its founding, the USSR had publicly aligned itself with the global anticolonial struggle and had not engaged in overseas imperialism, but the world was watching how Moscow would exert influence over the occupied nations of Central and Eastern Europe.
And then there was the “Third World”—everyone else, the vast majority of the world’s population. That term was coined in the early 1950s, and originally, all of its connotations were positive. When the leaders of these new nation-states took up the term, they spoke it with pride; it contained a dream of a better future in which the world’s downtrodden and enslaved masses would take control of their own destiny. The term was used in the sense of the “Third Estate” during the French Revolution, the revolutionary common people who would overthrow the First and Second Estates of the monarchy and the clergy. “Third” did not mean third-rate, but something more like the third and final act: the first group of rich white countries had their crack at creating the world, as did the second, and this was the new movement, full of energy and potential, just waiting to be unleashed. For much of the planet, the Third World was not just a category; it was a movement.11
In 1950, more than two-thirds of the world’s population lived in the Third World, and with few exceptions, these peoples had lived under the control of European colonialism.12 Some of these countries had managed to break free of imperial rule in the nineteenth century; some earned their independence when fascist forces retreated at the end of World War II; some attempted to do so in 1945, only to be re-invaded by First World armies; and for many others, the war had changed little, and they were still unfree. All of them inherited economies that were far, far poorer than those in the First World. Centuries of slavery and brutal exploitation had left them to fend for themselves, and decide how they would try to forge a path to independence and prosperity.
The simple version of the next part of this story is that newly independent countries in the Third World had to fight off imperial counterattacks, and then choose if they would follow the capitalist model favored by the United States and Western Europe or attempt to build socialism and follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union, hopefully moving from poverty to a position of global importance just as quickly as the Russians had. But it was more complicated than that. In 1945, it was still possible to believe they could be friendly with both Washington and Moscow.
A Vietnamese man named Ho Chi Minh, who had previously worked as a photo retoucher in Paris and as a baker in the United States, embraced revolutionary Marxism after he blamed the Western capitalist powers for refusing to acknowledge Vietnamese sovereignty at the Versailles Peace Conference following World War I.13 He became an agent for the Communist International before he led the Viet Minh resistance movement against the Japanese occupation in the 1940s. But when he arrived at the Ba Đình flower garden in downtown Hanoi after the two nuclear strikes on Japan by the US to declare independence on August 17, 1945, he opened with the following words: “‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.”14
He was celebrating the revolutionary ideals that America’s Founding Fathers had bequeathed to the USA, and that its leaders still deeply believed in. He was trying to tell the world that the Vietnamese only wanted what any other people wanted, that is, the right to govern themselves. He was also trying to survive in a very desperate situation. The French colonial army was on its way back to assert white rule over Indochina, and he knew that the last thing he needed was the most powerful country in human history also committed to crushing his independence movement. He was appealing directly to the stated values of the American people, just like many other leftists around the Third World did at the time.
After all, the United States had allied with the Soviet Union against Hitler. For the powerful men in that nation’s capital, however, things were changing very quickly.
Washington’s anticommunist crusade had actually started well before World War II. Just after the Russian Revolution, President Woodrow Wilson chose to join the other imperial powers in helping the White forces attempt to retake control from the Bolshevik revolutionaries. For two reasons. First, the core, foundational American ideology is something like the exact opposite of communism.15 Strong emphasis is placed on the individual, not the collective, and an idea of freedom that is strongly linked to the right to own things. This had been, after all, the basis for full citizenship in the early American republic: only white men with property could vote. And secondly, Moscow presented itself as a geopolitical and ideological rival, an alternative way that poor peoples could rise into modernity without replicating the American experience.16
But in the years just after World War II, a series of events brought anticommunism to the very center of American politics, in an intensely fanatical new form.
Actually Existing Anticommunism
It started in Europe, in areas ravaged by World War II. It did not please leaders in Washington that Communist parties won the first postwar elections in both France and Italy.17 In Greece, communist-led guerrillas who had fought the Nazis refused to disarm or recognize the government set up under British supervision, and civil war broke out. Then there was West Asia. In Turkey, the victorious Soviets demanded naval bases at the Strait of Hormuz, sparking a small political crisis. In Iran, the northern half of which had been under Soviet control since 1941 (per agreement with the Western Allies), the Communist-led Tudeh Party had become the largest and best-organized political group in the country, and ethnic minorities were demanding independence from the Shah, or king, installed by the British.
President Truman had much less patience for the Soviet Union than his predecessor, and he was looking for a way to confront Stalin. Greece and Turkey gave it to him. In March 1947, he asked Congress for civilian and military support to those countries in a special address that outlined what would be known as the Truman Doctrine.
“The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists,” he said. “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”18
Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had given some advice to Truman—in order to get what they wanted, the White House had to “scare the hell out of the American people” about communism. Truman took that advice, and it worked wonders. The anticommunist rhetoric only intensified, as the nature of the US political system provided clear incentives for its escalation. After Truman was re-elected in 1948, it just made political sense for the defeated Republican Party to accuse him of being “soft on communism,” even though he was nothing of the sort.19
The specific kind of anticommunism that took shape in these years was partly based on value judgments: the widespread belief in the United States that communism was simply a bad system, or morally repugnant even when effective. But it was also based on a number of assertions about the nature of Soviet-led international communism. There was widespread belief that Stalin wanted to invade Western Europe. It became accepted as fact that the Soviets were pushing for revolution worldwide, and that whenever communists were present, even in small numbers, they probably had secret plans to overthrow the government. And it was considered gospel that anywhere communists were acting, they we
re doing so on the orders of the Soviet Union, part of a monolithic global conspiracy to destroy the West. Most of this was simply untrue. Much of the rest was greatly exaggerated.
The case of Greece, the conflict Truman used essentially to launch the Cold War, is an important example. Stalin actually instructed the Greek communists to stand down and let the British-backed government take control after the Nazis left.20 The Greek communists refused to heed his instructions. Fighting a right-wing government that wanted to annihilate them was more important to them than any loyalty to the Soviet Union. Similarly, the Soviet leader told the Italian and French Communists to lay down their arms (they did), and asked Yugoslavia’s communist forces to stop supporting their Greek comrades, cede control of their country, and merge with Bulgaria (Yugoslavia’s leader, Josip Tito, did not, causing such a huge rift that Stalin tried to kill him).21 The leaders of Iran’s Tudeh Party thought their country was ripe for revolution after World War II, but the Soviets told them to try no such thing, and the USSR had already decided by 1946 that Turkey was not worth the trouble. The Soviet leader had no plans to invade Western Europe. Stalin of course did not back off in those parts of the world out of some generosity of spirit or his deep respect for the right of national self-determination. He did so because he had made a deal with the Western powers at Yalta, and he was too afraid of antagonizing the United States to violate it. He was surprised to see that Washington acted as if he had antagonized them anyway.22
The right-wing Greek government got the backing of the United States, which far preferred a British ally over leftist guerrillas, and employed a chemical called napalm for the first time in history to crush rebels who had fought against Hitler’s forces. The Royal Hellenic Air Force dropped the chemical poison over the verdant mountains of the Vitsi region, near the Albanian border. In Western Europe, the ancestral home of every US leader to date, Washington introduced the Marshall Plan, a brilliantly designed and magnificently effective economic aid package that put these rich countries on the path to American-style capitalist redevelopment.23
The Jakarta Method Page 2