On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation

by Ali, Tariq;Stone, Oliver

  More of a neoliberal, free-market philosophy?

  Much more of that, even before these words were invented. That is how the United States has tended to operate. I mean, that is how they built up the Saudi oil industry. ARAMCO went in, and actually built the oil industry in Saudi Arabia, which the Saudis later took over with very handsome compensation, and permanent tribute basically to Washington. US companies would go in, personnel attached to their companies would go in, intelligence agents would go in to keep Washington informed of what was going on, but they didn’t like direct occupations or sending in troops unless it became absolutely necessary.

  You’ve observed that England was very clever in using the antislavery platform to colonize Africa.

  It’s quite interesting that the argument the British gave for the colonization of Africa, and for sending British troops, was that this is the only way we can end slavery, ignoring the fact that Britain and fortunes had been made in Britain from the slave trade for many, many decades. But that was the argument they used, and I compare it to the argument used by the United States that we’re taking this country or that country to defend human rights. These are ideological justifications, given largely to their own people at home, to make something that is unseemly more palatable. But the British were the cheekiest, actually.

  Would slavery have ended otherwise, or did the British actually end it?

  No, slavery was coming to an end, more or less. The process had begun in the nineteenth century, especially after the defeat of the South in the American Civil War. And in Europe, it was ending. The French Revolution had ended it. The Haitian slaves had revolted. So what the British said was very typical of British imperialism, a lot of bogus, hypocritical talk. The way they ruled Africa was totally racist. I mean, if you look at what they did when they ruled Africa, they imposed an apartheid system on the country. They built whites-only clubs, whites-only segregated areas. People say the Afrikaners did that in South Africa, but the British did it all over the world, in India as well, but largely in Africa.

  I’d be curious, what do you think of Dr. Livingston, the Scottish missionary doctor?

  Once you belong to an imperial country, an imperial race, you think the world is yours. And even good people, you know, they decide that they can go and explore the world, and discover things. In the back of their mind is the fact that we are the empire, everything I’m doing is for the empire. And Livingston was not immune to that. The Scottish are now very hostile to the English. But in terms of the British Empire, the Scotts sometimes tended to be the most die-hard imperialists. They played a big role in establishing the British Empire, and in administering it.

  And there was a religious component, too. That was always part of it. We are bringing civilization and the Christian religion to the heathens. We will help them, but in return they have to become Christians. A lot of the missionaries believed that, and they believed it quite genuinely without any bad motives. In order to save these souls, we have to make sure the body is kept alive, too. The Brits did it in Australia to a certain extent, as well, converting the Aboriginals, bringing them to our way of life. And, of course, most of them were wiped out.

  Would Sir Richard Burton be on your bad-guy list?

  Well, Burton was a very interesting guy, and my bad-guy list isn’t so big, you know. I mean, there were lots of British scholars who went out into the world and did good things, discovered languages, wrote about them. Some of these individuals were Orientalists in the best sense of the word, that they wanted to learn about “Oriental” culture, learn the languages, translate them into English. And, for me, it is always a good thing when you begin to learn what other people are thinking. The early scholars who went to China provide us with insights into what fiction was being written in China in the eleventh century, for example, which we would never know otherwise. So, for me, these are, by and large, good guys.

  Could you discuss your views of Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

  Roosevelt was, I think, probably one of the most intelligent presidents produced by the United States in the twentieth century. When he decided something had to be done, he did it. He surrounded himself with very good people, strong-minded people, some of whom he trusted, some he didn’t, but by and large he took a decision and pushed it through. Whether or not you agree with the particular decision, that’s what he did. He was helped by the fact that, at the time of the Great Depression, the United States also had a strong labor movement. Today it’s difficult to think about trade unions playing a big part in national public life in the United States, but they did at the time. There were factory occupations taking place in Flint, Michigan, where autoworkers were occupying their factories, and women were setting up the women’s auxiliary, helping the strike, taking food for their men, building solidarity. And this pressure from below enabled Roosevelt to take on the giant corporations when he did, and pushed through the New Deal, which was essentially a social-democratic program for the United States. He couldn’t have done this at a different time. He had this ability to communicate with people through the wireless, before the age of television, and became an effective war leader.

  Howard Zinn seems to think less of Roosevelt, seeing him more as a capitalist front man who was preserving a decayed system.

  This is true on one level of course, but one can say this about every politician in the Western world. Sometimes people ask me questions about Obama. And I say, well, if you wear Caesar’s clothes, and you sit on Caesar’s thrown, you have to behave like Caesar. But there are choices even in how to be Caesar. You can be Caligula, or you can be Claudius. You can be Constantine, or you can be Julian. So you can say that about all politicians. They are capitalists, they serve capitalist interests, and it is true. But when there are no other alternatives, then you’re a bit stuck. So the question is: were there any big alternatives for Roosevelt? Looking back on the history of the twentieth century, at that point in time, Roosevelt was probably the best the United States could get. And his vice president, Henry Wallace, was a genuinely progressive soul, with genuinely radical ideas. And Roosevelt hung onto him until he was too ill and sick to fight the elements of his own party that wanted to get rid of Wallace. And the Democrats put in Harry Truman. I mean, what if Wallace had become president after Roosevelt died? Who knows how the Cold War would have unfolded, whether it would have started in that particular way or not, or whether Wallace would have used nuclear weapons against Japan.

  Would Roosevelt have used nuclear weapons?

  That’s an interesting question. I think there was a side of him that reflected the common views in the United States about the Japanese. That was not his strong point, Japan.

  He came to accept terror bombing, it seems.

  He did. You know, the terror bombing that took place in German towns—Dresden, and so on—was it militarily necessary? I don’t think so. But once you accept that, then the jump from the terror bombing of Dresden and Hamburg to using and testing these new weapons in Japan is not a big leap. I always wonder whether they would’ve tested these weapons out on a white race. Let’s put it bluntly. Somehow the Japanese had been demonized so much that wiping out two whole cities didn’t really matter. Everyone agreed to it. It wasn’t just the Americans. The British agreed, the Russians agreed to it. Left-wing—

  You say the Russians agreed to it?

  The Russians agreed to it.

  To Hiroshima?

  Stalin agreed to it. Even though it was a shot across their own bow, the Russians were informed that these weapons were going to be tested on Japan and they didn’t protest.

  Postwar anticommunism took root more in the United States than in France or other parts of Europe. What was the reason behind that?

  I think in France, of course, you had a large resistance during the Second World War. And there were two components of that resistance. There was a nationalist resistance under General de Gaulle. He was greatly admired because he had stood firm when France fell, and said we will
fight these guys until the end. Then, after the Soviet Union was attacked—and only after then—did the French Communist Party throw itself heart and soul into the resistance, and they lost many, many people. So the traditions of that resistance remained very strong in France right until the 1980s. And the communist role in that resistance meant that it wasn’t easy to vilify or demonize them. And the French intelligentsia that grew up in that particular period, whether they were members of the Communist Party or not, were in general sympathetic to Marxist ideas. I talk particularly of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, the whole school of younger people around them and Les Temps modernes, the magazine they set up. In addition, you had with de Gaulle a president who, in later years of the Cold War, didn’t want to be part of the American plans for global domination. He took France out of NATO, and he opposed the war in Vietnam. He came to Montreal, not far from the United States and said, “Vive le Québec libre!” You know, what more could he do? So that meant that France was never part of the Cold War ideology in the same way as the United States.

  McCarthyism in that exact form in which it formed in the United States couldn’t have been found in too many countries in Europe, Scandinavia excluded. Italy had a giant communist party, largely because of the role it had played in the resistance.

  Yet in the United States we had numerous strikes during World War II, and the question is why we changed so abruptly from 1944 to 1947, when Truman signed the antilabor Taft-Hartley law? Looking back, Eugene Debs ran for president, and he ends up in jail. Big Bill Haywood ends up running away from America because he’s sentenced to jail. It seems that we broke the back of the labor unions with Emma Goldman’s deportation and the Palmer Raids. There seems to be an ongoing war against labor.

  There was a total war against the American labor movement, especially from the beginning from the 1920s onward. And if you look at the statistics of the number of physical attacks on striking workers, either by the police or by private companies and goons hired by the corporations, it’s quite astonishing. Repression backed by the state, or accepted by the state, was used to crush a labor movement in this country. In this time, the “Bolshevik threat” played a very big part, too. And it’s at this same time that US leaders began to use religious imagery. The motto “In God We Trust” was put on the dollar in the 1950s. And increasingly presidents who were not deeply religious started paying lip service to religion. Why? Because religion was seen as a weapon against communism. And the state began to use religious emblems, as well. That is quite an interesting feature of the Cold War, which has led us partially where we are today. The United States has become a much more religious country than it used to be, with religion being taken far more seriously. Before the Cold War, religion was a sort of private matter; it didn’t really enter into the functioning of the life of the state.

  But instead of Wallace as president, we had Truman.

  The removal of Henry Wallace and the election of Harry Truman meant that the United States had decided to embark on a certain course. That course was an aggressive foreign policy, taking on the Russians. The first big outbreak as a consequence of this was the Korean War. With the defeat of the Japanese, Korea became vulnerable to nationalism, to communism, to radical currents. Had the United States not intervened, there is very little doubt that the whole of the peninsula would have fallen to the communists, who interestingly were more popular in what is now South Korea than what is now North Korea. In Seoul, for example, you had much more genuine popular support for the Korean communists. Kim Il-sung didn’t like many of the communists of Seoul because they reminded him of a period when communism was genuinely popular, and he didn’t like to be reminded of that. So a lot of communists from the South were repressed by Kim Il-sung when he established this parody of a Stalinist dictatorship in North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Many communists from the South were not given positions. Many were killed, some were imprisoned.

  So, the United States decided that it wasn’t going to allow Korea to “fall” to communism. The United States had sent troops into Korea and a border had been established on the forty-ninth parallel between North and South Korea. The North Koreans then decided on a raid, and crossed the border, which gave the United States a pretext for a war. This war went on for three years. It was the first of the hot wars of the Cold War. And had the Chinese armies not entered, North Korea would have fallen to MacArthur. MacArthur had started saying we are going to win against the communists of North Korea, and if necessary we’ll cross the Yalu River and go into China. This sort of talk was very dangerous. The Chinese Revolution had succeeded in October 1949. We talked earlier about the wave of enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution in Europe. There was a similar wave of enthusiasm for the Chinese Revolution in Asia—the Chinese way, the Chinese path. Mao Zedong was a popular hero. They had taken the world’s largest country, not a small thing. So when the Korean War began, the Chinese decided we can’t allow North Korea to fall, and sent in Chinese. The Chinese army fought the United States to a standstill, ultimately leading to an armistice in 1953. But it produced a lot of casualties. Mao Zedong’s son died fighting in the Korean War. So that was the first of these wars. The early period of the Cold War saw the breakup of old empires, with the United States essentially increasingly taking over the role of these empires. The Korean War, the breakup of the Japanese Empire. The Vietnam War, the breakup of the French Empire.

  Iran.

  Events in Iran in the early 1950s showed the weakness of the British, who could no longer control Iran. The election of a nationalist government in Iran, the National Front Party, a very democratic movement led by Mohammed Mosaddegh, was a turning point. The first thing Mosaddegh did when he was elected in Iran was nationalize the oil. He said Iranian oil is not going to remain under the control of the British. And at that point the United States decided to back the British, so the CIA and British intelligence organized the toppling of the Mosaddegh regime, bringing the shah back, who had fled, to Iran, and mobilizing religious people. All the demonstrations in Tehran against Mosaddegh were organized in the mosques. And with the shah in power, and all other political parties banned, torture used regularly as a weapon, the only space that could be used was the mosque.

  The toppling of Mosaddegh in 1953 in Iran was part of a wider pattern. In Latin America, all attempts by South American nationalist leaders, such as Arbenz in Guatemala, to break away from Washington’s embrace, from US corporations, to defend their own countries, to favor poor people, was seen as a communist outrage. The US response was to use any means available to topple them, get rid of them. We have to do virtually anything, including fighting wars, to preserve US power in these domains. And if it means linking up with the worst elements in South America, or Iran, or Asia, we will do it. We have one enemy, communism, and everything we use against that enemy is justified. This was also the period of the Vietnam War, the most striking manifestation of that impulse. It is important to remember about the Vietnam War that it escalated soon after a big American victory in Indonesia, when they organized a coup in 1965 that wiped out one million communists, ousting the independent nationalist leader Sukarno and imposing the brutal dictator Suharto. Time magazine openly said this is a big, big victory for the United States—and it was.

  But the Vietnam War produced its own contradictions. This was a war without end, and a war fought by conscripts, and that conscript army represented what the United States was in the 1960s. A revolt within the army began to erupt when Black and white GIs said, “Hell, no, we won’t go.” We ain’t gonna fight in Vietnam. The Pentagon was defeated. They knew they could no longer persecute this war because they had lost the confidence of their own soldiers. The antiwar movement was very important. I would never begrudge that. But the spreading of the revolt inside the ranks of the US Army, the GIs against the war, I thought was absolutely fundamental. And there is no other event quite like that in the history of the United States, or in the history of most other nat
ions. You have to go back to the First World War and the Russian Revolution, which happened in part because the soldiers threw down their guns and revolted. The big demonstration by GIs outside the Pentagon was quite incredible. These are soldiers in uniform on their crutches with their medals, some of the most decorated soldiers in US history, saying, we don’t want to win this war, and we don’t want you to prosecute this war. Unheard of. And that showed the best face of the United States. And whenever I argue with religious fundamentalists, I say basically you guys have no idea what the United States is because this is a country whose leaders are largely frightened of its own people and no one else. So you have to understand what the American citizens are, what motivates them, how they think. They brought the Vietnam War to a halt—obviously helped by the Vietnamese—which is why I think they will never have a conscript army again. That they have understood. We can’t fight wars with conscript armies.

  What was the relationship between Sukarno and the Non-Aligned Movement? Was that why he was seen as such a threat to the United States?

  Well, the United States, as we’ve been discussing, believed the world was black and white. They never thought there could be gray, a leadership that was neither communist nor pro-US. The Indian government, which started Non-Alignment under Nehru, Tito in Yugoslavia, Nkrumah in Ghana, Sukarno in Indonesia, who all said, look, we don’t want to be part of the Cold War. You know, we’re not communists, but we don’t agree with what you’re doing. And a rational government in the United States would have said it’s not such a bad thing to have some space between us and the communists, to have a general third way of people trying to promote their own path. But, no, the hysteria of that period was such that anyone who said we’re not on their side, but we’re not on your side either, was treated as an enemy. So they toppled government after government. In Indonesia, Sukarno was seen as an enemy because he would hop on a plane and go and see the Chinese. He would talk to the Vietnamese. He spoke out against the war in Vietnam. So he had to be toppled.