Coming back to Roosevelt, I think once Britain had survived that initial German onslaught, he thought probably these guys are going to make it, and we have to do something now. But the fact that he came to power on a pacifist ticket, saying we’re not going to go into any wars, is an indication on how deep that pacifist isolationist feeling ran inside the United States.
Let’s follow the money for a moment. We know that many Americans are tied to Germany by birth, and we know there’s a lot of money in Germany. We know that perhaps we can make a deal with the Germans financially that could be lucrative. Bonds and stocks can be traded with Germany, as well as with Britain, but there’s a strong anti-British feeling in America.
There is, and I mean, Henry Ford, you know, one of the sort of great industrialists of the United States was very pro-German, did his deals with them, as did others.
And Charles Lindbergh.
And Lindbergh. And so, you know, the thing for them, I mean just thinking purely as captains of industry, capitalism essentially is color blind, gender blind. It’s a struggle for profits. And so why privilege Britain rather than Germany? That’s how they thought. And the fact that Germany had an anticommunist leadership, that was fine. In fact, it was even good.
To follow the money further, I wonder about Pearl Harbor. If you study the Japanese aggression from 1931 onward in China, Japan is clearly dying for empire, an Asian sphere, throwing out the white man, throwing out the foreigners. So Japan is seriously pursuing wealth, chopping up China, going toward Thailand and Indochina, Indonesia, the oil-producing crescent of South Asia. Japan is growing very rich, right? So why is America all of a sudden putting an embargo on Japan at that point? Why are they stopping the Japanese from getting rich at the same time that they are defending the interests of the British and French Empires in South Asia?
I think a significant proportion of leaders in the United States felt that it would be easier for them to take over the role of the British globally than it would be to take colonies away from the French or the Japanese. I mean, that was a tradition. That if it’s the Brits, if this falls totally into the hands of the Japanese, it’s lost to us forever, or for a long time to come. Whereas if it’s in the hands of the British or the French—
Or the Germans—
Or the Dutch, then it becomes much, much easier.
So they would trust the Germans more than Japanese because of racial considerations?
The racial thing was so strong that I think young people in the United States would be genuinely shocked were they to look back at the propaganda images of the war against Japan. Regardless of what Japan had done, the so-called yellow peril, the vicious portrayal of the Japanese in US propaganda as “yellow devils” went very deep indeed. And we know that racism has played a very strong part in the United States. People sometimes forget that the Ku Klux Klan wasn’t just a tiny group of idiots who went around dressed in white, lynching Black people, but was probably one of the largest political movements this country has ever had with millions and millions of members. It was a genuine, popular, mass movement of poor whites. That is a reality. And so playing to that audience in the United States was very easy. And, of course, there had already been restrictions on migration of Chinese workers into the United States itself. So it went very deep.
An embargo is serious. An American embargo is the declaration of war, so to speak.
It was.
Like our Cuban blockade.
Yes, it was serious.
And the Japanese I think decided they had to either take on the United States now or never.
I think you’re right. The other choice they had, of course, if they’d been thinking strategically, is to have attacked Russia, which made much more sense from their point of view, and then they could’ve linked up with their German comrades halfway between and occupied Russia. Instead they decided to hit the United States, which immediately brought the United States into the war. And that was ultimately that.
There seems to have been a lack of coordination between Japan and Germany. That’s astounding on many fronts.
It is astounding.
Especially in the Russian situation because the Japanese withdrew from Siberia in about 1940, I think, and they moved the Russian general Zhukov from Siberia to Stalingrad.
Once Russian intelligence concluded that the Japanese had decided not to invade the Soviet Union, they could move all their troops and throw them into battle against the Germans. One of the top spies the Russians had, a very, very brilliant old Bolshevik spy, Richard Zorga, came from an old German family of Bolsheviks and fled to Russia. He spoke perfect German, looked like a perfect Aryan. He was based in Japan, and was so close to the German embassy in Tokyo that when the ambassador went back to Berlin, Zorga virtually ran the embassy. So he saw all the reports. And he warned the Russians, he warned Stalin, that the Germans are preparing to invade Russia. He sent them the planned date of Operation Barbarossa (though Stalin didn’t believe him). So Russian intelligence in Japan was very good. And the minute they knew Japan isn’t attacking us, all the troops were thrown into battle against the Germans.
Could it have been that Hitler was very confident that Russia would be his and that he didn’t want the Japanese coming in the back door and taking part of his treasure?
It could well be, actually.
And would Germany have gone on to smash the Japanese if they had won?
I think they would have done a deal. You know, you keep the Greater Japanese Empire, but keep it to the east, and we will run Europe and Greater Russia.
What were the Germans thinking about the United States in all this? Do we know?
They thought they would make a deal with the United States. They were absolutely convinced of this, precisely because of what you said about the large German American population. And so the hostility to the United States wasn’t so great, which is why in all the propaganda used by the Third Reich against the United States, they used to say that the problem with the United States is the plutocracy, and the Jewish wing of that plutocracy, which is going to drag the United States into war; that Roosevelt is a prisoner of the Jewish plutocracy, because they couldn’t bring themselves to attack a country in which a large section of the population came from Germany.
Chapter 2
The Post–World War II Order
Oliver Stone: You’ve written that the self-sufficiency in essential raw materials that characterized the United States came to an end after the Second World War. The United States found it needed to import oil, iron ore, bauxite, copper, manganese, nickel, oil. Can you talk a bit about the US need for raw materials after World War II and what happened after it had become the richest country in the world?
Tariq Ali: After the war, people’s expectations were much higher than they had been in earlier periods. The manufacture of cars, for instance, the explosion of that particular industry, the explosion of the military-industrial complex, was on the scale that no American leader could have conceived of prior to the First World War. So they were making sure that they were never short of supplies in order to keep the country going, and in order to protect and preserve US imperial interests, especially oil. So they needed raw materials. Eisenhower actually once even spoke in terms of the importance of Vietnam in terms of the raw materials the United States needed. And the deal with Saudi Arabia, which later came to haunt the United States in the twenty-first century, was very interesting because it showed the transition from one empire to another before the first empire had officially collapsed. The United States took over the role of guarding the Saudi royal family and all their interests from the British during the Second World War. The meeting where this took place was on a boat, a special boat in the Suez Canal. That’s where the deal was signed.
Protect the family from who?
To protect the family from its own people.
Even then?
Even then. The Saudi royal family, and especially the brand of religion that it believe
d in, the Wahabi faith, represented a tiny number of people in Saudi Arabia. So they used the strength they gained first from their deals with the British Empire and subsequently with the United States in order to preserve their stranglehold over their own people and to impose this particular religion on the people in Saudi Arabia, who really didn’t share it. So that goes back to the Second World War. But increasingly the United States was thinking, even while the war was going on, the French have collapsed, what is happening to the French colonies? The Dutch can’t fight, they’re occupied by the Germans. What’s going to happen in Indonesia? What is going to happen in Indochina? What is going to happen to India? Can we let the Japanese take India? Because at one point there was a real danger.
Can you talk about that briefly?
After the fall of Singapore in 1942, the Indian nationalists, Gandhi in particular, and Nehru, felt that they might end up discussing Indian independence, not with the British, but with the Japanese. So for the first time Gandhi made a strategic error, or a tactical error. He said, let us call on the British to leave India now. And the British said to him, wait until the war is over. We’re going to go. He said, no, you have to go now. So they withdrew all their people from governments within Indian provinces, and waged a civil disobedience movement called Quit India. Now people see this just as a national movement, which it was, but it was linked to the big Japanese offensive after the fall of Singapore, which was seen as the biggest defeat for the British military in Asia. And the British felt the Japanese are moving on, they’re reaching Burma. Soon they will occupy Bengal. And after they occupy Bengal, well, who knows? They might take Delhi. So the British government, Churchill in particular, panicked and sent left-wing politicians from Britain to see Gandhi, and say to him, look, we’ll give you whatever you want, but just hang on a bit. We’re giving you a blank check. And Gandhi replied, what is the point of a blank check from a bank that is failing? He really thought that the Brits were finished. But of course, the Japanese never made it to Delhi, though it is worth remembering that lots of Indian soldiers captured by the Japanese were transformed into an Indian national army. And there was one central leader of the Indian Congress Party, Subhas Chandra Bose, who flew to Tokyo and Berlin on the nationalist slogan “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and did deals with Hitler and the Japanese to launch a military offensive within India against the British. This was the Indian National Army, which was very popular.
What happened?
They didn’t get very far. They did fight against the British. Many of them were arrested. And after the war, when they were being brought to trial, top Indian politicians, including Nehru, donned their lawyers’ clothes and went in to defend them, saying they were nationalist patriots. We didn’t agree with them, but they did what they did against a country that was occupying them.
Since Japan had Burma, why didn’t they send more troops over to India?
It is another of these mysteries, why they gave up on India, why they didn’t invade the Soviet Union. They just gave up at one point in time, and felt that they had to concentrate everything elsewhere. I think, by that time, they probably felt that their supply lines were a bit overstretched.
Did India have any wealth for Japan?
Well, India had enormous wealth, potential wealth.
Potential, but not at the moment.
Not at the moment. It was wealth which would have to be exploited, but they had a massive labor force.
Yes, but they would’ve had to be fed, and the Japanese did have food problems.
You’ve written that, after the Second World War, essentially the United States struck a deal with Japan to run a form of one-party state, am I correct?
People talk a great deal about General MacArthur writing the Japanese constitution. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, people proposed a “Japanese-style” occupation of Iraq. But the occupation of Japan was by no means progressive. First, why keep the Japanese emperor around? Normally the United States did not have too much time for that, nor did the French because of their republican traditions. Rule through monarchs is more of a British tradition. But in the case of Japan, I think MacArthur and the US government decided that removing the emperor from the throne of Japan and making Japan a republic might unleash social and political forces in the country that they couldn’t control. They always needed people to control these countries on their behalf, and they felt they stood a better chance with the emperor. In fact, the astonishing thing is that the emperor was already preparing the speech he expected to make when he was tried as a war criminal, because he was centrally involved in the war. And when MacArthur went to see him, he thought this was the end. In fact, MacArthur said, hang on, we’re keeping you on, your position is safe.
The other thing to bear in mind is that, after the Second World War, in all three Axis countries, Japan, Germany, Italy, the bulk of the military structure of these countries was kept intact, and the same personnel who had fought against the United States continued to play prominent roles. In Japan, for example, they removed very few people. There was a war crimes tribunal to prosecute Tojo and some others, but by and large they kept the army in force. In Italy, 60 to 65 percent of Mussolini’s structure in the judiciary, in the military, in the police force was kept in place. In Germany, you probably have the biggest purge, but still a lot of former Nazis joined the Christian Democratic Party, and played a part in the police force and the judiciary, because by this time, the enemy was communism. And so anything that could be used against the communists was used.
Was there a moment during the Second World War when the United States became an imperial power of the magnitude to inherit the British mantle?
From the moment it began, really, something had to give. If the First World War was a decisive event for making the United States a world power, bringing it onto the world stage, the Second World War was a decisive event in terms of making the United States an imperial power, which meant it had to fight wars to preserve its dominion. This soon led to the interventions in Korea, in Vietnam, and so on. Of course, the United States had always been an empire in North America, as we know, expanding its territory at the expense of Mexico. Buying Louisiana from the French, kicking the Brits out. Controlling South America indirectly, by and large, even though the marines went in time and time again, as General Smedley Butler reminds us in his wonderful book War Is a Racket. By and large, the way the United States preferred to rule the world was to find local relays who would do their bidding. Where they did intervene directly, the results weren’t always happy, like in the Philippines.
You have pointed out that Britain ruled India with only, I think, thirty thousand soldiers.
That is amazing, yes. At the height of the British rule in India, there were thirty-six thousand white English soldiers. But the Brits, because they decided to stay there, ruled this vast and populous subcontinent by doing deals with wings of its ruling class in different parts, and creating a “new model army,” the British Indian Army, which was staffed with people from the poorest sections of the Indian countryside. They avoided recruiting in the towns, recruiting mainly poor peasants, or mountain people, like the Gurkhas, instead, who were paid and looked after. It was a sort of paternalistic army. They troops weren’t just left to rot, and that was a very successful operation, which no imperial power could ever repeat again.
And they developed a landlord class?
They did indeed. In previous centuries, during the Mughal empire, landlordism hadn’t been encouraged. The state was dominant. The British created a class of landlords by giving larger states to people who were already notables in these regions but who exercised power through collecting taxes, rather than ownership of land, though in many cases they had slowly begun to accumulate landholdings. So the British institutionalized all this by saying to these people, you’re the landlords, you control these areas, you control the tenants under you, and we need your support. A lot of tenants from these estates often went an
d fought for the British army in China, in Indochina, and elsewhere in the world. Lots of Indian soldiers died in the Second World War in the fields of Europe.
So you’re saying the United States inherited, with certain exceptions, this colonial legacy?
They inherited this colonial legacy from the British, but they didn’t operate the way the British did. When the British occupied Africa, British civil servants were stationed around the country. The queen was the head of the country. I mean, it was a traditional, old-fashioned colonialism. If you were a French colony in Africa, you were part of the French commonwealth. All the deals were essentially done in Paris. The United States didn’t go down that route. One reason they didn’t is because the early ideology of the United States was we are an anticolonial country because we had to get rid of a colonial power, the Brits, ourselves. And this played a very important part in how the United States formulated its thinking about its own empire. They could never admit they were an empire. It is only recently, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that they’ve begun to do that. And so that played some part in it, and that didn’t encourage them to send Americans around to staff the customs service of country X or country Y. They’ve always been unhappy when they’re forced to do that, as in Iraq today. So it was a different type of an empire. As a matter of fact, the British got more financially out of controlling Argentina indirectly than they got out of occupying Africa. And for the United States, I think it is this financial aspect that is paramount when US interests are concerned—what their corporations can do, what is the best possible atmosphere for them to function. That has dominated US thinking for a long time.
On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation Page 3
