Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

by Chalmers Johnson

  When Mao Zedong introduced Soviet-style collective farms into China and did not get satisfactory results, he did not abandon them but turned instead to truly gigantic collectives called “communes.” This Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s produced a famine that took some thirty million Chinese lives, a monument to communist extremism similar to the extremes of laissez-faire that the British dogmatically imposed on their conquered territories—and that Ferguson would have preferred to be yet more extreme.

  The historical evidence suggests a strong correlation exists between being on the receiving end of imperialism and immiseration. The nations that avoided the fates of India, China, Mexico, and the Philippines did so by throwing off foreign rule early—as did the United States—or by modernizing militarily in order to hold off the imperialists (and ultimately join them)—as did Japan.

  Even so, the United States is the heir to the British Empire in at least one sense: it is still peddling the same self-serving ideology that its London predecessors pioneered. In a typical speech from the White House, given on September 17, 2002, President George W. Bush said, “The United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world. ... Free trade and free markets have proven their ability to lift whole societies out of poverty—so the United States will work with individual nations, entire regions, and the entire global trading community to build a world that trades in freedom and therefore grows in prosperity.” This kind of rhetoric gives democracy a bad name.

  Some who deplore the British Empire’s racism and the fraudulent economic benefits it offered its imperial subjects are nonetheless willing to applaud its gentlemanly endgame, arguing that the way the empire dismantled itself after World War II was “authentically noble” and redeemed all that went before. Ferguson takes up this theme, too. “In the end, the British sacrificed her empire to stop the Germans, Japanese, and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the empire’s other sins?”94 Much of this is Anglo-American claptrap, but at its core there is a theoretical distinction that is important. First, a look at the argument.

  P. J. Marshall asserts categorically: “The British entered into partnerships with their nationalists and extricated themselves from empire with grace and goodwill.. . . The unwillingness of the British government after 1945 to be dragged into colonial wars is irrefutable, even if it is not easy to explain.”95 This idea, a staple of Anglophile romanticism, is simply untrue. When he was writing in 1996, Marshall was surely aware of the Malayan Emergency, a bloody colonial war to retain British possession of its main rubber-producing southeast Asian colonies that lasted from approximately 1948 to 1960. It was the British equivalent of the anti-French and anti-American wars that went on in nearby Indochina. Although the British claimed victory over the insurgents, much like the French did in Algeria, the long and deadly conflict led to independence for Britain’s colonies and the emergence of the two successor states of Malaysia and Singapore.

  The so-called Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya from 1952 to 1960—in the immediate wake of the global war against fascism—was one of the most vicious colonial wars Britain ever fought. No one knows precisely what “Mau Mau” means or even what language it comes from, but it was the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, some 1.5 million strong, who led the rebellion for freedom from British oppression. Kenya’s white settler population was different from similar groups in other colonies. A great many came from Britain’s upper classes, and they assumed privileges in their new East African enclave that had long since been abolished in their homeland. Caroline Elkins, an American historian who has reconstructed the revolt against these expatriates, writes, “Kenya’s big men quickly established a leisurely life-style aspired to by all Europeans in the colony. On their estates or farms or in European neighborhoods in Nairobi, every white settler in the colony was a lord to some extent, particularly in relationship to the African population.... [T]hese privileged men and women lived an absolutely hedonistic life-style, filled with sex, drugs, and dance, followed by more of the same.”96

  When the Kenyans rebelled against ruthless land seizures by the settlers and their adamant refusal to share power in any way, the British retaliated—in the name of civilization—by detaining, torturing, and executing huge numbers of Africans. They imprisoned in concentration camps nearly the entire Kikuyu population, whom the British contended were not freedom fighters but savages of the lowest order. This colonial war may have slipped the mind of the editor of the Cambridge History because the British government did everything in its power to cover up the genocide it attempted there, including burning its colonial archives relating to Kenya on the eve of leaving the country in 1963.

  “On the dreadful balance sheet of atrocities,” Elkins explains,”... the murders perpetrated by Mau Mau adherents were quite small in number when compared to those committed by the forces of British colonial rule. Officially, fewer than one hundred Europeans, including settlers, were killed and some eighteen hundred loyalists [pro-British Kikuyu] died at the hands of Mau Mau. In contrast, the British reported that more than eleven thousand Mau Mau were killed in action, though the empirical and demographic evidence I unearthed calls into serious question the validity of this figure. I now believe there was in late colonial Kenya a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead.”97 This was anything but an extrication from empire “with grace and goodwill.”

  Without doubt Niall Ferguson also knows about the way the British crushed the Mau Mau, since he and his family lived in Nairobi in the late 1960s, but he makes no mention of the rebellion in either of his books on the British Empire. Instead, he writes, “We had our bungalow, our maid, our smattering of Swahili—and our sense of unshakable security. It was a magical time, which indelibly impressed on my consciousness the sight of the hunting cheetah, the sound of Kikuyu women singing, the smell of the first rains and the taste of ripe mango.”98 The British seem to have no qualms about distorting the historical record in order to prettify their imperialism. Jan Christian Smuts, the Boer general who later defected to the British side and served twice in the early twentieth century as prime minister of the Union of South Africa, the British colony’s successor state, called British indifference to their violations of international law during the Boer War “very characteristic of the nation which always plays the role of chosen judge over the actions and behavior of all other nations.”99

  There are still other post-1945 colonial wars that contradict any claim of an honorable British abdication of empire, for example, the joint Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in November 1956 in retaliation for Gamal Abdel Nasser’s act of nationalizing the Suez Canal. Nothing came of it because the United States refused to join this exercise in gunboat diplomacy. Nonetheless, the incident revealed that some eighteen years after the British occupation of Egypt had supposedly ended, Britain still had eighty thousand troops based in the canal zone and did not want to leave.100 And then there is the British military’s 2003 return to what Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis calls “among the most disastrous and tragic creations of Britain’s colonial policy”—namely, Iraq.101 In 1920, following World War I, Britain violated every promise it had ever made to the diverse peoples of the Near East and created the hopelessly unstable country of Iraq from the Mesopotamian remnants of the Ottoman Empire. The new country combined mutually incompatible Kurds, Shia Muslims, and Sunni Muslims, whose struggles with each other were finally suppressed only by the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. In 1920, when the Iraqis revolted against the British, the Royal Air Force routinely bombed, strafed, and used poison gas against rebellious villages. It is remarkable that the British dared show their faces there again.

  There are other problems with the thesis that the British Empire revealed its human greatness at it
s twilight. The bungled partition of India into India and Pakistan caused between two hundred thousand and a half million deaths and laid the foundation for the three wars to follow between the two countries and the ongoing conflict in Kashmir.102 Raychaudhuri explains, “The British perception that Hindus and Muslims were two mutually antagonistic monoliths, a notion not rooted in facts, became an important basis for allocating power and resources. Hindu-Muslim rivalry and the eventual partition of India was the end result, and the British policy makers, when they did not actually add fuel to the conflict, were quite happy to take advantage of it.”103 In the partition, Lord Mount-batten, the last viceroy, openly sided with the Hindu-dominated Congress Party against the Muslim League.104

  An empire such as Britain’s that remains a democracy at home and a tyranny abroad always faces tensions between its people in the field and the home office. The on-the-spot imperialists usually exercise unmitigated power over their subordinated peoples whereas political leaders at home are responsible to parliaments and can be held accountable through elections. Writing about British imperialism, Hannah Arendt noted that “on the whole [it] was a failure because of the dichotomy between the nation-state’s legal principles and the methods needed to oppress other people permanently. This failure was neither necessary nor due to ignorance or incompetence. British imperialists knew very well that ‘administrative massacres’ could keep India in bondage, but they also knew that public opinion at home would not stand for such measures. Imperialism could have been a success if the nation-state had been willing to pay the price, to commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to liquidate the empire.”105

  Even though I believe Arendt overstates the achievements of Britain, her point is the main one I have tried to illustrate in this chapter. Over any fairly lengthy period of time, successful imperialism requires that a domestic republic or a domestic democracy change into a domestic tyranny. That is what happened to the Roman Republic; that is what I fear is happening in the United States as the imperial presidency gathers strength at the expense of the constitutional balance of governmental powers and as militarism takes even deeper root in the society. It did not happen in Britain, although it was more likely and altogether less noble than either Arendt or contemporary apologists for British imperialism imply. Nonetheless, Britain escaped transformation into a tyranny largely because of a post-World War II resurgence of democracy and popular revulsion at the routine practices of imperialism.

  The histories of Rome and Britain suggest that imperialism and militarism are the deadly enemies of democracy. This was something the founders of the United States tried to forestall with their creation of a republican structure of government and a system of checks and balances inspired by the Roman Republic. Imperialism and militarism will ultimately breach the separation of powers created to prevent tyranny and defend liberty. The United States today, like the Roman Republic in the first century BC, is threatened by an out-of-control military-industrial complex and a huge secret government controlled exclusively by the president. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, cynical and shortsighted political leaders in the United States began to enlarge the powers of the president at the expense of the elected representatives of the people and the courts. The public went along, accepting the excuse that a little tyranny was necessary to protect the population. But, as Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1759, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

  Rome and Britain are archetypes of the dilemma of combining democracy at home with an empire abroad. In the Roman case, they decided to hang on to the empire and lost their democracy. In the British case, they chose the opposite: in order to remain democratic they dumped their empire and military apparatus after World War II. For us, the choice is between the Roman and British precedents.

  3

  Central Intelligence Agency:

  The President’s Private Army

  The enormous apparatus of government intelligence and spy operations, of subsidized think tanks and research institutes, and the entire discipline of “strategic studies” failed to prepare the ground for our understanding of what is arguably the most momentous political event of this century. In understanding the collapse of communism and the Soviet state, the supposed experts have been virtually irrelevant.

  —RONALD STEEL,

  Temptations of a Superpower (1995)

  Let me tell you about these intelligence guys. When I was growing up in Texas, we had a cow named Bessie. I’d get her in the stanchion, seat myself, and squeeze out a pail of fresh milk. One day, I’d worked hard and gotten a full pail of milk, but I wasn’t paying attention and old Bessie swung her shit-smeared tail through that bucket of milk. Now, you know, that’s what these intelligence guys do. You work hard and get a good program or policy going, and they swing a shit-smeared tail through it.

  —PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON,

  quoted by Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows (1996)

  Two weeks after George Bush’s re-election as president in November 2004, Porter J. Goss, the newly appointed director of central intelligence (DCI), wrote an internal memorandum to all employees that said in part, “[Our job is to] support the administration and its policies in our work. As agency employees, we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”1 Translated from bureaucratese, this directive essentially passes the following message to the CIA’s employees: “You have always worked for the White House. I’m just reminding you of that fact. The intelligence you produce must first and foremost protect the president from being held accountable for anything he has done, ordered, or said concerning Iraq, Osama bin Laden, preventive war, torturing captives, the ‘war on terror,’ or any other subject on which critics might challenge him.”

  As it turns out, much of the information the Central Intelligence Agency had already produced on these subjects was false, misleading, or carefully circumscribed by administration needs and desires, as were key intelligence estimates derived from fabrications inspired by the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. Goss was merely trying to warn, and so head off, the increasing numbers of outraged, courageous CIA truth tellers who were leaking information harmful to the president before going down in flames. As Thomas Powers, an authority on the CIA, reminds us, “No one can understand, much less predict, the behavior of the CIA who does not understand that the agency works for the president. I know of no exceptions to this general rule. In practice it means that in the end the CIA will always bend to the wishes of the president.... The general rule applies both to intelligence and to operations: what the CIA says, as well as what it does, will shape itself over time to what the president wants.”2

  Since everything the CIA writes and does is secret, including its budget (regardless of article 1, section 9, of the Constitution, which says “a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time”), accountability to the elected representatives of the people or even an accurate historical record of actions is today inconceivable. Congressional oversight of the agency— and many other, ever-expanding intelligence outfits in the U.S. government, including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA)—is, at best, a theatrical performance designed to distract and mislead the few Americans left who are concerned about constitutional government. In fact, the president’s untrammeled control of the CIA is probably the single most extraordinary power the imperial presidency possesses—totally beyond the balance of powers intended to protect the United States from the rise of a tyrant.

  This situation is hardly new, although in late 2004, former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman declared that the Bush administration’s record in relation to the CIA represented “the worst intelligence scandal in the nation’s history.”3 Perhaps no comme
nt caught the reality of the agency’s role better than James Schlesinger back in 1973. When the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who had briefly succeeded Richard Helms as CIA director before becoming secretary of defense, arrived at the agency’s Virginia “campus,” he immediately announced: “I am here to see that you guys don’t screw Richard Nixon.”4 Schlesinger wanted to protect the Watergate-embattled president from revelations that the CIA, on Nixon’s orders, had tried to cover up the break-in of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee by his personal agents as well as the agency’s illegal infiltration of the anti-Vietnam War movement within the United States. (At the time, the CIA was prohibited from domestic spying operations.) Schlesinger underscored his point by noting that he would be reporting directly to White House chief of staff Bob Haldeman, not, as Helms had done, to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.

  In George W. Bush’s White House, Goss did not need to bother going directly to Karl Rove, Bush’s political “brain,” since the president’s outgoing and incoming national security advisers, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, spent the years 2001 to 2004 under Rove’s tutelage working to reelect the president.5 Moreover, in April 2005, Goss’s position as director of central intelligence changed. He became merely the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, not the director of Central Intelligence, which has now become the purview of the newly appointed director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, who presides over the fifteen separate federal intelligence agencies in a post-9/11 attempt to bring some coherence and coordination to them. As a result, Goss no longer briefed the president every morning on the CIA’s view of the world, and he attended National Security Council meetings only at Negroponte’s invitation. In May 2006, Bush fired Goss and replaced him with a four-star air force general, Michael Hayden, former director of the nation’s eavesdropping and cryptological intelligence unit, the National Security Agency. Scott Ritter, author of Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the U.N. and Overthrow Saddam Hussein, commented that “Goss’s tenure [as director of the CIA] will go down in history as one of the worst ever (followed closely by that of George Tenet).”6 Whether anything has actually changed other than some titles and bureaucrats is, however, an open question.