Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  This new model imperialism chimed well with the evolving ideology of democracy. Where ‘spreading democracy’ had once meant annexing territory to allow America itself to spread, it now meant ensuring that other nations played by the democratic rules that would allow American corporations to spread. America’s existing colonies became an increasing anachronism, and in 1934 the US Congress in the Tydings-McDuffie Act committed itself to granting independence to its largest colony, the Philippines, in ten years’ time (a commitment made impossible by the Second World War but honoured in 1946).

  Between the two world wars Russia was unable to expand its empire and America had no need to. Territorial aggrandisement in the United States had been driven by the desire for land to settle and resources to exploit, primarily gold. As America became less tolerant of immigrants the need for new land disappeared, and as the country became self-sufficient in nearly everything there was less pressure to seize the resources of others. In Russia territorial aggrandisement was militarily impossible, but Russia was able to grow in a more traditional manner, a manner that had largely disappeared in America with the taming of the western frontier.

  It is easy to forget that at the beginning of the twentieth century one of the world’s last great unexplored habitable regions was not in the jungles of central Africa or the Amazon rainforests or the wilds of Borneo but in Europe. What is now the Komi Republic was until the 1920s a vast, frozen and virtually unknown wilderness stretching across the top of European Russia. Its exploration and exploitation are almost entirely thanks to one man, Joseph Stalin, and were accomplished almost entirely with the methods of a man that Stalin consciously emulated, Peter the Great. In 1722 Peter the Great exiled prisoners and their families to the silver mines of Dauriya in eastern Siberia. Stalin did the same sort of thing on a massive scale. Thousands, later hundreds of thousands, of prisoners slaved and died to open up Komi. A typical example of the early exploration was the founding of the city of Vorkuta. The twenty-three men who set off by boat from the prison camp at Ukhta in 1931 could not have been more different from the pioneers in America. Led by secret policemen, most of the party were prisoners, and included geologists specially arrested for their expertise. After paddling through mosquito-infested swamps for hundreds of miles they managed to build a camp and survive through the Arctic winter. In spring they started digging for coal with shovels and picks. Just seven years later 15,000 prisoners were employed in a chain of mines that spread out from the new city of Vorkuta.

  As an aside, the sheer scale of unexplored Russia was demonstrated when, as the western world rocked to the Beatles and Rolling Stones, the crew of a KGB helicopter stumbled across a community that could not have been more divorced from the cultural currents of both west and east. Flying over virgin forests in the Urals they were shocked to see signs of human habitation; by chance they had discovered a group of religious dissidents, Old Believers, trying to escape the atheistic tentacles of the Soviet regime. What was amazing was that the community had fled to their forest refuge in 1919 and for half a century had succeeded in remaining undiscovered by one of the world’s most omnipotent police states. (The KGB, of course, was not impressed by this feat, and the group’s leaders soon found themselves isolated again, this time in the punishment cells of the Potma camp for political prisoners.)

  Pushing into uncharted wilderness and pushing into the well-charted territory of others were two sides of the same coin, capturing the same heady mixture of adventure, patriotism and greed.

  After the Second World War conditions changed: Russia found itself with sufficient military strength to expand beyond its frontiers once again and America discovered it needed resources from overseas, and once more started to flex its military muscles, but in historical terms the first half of the twentieth century was a period of consolidation and transition for both the Russian and American empires. The Bolsheviks consolidated themselves in power and the world came to terms with an empire moving from an autocracy predicated on the divine right to rule of the Romanov dynasty to one based on the quasi-divine right to rule of the Communist party. In America corporations consolidated their position at the heart of American society, and the imperialism of the Spanish-American War moved to something very different, something that in some ways was not imperialism at all.

  The debate about the existence or otherwise of ‘corporate imperialism’ is essentially a debate about definitions: the growth and influence of American corporations is a fact, but whether it constitutes imperialism is a matter for debate. Another feature that some claim to see in twentieth-century American imperialism is far more controversial because there is no agreement on the underlying facts. It is something that strikes to the very soul of American society, a characteristic that was certainly present before the twentieth century but many would argue has since disappeared: racism. The lines between racism, racial pride and patriotic fervour are blurred and move over time. What was taken for granted in one century may seem totally abhorrent in another. Men whose views would today be described as racist gave their lives to end slavery. Apartheid in America reached its height at the very moment that black and white Americans were together dying for their country in the trenches of Flanders. It is easy to assume that values we treasure like democracy and liberty remain unchanging through the centuries; that the ideology of democracy that Thomas Paine proclaimed is what we believe today. But the reality is that values change dramatically. Until the middle of the nineteenth century there were many church leaders who endorsed slavery and serfdom; today such convictions have simply vanished.

  Another belief once widely held that has also disappeared or at least become invisible is the doctrine of eugenics. Named after the Greek for good breeding, this is the belief that the quality of individuals is determined by their genes, and the quality of society by its gene pool. Now considered a Nazi aberration, eugenics was once widely supported. The First International Eugenics Congress in London in 1912 was attended by leading political figures, such as Winston Churchill, and such distinguished scientists as Alexander Graham Bell. Bell presided over the Second Congress, hosted by the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1921, which again was supported by leading politicians, for example future president Herbert Hoover. The congresses heard learned papers on such themes as the dangerous consequences for Sweden of allowing interbreeding with Finns, and political diatribes on the ‘rising tide of color’ in America. The ideology of compulsory genetic improvement was certainly not restricted to Germany. The Russian Eugenics Society proposed that the communist state’s first five year plan should include the artificial insemination of suitable women with the sperm of suitable men to improve the genetic quality of the Soviet population. It was widely believed that supermen and super-races could be created by proper breeding. After Lenin’s death his brain was rushed to the Moscow Institute of Brain Research to see what could be learnt that might help to make others in his image.

  The pseudo-science of eugenics was started in Britain, but its most active non-Nazi proponents were in America. The forced sterilisation of ‘undesirables’ in the US was far from being a central feature of American life but it happened; at least 20,000 were forcibly sterilised in California alone between the early 1900s and late 1960s. The programme was supported by campaigning groups like the Human Betterment Foundation, sanctioned by the Supreme Court and, it is claimed, providing a blueprint for Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, which borrowed heavily from American laws when introducing forced sterilisation for its own ‘undesirables’. A typical advocate of ethnic cleansing was Charles Goethe, founder of the Eugenics Society of Northern California, who proclaimed in 1929 that the Mexican was ‘eugenically as low-powered as the Negro. He not only does not understand health rules: being a superstitious savage, he resists them.’Today Goethe has a public park named after him in Sacramento, California’s capital.

  Eugenics was the polite face of racism; underneath it was a far more virulent strain. In 2005 the US Senate p
assed a motion apologising to 4,743 people lynched between 1882 and 1968. Specifically it was apologising that Congress had three times thrown out a bill, first introduced in 1900, that would have made lynching a federal offence. Most states refused to prosecute whites for lynching blacks, and by refusing to intervene Congress had effectively sanctioned the practice. Not all the victims were black. Immigrants were also targeted, and a century before the Senate apology the US government had paid nearly $500,000 as compensation for the lynching of their citizens to the governments of Italy, Mexico and China. Lynchings are often portrayed as small-scale aberrations carried out by a handful of drunken white males in the middle of the night. In fact, as two researchers put it, ‘Mob killings were often carnival-like events. Refreshments were sold, trains made special trips to lynching sites, schools and businesses closed to let people attend. Newspapers ran adverts for them. Corpses were displayed for days. Victims’ ears, fingers and toes became souvenirs.’ Some victims had their eyes gouged out or their teeth pulled with pliers; others were beaten, burned at the stake, dismembered or castrated.

  The Senate acted after the publication of a book of souvenir postcards depicting photos of lynchings – a typical example, showing the burnt corpse of the victim of a 1915 Texan lynching, is inscribed on the back, ‘This is the barbecue we had last night … Your son Joe.’The senators who in 2005 found such barbarism appalling would probably have denied that there were any real parallels between events in America and the Holocaust in Europe, but racism and anti-semitism were not restricted to Russia and Nazi Germany. American campaigns against ‘communists’ often highlighted their genuine or imagined Jewish backgrounds, and Henry Ford used the media interests he controlled to whip up anti-Jewish sentiment. Ford, the archetypal corporate magnate of the 1920s, wrote, or had written for him, a book entitled The International Jew, which blamed the First World War and nearly everything else on the Jewish race. When Jews escaping Germany after the horror of Kristallnacht tried to settle in Haiti, the United States government used its quasi-imperial authority to ‘persuade’ the Haitian regime to stop them doing so.

  If Trotsky could see hope for his cause in America so too could his most rabid right-wing opponents see hope for theirs. What Trotsky and Ford both misjudged was the degree to which the ideology of democracy was ingrained in the American soul. Demagogues might come to power in Europe, but in America the power of democracy would, it seemed, inevitably triumph – especially as the presidential aspirations of America’s very own demagogue were ended in September 1935 by an assassin’s bullet.

  CHAPTAR 13

  HOT AND COLD RUNNING WAR

  The writing and rewriting of history is no less powerful for being largely unconscious. There have been examples, especially in Russia, of history being deliberately rewritten to present whatever message is politically correct at the time, but more often rewriting merely reflects a change of emphasis. The choice of one word over another fundamentally alters historical perceptions. Empires usually expand through military might. Texas, Tibet and Turkestan have all been absorbed into imperial neighbours, but American sources would say that Texas was ‘united with’ the rest of America whereas Tibet was ‘seized by’ China. Official communist histories still reported that the tsars had ‘united’ Turkestan with the rest of the Russian empire.

  ‘Communism’ and ‘capitalism’, like ‘right’ and ‘left’, are similarly terms that mean very different things to those who wave them as banners or hurl them as epithets. Communism melded the slogans of the left on to the traditions of totalitarian autocracy to produce a new ideology that served only the interests of its leadership. Communism came to signify no more than the supremacy of the Communist party – first in the person of Stalin, then in the more diffuse form of the party nomenklatura; a collective leadership with all the classic attributes of oligarchy. Similarly corporatism borrowed the slogans of the right to disguise an ideology that in practice gives enormous power to corporate leaders, another oligarchy.

  The competing empires of the twentieth century were often described as capitalist and communist, but this is misleading. Capitalism is a way of describing economic and commercial processes; communism is a theory of how society has, does, will and should function. Capitalism can be observed; communism must be believed. When societies describing themselves as communist have been observed, the startling fact is that they bear virtually no resemblance to communist doctrine. Communism is more religion than science. The ideological opposite number is not capitalism but ‘corporatism’, a belief system that like communism purports not just to explain the world but to define the values that are ordained to bring about the perfect society.

  To identify the ‘left’ with communism and the ‘right’ with corporatism is also misleading. Many on the left were deceived by Stalin’s slogans, but others provided some of the new ideology’s fiercest critics. Men like George Orwell saw exactly what Stalin had done to the ideals of the Russian Revolution, whereas President Truman insisted that Stalin was ‘honest’ and ‘straightforward’ and compared him admiringly with his colleagues in Missouri politics. On the other hand some of the most articulate critics of corporatism – from Thomas Jefferson through President Eisenhower to Chief Justice Rehnquist – have not come from the sloganising left.

  What communism and corporatism really show is that using terms like left wing and right wing to describe historical forces obscures more than it clarifies. The philosophies of both left and right originated in an ideal of individual liberty from which the two great new ideologies of the twentieth century effectively turned aside.

  Allies Apart

  Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Russia and America annexed territory and seized resources from supposedly savage natives and Christian states alike. By the beginning of the twentieth century the boundaries of the continental United States were fixed and a ragbag of dependencies, territories and colonies speckled the Pacific from Alaska to Manila, with a couple of Caribbean left-overs from the Spanish American War – Puerto Rico and Cuba – thrown in. The borders of the Russian empire had never been fixed, and as the twentieth century erupted into war and revolution it looked as though the empire of the tsars might vanish with the Romanovs; in fact it shrank but was far from disappearing. Between the First and Second World Wars the new Russian leader Joseph Stalin consolidated his tsar-like hold on his people, and American corporations continued their gradual globalisation in search of resources and scale.

  The Second World War was to change everything and nothing. The Red Army emerged from the war by far the largest military force in the world, and used its overwhelming superiority to seize half of Europe; the United States emerged from the war by far the largest economy in the world, and used this financial might (rather than its nuclear superiority) to expand and consolidate its informal commercial empire. It seemed that the prediction made by Alexis de Tocqueville more than a century earlier had come true: one day America and Russia would each be ‘called by some secret desire of Providence to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world’. The Second World War increased the size of the two empires and destroyed or weakened competing empires, but the basic character of each superpower remained unchanged. Russia had an empire when the war began – stretching from Mongolia in the east to the Caucasus in the south and Ukraine in the west – and it had an empire when it ended, albeit a larger one. America had switched from formal empire to informal empire after the Spanish-American War, and despite ending the war with its army occupying Japan and a large part of Germany continued with this policy.

  In some ways the decade after the Second World War was as critical in shaping the two empires as the war itself. It was then that the United States developed ways of ensuring that less powerful governments around the world would support, not hinder, its commercial empire, and Russia showed the first signs that its empire had reached its zenith and was destined to fail.

  Initially it seemed that old-fashioned military imperia
lism survived, and would continue to thrive, in the Russian empire, but that elsewhere it had been replaced by the benign ministrations of dollar diplomacy. Yet paradoxically in the half century that followed it was not to be Russia that most frequently resorted to gunboat diplomacy. The Red Army was in action outside its borders only a handful of times, whereas the US averaged around eight overseas military ‘interventions’ a year (albeit some on a very small scale).

  If in some ways the Second World War created a whole new world, with Russia brutally repressing half of Europe and US troops waging war from south-east Asia to the Middle East, the motivations of the two nations remained constant. Russia wanted two things: a security cordon between itself and its enemies, and to pursue its age-old quest for territory. America wanted two things: the scale that its corporatist economic model demanded, and to pursue its age-old quest for resources (including, from 1941, oil). What both nations had in common was that these objectives – unsurprisingly in both cases naked self-interest – were rarely acknowledged. Instead for the rest of the twentieth century both nations would once again ride to battle under the banner of ideology. From Prague to Kabul the Red Army crushed any signs of independence in the name of universal brotherhood, while US marines fought to impose liberty on unwilling Vietnamese peasants and Caribbean islanders. The ideology of communism crossed swords with that of a newly rampant democracy, a force that before the war had been written off by many on both the left and the right.

  In the 1920s and ’30s, as the world tumbled into depression, democracies had failed. Men like Mussolini, Hitler and Franco stormed to power promising salvation to their nations and replacing free elections with trains that ran on time. Little men fighting for the ‘little man’, they delivered short-term gain and long-term pain. Their appeal was not confined to Europe; in America a travelling salesman named Huey ‘Kingfish’ Long did for Louisiana what Mussolini did for Italy: providing new roads, new schools and corruption on a monumental scale. In 1934 he set his sights on the White House by doing what was then revolutionary: buying time on the radio to spread his message across the nation. Under the slogan ‘Every Man A King’ he built a movement that soon had 7 million members, nearly three times the size of the Nazi party that had carried Hitler to power the year before. Long promised to give every American family $2,500 and to provide free old age pensions, pledges to be funded by a 100 per cent tax on incomes over $1m and a 100 per cent tax on personal fortunes over $3m. His campaign against corporations and oligarchs struck a chord with large parts of the American population and President Roosevelt is said to have told friends that he feared that he might be the last constitutional president. Huey Long’s assassination ended that threat. American democracy had been saved by an assassin’s bullet, and Americans sat back to watch the demagogues of Europe lurch into war.