-
Conclusion: The Violence Comes Full Circle-From the Cold War to the War on Terror
- University of Massachusetts Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Conclusion The Violence Comes Full Circle-From the Cold War to the War on Terror In his trilogy on the American empire, Chalmers Johnson demonstrates how the United States has historically projected its power through a variety of means, including economic blackmail and the manipulation of financial institutions, covert operations, propaganda, arms sales, and, most important, the development of a network of military bases whose scale dwarfs that of all previous empires, including Rome.' This book has sought to examine another important structural dimension of U.S. power, namely, the training of police and paramilitary units under the guise of humanitarian assistance, which preceded and continued through the era of global military bases. The central aim ofthe police programs was to promote the social stability deemed necessary for liberal capitalist development and to strengthen the power of local elites serving American geostrategic interests. Driven by the Progressive Era emphasis on professionalization and modernization, the programs were critical in recruiting local intelligence "assets" and in establishing sophisticated surveillance apparatuses to monitor and destroy social movements deemed threatening to the United States. Police were valued more than the military as the "first line of defense" against subversion and were seen as best capable of implementing "civic action" programs designed to "win hearts and minds:' They were trained in riot control and counterinsurgency and even taught bomb making. Because of the emphasis on political policing and militarization and America's penchant for supporting right-wing dictators out of geopolitical and economic expediency, the police programs contributed to the growth of repression and violence. They helped to perpetuate and even create particular types of authoritarian regimes that were dependent on foreign aid for their survival and developed repressive surveillance and internal security apparatuses to quash dissent. The political scientist Thomas Lobe concluded in a 1977 study that the achievements of the OPS were "like massage parlor transactions- seedy and degrading . . . foreboding ill for civil liberties and human rights:" The OPS and its predecessor agencies were especially influential in providing modern weapons , building advanced telecommunications networks to aid in the tracking 232 of subversives, and providing ideological conditioning to state security forces which established a rationale for major human rights violations. The empowerment of paramilitary forces skilled in the black arts of psychological warfare fueled the growth of deadly internecine conflict and death squad activity, which the United States supported under programs like Phoenix and Operation Bandeirantes. Many of the originators of the OPS recognized that police modernization could contribute to the warping of democratic development in countries lacking an independent legal system and a judiciary capable of reigning in abuses. Roger Hilsman wrote in a secret report that in Asia, "the danger of counterguerrilla police becoming a 'pocket army' is well recognized. Once a police unit attains a separate identity [from the police chain ofcommand] and administrative autonomy, the problem of militarization arises:' Pointing to the growth of a repressive internal security apparatus in South Vietnam under Diem and the advent of a coup d'etat in Honduras owing to US. training of the paramilitary civil guard, General Maxwell Taylor cautioned that the OPS was creating rival power centers to the army, inimical at times to American interests.' Hell-bent on stopping communism and asserting US. hegemony, the "best and the brightest" in Washington did not heed their own warnings, with profound consequences . The police programs exemplify the dark side ofAmerican empire. As Alfred W McCoy has noted, while previous colonial powers developed elaborate foreign services and cultivated Orientalist intellectuals to help them better understand the cultures they were bent on subordinating, the United States during the long American century placed special emphasis on exporting new technologies to gain and systemize statistical information for purposes ofsocial control, an inclination that grew out of corporate, bureaucratic culture and the domestic initiatives of the Progressive Era and accounted in large part for the importance of the police programs. The vast statistical charts and mass of raw data (much ofit inaccurate) on the NLF hierarchy in Vietnam and the numbers of enemies reportedly captured and killed under Operation Phoenix took this inclination to absurd levels, though it had many precedents.' The obsession among leading intellectuals with order and stability as a precondition for development was another key factor underlying the growth of the police programs. Rooted, again, in Progressive Era ideologies, it led the United States to embrace despotic leaders who, ironically, provoked the rise of insurgency and thus the very instability that threatened the ability of...