Marin County and the Permissive Society

By Michael K. Smith 

 

Originally published on March 20, 2002 by the Anderson Valley Advertiser

 

Like John Walker Lindh* I grew up in posh, left-leaning Marin County and joined an authoritarian cult that methodically killed thousands of my fellow Americans. It was 1973 and after years of exposure to permissive norms I had little sense of direction and interviewed for a job at the local McDonald's. My divorced parents raised no objection and soon I was making a major contribution to cardiovascular disease as I bagged fries, flipped burgers, and hyped deep-fried pies to future victims of arteriosclerosis and congestive heart failure. Luckily, nobody reported the case to the Attorney General, so I was spared Ashcroft-like denunciations about youth being no absolution for treachery, nor self-advancement an excuse to take up lard against one’s country. In fact, I was rewarded for participating in McDonald’s nation-wide attack on the public health: my official transcripts register 40 credits for what is called, appropriately enough, WEEP, the school acronym for work experience. This represents 20% of the units required for graduation and an interesting revelation of elite educational standards at the time. Permissive society, indeed. 

 

My plunge into McDonald’s occurred after 16 years of indoctrination in consumer society. Well-meaning but impressionable, I actually enjoyed the job, which was certainly preferable to sitting in a hard chair all day listening to teacher monologues I thankfully no longer remember. So I stayed on for four years, earning high marks for my work on “lot and lobby” (janitor), “fries and-shakes,” “window” (cash register), “dressing” (putting condiments on buns), “grill” and “buns.” My indulgent parents dutifully supported me, paying my living costs while McDonald’s profited off my underpaid labor (I started at $1.80 an hour in 1973 and ended up at $4.50 an hour in 1977). By the last two years I made manager and was considered for Hamburger University, the holiest of holies in the fast food world. I thought it an honor but fortunately never went, else today I might be saddled with a degree in “Hamburgerology.” 

 

It was corporate liberalism's presumption of “value-free” neutrality and education as a meal-ticket to the job market that led to this abdication of communal responsibility. Swamped in tolerance for commercialism, my parents figured I was “keeping out of trouble,” while my teachers and counselors were pleased I was acquiring job skills, though of what long-term use burger-flipping and milkshake-making actually were they never bothered to explain. The presumption was that learning to make any kind of living is the purpose of education, so no one questioned this highly dubious expenditure of my teen years. Since I was making money I was obviously on the success track, and what could be more important than that? 

 

Another area where the County distinguished itself for excessive tolerance was in anti-Arab racism. I remember a morning assembly at Granada Elementary, a Montessori school regularly featured on national TV for its innovative architecture and learn-at-your-own-pace curriculum. Israel had just launched its successful blitzkrieg assault on Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the Six Day War and our teachers ridiculed what they took to be Arab military ineptitude. The Arabs ran from toy bombs dropped by the Israelis, they laughed, which turned out to be nothing more than packages of glass that broke upon hitting the ground. Full of mirth, we enjoyed the image of hapless Arabs running away from harmless packages, never learning of the effects of the real bombs or the napalm Israel used in that war. None of the teachers lost their jobs for this lesson in racism and maybe they shouldn’t have, since by the Supreme Court’s “community standards” criterion, promoting racist stereotypes of Arabs is too routine to qualify as an offensive act. Check with your local video shop — all Arabs are corrupt sheiks, barbaric terrorists, or medieval camel jockeys — fair game for abuse. Thus it was no surprise years later when Marin County native Robin Williams mocked Egyptian military abilities in a TV tribute to Jonathan Winters, ridiculously dropping an imaginary rifle over and over to characterize Arabs as buffoons. 

 

The County has also been far too lenient towards the wealthy, allowing them to stream in and drive up the price of housing to the point where it now costs $4,000 or more to move into a 1-bedroom apartment and there are the beginnings of shanty housing in the hills. When I was a child, on the other hand, Sausalito resembled a Mediterranean fishing village, with street artists, boat dwellers, and other bohemians mixing amiably with middle class professionals and businessmen. The rich took a liking to this atmosphere and bought the place up, in the process driving out the artists and houseboat people who made the town attractive in the first place. Now it is a magnet for tourists and yuppies and there is no street life to speak of. For some reason Trent Lott has yet to condemn this casualty of the permissive society.

 

How does one recover from growing up amidst such misguided tolerance? Well, a dissident reading list helps. Sometime during my university studies I washed up on the shores of Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Jonathan Kozol, Edward Said, and Marilyn French, taking a long look at their sobering offerings. My excessive tolerance towards unaccountable authority rapidly dissolved and I found myself questioning the legitimacy of endless wars, limitless profit, permanent racism, male supremacy, in short, the entire direction of the contemporary United States. Two years ago in the very same Marin County that had taught me to see the world in value-neutral terms, I taught ESL for a year at the local community college. One night I wrote these lines: 

 

I look into the faces of my ESL students at the College of Marin, still eager after a half-compensated workday. I regret the language barrier that leaves so many questions unasked. 

 

Seeing Ermith I think of desperate refugees sent back to Haiti through shark-infested waters. Taking in Rosa’s smile I remember the fall of Arbenz triggering an orgy of anti-Communist bloodletting. Listening to Kathleen’s harrowing tale of escaping Vietnam by boat I think of an ocean of dioxin putting her craft to launch. Saying hello to Sang I recall Korea converted to a corpse-strewn wasteland under the iron rule of rival dictatorships. Greeting Eduardo I am reminded of 70,000 murdered by Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “moderate authoritarians” in El Salvador. Collecting a paper from Zelalem I think of mountains of African bones bleaching the floor of the Atlantic. Hearing Rigoberto talk of Cuernavaca I reflect on James Polk plundering a third of Mexico on the fraudulent pretext of “American blood shed on American soil.” Glancing at Adela I think of Bolivian tin miners with rotting lungs and Che Guevara tracked down and murdered by the CIA. Resenting Marcia arriving typically late, I remind myself that US reparations for overthrowing the Brazilian government are even more overdue. Listening to Jose I see half the Honduran population starving to death while Washington converts the country to a military base from which to make war on Nicaraguans. Turning to Masahito I remember two huge fireballs incinerating 200,000 Japanese and cursing generations unborn with genetic deformities. Correcting an answer from Vladimir I recollect CIA anti-Communist forces parachuted into the Ukraine to join up with an army once supported by Hitler. 

 

A student tells me his nationality, and I thank God I know not a single thing about his native Bhutan. 

 

Happily, there are increasing signs that I am far from alone, that many Marinites are intolerant of Empire. Thanks to tireless organizers, on a recent Saturday morning two hundred people turned out for a seminar critical of US policy in the Middle East and on separate evenings William Blum and Father Roy Bourgeois spoke against the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. School of the Americas to large, appreciative audiences. The good Father welcomed President Bush’s call to shut down terrorist training camps wherever they may be, suggesting he start with Fort Benning in Georgia where the US trains Latin American military officers in the art of counterinsurgency — a fancier name for terrorism. After speaking on the theme of “Expansion of Empire,” Blum said in his question period that there is one group he has more trouble getting through to than even the far right: liberals. 

 

They cannot believe the American Empire is not benevolent at heart, so they permissively let it run amok.

 

*A household word a generation ago, Lindh is a Marin County native who studied Islam and ended up in Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban, becoming famous as a result of the 911 attacks.

Two Centuries of U.S. Contempt For Cuba*

 “I do believe I’ll be . . . .having the honor of taking Cuba.”

                                                        ----Donald Trump

 

Donald Trump tightened already suffocating sanctions on Cuba on May 1, at the same time as he made renewed threats to “take” the island as soon as he finishes committing the greatest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history in Iran. The new measure to heap further unmerited suffering on Cubans was justified on the laughable pretext that their government poses an extraordinary national security threat to the United States, which, if it were true, would constitute an equally extraordinary confession of military impotence on the part of the United States.[1]

 

That point aside, it’s a simple historical fact that U.S. contempt for Cuban sovereignty long predates Washington’s fixation on “national security” as a pretext for its interventions, so the problem does not lie in Havana.

 

Over two centuries ago Washington was already firmly opposed to independence for the island, mainly because it was “strategically situated and rich in sugar and slaves,” in the words of U.S. foreign policy expert Piero Gleijeses. Such advantages were not to be sacrificed to a heavily mixed-race population of “mongrels” achieving independence, to use the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny.[2]

 

Thomas Jefferson recommended that James Madison offer Napoleon a free hand in Spanish America in return for the gift of Cuba to the United States. Writing to Madison in 1823, he said that the U.S. should not go to war over the island, since “the first war on other accounts will give it to us, or the Island itself will give it to us, when able to do so,” sounding very much like Donald Trump today. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams explained Cuba’s strategic value, describing it as “an object of transcendent importance to the commercial and political interests of our Union.” He, too, favored it remain under Spanish control until it fell into U.S. hands by “the laws of political . . . gravitation,” a “ripe fruit” ready for harvest. This view was almost universal in the U.S. Executive Branch and Congress at the time.

 

Concern over Cuba on explicitly political grounds arose with the coming of its national liberation movement in 1868. A key concern was the movement’s democratic tendencies, which included such heresies as democracy, freedom, and equal rights for everyone, not just white property owners. This was the familiar imperial fear of a bad apple spoiling the barrel, in this case Cuban independence possibly succeeding and inspiring other colonized peoples to similarly strive for national independence. If Empire is to exist, that kind of example has to be stamped out.[3]

 

Some U.S. lives and property were lost in the initial stages of Cuba’s war for independence, but the real crisis came in 1873 when Spain seized the Virginius, a ship flying the U.S. flag and carrying weapons to the Cuban revolutionary forces. The Spanish executed fifty-three crew members. Hamilton Fish, President Grant’s secretary of state, resisted calls for revenge knowing that the ship had been breaking the law and wanting no part of the multiracial Cuban population. When a cabinet member raised the idea of annexing Cuba, Fish quashed the idea with a reminder that the U.S. already had terrible racial problems in “South Carolina and Mississippi.”

 

In the end, Spain paid an $80,000 indemnity for lives of the crew members and remained in control of Cuba when the war ended in 1878.[4]

 

The war did not resume in full force until 1895, when Madrid’s empire was near collapse. For years it had been forced to simultaneously fight liberation movements in Cuba and the Philippines. Its colonies on the American mainland had been liberated in 1825, but it clung hard to the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, the last of its colonial possessions in the Americas. Meanwhile, U.S. influence had grown to the point that it could ignore British power and conquer Cuba, just in time to prevent victory by what it openly regarded as the indigenous lesser breeds. The New York press described the latter as “ignorant niggers, half breeds, and dagoes.” General Samuel B. M. Young of the U.S. military command was of a similar view, dismissing Cuban soldiers as “a lot of degenerates,” and “no more capable of self-government than the savages of Africa.”[5]

 

By late 1895, the rebels claimed to have established a provisional government. But neither Grover Cleveland nor William McKinley were willing to recognize the revolutionary forces. To have done so would have released Spain from the obligation to protect $50 million in U.S. property in Cuba. The U.S. government preferred to hold “civilized” Madrid responsible for that property and U.S. lives on the island, while pressing the Spanish government to give the “uncivilized” Cuban rebels enough autonomy so they would lay down their arms.

 

Spain, however, refused to grant the autonomy, at least at first. Its formerly global empire had withered away to just Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and no Spanish government could expect to remain in power if it lost control over any of these. The Spanish took a hard line, sending 150,000 soldiers who tried to destroy rebel support by rounding up thousands of Cubans and locking them in barbed-wire concentration camps. But the revolution continued to spread, and insurgents adopted a scorched earth policy that destroyed U.S. property.

 

Cuban suffering was incalculable. Typhus, smallpox, and cholera stalked the island, and famine was widespread. A huge portion of the population was sunk in disease, death, and despair.[6] As Spain lost control over the deteriorating situation riots broke out in Havana in late 1897. McKinley moved a warship, the Maine, into Havana harbor to protect U.S. citizens and property. Days later an explosion sank the Maine, killing more than 268 U.S. sailors. A naval court of inquiry investigating the sinking could not determine blame for the disaster.

 

Nevertheless, egged on by a sensationalist press that eagerly pinned the blame on Spain, excitement for war with Madrid mounted. President McKinley opposed it, but he also wanted U.S. property in Cuba protected, the Cuban revolution prevented from turning sharply left, and restored confidence in the U.S. business community, among other concerns. These outcomes could only be achieved through war.

 

Two months after the blowing up of the Maine, Congress authorized it and events proceeded in rapid-fire succession. Madrid broke off relations with Washington; the jingoist press chorused, “On to Havana!”; a million men raised on romantic tales of Antietam and Gettysburg rushed to enlist; the French ambassador informed Paris that a “sort of bellicose fury has seized the American nation;” a rabid Teddy Roosevelt set off to “whip the dagoes.”[7]

 

U.S. and Cuban forces made quick work of the Spaniards, and yellow fever made quick work of the Americans. Cuba emerged in ruins, its agriculture and industry destroyed.

 

U.S. investors seized the railroads, the mines, and the sugar plantations.[8]

 

The events of 1898 are often said to represent the launching of U.S. empire, but in fact the U.S. was an empire from the beginning, deeply rooted in racist assumptions that make Teddy Roosevelt’s overt contempt for “dagoes” appear mild by comparison. These assumptions were on vivid display in the way black U.S. soldiers were treated by their fellow Americans as they went off to war in Cuba.

 

Tampa shopkeepers snarled at members of the all-black 24^th Infantry, refusing to serve them on the grounds that, “We don’t sell to damned niggers!” Several officers from the all black Eighth Illinois regiment were thrown out of a Baltimore restaurant, which wanted nothing to do with them. A brewery worker in Martinsburg, West Virginia loudly offered his opinion to black soldiers that, “all niggers ought to go to Cuba where they’d get killed.” In Hampton, Georgia, Private James Neely of the Twenty-fifth infantry was murdered after daring to ask for a glass of soda water in a drugstore. On the outskirts of Macon, Georgia, a sign at the entrance to a public park said simply: “No Dogs and Niggers Allowed.” Visitors to the town could also see the lynching tree where Will Singleton had recently been hanged, shot, and castrated. Implicit justification for all this was provided by the Macon press, which complained of a “riotous mood” among black troops headed for Cuba, whose contempt for Jim Crow was said to have an “unhealthy” effect on local blacks, a large number of whom worked the chain gangs.[9]

 

Due in no small part to such virulent racism, Cuban independence did not emerge in 1898. U.S. plantation owners had never gotten over Haiti’s having established itself as the first independent black republic in 1804, fearing the spread of revolutionary ideas into the U.S. slave population, and almost a century later the fear of Cuba’s black and mixed-race population was still palpable among U.S. leaders. They did not want black people in power just 90 miles from the United States.

 

So Spanish rule was replaced by U.S. rule – military occupation until 1902 - and after that de facto rule by the Platt Amendment, an agreement between Cuba and the U.S. that allowed Washington “to intervene at any time for the preservation of Cuban independence [and] the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty.” The Platt Amendment allowed the U.S. to acquire the naval base at Guantanamo Bay in 1903, and was used to justify four U.S. interventions before it was finally repealed in 1934.

 

Broken by the war, and with most of its population poor, illiterate, and ill, Cuba was left utterly dependent on the United States, which kept the island undeveloped just as Spain had done. The lucrative sugar industry was modernized and mechanized as a monopoly of the U.S., which was the dominant market and the principal investor. By the mid-1920s, the United States controlled two-thirds of Cuban agriculture. The sugar boom of that decade paid for stately public buildings and luxury homes for the wealthy, but gave nothing to the poor. U.S. firms constructed rails and roads and installed banks, electricity, and the world’s first automated telephone system, but repatriated all the profits for themselves.[10]

 

It took decades more of Cuba being an impoverished U.S. client state before revolution was put back on the agenda. On July 26, 1953 Fidel Castro attacked the Fort Moncada barracks at dawn with 120 young people long on guts and short on weapons. Some of them died in battle but many more were tortured to death by Fulgencio Batista’s army, which tore out the eyes of Abel Santamaría, among others.

 

Instead of being cowed into submission, Castro, taken prisoner, presented a forceful and unapologetic defense of the attack. The amazed judges gave him their rapt attention, hanging on every word. Claiming the ancient right of rebellion against tyranny, Castro accused Batista and his officers of butchery and betrayal, and defiantly declared that, “This island will sink in the ocean before we will consent to be anybody’s slaves . . .”

 

Putting forth a revolutionary program, he said that what was inconceivable was not the attack on the barracks but the failure to provide food and work for everyone:

“What is inconceivable is that there should be men going to bed hungry while an inch of land remains unsown; what is inconceivable is that there should be children who die without medical care; that thirty percent of our campesinos cannot sign their names, and ninety-nine percent don’t know the history of Cuba; that most families in our countryside should be living in worse conditions than the Indians Columbus found when he discovered the most beautiful land human eyes had ever seen . . .”

 

“From such wretchedness it is only possible to free oneself by death; and in that the state does help them: to die. Ninety percent of rural children are devoured by parasites that enter from the soil through the toenails of their unshod feet.

 

“More than half of the best cultivated production lands are in foreign hands. In Oriente, the largest province, the lands of the United Fruit Company extend from the north coast to the south coast . . . .

 

“Cuba continues to be a factory producing raw materials. Sugar is exported to import candies; leather exported to import shoes; iron exported to import plows. . . .”[11]

 

On New Year’s Day 1959 the Cuban revolution triumphed, and almost immediately evoked Washington’s wrath. By late that year the CIA and the State Department agreed that Fidel Castro had to be overthrown. One reason, State Department liberals explained, was that “our business interests in Cuba have been seriously affected.” Another was the threat of a good example, i.e., the tendency of a successful revolution to inspire other subjugated peoples to challenge U.S. imperial control over their destinies. Or as the State Department concluded in November 1959: “The United States cannot hope to encourage and support sound economic policies in other Latin American countries and promote necessary private investments in Latin America if it is or appears to be simultaneously cooperating with the Castro program.”

 

What was this program? Nationalization of a billion dollars in U.S. corporate holdings; carrying out the most extensive land reform in Latin American history; creating state cooperatives; building thousands of homes for the poor; cutting rents in half, providing jobs for the unemployed, wiping out illiteracy, vastly expanding medical and public health programs; abolishing racial discrimination; and opening the nurseries, resorts, and hotels of the rich to the entire population. This was an immensely popular set of policies, not just in Cuba, but wherever there were poor people.[12]

 

In elite planning circles in the U.S., however, the reaction was quite different. By October 1959, planes based in Florida were carrying out strafing and bombing attacks against the island. In December, CIA subversion was intensified, including supplying arms to guerrilla bands and sabotage of sugar mills and other economic targets. In March 1960, the Eisenhower administration formally adopted a plan to overthrow Castro in favor of a regime “more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S.,” a self-contradictory goal that was to be accomplished “in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention,” due to Castro’s popularity.[13] The logic of the terror and economic strangulation was spelled out by Lester Mallory at the State Department, who wrote that “disenchantment and disaffection based on economic disaffection and hardship” should be cultivated in order to “bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.”

 

During the 1960 presidential campaign Kennedy tried to be more rabidly anti-Communist than Eisenhower and Nixon, accusing them of threatening U.S. security by permitting “the Iron Curtain . . . .90 miles off the coast of the United States.” In a Cincinnati speech he promised to overthrow the Cuban government if elected.[14]

 

He did his best to deliver on the promise. Sabotage, terror, and aggression sharply escalated under Kennedy, as well as devastating economic warfare that a tiny nation has no chance of withstanding for long. Havana’s dependence on the U.S. for both imports and exports was immense, and could not be easily replaced, and not at all without great cost. Kennedy and his “Best and Brightest” brigade did everything they could think of to maximize Cuban suffering.

 

 “We were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs [April 1961] and thereafter,” Kennedy’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara admitted to the Church Committee. Much of Kennedy’s Latin American policy was based on the fear that the Cuban revolution was a “virus” that would infect others and curtail U.S. hegemony in the region.[15] As a 1964 CIA report put it: “[Cuba] is being watched closely by other nations in the hemisphere and any appearance of success there would have an extensive impact on the statist trend elsewhere in the area.”[16]

 

Calling to mind Hitler’s rhetoric on Czechoslovakia, President Kennedy accused Cuba of being a “dagger” pointed at the United States and sent a proxy army to invade the island at the Bay of Pigs in April, 1961, while plotting Fidel Castro’s assassination.[17] Castro’s crime was having abolished capitalist control of the Cuban economy, which had terminated the Mafia-run play land that enriched foreign investors while Cuba starved.

 

Aside from the preposterousness of tiny Cuba posing a threat to a nuclear-armed superpower over eighty times its size, the U.S. had no legal leg to stand on. Article 15 of the Charter of the Organization of American States read: “No state or group of states has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever in the internal or external affairs of any other state." The U.N. Charter stated: "All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat of use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state  . . .”

 

Humiliated by the failed invasion, but determined to isolate Cuba’s revolution, President Kennedy unveiled the Alliance For Progress, embracing the rhetoric of social change while expressly proscribing revolution or socialism. A major feature of the plan called for shifting the role of the Latin American military from “hemispheric defense” to “internal security,” encouraging the CIA to establish death squads under the aegis of “police training” while Kennedy rhapsodized about creating “a hemisphere where every man has enough to eat and a chance to work, where every child can learn, and every family can find decent shelter.”[18]

 

Washington escalated its clandestine attacks on Cuba and prepared a second American invasion. Hoping to deter the event while giving Washington a taste of its own nuclear medicine, Cuba requested that the Soviet Union install nuclear missiles on the island in the fall of 1962. When Krushchev complied, JFK opted for a game of nuclear chicken, imposing a unilateral blockade on Cuba in violation of the UN Charter, rather than negotiate a quiet solution, which he regarded as the sissy’s way out. In resolving the conflict, the U.S. did not renounce its ongoing terrorist war against the island, which included chemical and biological attacks, as well as regular attacks on Castro’s life. Cuba went into permanent military mobilization and embraced the Soviet Union, while Washington established a complete trade and credit embargo, the prescribed remedy for states that infringe on the sacred privileges of private investors.[19]

 

Over sixty years later Washington is still obsessing over tiny Cuba, a health and education superpower that ended illiteracy nearly overnight at the start of its revolution, and now sends doctors all over the world to cure blindness and many other illnesses, as well as provide critical care in the wake of natural disasters, all without charge to the patients. This, while its far wealthier northern neighbor squanders trillions of dollars on endless wars and remains the world’s only developed country without universal health coverage for its people, who pay twice as much as other developed countries do for a system that delivers far worse health outcomes.

 

But these warped priorities are precisely the point. They are immensely profitable for the owners of the private economy, which for some time now has been a global economy. If these gluttonous few are to continue expanding their wealth these priorities must become everyone’s priorities, which means doing away with a revolution dedicated to what is regularly denounced as an extremist agenda by Washington.

 

Just what is this “extremist agenda”? In a nutshell, it’s the Cuban stance on human rights, announced by Fidel Castro in his New York City speech to the UN in 1960:

 

“The right of the peasants to the land; the right of the workers to the fruit of their labor; the right of children to education; the right of the sick to medical treatment and hospital attention; the right of youth to work; the right of students to free education . . . ; the right of Negroes and Indians to full dignity as human beings; the right of women to civil, social and political equality; the right of the elderly to a secure old age; the right of intellectuals, artists, and scientists to fight, with their work, for a better world . . . the right of nations to their full sovereignty; the right of peoples to turn fortresses into schools, and to arm their workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, blacks, Indians, women, the young and the old, and all the oppressed and exploited people, so they themselves can defend their rights and their destiny.”[20]  

 

It is to destroy the viability of this agenda that we fight forever wars.

 

God Bless America.

 

 

*The halting half-measures taken towards normalizing U.S.-Cuba relations by Barack Obama did not address the criminality of longstanding U.S. policy, which he regarded – incredibly - as having been undertaken with “the best of intentions.”

---

[1] . “Trump Tightens Sanctions Against Cuba, Threatens To ‘Take’ The Island,” La Jornada (Spanish), May 2, 2026

 

[2] Noam Chomsky, Year 501 – The Conquest Continues, (South End, 1993) p. 143.

[3] Chomsky, ibid. pps. 143-4

[4] Walter LaFeber, The American Age, (Norton, 1989) p. 163

[5] Tariq Ali, Winston Churchill - His Times, His Crimes, (Verso, 2022) p. 23: Noam Chomsky, Year 501 – The Conquest Continues, (South End, 1993) p. 144

[6] Tariq Ali, Winston Churchill – His Times, His Crimes, (Verso, 2022) p. 24; Lloyd C. Gardner, Walter F. LaFeber, Thomas J. McCormick, Creation of the American Empire, Vol. 1 (Rand McNally, 1976) p. 243

[7]Daniel B. Shirmer, Republic or Empire - American Resistance to the Philippine War (Schenkman Publishing Company, 1972) pps. 51, 55-6, 72, 83; Walter Millis, The Martial Spirit, (Literary Guild of America, 1931) pps. 108, 125, 127, 139, 147, 174, 362, 364; Claude Julien, America’s Empire, (Pantheon, 1971) pps. 55, 74; Noel J. Kent, America in 1900, (M. E. Sharpe, 2000) p. 12;

 

[8] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, (Harper, 1999) p. 310

[9] William B. Gatewood, Jr., Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898-1903, (University of Illinois, 1975) pps. 119-20, 140-3

 

[10] Mandy Macdonald, Cuba, (Kuperard, 2006) pps. 22-3

[11]Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire – Century of the Wind, (Pantheon, 1988) pps. 148-9

[12] Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America – From Hiroshima To Watergate, (Holt, 1978) p. 216

[13]Noam Chomsky, Year 501 – The Conquest Continues, (South End, 1993) pps. 145-6

[14]William Mandel, Saying No To Power, (Creative Arts, 1999), p. 374

[15] Noam Chomsky, Year 501 – The Conquest Continues, (South End, 1993) p. 146

[16] Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Latin America – From Colonization To Globalization, (Ocean Press, 1999), p. 70

 

[17]Todd Gitlin, The Sixties – Days of Hope, Days of Rage, (Bantam, 1987), p. 90

[18]Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions – The United States in Central America, (Norton, 1984) p. 151

[19]Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, (Little, Brown, 1997) p. 440n.; Cedric Belfrage and James Aronson, Something To Guard – The Stormy Life of the National Guardian, 1948-1967 (Columbia, 1978) p. 277; William Blum, Killing Hope - US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, (Common Courage, 1995) pps. 184-9

[20]Fidel Castro, Ten Days In Harlem – Fidel Castro And The Making Of The 1960s, (Faber & Faber, 2020), pps. 166-7

Demonized Iran – A Tale Told By An Idiot

The current failing effort to make Iran out to be a major threat to world peace starts the clock at 1979 in its propaganda effort to justify U.S. aggression against Teheran, which deliberately overlooks the events of 1953, when a joint U.S.-British effort overthrew the then secular Iranian government in order to take over the country's oil industry.

 

Much like John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, who successfully plotted the U.S. coup against him, Mohammad Mossadegh (Time’s Man-of-the-Year in 1952) came from an affluent background, welcomed the principles of capitalist democracy, and loathed Marxism. What set the three men on a collision course was not their political values, but the radically unequal world around them.[1]

 

Mossadegh grew up watching foreigners loot his defenseless country. Nourished by corruption, predatory foreign companies bought up rights to establish Iranian banks and run its post office, telegraph service, railroads, and ferry lines. Other Western firms took over the caviar industry and tobacco trade. When oil was discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, British officials just bribed a puppet monarch - Mozaffar al-Din Shah - to sign Iran's rights away to foreign investors. The ocean of oil underfoot became the property of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, mostly owned by the British government.

 

Thus it was that in his short span of years Mossadegh witnessed a stupendous source of national wealth siphoned off to benefit distant foreigners while Iranian peasants lived in hovels and a quarter of the population consisted of nomadic bands. The country suffered a ninety-percent illiteracy rate, an incredible fifty-percent infant mortality rate, and saw seventy percent of its land monopolized by two percent of its population. Iran exported $360 million worth of oil a year, but only received $35 million in royalties from the Anglo-American Oil Company.[2]

 

Educated Iranians of Mossadegh's era faced a choice of continuing this humiliating submission to foreign exploitation or launching a rebellion doomed to failure. Mossadegh chose to rebel, demanding full Iranian control of the nation's resources, which made him a target for Anglo-American imperialism. 

 

Following World War II Mossadegh had emerged as the leader of the nationalists in the Iranian Parliament, with a reputation for being an honest patriot.[3] He not only denounced British control of the oil industry, but also opposed a vast, mega-profit development scheme Allen Dulles had negotiated for Overseas Consultants Inc., a group of eleven American engineering firms with massive construction plans, including hydroelectric plants, rebuilt cities, and industries imported from abroad. Mossadegh denounced it as a sellout to foreign interests, a judgment that found favor in the Iranian Parliament, which killed the project by refusing to appropriate funds for it in December, 1950.

 

After delivering this heavy blow to foreign capital, Mossadegh was chosen to be prime minister in April 1951. Before accepting, he asked for a vote in favor of nationalizing Iran's oil industry, and the vote was unanimous. From that moment on he was regarded in Washington and London as the worst sort of enemy, a populist rabble-rouser who stirred the masses with appeals to independent nationalism, which was effectively treason to transnational capital.

 

In 1953, with the unanimous backing of the Iranian Parliament and overwhelming public support, Mossadegh proceeded with the nationalization, expropriating the Anglo-American Oil Company. In an impassioned address to the nation he warned that Iran was taking control of "a hidden treasure upon which lies a dragon."[4] 

 

The dragon retaliated by CIA coup, overthrowing Mossadegh in favor of Shah Reza Pahlavi. General Fazollah Zahedi, a Nazi collaborator and staunch partisan of American oil, became the new prime minister. [5]  President Eisenhower quickly extended him "sympathetic consideration."

 

The CIA's Kermit Roosevelt emerged as vice-president of Gulf Oil. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to divulge details of the new arrangements, because "making them public would affect adversely the foreign relations of the United States."[6] 

 

President Eisenhower told the American people that the Iranian people had "saved the day," owing to their "revulsion against communism," and "their profound love for their monarchy."[7]

 

The New York Times hailed the destruction of Iranian democracy as "good news indeed," calling the putsch an "object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid" by a country that "goes berserk with fanatical nationalism."[8]

 

Thousands of Mossadegh supporters were dispatched to jail, torture chambers, and graveyards.[9]

 

A deeply grateful Shah thanked U.S. Ambassador Loy Henderson and Kermit Roosevelt, telling them that he owed his throne to God, the Iranian people, the army, and to Washington.[10]

 

Gripped by megalomania, the Shah ruled for the subsequent quarter century in a romantic haze built on a fantasy version of Iran and also of himself. He told Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that he was guided by visions and messages from God, as well as Imam Ali. "I am accompanied by a force that others can't see, my mythical force, I get messages, religious messages."[11]

 

Instead of seeking psychological help, the Shah went for armaments and the technology of repression, soon becoming the central U.S. military and economic partner in the Middle East. Portrayed in the West as a far-seeing moderate in a land teeming with swarthy medievalists, he remained deeply unpopular at home due to his policies of super-militarization, forced modernization, and systematic torture. Powerful Ayatollahs bitterly objected to his rule, and as they amassed a huge popular following the Shah grew increasingly isolated, clinging to power with an avalanche of weapons sent on by Washington.

 

By the mid-seventies the Shah's throne sat atop a veritable powder keg. Two-thirds of the population was under thirty. Cities were hideously unlivable, as urban settlements had quadrupled to twenty million in the previous twenty years. Fifteen percent of the entire country lived around Teheran in shanty dwellings lacking sewage or other water facilities. The nation's incalculable oil wealth reached few hands, and a restless student generation had no prospects. The bloated bureaucracy was totally corrupt.[12]

 

Hatred of the military surged as the economy gagged on $18 billion in Western arms imports (mostly from the U.S.) between 1974 and 1978, including air-to-air missiles, smart bombs, and aerial tankers, "everything but the atomic bomb," according to a State Department official. While Shiite leaders rallied massive popular support, the Shah eliminated civilian courts, held 100,000 political opponents in jail, and carried out more official executions than any other country in the world, in addition to using methods of torture that Amnesty International called "beyond belief."[13]

 

Nevertheless, enthroned as he was atop an ocean of oil, the staunchly anti-communist Shah was a greatly admired leader of the "Free World."[14]

 

For New Year's Eve in 1977 Jimmy Carter flew to Teheran to celebrate the 2500th anniversary of the Persian Empire with the Shah. The two heads of state dined in the Niyavaran Palace surrounded by obscene luxury in a city teeming with hideous slums. 

 

In his after dinner speech Carter all but buried his face in the Shah's lap, displaying a stomach-turning capacity for obsequious flattery. He praised the "great leadership of the Shah," and proclaimed Iran a "great island of stability" in a "troubled" region of the world, which, he gushed, was a great tribute to "you, Your Majesty," and to "the respect and admiration and love" which, he alleged, the Iranian people felt for their King, though at that very moment thousands of them were political prisoners suffering Nazi torture techniques in Iranian jails.[15] Continuing in the same vein, Carter declared that "the cause of human rights is one that also is shared deeply by our people and by the leaders of our two nations." He concluded on a note of utter devotion: "There is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal friendship and gratitude." 

 

A beaming Shah leaped to his feet in applause, grasping Carter's right hand in both of his. 

 

On the route to the airport the next morning the mutual admirers failed to notice thousands of young Iranians pelting the army with rocks along the side streets. Soon, nationwide riots would break out.[16]

 

Nine months later, Carter phoned the Shah during the worst crisis of his entire rule ("Black Friday"), expressing support following his machine-gunning of dozens of demonstrators (thousands according to Iranian dissidents) by troops that had been armed and trained by the United States. The following month Carter received the Shah's son (who was undergoing training at the United States Air Force Academy at the time) in Washington and told him: "Our friendship and our alliance with Iran is one of our important bases on which our entire foreign policy depends." Speaking of the Shah's liberalization policies, he added, "We're thankful for this move towards democracy. We know it is opposed by some who don't like democratic principles, but his progressive administration is very valuable, I think, to the entire Western world."

 

By that point, of course, nearly the entire Iranian population was fed up with the Shah's blood-soaked "progressive administration" and its boundless corruption. Graft and bribery were so endemic under his rule that he had amassed a personal fortune worth billions of dollars, still a large sum today, and a gargantuan one in the late 1970s.[17]

 

There can be little doubt that Carter's complete lack of concern for democracy, in spite of protestations of the centrality of "human rights" to his administration, was helping provoke an explosion of popular revulsion at the Shah's misrule. 

 

By January, 1979 the breaking point had been reached. Everyone was cursing the cold, the snow, and the Shah, and strikes paralyzed the country. As power cuts plunged the capital into darkness, food supplies ran out and long lines formed for resupplies of paraffin. Roaming gangs stopped fancy cars to siphon what they needed while oil production stopped and the army went to work the fields. With gas lines backing up for hours, soldiers kept order firing automatic weapons in the air. 

 

The Shah’s henchmen fled like startled cockroaches. Ministers carted away bags stuffed with bank notes; ladies made off with jewelry boxes; masterless butlers wandered around in a daze. Suitcases and crates crammed with paintings, Persian rugs, and precious jewelry, found their way to Europe and America, leaving palaces and elegant homes suddenly eerily empty. Bombarded by money transfers, Central Bank workers went out on strike, refusing to process the deluge. 

 

At Niyavaran palace the Shah sat behind a bank of guards and surveillance equipment wondering what went wrong. Surrounded by gilt, beveled mirrors, chandeliers, gold-plated telephones and jewel-studded gold cigarette boxes, he was plunged into gloom. Anwar Sadat beckoned him to exile in Egypt.

 

He fled, and Teheran erupted in joy.[18]

 

Two weeks later the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from fifteen years of exile, greeted by a joyous crowd of three million at the airport.[19] Two months after that, 99% of the adult population voted for an Islamic Republic in an extraordinary 95% turnout.[20] The U.S. client state was no more.

 

At every stage of its confrontation with the Islamic Revolution, the U.S. response appeared to be tone deaf and inept. A little over eight months after Khomeini's return to Iran, Carter allowed admission of the ailing ex-Shah to a New York hospital for cancer treatment, and enraged Iranian protesters poured over the U.S. Embassy walls in Teheran, seizing 66 Americans trapped inside. Telling a lurid tale of America-backed torture, murder, and looting, they announced themselves as "followers of the Imam's line," and demanded the return of "the criminal Shah." 

 

Effigies of President Carter and Uncle Sam were set aflame. American flags were spat on, trampled, and burned in the street. Blindfolded Marines, handcuffed behind their backs, were paraded before TV cameras surrounded by vengeful, chanting mobs. "Death to America! Death to Carter! Death to the Shah!"

 

The Pope, offering to mediate the crisis, was rebuffed by an angry Ayatollah Khomeini: "Where was the Vatican, when the Shah put our youth in frying pans and sawed off their legs?"[21]

 

Although the U.S. media offered extensive and dramatic coverage of events in Teheran, the non-stop chatter of the pundits did nothing to enlighten the viewing audience. Terms like Mohamedanism, Mecca, purdah, chador, Sunni, Shiite, mullah, imam, Ayatollah Khomeini, militant Islam were packaged up for American viewers in absurd three minute summaries of the meaning of Islam, which only conveyed the mis-impression that Islam was inherently violent, dangerous, and anti-American, a view that persists to this day.

 

Interviews with Iranian officials alternated with comments from the hostages' parents, bulletins on the ex-Shah's failing health, and footage of emotional street demonstrations in Iran. The rituals of the Iranian crowds were cast as though they were sick imitations of Nuremberg, circuses manipulated by mad dictators caught up in religious frenzy, in stark contrast to the level-headed millionaires psychoanalyzing their behavior in American T.V. studios.

 

Not a single establishment journalist found the U.S. responsible in any way for its Iran predicament. No one offered to make amends for the coup of 1953. The Washington Post dismissed the Shah's use of systematic torture as inconsequential, since "it can be argued that it was entirely in the tradition of Iranian history."[22]

 

In the middle of the hostage crisis another one occurred in neighboring Iraq, where Saddam Hussein overthrew General Ahmed Hassan Bakr and executed all his political rivals. A short time later, president Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly encouraged him to attack Iran, which he promptly did, invading in September, 1980 with "strong U.S. backing," according to war correspondent Robert Fisk.

 

For Saddam the goal was to seize the Shatt al-Arab waterway and Iran's oil-rich southwestern Khuzestan region; for Iran, it was to survive an existential war and defend the Islamic Revolution.

 

The war lasted eight long years and featured horrifying trench warfare similar to battles in WWI, with maimings and killings well into the hundreds of thousands on both sides, while the combined population of Iran and Iraq was only fifty-seven million. Iraq repeatedly used nerve and mustard gas thanks to a Department of Commerce license that allowed an American company to ship Saddam a smorgasbord of deadly agents for years, and both sides freely bombed civilian populations.[23]

 

Washington also provided Hussein with battle plans and satellite data. Over the course of the war, Iraq-U.S. relations became so close that the Reagan administration barely reacted when Iraqi missiles hit the USS Stark in the Gulf, killing several dozen U.S. servicemen. Only when it became convenient following Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait did Washington criticize Iraq’s appalling human rights record, omitting mention of the U.S.'s starring role in his worst crimes.

 

One of the most gruesome atrocities of the war period occurred in 1988, when the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in an ascending flight path over civilian airspace in the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people on board. The American commander knew at the time that he was shooting down a civilian plane. 

 

Admiral William J. Crowe, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, established the U.S. official line on the horror, accusing the Iranians of having brought the attack on themselves with irresponsible behavior.

 

The U.S. establishment media suggested that the Airbus might have been on a suicide mission, that the pilot may have been deliberately trying to crash his passenger-packed plane into the American frigate that shot it down. Articles focused on the commander's anguish in having shot the plane down, reporting the event as a tragic error. President Reagan called it an "understandable accident." Vice-President Bush declared he would "never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are." 

 

This was all self-serving nonsense.

 

In an article in the September 1989 issue of the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings, Edward Herman reported in his 1992 book, "Beyond Hypocrisy," David R. Carlson, commander of the USS Sides, an escort frigate in the vicinity of the USS Vincennes when it shot the Iranian Airbus down, wrote that he was disgusted with the U.S. excuses for this act, as well as the attempt to blame it on the Iranians. He added that the idea that the Vincennes was attempting to defend itself against Iranian attack was based on a series of lies. "When the decision was made to shoot down the Airbus, the airliner was climbing, not diving; it was showing the proper identification friend or foe - IFF (Mode III); and it was in the correct flight corridor from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. The Vincennes was never under attack by Iranian aircraft. There was no targeting being done by the Iranian P3. The conduct of Iranian military forces in the month preceding the incident was profoundly nonthreatening." According to Carlson’s account, Herman wrote, for a considerable time before the shootdown the Vincennes' actions "appeared to be consistently aggressive, and had become a topic of wardroom conversation." Someone had even jokingly come up with the nickname "Robo Cruiser" for the Vincennes, and it apparently stuck.

 

Nevertheless, the New York Times continued to support the official story that the Iranians were to blame for the "accidental" shoot-down and never reported on Commander Carlson's correction.

 

Adding to the horror, the personnel on the Vincennes were given a hero's welcome when they returned to the dock in San Diego, and later made it onto national TV and became celebrities. In April, 1990, Herman wrote, the commander of the Vincennes was given the Legion of Merit award for "exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service" and for "the calm and professional atmosphere" under his command.  The destruction of the Airbus and the killing of 290 passengers was not explicitly mentioned in the citation.[24]

 

Nearly forty years later, Washington is still attacking Iran, based largely on the same highly caricatured image of the country it has held since 1979, and has learned nothing about the reality of its own relations with Teheran. The U.S. continues to be in the Iranians' back yard - relentlessly - supporting dictatorships, overthrowing regimes, backing genocidal Israel to the hilt, all of which results in a horrifying record of slaughtered civilians that has literally appalled the entire world.

 

Meanwhile, the Iranian proxies Washington accuses of terrorism are all products, directly or indirectly, of its own foreign policy. It was Israel and the United States, after all, who took a small, Islamic group offshoot from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt called Hamas in the early eighties and built it up and funded it to counteract the secular Palestine Liberation Organization with a religious group. Hizbollah arose because the U.S. backed Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, killing thousands of Shiites who had no real stake in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The rise of ISIS a generation later is directly attributable to the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq in 2003. And Al Qaeda, which preceded it, grew out of U.S. support for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan after the Soviets invaded that country in 1979.

 

Aside from the obvious fact that the U.S. is far and away the world leader in committing acts of terrorism, the bungling incompetence at protecting its own declared interests is staggering.

 

Meanwhile, to this day a bipartisan consensus reigns in Washington that the U.S. somehow has the moral standing to judge Teheran for its human rights record. But as is so often the case with imperial moralizing, the crimes of the accused pale in comparison to the horrors perpetrated by those who wish to see them self-righteously judged.

---

[1]All biographical data on Mossadegh is from Stephen Kinzer, “The Brothers – John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, And Their Secret World War,” (Holt, 2013), pps.119-24

[2] Lawrence S. Wittner, “Cold War America – From Hiroshima To Watergate,” (Holt, 1978) p. 151

[3] William Blum, “Killing Hope – U.S. Military And CIA Interventions Since World War II,” (Common Courage, 1995) p. 70

[4] Lawrence S. Wittner, “Cold War America – From Hiroshima To Watergate,” (Holt, 1978) p. 151

[5] William Blum, “Killing Hope – U.S. Military And CIA Interventions Since World War II,” (Common Courage, 1995) p. 67

[6] Lawrence S. Wittner, “Cold War America – From Hiroshima To Watergate,” (Holt, 1978) p. 153

[7] Medea Benjamin, “Inside Iran – The Real History And Politics Of The Islamic Republic Of Iran,” (OR Books), p. 27

[8] Noam Chomsky, “Towards A New Cold War,” (Pantheon, 1978) p. 99; William Blum, “Killing Hope – U.S/ Military And CIA Interventions Since World War II, (Common Courage, 1995) p. 71

[9] Cedric Belfrage, “The American Inquisition 1945-1960,” (Monthly Review, 1973)  p. 202

[10] Arash Norouzi, “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army, and to you,” www.mohammadmossadegh.com

[11] Medea Benjamin, “Inside Iran – The Real History And Politics Of The Islamic Republic Of Iran,” (OR Books, 2018) p. 30

[12]Walter LaFeber, “The American Age – United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750,”(Norton, 1989) pps. 659-61

[13] Medea Benjamin, “Inside Iran – The Real History And Politics Of The Islamic Republic Of Iran,” (OR Books, 2018) p. 29.

[14] Lawrence S. Wittner, “Cold War America – From Hiroshima To Watergate,” (Holt, 1978) p. 393

15 On CIA torture techniques derived from the Nazis and taught to the Shah’s SAVAK, see Noam Chomsky, “Towards A New Cold War,” (Pantheon, 1979) p. 455-6n

[16] William Shawcross, “The Shah’s Last Ride,” (Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 130; Pierre Salinger and Eric Laurent, “America Held Hostage,” (Doubleday, 1981) pps. 3-7

[17] Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, “The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism” (South End, 1979) pps. 64, 292-3

[18] William Shawcross, “The Shah’s Last Ride, (Simon and Schuster, 1988) pps. 15-37, 275

[19] Medea Benjamin, “Inside Iran – The Real History And Politics Of The Islamic Republic of Iran,” (OR Books, 2018) p. 37

[20] Medea Benjamin, “Inside Iran – The Real History And Politics Of The Islamic Republic Of Iran,” (OR Books, 2018) p. 39

[21] William Shawcross, “The Shah’s Last Ride,” (Simon and Schuster, 1988) p. 278 Khomeini quoted in Clifton Daniel, ed., “Chronicle of America,” (DK Publishing, 1997) p. 865

[22] Edward Said, “Covering Islam,” (Vintage, 1981) pps. 95-133 passim

[23] Robert Fisk, “The Great War For Civilisation – The Conquest of the Middle East,” (Knopf, 2005) pps. 210-12

[24] Edward S. Herman, “Beyond Hypocrisy – Decoding The News In An Age of Propaganda,” (Common Courage, 1992) pps, 31-2. See also, Alexander Cockburn, “Corruptions of Empire,” (Verso, 1988) pps. 515-18, and Noam Chomsky, “Class Warfare,” (Common Courage, 1996) pps. 89-90. For a very detailed account, see Robert Fisk, “The Great War For Civilisation – The Conquest of the Middle East,” (Knopf 2005) Chapter 8.