plebiscites, and so on.
After World War I, in Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Panama, the Monroe Doctrine—the notion that the United States reigns supreme in the New World—was enforced (or, in Cuba’s case, was attempted) through armed invasions, local militias, and internal subversion. Most invasions set the stage for a series of dictators serving US interests: Batista, Trujillo, Duvalier, and Samosa. In Franklin Roosevelt’s famous words (about Samosa), “He maybe a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Of course, such a person is much more useful to you (in the short term) than someone trying to serve his own people’s interests. The long term is another matter. The replacement of Mossadegh, the Iranian nationalist, in 1953 with a puppet, the shah, may have given temporary economic benefit to the United States, but certainly it helped produce a long-term disaster.
The United States invaded Nicaragua thirteen times in the twentieth century before turning the murderous Contras loose on them in the 1980s, when the Nicaraguans finally voted for socialism. The country remains the second-poorest in the Americas, second only to Haiti, another country that has enjoyed frequent US invasions (including a twenty-year occupation). The Brazilian adventure was typical. A US-supported military coup in 1965 overthrew the democratically elected and mildly socialist government, instituting a reign of terror and laying the groundwork for similar events in Argentina and Chile, with combined mortality running into the hundreds of thousands. The US ambassador to Brazil at the time put the matter succinctly, in the best tradition of false historical narratives: The coup was “the most decisive victory for freedom in the mid twentieth century.” The “democratic forces” now in power would “create a greatly improved climate for private investment.” Thus is a false historical narrative maintained and embroidered. We start with the notion that it is our right—nay, our duty—to intervene in the internal affairs of our neighbors because we thereby create freedom, democracy, and (most important) improved investment opportunities for ourselves that we then imagine benefit the Brazilians apace. In fact, it is only now, after the military dictatorships have long withered away, that under a fully democratic (and mildly socialist) government, Brazil is making rapid economic strides in the world, much more so than is the United States.
Much more recently, George W. Bush said the United States was going to war with Iraq. Congress said they wanted evidence that Iraq was a threat. The CIA provided the evidence. Congress voted to go to war. My guess is that most Americans now remember the sequence as: The CIA provided evidence that Iraq was a threat. Based on this evidence, Bush and Congress decided to go to war. If so, a false historical narrative was born, another aggressive war turned into a defensive one.
One cost of US attachment to international intervention and war is the growth of the military-industrial complex famously warned against by President Dwight Eisenhower fifty years ago—or military-industrial-congressional complex, as he first called it. Its appetite seems insatiable; the United States alone now spends almost as much on warfare (“defense”) as the rest of the world put together. Many of the chief US export industries are military as well: fighter jets, helicopters, rifles, bullets. We arm the world at every level, from criminal gangs in our own hemisphere to entire states throughout the world. The collapse of the Soviet system gave only a temporary respite from these forces, and the United States is now spending relatively more than ever. At the same time, an enormous and very expensive intelligence system is being created.
Note that the Soviets provided a counterweight to rapacious capitalism. With their collapse, the past twenty years have seen intense American wars, an accelerated shift of wealth to the already wealthy (a trend that began a few years earlier), and gross financial thievery by the wealthy and their agents leading to near economic collapse.
US HISTORY TEXTBOOKS
A useful part of understanding false historical narratives is seeing what efforts are made to instill them in schools, and we shall try to do this for each of our examples. In the United States, high schools were first required to teach US history around 1900 as part of a nationwide, flag-waving frenzy. Although by logic, one might easily imagine that the function of teaching one’s own history would be to learn and prepare oneself for the future, the nationalistic origin reveals the deeper force that operates in country after country—toward building a positive, patriotic