A quote from Mark Twain comes to mind here: Patriotism is the last refuge
of
the scoundrel. It is not that patriotism is wrong; it is usually a good
thing. However, it is a darned good hiding place for scoundrels.
Anti-communism was the same. Indeed, I'd argue that the scoundrels who hide
behind patriotism and anti-communism do more hard to those causes than
those
who are simply apathetic.
Dan M.
I'm not exactly happy with our policy in Guatemala. I think it was
possibly the lowest point in 20th century American foreign policy, to be
honest, and something of which we should be deeply ashamed. What bugs me
is, well, two things. The first is the moral arrogance inherent in
condemning the policy makers who made these decisions as evil, corrupt, or
stupid when, as far as I can tell, they were doing the best they could in a
difficult circumstance. The scoundrels who hid behind anti-communism did a
great deal of harm to it, certainly - but not nearly as much harm as the
many people who were just anti-anti-communist because they didn't want to
admit that communism was evil and more, that their country could be on the
right side. The second is that, to be honest, I think that if you and Nick
had been running American foreign policy during the Cold War you would have
sat on your hands until the firing squads came. I don't mean that as an
insult. I think Gandhi would have done the same thing, for example, and
there's no human being (save Lincoln) of whom I have a higher opinion than
Mahatma Gandhi. But I think that you're both so concerned with keeping
your own hands clean, and (to be honest) so reluctant to use and recognize
American power for what it has been - the greatest force for good in the
twentieth century, if not all of history - that you could not have done the
dirty, but necessary, things that are necessary for the good to triumph in
a world populated by monsters. Do I agree with every decision made? No,
not at all. But I agree with most of them. And it seems to me that, quite
often, the same people who made the (disastrous) decisions about Guatemala
were right on most other things, while the people who condemned them would
have lost the war in a heartbeat. Sometimes you _do_ have to accept the
flimsy excuses and work with unpleasant people. The right wing dictators
who shot innocents were sometimes the only people who could oppose the real
- not fictional - Communist insurgencies that were threatening to take over
these countries. That fact not everyone they killed was a guerrilla does
not mean that nobody was. Jeffersonian Democrats don't tend to spring out
of the woodwork in Latin America. The alternative to our supporting these
dictators was _not_ the Swedish government appearing and running the
countries. It was someone else, probably someone worse, taking over and
running the countries. On the whole, I tend to think that the people we
supported were no worse than the people who would have replaced them. They
were almost always better than the governments that the (real) Communist
insurgencies would have installed. Whatever quibbles I might have with
various individual decisions - and, btw, our decisions with regards to
Guatemala go back to the 1950s, which explains my reference to Eisenhower
and is critical to understanding our involvement there - the broad scope of
them was clearly correct, and I'm not certain that the mistakes weren't a
necessary consequence of the attitudes that brought success. Churchill,
for example, opposed Indian independence with the same fervor he brought to
opposing Hitler. He was right about the second and wrong about the first -
but both were a logical product of his character. On the whole, we - even
the people of India, in the end - were better off with Churchill than
without him.
Gautam
