We get to hold all the guns and the money

November 11

GUEST: David Vine, professor of political anthropology at American University, and author of the newly published The United States of War, talks about the world history of America's endless conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State. 

The United States of War

Dr. David Vine uses meticulous research to bring his readers out of their coma of US exceptionalism. It is a difficult transition for most.

As a draftee in 1967, I was against the Vietnam war, but I thought it was an aberration rather than a blueprint for how my country interacted with the rest of the world. I held the line at the Second World War. I know that we invaded Mexico in the 1800s, and Hawaii, Cuba and the Philippines as well. I knew about the history of Native Americans too, and felt the shame of Slavery and Jim Crow. But it seemed to me that my country had lost its way after defeating Germany and Japan, becoming the empire that was there for the taking.

Since then I have read  Zinn's People's History, as well as Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me. But as far back as I was willing to go was the turn of the last century. With the help of Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow, I admitted that the American Empire began a good deal earlier than I had previously thought. 

My life experiences also changed by perspective. I spent a year in Korea in the US Army, and I recommend that experience to anyone who wants a clearer picture of how imperial occupation works. You get to hold all the guns and the money, while pitifully poor supplicants get to trade their dignity or their sisters for a little bit of your power and wealth. 

Traveling in Central America during the 1980s, I got a chance to see what imperialism does to native peoples. We were destroying Nicaragua so that their socialist revolution would not be copied by the rest of Central America. We did it by hiring the Contras, brutal killers who followed the empire's directives. El Salvador had its own killing fields, all paid for and armed by that enemy of freedom, my very own country. So maybe I didn't need books to understand what living in the belly of the beast was like.

Knowledge is a first step. Without it there can't be activism. If we want to change our country we must understand how it became a military behemoth, and a threat in this nuclear age to all of humankind.