Escaping Orthodoxies

leaders claim when they use force. The major recent academic study of humanitarian intervention is by Sean Murphy, Humanitarian Intervention: The UN in an Evolving World Order. He's now an editor of the American Journal of International Law. He points out, correctly, that before the Second World War, there was the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928 that outlawed war. Between the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the U.N. Charter in 1945, there were three major examples of humanitarian intervention. One was the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and north China. Another was Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and a third was Hitler's takeover of the Sudetenland. They were accompanied by quite exalted and impressive humanitarian rhetoric, which as usual was not entirely false. Even the most vulgar propaganda usually has elements of truth. In fact, the propaganda was similar in its rhetoric to other so-called humanitarian interventions, and about as plausible. Furthermore, here you have to look elsewhere. What you have to do is look and see what was the U.S. reaction. Some of it is public, but parts of it are from the internal record, which is now partially declassified. The reaction is commonly called appeasement. But that's a little misleading, because that makes it seem as if you're groveling before the tyrants. It doesn't convey the fact that the reaction was actually approval and was rather supportive. When it was critical, it was on very narrow grounds. So in the case of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and north China these are things I wrote about over thirty years ago, because these were public records the official U.S. reaction was, We don't like it, but we don't care, really, as long as American interests in China, meaning primarily economic interests, are guaranteed. The U.S. Ambassador, Joseph Grew, who was a very influential figure in Asian policy in the Roosevelt Administration, in 1939, pretty late, ridiculed the idea that the Japanese were big bullies and the Chinese were oppressed people. By then there had been huge atrocities, the Nanking massacre and on and on. Grew said the only real problem was that the Japanese were not protecting U.S. interests in China. If they did that, it would be OK. At the same time Roosevelt's Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, said that we could reach a modus vivendi with Japan if they were to protect U.S. commercial interests in China. If they wanted to massacre a couple of hundred thousand people in Nanking, its another story.

Same with Mussolini. There was extreme support. The State Department hailed Mussolini for his magnificent achievements in Ethiopia and also, incidentally, for his astonishing accomplishments in raising the level of the masses in Italy. This is the late 1930s, several years after the invasion. Roosevelt himself described Mussolini as that admirable Italian gentleman. In 1939 he praised the fascist experiment in Italya's did almost everyone, its not a particular criticism of Roosevelt and said it had been corrupted by Hitler, but other than that it was a good experiment. How about Hitler's taking over the Sudetenland in 1938? One of Roosevelt's major advisors was A.A. Berle. He said that there's nothing alarming about the takeover. It was probably necessary for the Austrian Empire to be reconstituted under German rule, so its all right. The State Department, internally, was much more supportive of Hitler, on interesting grounds. He was a representative of the moderate wing of the Nazi Party, standing between the extremes of right and left. In 1937 the European Division of the State Department held that fascism must succeed or the dissatisfied masses, with the example of the Russian Revolution before them, will swing to the Left, joined by the disillusioned middle classes. That would be the real tragedy. Notice this is the late 1930s. There's no concern about Russian aggression. That's a typical remark. That's the way every monster is described, a moderate standing between the extremes of right and left, and we have to support him, or too bad. That's a famous remark of John F. Kennedy's about Trujillo reported by Arthur Schlesinger, the liberal historian and Kennedy aide. Kennedy said something like, We dont like Trujillo. Hes a murderous gangster. But unless we can be assured that there wont be a Castro, well have to support Trujillo. We can never be assured that there wont be a Castro. Remember how Castro was regarded at the time. We know that from declassified records. Kennedy was going to focus on Latin America. He had a Latin American mission, including Arthur Schlesinger, who transmitted the conclusions of the mission to Kennedy. Of course they discussed Cuba. Schlesinger said the problem of Cuba is the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into your own hands. He later explained that its an idea that has a lot of appeal to impoverished and oppressed people all over Latin America who face similar difficulties, oppression and misery and might be inspired by the example of the Cuban revolution. So thats the Cuban threat. Schlesinger also mentioned the Soviet threat. He said, Meanwhile the Soviet Union hovers in the wings, offering development loans and presenting itself as a model for achieving modernization in a single generation. So that's the Cuban threat and the Soviet threat. You have to stop that. It was the same reason that the State Department gave for supporting Hitler in the 1930s, and in fact just about every other case. Case after case after case. The threat of a good example, or its sometimes called the virus effect. The virus of independent nationalism might succeed and inspire others. Actually, the war in Vietnam started the same way.

DB, I think; maybe check: There was a comment attributed to FDR about a Latin American dictator, I think it was the elder Somoza. He may be an SOB, but he's our SOB.

Thats falsely attributed, but it's the right idea.

DB: Speaking of Nazi Germany, Goebbels once said, It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.

It's worth remembering where he got that idea. We ought to come back to humanitarian intervention, because of course the fact that Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese fascists called it humanitarian intervention is not enough to prove that other cases are not humanitarian intervention. It just raises some questions that a serious person would want to look at.

Goebbels got that idea, as did Hitler, from the practice of the democracies. They were very impressed. Hitler in particular talked about the successes of Anglo-American propaganda during World War I and felt, not without reason, that that's partly why Germany lost the war. It couldn't compete with the extensive propaganda efforts of the democracies. Britain had a Ministry of Information, or some Orwellian term, the purpose of which, as its leaders put it, was to control the thought of the world, and in particular to control the thought of liberal American intellectuals. Remember the circumstances. Britain had to get the U.S. into the war somehow, or it wasn't going to win. That meant it had to appeal to the educated sectors in the U.S. and get them on its side, and they did. If you read back, John Dewey's circle, I'm sorry to say, what they produced about the First World War is very similar to the chorus of self-adulation that similar circles produced during the bombing of Yugoslavia last year, full of praise for their own enlightenment. They were very pro-Wilson's war, and the population wasn't. Wilson in fact was elected on a kind of pacifist program. Peace without victory, was his slogan. He immediately tried to turn the country into raving warmongers, which they did, through propaganda. But the educated sectors, especially the progressives, the liberal, educated sector took great pride publicly, in The New Republic, for example, the main journal, that this was the first war in history, as they said, which was not due to military conquest or crass economic motives but just for values and that had been led by the educated sectors who understood this and brought the population to war. It was a new era in human history. Incidentally, this is the same thing we heard last year in Yugoslavia. The first war ever fought for principles and values. We are an enlightened state. There was a huge chorus of self-praise. Not at all new, very similar to the First World War. At that time the educated sectors here were transmitting tales about Hun atrocities, tearing arms off Belgian babies. Like most propaganda, there was some element of truth to it, but it turned out that it was mostly fabrication. In fact the picture wasn't pretty, but it was not what was being presented. One of very few people who resisted was Randolph Bourne. He had been in Dewey's circle and was more or less thrown out, barred from participation, because he was telling the truth, what later was recognized to be the truth, about what the war was really about and why Wilson was trying to get us into it. That was not acceptable just as its not acceptable here, right now. In fact, the similarities are very striking, as is the style, and intellectual and moral level, of the defense of orthodoxy. For people who want to think about humanitarian intervention, its worth looking at.

So the British had the Ministry of Information. The U.S. had the Committee on Public Information, the Creel Commission, which was mostly liberals like Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays. The latter went on to found the public relations industry. They succeeded. They were very impressed with their success in turning a pacifist population very quickly into raving anti-German fanatics. It was real hysteria about the Germans. It happened pretty effectively. A number of groups were impressed. One group was the progressive intellectuals. Tha's the background for the influential social and political theories that developed in the 1920s, mostly from progressive circles. Its part of the founding of modern political science and the public relations industry and the media. The new insight the new art of democracy, in Lippmann's phrase is that we have ways, as Bernays put it, of regimenting the minds of men just as an army regiments their bodies, and we should do it. Because were the good guys and smart guys and they're stupid and dumb, and therefore we have to control them for their own good. And we can do it because we have these marvelous new techniques of propaganda. It was honestly called propaganda in those days. Bernays' book is called Propaganda. Lippmann's the same. Harold Lasswell, Reinhold Niebuhr, it goes on and on. That's one group that was impressed. Another group that was impressed was business leaders. That's where you'd have the real explosion of the huge advertising and public relations industry. And their leaders were again pretty frank. We have to impose on people a philosophy of futility and ensure that they're focused on the superficial things of life, like fashionable consumption. They have to try to pursue what were called fancied wants, invented needs. We create the needs and then get them to focus their attention on it. Then they don't bother us, they're out of our hair. Its not hard to see the consequences years later. This wasn't new. These ideas start with the Industrial Revolution, but there was a real upsurge in the 1920s and since. These are the huge industries of domination and control. Another group that was impressed was what became the Nazis, who recognized, Hitler discusses this, I think it must be in Mein Kampf, that the Germans simply couldn't compete with the Anglo-American propaganda. And next time, he says, well be ready with our own propaganda. That's the background of the Goebbels quote. So yes, they recognized it and they got it from a good source, the democracies.

Incidentally, its not in the least surprising. It should be expected that its in the democracies that these ideas would develop. Because in a democracy you have to control peoples minds. You can't control them by force. There's a limited capacity to control them by force, and since they have to be controlled and marginalized, be spectators of action, not participants, as Lippmann put it, you have to resort to propaganda. This was well understood and very self-conscious. It was a very reasonable reaction. You can trace it right back to the seventeenth century, the first democratic revolution.