OMNI WAR WATCH
WEDNESDAYS, #202, NOVEMBER 6, , 2024. Compiled by Dick Bennett
https://www.haymarketbooks.org ›
books › 1080-the-for... 1st ed. Mullins
Main E183.7 .L45.
[At least since 1971 a text book of US aggressions abroad and
its coverup doublespeak has been available. Is this history—of
course brought up to today!-- being taught in the public schools and colleges in
2024? --D]
Publisher’s description:
This is the story of a nation—the United States—that has conducted more than
160 wars and other military ventures while insisting it loves peace. In the process, the US has forged a world
empire while maintaining its innocence of imperialistic designs. From Mexico to Lebanon, from China to the
Dominican Republic, from Nicaragua to Vietnam, the US has intervened regularly
in the affairs of other nations. Yet the
myth that Americans are benevolent, peace-loving people who will fight only to
defend the rights of others lingers on. Excesses
and cruelties, though sometimes admitted, usually are regarded as momentary
aberrations.
In this comprehensive history of American imperialism, Sidney Lens punctures
the myth once and for all by showing how the US, from the time it gained its
own independence, has used every available means—political, economic, and
military—to dominate other peoples.
Reviews
- “In early 2003,
Michael Ignatieff, a Harvard professor, wrote in the New York Times:
America’s empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest, and the white man’s burden. We are no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company, when American corporations needed the Marines to secure their investments overseas. The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights, and democracy. Only someone blind to the history of the United States, its obsessive drive for control of oil, its endless expansion of military bases around the world, its domination of other countries through its enormous economic power, its violations of the human rights of millions of people, whether directly or through proxy governments, could make that statement. What Sidney Lens wrote around 1970 about ‘the myth of morality’ encircling American imperialism was clearly still in evidence in 2003. His history of American empire is essential for understanding what still goes on in our time.” —From the foreword by Howard Zinn (in the 2nd ed.)
“The observations Sidney Lens made of American imperialism in the 1970s are still valid today. You could say they were prophetic. I’m so glad this book is being republished. It couldn’t be timelier.” —Studs Terkel
Dick’s response: Lens’ book is dedicated “To the children of Vietnam, who are being murdered and maimed by my government—and yours.” That dedication remains appropriate today. But I want to draw your attention to another theme of the book, which also persists, and in fact is a chief cause of US imperial expansion; I refer to US hatred of communism in general and Soviet communism specifically, and now of Russia. ”The quarrel with the Soviet Union—it cannot be affirmed too often—was not the cause of America’s imperial policy, but an effect of it. Washington was determined to organize the world to its ends; Moscow simpjy refused to be molded and manipulated like Britain or France” (349). Few US leaders (like J. William Fulbright) even attempted to understand the world and the Soviet Union as the Soviet leaders saw and understood them. One--George Kennan—is quoted by Dr. Helen Caldicott in her book, Missile Envy (1986 rev. ed., p.309): “We have gone piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of destructiveness upon old ones. . . .and the result is that today we have achieved, we and the Russians together, in the number of those devices, in their means of delivery, and above all in their destructiveness, levels of redundancy of such grotesque dimensions as to defy rational understanding.”
END OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #202, NOVEMBER
6, 2024.