KenFM

Transcription

Hello and welcome to books of our time produced by the Massachusetts School law and seen across the nation today we shall discuss a book entitled overthrow by Stephen Kinzer a former reporter for the New York Times who has reported from more than 50 countries on four continents overthrow is about america's more than one hundred year long history of overthrowing foreign governments that we don't like by American invasions or by American sponsored coup d'etats this includes the governments have many nations which consequently became our enemies some of which are still our enemies today for example Iran and cuba others some of which we invaded several times were the Philippines Chile Guatemala nicaragua Panama vietnam and iraq we have a long history of militarized action some would say militarist action usually in service of our commercial interests in foreign markets plantation crops like bananas and oil and note that the long history of military action discussed by Kinzer does not even include major wars like world war 1 and World War two and Korea kinder sees our current actions in Iraq not as a mere aberration due solely to george bush but as following in train of 100-plus years of similar actions and philosophy which americans largely don't know about because he elaborates a long-standing foreign policy tradition that most of us are largely ignorant of Kinzer's book is vital to anyone who wants to understand America's foreign policy today Stephen Kinzer is here with me to discuss his book and I am Lawrence R Velvel the dean of the the Massachusetts School of law Steve thank you that is by far the longest introduction by a factor of three or four that I have ever done thank you for coming up I i understand you live in Chicago now an ex Boston area native you and I have reversed somehow or other and I gather you're on a sort of book tour for the paperback edition tell me how did the hard copy was the hard copy edition received was it well-received actually I think I'm I have no reason to be other than very pleased with the reception of this book was well-reviewed sold something like almost fifty thousand copies in hardcover I think that there is because of what's happening in the world today an interest in trying to understand why the United States behaves this way in a sense iraq the Iraq conflict is a keyhole through which we can see what lies behind American foreign policy I think there is a thirst now for some broader explanations of how the United States got to this point and I attribute the success of Overthrow to that interest 50,000 copies in hard copy is some shakes these days as they say in New York that's not chopped liver that's a that's a lotta copies of a hard copy book STeve um do you think you know you say people are searching for the answers as to why is it that we act as we do it is a tragic fact but nonetheless a fact is it not that the things you are talking about throughout overthrow and that we will be talking about for two shows are largely kept or have been largely kept out of our history books that most of have read as students in the United States actually our self-image as a nation when we think about what we have done militarily in the world is shaped I think above all by world war two I'll but actually World War two was in a sense an aberration World War two was a case where we actually fought against tyrants yeah yeah to bring democracy that's why we love to focus on that part of our history but when you look at other interventions and other american military actions over the last 100 plus years you'll see that in many cases we actually overthrew leaders who embraced fundamental American principles and replaced them with tyrants who despise everything the United States stands for yeah know you were talking at lunch today about people's image in the United States being formed in one way or another militarily and politically by world war two a fellow named Christian Appy wrote a book called working-class war about vietnam marvelous book and yes part of it he he points out that so many of the soldiers in Vietnam when asked why they felt as they did about america and about the military their answer was John Wayne movies John Wayne movies and you point out that that John Wayne movies did have a tremendous impact I on the thinking people in this country I would say you use the phrase John Wayne movies I guess by which you mean the whole western movie tradition and Sands of Iwo Jima and movies like that yeah I do think that there's a kind idealization of war that war is something noble that war is something positive that war is something manly war is something patriotic this is something that's easy to believe for people who live in a country where there hasn't been a war for more than a hundred years you don't find anybody saying this in countries that experience war themselves now about the reference that you made to the John Wayne movies I think brings up two observations first of all John Wayne movies or movies about conflicts in the Old West or war movies that glorify combat tend to be based on the idea that the only way to resolve a conflict is to have the two enemies face each other and violently confront each other until one is dead and the in the survivor gets everything there's a sense that diplomacy is something for wimps yeah negotiation is not for americans it's not for real men we like to use our military force and that way we never have to compromise because compromise is the essence of what negotiation is about so you never saw a John Wayne movie where at the end John Wayne is sitting around with the Indian an saying look you have to live here I have to live here I'm sure we can dwork out a deal where everybody can be happy they don't end that way they end with one lying dead on the floor I think the other paradigm that maybe you we have taken from our cultural heritage in the western movies in war movies is this paradigm which shows up in so many westerns of the lawless region or the lawless town where it's impossible for a decent family to live because there's thugs and brutes everywhere and then the situation is resolved when one man rides into town with a gun yeah and he is appointed himself to clean up this town yeah and the fact that other people don't like what he's doing that nobody has him authorized to do this not only doesn't discourage him but it add nobility to his cause so this idea that you can go in with a gun to a turbulent area which is essentially what we did in Iraq and imagine that by force you can create a situation that's positive and quiet and that there will never be any negative repercussions from your intervention is something I think we take from these idealized movies you know I wanted one of the great lines in movie history with the last line of the movie called Shane come back Shane I don't think there's going to be anybody in Iraq saying come back Shaine when we finally leave that country in any event Steve how did you get interested at lunch you were talking about the time you had spent in Nicaragua and Guatemala and the impact that had on your interest in these things explain to people how you got interested in the history of american intervention abroad I went to Central America as a correspondent for The New York Times it was during the nineteen eighties when the Sandinistas had just taken power in nicaragua there were conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala and I was there essentially as a war correspondent I was writing my daily stories about combat and what was happening today and about poverty in these countries and it was natural that after a while I began asking myself why this was happening why are these countries in such constant conflict why is there so much upheaval in these countries and why are they so poor sometimes newspaper journalism with its demand and for the daily story doesn't give you the chance to explore these larger questions so what I did was try to learn as much as I could about the history of these countries I I particularly focused on the two where I spent the most time which were nicaragua and Guatemala and as I began to learn Do you speak Spanish by the way yo hablo español yo hablo español ok so I began looking at history of these countries and I realized in both cases both in nicaragua and in Guatemala the spiral down into poverty and violence actually was set off by an american intervention at the beginning of the 20th century Nicaragua was ruled by very dynamic vibrant modernizing figure he had the idea of pulling that country out of feudalism and clerical control and turning it into a modern capitalist state but when you are a nationalist it means by definition that you put the interests of your own country first and of course we expect that of our own leaders in the United States but we don't like it when leaders of other countries do that we often feel that the leader of the United States should put american interests first and the leaders of other countries should also put american interests first so this was Zalaya's problem he was ruling strictly on behalf of nicaraguans this put him in conflict with some american companies the american government got very upset when he decided he wanted to take bank loans from banks in Britain and France instead of banks in the United States a series of events led to his overthrow why did they get upset by that it's very interesting the way these bank loans used to work and the Americans were the masters of this is they lend money to a country and what they would like to do is actually lend more than they know the country can pay back or impose terms that they have a feeling the country's not going to be able to meet and then when the country has to default or there are problems in repayment what the US government will do working with these banks is takeover the revenue-generating operations in that country take over the customs service take over if there's a national railroad or a national steamship line or a national bank and that's actually what we did we we took over all those things and in nicaragua what we were afraid of is that if a country like nicaragua were to take out loans from European banks and there was a problem then the europeans would suddenly be there and we didn't want that because they were doing the same thing exactly they didn't want the europeans doing what we were doing Zelaya the president of nicaragua in the early part of the 20th century got into trouble with the US and the Americans landed a force which ultimately ended up in in overthrowing him so that was as early as 1910 ever since that time Nicaragua has been caught in this spiral of rebellion and repression one of president's Zelaya's followers started a rebellion two years after he was overthrown against the regime the United States placed in power he was killed in a battle with US Marines after his death a young boy named Augusto Sandino was inspired by seeing his dead body later on Sandino led an uprising also against american marines that lasted for a number of years in the nineteen twenties and thirties after Sandino was assassinated another generation picked up the torch of rebellion that was the group that became known as the sandanistas they actually came to power in 1979 that led to another american intervention the contra war of the nineteen eighties so I don't think there's any other country in the world where you can trace the cycle of repression and rebellion and american intervention so clearly over such a long period of time as you can in Nicaragua so having discovered and learned all of this I went home and wrote a book about nicaragua and I tried to explain everything about how this country had gotten to be this way I did the same thing in Guatemala I remember the day my future started I was walking with Beau thinking about my life I had big dreams but my career was going nowhere that's when I discovered the Massachusetts School of Law a few years later I'm here with Beau but now I'm thinking about my client's problems instead of my own teachers with real world experience up a fun campus and the most affordable law school in New England change your life at the Massachusetts School of Law at andover your future starts here the marine general who was in charge a lot have a lot of these invasions was a fellow named Smedley Butler right a fascinating figure Smedley Butler was one of the main officers in charge of a lot of these American interventions abroad he became the youngest general in American history and he was the first real hero of the Marine Corps previously was it was the army and sometimes the navy that produced heroes yeah so he was so successful he became such a famous figure in america that the Marine Corps realizing what great publicity he was called him back and asked him to go on a speaking tour in the US to raise up interest in the Marines and in the military and he made his first speech in philadelphia and his first line was I was a gangster for capitalism it was a racket he went on and on and on yes war is a racket he went on and talked about how he had overthrown the government of Nicaragua on behalf of a group of american banks he had overthrowing the government of Haiti because of American rail interests he had gone and invaded china because the US wanted to get involved in the China trade after he made the speech and then he made one other before the marine generals in washington went into a panic and called back and told him not only that he shouldn't continue the speaking tour but he really ought to retire from the marine corp you know it's totally only beside the point but did you know that Smedley Butler once dug up Stonewall Jackson's arm yes it is true stonewall Jackson's arm after it got amputated was buried in a tomb as it were at Parsons house outside of Fredericksburg andButler didn't believe it and he went and dug it up and sure enough there was stonewall jackson's arm but anyway ok you were talking about Guatemala so guatemala's a somewhat similar story although it happened later in 1954 the guatemalan dictatorship had been overthrown ten years earlier and Guatemala had 10 years real democracy from 1944 to 1954 the figure that the two democratically elected presidents in Guatemala admired the most was franklin roosevelt they were trying to establish in Guatemala kind of a socially conscious democracy and one of the principle goals of the guatemalan government was land reform in a country that is so reliant on cultivating your own food having a plot of land or not having a plot is the difference between starvation and survival so while Guatemala had this very odd situation where it was totally dominated by one big american company united fruit which of course is based in Boston and the banana company they were the largest banana producers in the world united fruit in addition to its own plantations were it grew the bananas in Gutaamala also owned almost all the arable land besides its own plantations that existed in Guatemala they had over 500,000 acres of land that they didn't use so the guatemalan Congress passed a law that required the United Fruit Company to sell that land to the government and that land would then be divided up into small parcels and handed out to families that need land in order to survive well of course the United Fruit Company was horrified by this it went to the Eisenhower administration plead its case many of the people in the administration were either former directors or future directors or stockholders in United Fruit the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had been the lawyer of United Fruit so in 1954 the CIA went into Guatemala and overthrew that government only about six years later a rebellion broke out against the regime that the US had imposed and that billion turned into a thirty year Civil War in which literally hundreds of thousands of people were killed I think that probably more people killed in violence in Guatemala than in all the rest of Latin America put together forget about Chile and Argentina those were just drops in the bucket compared to the amount of blood that was spilled in Guatemala and most of the guatemalans who were killed we're not combatants they were just villagers who happened to live in an area where the government thought that there shouldn't be any people so ever since that time guatemala has been caught in this terrible spiral of violence and poverty and repression and when you look back it didn't have to be this way Guatemala was a functioning democracy in the late forties and early fifties here's another case where we overthrew a person who essentially was a pro-american figure that is to say in his outlook towards government in life and the responsibilities of leaders to their people was reflecting what americans believe and the tyranny that we imposed there afterwards was run by people who despise everything that America stands for so we in many cases have actually set in motion processes that have thrown these countries into chaos and in many cases created whirlpools of instability from which undreamed of threats emerged years later at lunch you talked about what Che Guevara learned from I believe nicaragua and what he told castro why don't you elaborate that actually it was che guevara who came to guatemala during the time when Guatemala was a kind of socialist democracy if you want to call it that in the early 1950s there was a great interest among the young generation all over Latin America in what was happening in Guatemala here was a regime inspired principally by franklin roosevelt who was going to try to have social reform within a democratic context something that had rarely been tried in Latin America so a lot of interested young idealists from other parts of Latin America came to guatemala either to participate or just watch and hang out and see what was happening maybe learn lessons that they could take back to their own countries che guevara was one of them he was a young doctor from Argentina he came to guatemala and he was actually in Guatemala on the day that the US succeeded in overthrowing the Arbenz government he had to flee into the Mexican Embassy for shelter and stay there for a couple weeks finally he was allowed to leave he went to Mexico in Mexico he met fidel castro castro was there preparing his invasion up his homeland cuba and castro like all Latin American political figures at that time was fascinated by what had just happened in Guatemala by the Arbenz government and by the American coup that overthrew the government and as che guevara wrote in his diary castro grilled him for hours about what what happened in Guatemala and essentially what che Guevara told him was this here's the way the United States managed to overthrow the Arbenz government Arbenz believed in democracy when you have a democracy you have independent newspapers you have opposition political parties you have trade unions student groups you have all sorts independent organizations that are allowed to function and thrive free well the CIA came in they were able to penetrate all those organizations and bribe newspaper editors members of parliament opinion makers of all sorts so suddenly Arbenz found himself in this climate where he was being attacked every day in the newspaper and he was being announced in congress there were protests against him in the streets I don't think even he ever realized before he died how completely all of this had been fomented by the CIA but che guevara did and his message to castro was Arbenz was overthrown because he believed in democracy what we have to do if we take over in cuba is make sure there is no democracy that there are no trade unions that are independent no independent student groups no independent newspapers no free civil society because if you establish a democracy in Latin America and try to have social reform the United States will come in and crush it so the lesson is when we take over in cuba we must establish a dictatorship that's what happened and that's the lesson that not only fidel castro but a whole rising generation of political leaders all around this hemisphere took from our intervention as we will get into later we do the same thing with Mosaddegh and Iran which is the reason that they hate our guts to this day but we we will take a break now when we come back we'll start over again as it were by going back by going back to 1893 in 1898 when this all began never to have stopped until our own time stay with us we'll be right back with Stephen kinzer Allison was a legal assistant with much bigger dreams Eric turned his business background into so much more they found their futures at the Massachusetts School of law and so can you immerse yourself in a fun supportive campus environment learn professional skills from instructors with real-world experience take the first step in changing your life at the most affordable law school in New England the Massachusetts School of law at Andover your future starts here up Steve you point out in your book that this habit of American interventionism by military invasion or by coup d'etats began with Hawaii in 1893 by really got rolling one might say with the spanish-american war in 1898 where we fought both in and around both cuba and the Philippines would you say that we have done this kind of thing as much as or more than and any other country including in its perhaps in its heyday of imperialism Great Britain certainly in the modern age in the twentieth century let's say and getting into the 21st there is no country that overthrew so many governments so far from its own shores as the United States in different historical periods there have been different imperial powers we can go all the way back to ancient world but in the modern era which as you say more or less starts in 1893 if you want to call it a long twentieth century it's the United States that really is the champion in regime overthrowing all of which has coexisted easily in the American mind with the idea that we are the most peace-loving of nations it seems to that there is a slight bit of dis-continuity there but so be it that that's the way americans see it it seemed to me in reading your bit about it beforehand because I had read histories but never have I I don't think there has been a book which has focused all of it into you know in between two covers and one of the things that comes out very clearly is that in 1898 a sea change suddenly occurred in the american attitude yes we had acted badly towards the native americans and had imperialistically taken over their lands if one wishes to call that imperialism and yes we fought a war with Mexico in which we took over half their country and that was the purpose of the war there's no getting around it and added the states Texas California New Mexico and Arizona a major portion of our own country but never before had we gone over the oceans what accounted for this sudden switch in 1898 very interesting question I think there were several factors you have to put this in the context of change that went on in america at the end of the 19th century first of all in 1890 the US Census Bureau officially announced that the American frontier was closed that meant to say there were no undiscovered lands we couldn't push any further within the United States secondly American mmm manufacturing business had really begun to mature american business mastered the techniques of mass production and it was producing actually more then Americans could consume the same was true of American agriculture American agriculture became hugely productive now during the same period in the later part of the 19th century there was also huge poverty in the US and lots of conflicts including violent labor uprisings that led to episodes like the haymarket killings so the surplus strikes that the US had in its manufactured goods in particular in agriculture could have been used to ease social tensions within the US but that would have required a kind ofredistribution of income that was not acceptable to the US is it fair to say I was trying to think about when I read this in your book would it be fair to say that what would have been required was something on the order of what occurred forty years later in the New Deal yeah I think you're right I think they would have had but don't forget that in the period between let's say the end to the Civil War and 1900 the US was ruled by a series of very weak presidents and this was the same time when business became hugely powerful it was the era of the robber barons so you had that contrast on the one hand no government regulation no antitrust regulation at all very weak government and very strong and rapacious multi-millionaire businesspeople so essentially the rules of the game in america were being set by a handful of these very rich industrialists so what happened was that the US looking for newmarkets and it could no longer find new markets within the US because we werent' growing anymore we had populated the entire North American continent we also were looking for resources to fuel our country and our industrial machine so the search for resources and the search for markets which had been confined within North America in fact which was a large reason why we expanded to fill all North America yeah now had to be taken elsewhere we already expanded as far as we could in North America and it was at this period that americans really began casting their eyes abroad and looking for other places that we could take over which we could penetrate economically and therefore control politically yeah and what we wanted from them as i understand were resources which ultimately in later years came to mean oil it didn't mean oil at the time plantation agriculture those kinda resources and various ores and minerals up and and we wanted they had enough people who were able to afford our manufacturing and produce so we wanted that we wanted we wanted a large Navy which required coaling stations Island bases that is to say and I have a sense the that we also were smitten with the idea then prevalent in the world of becoming a great power and that's what things like the white fleet were all about i gather now in your book you you mention some of the leading figures on one side or another of the imperialist movement and the anti-imperialist movement who were some of those figures and what were the reasons for their positions like I'm sure for example that theodore roosevelt had certain psychological demons that were not possessed by admiral Mahan it's true roosevelt was a fascinating figure and he was a person I think who was compulsively active he had to be doing things all the time and the idea that America could in any way be satisfied with what it was or with what it had was not compatible with his personality admiral Mahan was another figure very prominent at that time he was director of Naval Academy and a philosopher in a sense of naval power he wrote a very influential book about how sea power determined the rise and fall of empires over history it fascinated roosevelt who actually wrote a review of his book and corresponded at great length with Mahan Mahan came to washington and testified in front of congressional committees he was a very influential figure his idea was that America needed a big navy and that in order to have a big navy you needed to have Island bases all over the world he actually was a little bit less of an imperialist he would have been happy with just a little island or just a port it was roosevelt's who said why take why take just a port we'll the whole country the book was called the influence of sea power upon history exactly and it's one of the most influential military books ever written in the United States I think I recently gave a speech at west point and there's a Mahan Hall there and they tell me that was the there's always a competition between the Army the Navy yeah this is the one time he was so important that even at west point we decided to name a hall after him and of course the other figure in this kind of trilogy when you had roosevelt in the executive branch and then you had Mahan sort of in the world of ideas the figure who was the principal proponent oven American imperialism in the US congress was Henry Cabot Lodge the Cabot family and the Lodge family had become very wealthy through their investments in united fruit which was of course based in Boston and was a major constituent of Lodge so those were the principle figures that pushed America towards war at the end of the 19th century there did emerge particularly as the war in the Philippines continued something called the all-american anti-imperialist league and this was an organization that posited itself as a group of patriotic Americans it included the president of Stanford University it included Andrew Carnegie it included Mark Twain even former President Grover Cleveland was a member of the all-american anti-imperialist league it had its headquarters in Boston have so there was even then an outcry against the use of american power to subjugate peoples far away but ultimately as has happened repeatedly in American history the anti-imperialist movement wound up on the losing side of the domestic political debate stuck in a cubicle jess was going nowhere Carol made the switch from a tech company Everell was an undergrad who knew he wanted more he deserved more find your future at the Massachusetts School immerse yourself in a supportive campus environment learn professional skills from instructors with real-world experience take the first step in changing your life at the most affordable school in New England the Massachusetts School of law at andover your future starts here there's no question I gather that TR had certain psychological demons to wit that his father did not fight in the civil war and he had been very frail as a youngster which is one of the reasons why he took up exercise and ranching in shooting and all those things you know as have gone through my career as a journalist and worked in many parts of the world I've had a chance to observe a number of world leaders or national leaders and I believe that those of us who analyze world affairs often make a common error and that is we tend to underestimate the influence of the psychology of the individual leader on the policies of nations and world politics actually looking at the personality of the leader can give you great insights political scientist hate this because they like to think that everything goes according to systems and situations and broader theoretical constructs but actually I feel from my own observation and from my study of the cases I talk about in my book that you have to understand the psychology of the individual to understand why nations act the way they do and there's hardly a better example than Theodore Roosevelt yeah yeah and a you know people occasionally say I think it will be increasingly accepted over time that if you really want to understand the ofhistory the United States at the beginning 20 century fifty years from now talk to psychologist not to psychiatrists not to historians or political scientist some of the ideas that got bandied about on one side or the other back in the late 1800s early nineteen hundreds led to imperialism perhaps you can elucidate them a little bit one was what Kipling called the white man's burden what exactly did that mean there was a growing sense and it came from British imperialism and actually it's been an underlying motivation of imperialism all the way back to the days of ancient Rome and before that there's a hierarchy of races in the world in that some are naturally born to lead and to rule and others are constitutionally incapable of ruling themselves this idea we have today of multi-culturalism that all cultures have succeeded in their own ways and all have something to learn from each other is very new this was not an idea than anyone would have taken seriously even as recently as a hundred years ago so their is and has been a sense in the United States the we have been blessed with prosperity democracy freedom god has been so good to us that we not only have a right to spread this all over the world but we really have a duty it would be so selfish of us not go abroad and share the benefits that we have with other people the idea that other people have other cultures and other needs and other traditions and other heritages and that the system that we have adopted in the US is not appropriate for every country in the world was put aside actually that was the idea on which the United States was founded I studied colonial American history in college and I have read over and over statements by our founding fathers who not only did not believe that the system of Republican democracy could fit all countries they weren't even sure it could work in this country they felt and they said very explicitly that you need a whole series of very special circumstances for this kind of government to succeed and the idea that they were basing this on was original elucidated by John Winthrop that America should be as a city upon a hill and the eyes of all people would be upon us what he meant is let's build a very good society other people in the world will see us if they would like to copy some aspect of us that will be our contribution to the world but it was around the end of the 19th century that we dropped that idea that we weren't just gonna be a model we were going aggressively to go out into the world and force other countries to adopt our model yes yes a perversion of the reasons for which winthrop said it religious reasons played a role too I understand I think that this is another factor that you can trace back to other imperial powers but it's certainly true in the US that there was a sense the we had not only discovered the perfect ideal political system but it was we had done this because we had found the true religion and the true faith so just as we had an obligation to go abroad and spread our political system we had the duty to go abroad and wean what we considered savages away from their false idolatrous religions and bring them the true religion so definitely there's a religious overtone to this and a number of the leaders who were the principal American imperialists were religious people just to give one example after the United States conquered cuba we suddenly noticed that we had a new situation in the Philippines the Philippines was never part of why we fought the spanish-american war the reason we fight it was for cuba but part of the tactic was to destroy the Spanish fleet that happened to be in the Philippines at the time so it couldn't come to cuba and aid the Spanish colonialists there so afterwards we destroyed the Spanish fleet and then President McKinley had to face the question so now there's no Spanish power in the Philippines what do we do with the Philippines do we take it over do we let it become independent and actually it was admiral Mahan who had the idea why don't we just take a piece of Manila Bay as a naval base and let the rest of the country become independent so there are all these different ideas floating around and it was mckinley who decided no we're gonna take over the whole country in turn into an American possession and he later told a group of people who came to visit him in the white house why he made that decision he said he couldn't make up his mind any finally got down on his knees and prayed to God for guidance and God told him it was the duty of the United States to take over the philippines in civilize and Christianize it apparently what God didn't tell McKinley or mckinley didn't hear was that the Philippines had been under Spanish rule for three hundred years and was already a fully Christian country but it was this idea that we need to spread the combination or our political religion and our spiritual religion that motivated much of american expansions yeah and of course we sent missionaries to china we sent missionaries to the Near East the the Protestant missionaries had a great deal to do with our foreign policy in a lot of places i gather over the decades and I think you pointed out we did not know nor did we care what people in those countries thought it's not only that we didn't know we would have thought to ourselves it would be rediculous even to be interested or to care about what these people thought because they were so primitive they could not possibly have an idea of what was good for them the only people who would know what was good for them was us yeah take up the white man's burden sent forth the best ye breed and so on and so forth and this line actually is a reflection of the view which I think Americans still hold to this day that not only are we not overthrowing regimes and intervening in other countries for our own benefit god forbid but we are actually sacrificing ourselves in order to help raise them up yeah yeah up now the last thing that seemed to have a huge effect but not until approximately nineteen 48 49 50 was the fear of communism the conflating nationalist desires with communism if they didn't like us they must necessarily be communist instead of nationalists that had a major impact too I take it it's definitely true quite tragic actually that during the Cold War period it was impossible for the United States to believe that nationalist leaders in Africa and Asia and Latin America were nationalists just because they were responding to the situations in their own country for example president Arbenz in guatemala in the fifties imposed his land reform programme strictly because of the situation within Guatamala right or wrong he was making a decision with a group of other Guatemalans there was no one else involved but we couldn't believe that we assumed that if he was engaged in any policy that infringed on the rights of an American company and challenged the United States in that way he must've been ordered to do this by the Kremlin it wasn't possible to imagine he could have done this on his own and I think there might be a reason for this tragic misunderstanding when Americans study diplomacy or foreign affairs the kinds of people that become statesmen and diplomats and the people who shape our foreign policy essentially what they study is European diplomacy that's where diplomacy really was born in the modern era and patterns of european diplomacy are very familiar to people who have been trained in foreign policy practice in the United States and those are big power conflicts big powers that use small powers secretly to accomplish their goals shifting alliances these are all very familiar to American policymakers but the fervent desire of people in poor countries to control their own natural resources has never been an issue in Europe it's not part of the European history so it's not something that was ever in the minds of our policymakers I think this might have been something that led them to this terrible misjudgment no yea it's as if everything were the balkans so to speak small stake you know before world war one small states where the other states are intervening we have to take a break when we come back perhaps we can carry on by beginning to describe what happened in the Philippines and in cuba probably we'll do one and then we'll do the second one on the next show during the time or just after the spanish-american war when so much happened particularly in the Philippines that was prologue for what's gone on for the next 100 years stay with us we'll be right back with author stephen kinzer over 25 years ago we said legal education was broken change is uncomfortable but it's often needed so we rolled up our sleeves and we fixed it law schools are just too expensive ours isn't most schools don't teach needed professional skills ours does because our professors continue to have real world experience to often you settle for a career that's less than what you hoped for you shouldn't come see the future the Massachusetts school of law at andover your future starts here now Steve there has been a theory in our history books that we read as kids I suppose and elsewhere that America United States liberated cuba from the Spanish yoke I gather from your book that that is to put it tactfully not exactly true what happened down there the story of what happened in cuba not just in 1898 but in the 100 years that followed is a classic example of what I talk about in my book as the unintended consequences of our interventions essentially the story was this Cuban revolutionaries had been fighting to overthrow Spanish rule starting in the eighteen seventies into the 1880s into the 1890s spain was a declining power at that time cuba was its last remaining possession last remaining big possession in Latin America and the Cuban revolutionaries by 1898 had come quite close to victory in the early months of 1898 as a result of newspaper circulation wars in the US there were a whole series of lurid stories published about how evil and brutal Spanish colonialism in cuba was now Spanish colonialism had very unpleasant aspects but it was the same in 1898 is it had been in 1888 and 1878 and 1868 we never read about it in the newspapers but suddenly there became this fanatic focus on the evil brutality the worst thing happening anywhere in the world today was the oppression that was being visited on these poor innocent cubans by these brutal Spanish oppressors so this brought America to a boil and that situation was intensified when the American battleship Maine was blown up in Havana harbor in the spring of 1898 Maine was destroyed by an enemy's infernal machine was the headline in the hearst paper in New York and and that paper actually contained on the front page a big diagram explaining how the Spaniards had attached the mine to the side of the ship and where the wires had gone and how the underwater team team had approached it it actually wasn't until the nineteen seventies that the US Navy appointed a commission under Admiral Hyman rickover to investigate what really happened on the maine and they found out it was a spontaneous explosion inside the ship because the coal magazine was placed too close to where the armaments were being stored but nobody knew that or cared about that at the time coal has a certain self it's volatile self inflames if it's too anyway nobody in america wanted to hear that just the episode with the Maine just inflamed Americans more so the american congress decided that it would send soldiers to cuba to help the Cuban revolutionaries overthrow Spanish rule now quite to their surprise the Cuban revolutionaries weren't so sure they liked this idea thousands of American troops suddenly arriving in Cuba what's going to happen to them afterwards so they didn't like this idea and weren't willing to invite Americans to come this quite shocked the Americans who thought they were only helping these revolutionaries and so the US Congress passed a law called the teller amendment in which we said very explicitly we promise that as soon as we have helped the Cuban revolutionaries overthrew Spanish rule we will withdraw all our troops and we will allow Cuba to become independent once that was a law in the US in the US penal code the Cuban revolutionaries relented and said fine since you've promised send some troops down to help us the Americans did that of course theodore Roosevelt was the most famous of the Americans who went there I learned while researching my book that he had actually had his uniform tailored at Brooks Brothers in New York City so he wasn't exactly a guerrilla fighter climbing out of the mud but anyway the US fought Spain for exactly one day July 1st 1898 three different battles were fought and Spanish power was already so weak that that was enough soon after that the Spanish surrendered cuba became came under the power of the United States and in the last weeks of 1898 there was frenetic preparation in cuba for the biggest event in human history which is independence finally there were gonna be yacht races and banquets and a big parade of Cuban revolutionary soldiers and fireworks and just before this independence celebration was about to begin the American military governor announced that he was forbidding all the celebrations and then said by the way we've also changed our mind about the whole independence idea we've decided we're keeping our troops here and we're gonna rule Cuba directly and you not going to become independent reasons for this had to do with fears of American sugar growers that they would lose their plantations in cuba fears of American manufacturers that they would lose their market in Cuba so the Americans ruled Cuba directly through a series of military governors and then indirectly through pliant dictators who ruled through the thirties and forties and fifties how long did we have military governors there the military governors lasted about 12 or 14 years roughly til 1910 yup and then the first president of the Republic of Cuba was a guy that we found in new york who had the number one qualification that we insisted on for a Cuban leader which is that he spoke English so if you flash forward to 1959 when Castro took over in cuba the first thing he said in his first speech was this isn't gonna be like 1898 again yeah it's an example of how the resentment over these interventions really festers in the hearts of patriots and it tells me that if we had allowed cuba to become independent as we promised we probably would never have had to face the whole phenomenon of castro communism over the last 50 years you know history being what it is and and so we can't necessarily we can't know what didn't happen we can't know what would have happened had we done it differently we we can know that we created certain situations and it seems to me reading your book that we created castro because the dictators who ruled cruelly until Castro finally threw some of them out and we dominated their economy to the point where americans you know in the forties and fifties and thirties used to go down to cuba we read hemingway's stories right used to go down to cuba for their vacations the Mafia ruled the ruled havana and we created some terrible situation it's not in our history books so when castro takes over and gave us you know thumbed his nose at us and of course I was about twenty years old and so remember a lot of this stuff hey we didn't understand why why are they mad at us exactly there's a great quote from Eisenhower where he says I'm very puzzled this is a country that where they're buying all our goods and we have good relations with them I don't understand as he put it what the problem is but as we said it's not only resentment over what happened in 1898 but then it was also the lesson of what happened in 1954 in Guatemala where democratic government was overthrown by the CIA these things together lead castro first to want to overthrow the regime under which Cuba was living and second to make sure that his regime would not be democratic and therefore allow openings for foreign powers to come in and overthrow him and you know about this point its well-established nobody denies any more that the kennedys tried a couple times to kill castro he didn't forget that either how would you yeah yeah now the situation in the Philippines similar in some ways different in some ways elaborate we have about five six minutes left we may not get that done with the Philippines but if not will pick it up again at the next hour but elaborate if you would what the situation was in the Philippines and what happened there well as I said earlier that we had this odd situation where we destroyed the Spanish fleet there and didn't really know what to do with the Philippines suddenly it was in our hands and we decided to take it over it became an actual possession of the United States just like Cuba but unlike in cuba the revolutionary movement that had been fighting the spaniards before we arrived simply changed enemies instead of fighting against the rule of the Spanish they started fighting against the rule of the Americans we assumed that wouldn't happen we assumed the only thing the Philippine revolutionaries wanted was to get rid of the Spanish we didn't understand that they also wanted to become an independent country and that they would fight like this is like the Mosaddegh business isn't it these patterns repeat themselves time and time again that's the crucial point really isn't it absolutely and that's I think one reason why it's so important to look back at these other episodes the Philippines actually became one of the first big counter-insurgency wars the United States ever had to fight well this war is almost totally forgotten in the United States although certainly is not forgotten in the Philippines we lost thousands of american soldiers in the Philippines tens of thousands of Filipinos were killed and some of them in in very brutal ways it was the time when the united states had its first torture scandal as american soldiers start coming back journalists interview them and they found out all the torture techniques that the US was perfecting in the Philippines and it is no coincidence that the generals who were leading the American effort in the Philippines had their combat experience where in fighting against the Indians in the western United States so the same tactics that were used against the Indians were then brought to the Philippines and used there and talking about how patterns repeat themselves it isn't only that we had a torture scandal in the Philippines much like the one that we later had in Iraq isn't only that the US government kind of glossed it over and nobody at any higher levels was ever punished but here's an interesting detail the most commonly used torture in the Philippines in the first years of the 20th century which became very widely known in the US because so many american soldiers talked about it was something called the water cure what they would do is force a bamboo pole down someone's throat pump pump him full of water usually saltwater or dirty water until his stomach expanded is bloated then you would jump on his stomach until either he would talk or he would die would repeat this until you got what you wanted or killed the guy now the reason I find this interesting is when we look at the complaints about what's happening in the American base at Guantanamo what's the most common torture that we hear about it the one that they call waterboarding yes it's not only that the themes are repeating themselves it's the actual practices yeah you know a as I understand Steve we would burn down whole villages shades of vietnam I want you to turn this island into a howling wilderness I I want you to kill and burn the more you kill and burn the more you will satisfy me that was the direct line from one of the american commanders they would capture women and children stand them up and shoot them people were watching bodies floating down the rivers of the Philippines these were the stories that later began appearing in the american press but the way the US reacted was so classic first of all there was outrage yeah and then there were the leaders of the US particularly Henry Cabot Lodge who would say these people are fighting a war against savages so far away it's really not fair to force them to live up to certain civilized standards that we would like to live up to so as Lodge put it let us oh let us be fair to our own in other words if we are doing it it automatically becomes justifiable it has no bearing on national policy it's all the same things we've been hearing again remarkable they have dragged us down to the position where we must use these terrible tactics it's their fault yeah yeah let's fight fire with fire allright that's going to be the end of the first show Steve I think the next show we'll start out with Guatemala I i mean with Iran and talk a little bit about what has happened there and and in the Middle East afterwards as well as many other things to the audience be with us again next time for the second installment of our television interview with Stephen Kinzer