By Ron Ridenour | 04/29/2011

(This article is Part II of journalist Ridenour’s political autobiography, Solidarity and Resistance: 50 Years With Che. Click here for Part I)

Wilfred Burchett was a key source of information for many of us who wanted to understand what the United States was doing against Southeast Asians. Burchett was an intrepid reporter for decades. He was the first correspondent to enter Hiroshima after the nuclear bombing and brought the world the military-censored news of its horrors.

Burchett’s journalist code influenced my journalism:

“It is not a bad thing to become a journalist because you have something to say and are burning to say it. There is no substitute for looking into things on the spot, especially if you are going to write on burning international issues of the day. Make every possible effort to get the facts across to at least some section of the public. Do not be tied to a news organization in which you would be required to write against your own conscience and knowledge.”

I later met Burchett. We spoke of doing some writing about Cuba but we never got around to it.

I had begun working as a reporter in 1967. The written word for me is a tool I wield for our liberation from exploitation and oppression. My first reporting was for the Communist Party’s California weekly, People’s World. My last articles for that publication were first-hand accounts from Prague just after the Soviet invasion. They were not published however–a decision taken by top party leaders over the editor’s objection–and I ceased writing for the People’s World.

Che was with me in more ways than I knew at the time. His image and revolutionary thoughts were often present at demonstrations in which I participated, especially anti-imperialist actions. But what I did not know, until I worked in Cuba in 1988, was that he had a flair for writing journalistically.

On June 14, 1988, Cuba’s Journalist Union published Che Periodista (Journalist Che) commemorating his 60th date of birth. It is a collection of chronicles, battle accounts, critiques of imperialism, ideological think pieces, and an homage to Camilo Cienfuegos, a close comrade killed in an airplane accident after the revolutionary victory.

Che’s reportage originally appeared in Verde Olivo (Olive Green), the Cuban revolutionary army magazine, written between October 1959 and April 1961. I found Che’s writings concise, freshly formulated in a crisp style.

After my Czechoslovakia report was ideologically censored by the Communist Party, I sought employment in the mass media, or mainstream media (MSM). My first job was as sports editor in central California at the Hanford Sentinel (1969-70). Not knowing anything about sports writing, I learned on the job. Then, I moved up to general reporting and features. I was soon fired, because I wrote about a taboo subject: racist covenants in housing.

The editor ran my piece, “Titles Include Race Restricting Provision,” on the front page, January 29, 1970. The lead read: “Said premises shall not be sold, conveyed, rented or leased to or occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race.” I had found this restriction on deeds at a real estate agency.
Ron Ridenour

When real estate advertisers complained to the publisher, he warned me to learn what to write and what not to write. After I told this to a local Mexican-American, who had told me that some of his people had been denied the right to buy certain properties, one hundred people showed up to picket outside the newspaper offices. This was the first time in its history that the paper had been picketed. The publisher fired me as they chanted to save my job.

Twins and Fired

“Twins! I had twins,” I yelled to Bill when I came to work one morning at the Riverside Press-Enterprise, my next newspaper job. The week before, I had been congratulated and promoted by the publisher after my probation period of three months. I worked on the editorial desk with Bill, our city editor. But now he wasn’t smiling as usual.

“Ron, I’ve got bad news,” Bill said glumly. “The FBI is coming tomorrow to talk about you,” his voice tapered to a whisper when mentioning the FBI.

Goddamn government! Just got back on my feet; and now with two sons I had to find another job.
The FBI agents told the chief editor and the publisher that I was secretly working with the Black Panther Party in the city. It didn’t help my case with the anti-union publisher that I was trying to organize a union as well. The publisher fired me upon hearing from the FBI.

I didn’t know it at the time but I had been a target of COINTELPRO, the Agency’s code name for its dirty tricks campaign against leftists, especially anti-war and civil rights activists, and Black Panthers. Their tactics included periodic murders, fraudulent imprisonment, and cajoling employers to fire their workers who were government opponent activists.

After leaving the Committee United for Political Prisoners, I took a reporting job at the weekly Los Angeles News Advocate (LANA), whose slogan was “radical, responsible journalism”.

I covered many topics, but concentrated on the Vietnam War and resistance to it. The publisher and I were often at odds over how radical we should be. With my last reportage for LANA I combined my journalism and my activism in the anti-war movement as one of 150 delegates from US groups participating in the largest world-wide anti-war conference. The World Peace Assembly was held in Versailles, France February 11-14, 1972.

We were 1200 delegates from 84 countries. Both US anti-war coalitions were present: People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice and National Peace Action Coalition. I supported both and tried to get them to cooperate in some actions, which rarely succeeded. It was a unique event for me personally because it was here where I first met Burchett. It was also my first encounter with the people that my country was murdering in Southeast Asia, and with people from Cuba, the country that would become my true homeland in years to come.

Among several well known participants was one of Bolivia’s many generals who had seized political power, Juan José Torres. In fact, General Torres had just been ousted the summer before as the nation’s top leader by another General, Hugo Banzar, in yet another coup. I did not know it at the time but Torres had been on the Joint Chiefs of Staff under yet another coup general, René Barrientos, and as such he had cast his vote to murder Che. Yet here he was a “peace” delegate.

During three days of speeches, debates, and working group sessions we adopted an extensive program of antiwar activities to occur in many parts of the world throughout the rest of the year. We were not united on priorities or tactics, however. Some wanted to concentrate on pressuring politicians to be more serious about peace negotiations; others wanted more actions against politicians for making the war in the first place, having no trust in their “peace” rhetoric.

I came under fire from some for my position to boycott the crucial war technology industry, especially war aircraft corporations. Nixon had begun to withdraw troops and was bombing all the more. While we met, in fact, the International Herald Tribune reported, on February 14:

“The US Command in Saigon announced that B-52 bombers few 19 missions in the 24 hours ending at noon today, the largest number of missions flown in a day…”

My proposal to boycott and picket war industries was denounced by the French Communist Party (supported by other national CPs) as “anti-working class”. They had control of the unions in many war plants, especially in France. If my proposal took effect, workers would lose wages and even jobs. I was seen as a provocateur, something the CIA also circulated. Divide and conquer!

There was a special meeting with the leading delegates from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia for all the delegates from the United States. I felt overwhelmed with admiration for them and tearfully sad.

I also had a heartfelt meeting with Melba Hernandez, Cuba’s leading international representative. She had been a guerrilla at the Moncada barracks, Santiago de Cuba, July 26, 1953.

We concluded the conference with most of us marching in Paris against the war. Between 25,000 and 40,000 participated. At a celebration in the evening, Joe Bangert sang. He was a New York delegate of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He had been a solider in Vietnam and had gone over to the people’s side, marrying a Vietnamese woman. She and her child had just been killed in a US bombing raid.

Leaving LANA, I went over to its competitor, the much larger Los Angeles Free Press, or the Freep, as it was known popularly. I was the political reporter. I continued anti-war reportage, exposing police brutality, racism in housing and in government, covering the student revolt and various liberation struggles. One of my most significant reports was about the May 1972 demonstrations, which had been called for at the World Peace Assembly.

My two-page spread in the forthcoming Freep started thusly:

“Anti-war activists say that the government of the United States is waging an all-out war against the people of Indochina and the people of this land.

On May 11, 1,800 tons of bombs were dropped on a small area outside the town of An Loc in South Vietnam. The same day, the news media reported that 1,800 Americans had been arrested during the three-day period in protests involving hundreds of thousands against Nixon’s actions.”

Furthermore, for the first time, Nixon’s generals had mined Vietnamese harbors.

In the Los Angeles area, we held demonstrations in many places, among them at Nixon’s reelection campaign headquarters. The police were extremely violent. They beat people, and choked some unconscious with truncheons. Two plainclothes policemen, who had been on the picket line, beat Ron Kovics with blackjacks as he sat in his wheelchair. I filmed the police violence.

Kovics had fought against the Vietnamese. After he was wounded and paralyzed for life, he began to see who the real enemy was. He eventually wrote an auto-biographical account, Born on the 4th of July (his birth date as well as that of the U.S. Declaration of Independence), which was made into a Hollywood movie of the same name. Kovics is still acting against US wars to this day, now in the Middle East.

On that day, four decades ago, 200 Los Angeles demonstrators were arrested for “failure to disperse when ordered”. My colleague, Earl Ofari, wrote a sidebar to my coverage:

“Among those arrested…was Ron Ridenour…as soon as he began filming Ron Kovics being pushed out of his wheelchair by police officers, two plainclothes officers whom [Ridenour] knew from other demonstrations yelled at a uniformed officer to arrest him.”

I was jailed and released hours later on bail. I was later charged with the usual “disturbing the peace,” “interfering with an officer”, “resisting arrest”, and a couple more counts for good measure.

My case spurred several newspapers and media associations to support my right to report and photograph without being arrested. A defense committee was also organized. Nevertheless, I was found guilty of some of these charges and sentenced to one year in prison. One charge was “disturbing the peace.” The nature of that “disturbance”: swearing in the presence of women as I was being attacked by cops.

Kovics commented: “They beat me because I represented the undeniable truth of the war. I represented the crimes of this war. …It’s absurd that [Ron] should get one year in jail for taking pictures of me being beaten.”

We appealed the case. We had many witnesses, including the ex-wife of undercover cop Stanley Frugard, who testified that he had been an undercover policeman who had been after me for years.

Appellate judges concurred that the sentencing judge had erred in not allowing my attorney to argue that I was a victim of “discriminatory enforcement”. So, I was free again. But the Los Angeles Police Department’s notorious “red squad” did not rest at that.

COINTELPRO Provocation

“Ron Ridenour’s [pen has] inspired some and angered others…a copy of [Ridenour’s] 1971 Internal Revenue Service forms…found its way anonymously to the newspaper offices. The same forms were also sent to the Staff [another “underground” newspaper], the Socialist Workers party headquarters, to the Peace Action Council, and to the Citizen Research Investigating Committee,” wrote Los Angeles Free Press editor Art Kunkin.

This was another COINTELPRO action, trying to cast me in the light of an agent for the US government. Someone(s) had taken my signature, the same one as was on my California driver’s license, and copied it onto fake tax forms. I was supposed to have earned $17, 784.54 from the “United States Army, Pentagon Building Arlington, Virginia.”

“A handwritten note accopanying the information said: `I think you’ll know what to do with this information about a pig agent;” signed by “a concerned friend.”

Government agents of world destruction were trying to make my fellow activists and government critics think of me as a “pig agent” and they were nearly successful, because the Staff had assigned someone to write a story that I was an agent. Fortunately, Kunkin did his homework convincingly for the reporter, and others who had received the forgery, making them realize that this was, in fact, a provocateur action.

This was becoming a common tactic, which caused several honest leftists, especially Black Panthers, to be cast aside as agents. In some cases, violence was committed against innocent people.

In my case, it was ironic that in the same period that I was being smeared, a FBI memorandum from the L.A. office, dated November 28, 1973, noted:

RIDENOUR’s long association with the `underground´ press as well as his affiliation with numerous subversive groups would both tend to preclude interview of subject since this would most surely be a futile effort.”

I continued writing exposés and acting against the wars abroad and brutality at home.

I wish to share one more issue where I was both reporter and activist, that of Wounded Knee.

Wounded Knee was part of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. It had the highest murder rate of any area of the United States. Between 1973 and 1976, there were 170 murders per 100,000 population average, whereas the city with the highest murder rate was Detroit, Michigan with 20 per 100,000. The national average was nine per 100,000.

At Pine Ridge, poverty, alcoholism and unemployment were widespread. The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ local authority, Richard Wilson, and his deputies ruled over the large reservation like concentration camp guards.

The traditional Oglala Sioux chiefs called in AIM (American Indian Movement) to help them out. This resulted in an occupation of the local post office. Then the chiefs declared secession from the United States. They declared secession and initiated the Independent Oglala Nation (ION). They sought to reclaim their sovereignty which had long ago been stolen from them by the US government despite treaties that had supposedly guaranteed them self-determination.

US Marshals, FBI agents and National Guard troops were sent in. Indians held their ground with rifles. The government had 15 armored personnel carriers, .50 caliber machine guns, and helicopters, as well as light weapons. Apparently, their orders were to prevent numerous deaths. Nevertheless, in the 71 days the ION held out two Indians were killed by snipers, and two, at least, were wounded. One Marshall was wounded.

This unusual militancy created a stir across the nation. Celebrities, such as Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando, spoke out for them. In fact, during the stand-off, Brando asked Apache Sacheen Littlefeather to speak for him at the Oscars where he was to be presented with the best actor award for “The Godfather”. She said that Marlon would not accept the award due to “poor treatment of Native Americans in the film industry”.

While the Free Press’s owners and I differed over politics and their sexist sex ads, they allowed me to rent a car at their expense and drive to the battlefield. Many supporters had come in stealthily as well. Among the 500 defenders of the new nation were representatives from 60 other tribes from many states. There were a few Chicanos (Mexican-Americans active in their own liberation struggle), a handful of blacks and a few Vietnam War veterans. One of those was Joe Bangert.

I came as a reporter-photographer but also helped the leadership with publicity and getting the message out. When I left, I carried information to another reservation and organized support.  One of the leaders of the movement, Carter Camp, a Poncha Indian from Oklahoma, told me:

“We’re going to revive our roots; return to the ways we always lived and complete the hoop that was broken when our whole nation was broken…The new nation shares what it has. There will be no accumulation of goods. No one will have so many horses that some do not have any.”

“We identify with the oneness of all people. Black, yellow, red and white are the four scared colors and are the colors of all people.”

These Native Americans felt kinship with the 200 Indians massacred at Wounded Knee by U.S. government troops in 1890. They now declared that, “The right to life belongs to each man. By remaining a separate nation we choose to live.”

But it was not to be that way. On May 5, a peaceful negotiation had been worked out. Some leaders were arrested but allowed to make bail, and some courts dismissed the charges. U.S. government “spin doctors” understood that the Native peoples had a lot of sympathizers around the world.

In December 2007, some activists from the 1973 takeover restarted a move to secede from the US. Representatives take their message to international bodies. I met some in Bolivia, in 2010, at the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth—about which I write further on in this series.

Besides my writings at the Freep, I was somewhat more successful at organizing a Newspaper Guild union there than I had been at the Riverside Press-Enterprise. But as we were negotiating a contract, the publishers fired me. They were angry about my organizing and also because I supported radical feminists who were protesting the paper’s sexist ads. Shortly after they fired me, Kunkin was fired and many workers left. The union fell apart.

Freelancing

Graham Greene’s writings influenced me deeply. One of the philosophical pearls that Greene wrote became a motto for me as well as that of Burchett’s: “I try to understand the truth even if it might compromise my ideology.”

I met Greene in Panama where he wrote a talk to launch a solidarity march with Central America for which I was an organizer and media coordinator, in 1985-6. We were 400 people from a score of countries joined to support the Contadora peace process—a Latin American initiative to pressure the El Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments to stop repressing their own people and to end the US-sponsored Contra war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. We crossed through much of Central America and ended in Mexico City “marching” mainly in buses we hired. The last demonstration attracted 50,000 people in Mexico City. Most of us stopped to shout our anger at the Embassy of Death, as Mexicans call the US Embassy.

For me, as a solidarity activist and Marxist thinker, the most decisive motivation to struggle is the issues and not what any political party or government advocates—first an activist and then an advocate journalist for the underdog, for the invaded peoples.

So, after being fired from several jobs both in the mass media and the alternative/left media, I went about making a so-so living freelancing rather than kow-towing to MSM ideology or too simplistic leftist ideological media.

During the next years I wrote and/or edited for scores of US newspapers, news agencies,
magazines and alternative media as a stringer, correspondent or freelancer.

One of the most popular pieces I did as a freelancer was my Playboy scoop–an interview with Jane Fonda, and her radical husband Tom Hayden. I knew them from the anti-war movement and convinced Fonda to do this interview. She had despised Playboy for publishing a nude or semi-nude photo of her without permission. She had always refused their interview requests.

The Washington Post’s west coast bureau chief Leroy Aarons joined me. I had to miss the fifth and final session because I started serving a six-month jail sentence for supporting striking textile workers in Los Angeles. Four plainclothed policemen had jumped me as I stood before a busload of Mexican workers brought in from across the border. They had not been told that the Mexican-American workers at the plant were on strike. As I spoke to them in Spanish about this and encouraged them not to become scabs, the cops took me down. I was arrested for “resisting arrest”, of course.

In between freelancing for magazines and newspapers over a decade, I worked 18 months for the American Civil Liberties Union as its media chief. I got our civil liberty court cases and general message out to the media, often successfully. I also edited and wrote for our newspaper-journal.

In the mid-1970s, I had a stint as an editor/reporter at the rebellious and investigative reporting weekly, the Los Angeles Vanguard. We were a handful of full and part-time editors and writers but we put out a good rag. We even won an award for pieces Dave Lindorff wrote. My forte was police brutality investigations. This was, perhaps, the best newspaper I worked on, but we couldn’t last long without advertisers. Newspapers can’t survive in the capitalist world on sales alone.

Four or five years after I was fired from the Los Angeles Free Press, the iconoclastic Larry Flynt of Hustler and Chic magazines hired me as its managing editor. Flynt had recently bought the Freep and gotten rid of the sex ads. He wanted an investigative reporting, ass-kicking newspaper.

Soon after my coming aboard, a whistle-blower handed me a copy of the former LA Police Department chief’s auto-biographical manuscript, Hang `Em at the Airport, which was a reference to what chief Ed Davis had remarked regarding how he would handle the airplane hijacking problem:

“I’d move a portable courtroom, complete with judge, jury and executioner, out to the airport. Once a skyjacker was taken into custody, he could have the benefit of a swift and sure justice. If he was found guilty, he could be hung on the spot.”

This crazy man was running to be governor at that time, and he had the audacity to entitle his biography with that hanging judge message. Fortunately he didn’t win, but not because he was crazy, I think, since several other crazy men became California governors: Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger among them.

There wasn’t much revealing about the manuscript and Davis hadn’t found a publisher, but we had a scoop anyway. The reporter I assigned to do the story, Bruce Henderson, called Davis’ agent-lawyer to get a response. The response came quickly in the form of an injunction against publishing any material from the book. So we wrote around it and when indicating a citation from the book, we had blank spaces around the words: “Deleted by order of commissioner Arnold Levin”.

Unfortunately, Larry Flynt was soon shot walking out of a courtroom, one of many he was forced to appear in by authorities opposed to his magazines. This was in Georgia, where he and his lawyer were shot by yet another crazy man. Both men survived, but Flynt was paralyzed from the waist down. Flynt’s executives did not like Flynt’s maverick ideas about radical, muckraking journalism, so they closed down the Freep. I was out of a job again and went back to freelancing.

At the end of 1978, I traveled to Nicaragua and Costa Rica to cover the liberation war fought by the Sandinistas (FSLN). This was the era of President James Carter. He realized that the Somoza family dictatorship was coming to a close, and an alternative had to found—much like the imperialists have recently decided to get rid of Gaddafi. There was no alternative, other than the leftist FSLN guerrillas, and they would not do for imperialism. Among those I met in death-soaked Nicaragua was Carter’s government messenger, who told me that they were working on an alternative. But before they could create one, the Sandinistas won their revolution on July 19, 1979.

Before their victory, I had met with some guerrilla fighters. Among those I interviewed were the future Foreign Minister Miguel D’Escoto, who also became the United Nations General Assembly president years later; the poet and liberation priest Father Ernesto Cardenal, who became the Minister of Culture; and the future Vice-President Sergio Ramirez.

My writings appeared in magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times. I left the United States soon thereafter, in 1980. In 1984, I worked for President Daniel Ortega’s wife, Rosario Murillo, for a while. She was the director of the Sandinista Cultural Workers Association (ASTC). I wrote public relations pieces for them, including from the war zone by the Honduran border. I also did a report about censorship affects for the Minister of the Interior, Tomas Borge.

When I moved to Denmark my pen continued painting sketches of US-caused pain.

RON RIDENOUR, who was a co-founder and editor with Dave Lindorff in 1976 of the Los Angeles Vanguard, lives in Denmark. A veteran journalist who has reported in the US and from Venezuela, Cuba and Central America, he has written Cuba at the Crossroads, Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn, and Yankee Sandinistas. For more information about Ron and his writing, go to www.RonRidenour.com

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Chronicles of Participatory Journalism—

Sun, 04/17/2011 By Ron Ridenour

(This article is the first of seven pieces dedicated to the Cuban revolution and its defeat of the US imperialist invasion 50 years ago, April 17-19, 1961, and embraces my half-century struggle.)

I. Sharing Che’s Activism

Che’s penetrating eyes stare at me seriously as I write about him. It is strange that I have never written about him before, other than to quote him. Perhaps it is because Che has been too large a figure for me to tackle? I don’t know. This writing, though, is a commemoration of Che and of my 50 years in our common struggle.

Ernesto Guevara was my greatest personal inspiration and Cuba’s revolution was my greatest collective inspiration—along with the Vietnamese resistance fighters. Nicknamed Che, an Argentine expression, he lived and died as he preached. Che’s internationalist ideals, his consequent actions, his integrity and charm, have influenced my life all these decades.

What immediately attracted me was his forthright manner of speaking and writing, and his bravery and fairness in battle. Che’s dream was to liberate Latin America from the shackles of United States imperialism and its lackey national dictators and murderous straw men. This would be followed up by worldwide socialist revolution.

“I am Cuban and also Argentine…patriotic for Latin America…in the moment it might be necessary, I am disposed to offer my life for the liberation of whichever of the Latin American countries without asking anything of anyone.”

Those are his prophetic words printed on a calendar of photos, which I recently bought in the school room at La Higuera, Bolivia where he was murdered. The images of Che on my walls are important to me, as are some slogans, such as Fidel’s: “To be internationalist is to settle our own debt with humanity”—a moral displayed on Cuban billboards.

I began to share Che’s dream as my first life, that of a follower of the brutal and chauvinist American Dream, drew to a close. In my family, you were either an active American Dreamer, like my career militarist father, or a passive one like my grandmother, whose motto was: “Ignorance is Bliss”. I came to feel that these codes rejected other people. When I severed that knot, I entered a world of humanistic vision and struggle. I still see myself as a youth of the 60s, when many of us across the world fought the profiteering war-making empire-builders.

The author, Ron Ridenour

Reading about Che and Cuba’s revolution was a part of my reeducation. Participatory journalism became important to me, too, when I began reading articles by Lionel Martin in the New York-based weekly Guardian, which I later wrote for. I met the affable Lionel in Cuba years later. I recommend his book: The Early Fidel: Roots of Castro’s Communism.

Che was born Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, in Rosario, Argentina, June 14, 1928. Celia de la Serna y Llosa, his mother, and Ernesto Guevara Lynch, his father, were middle-class and of Spanish-Irish descent. In his youth, Ernesto read Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Marx. He kept a philosophical diary and thought of writing a biography of Marx.

In 1953, Guevara graduated in medicine from the University of Buenos Aires. He made long travels throughout much of Latin America, hitch-hiking and by motorcycle. After witnessing and fighting against US intervention in Guatemala, in 1954, Che became convinced that the only way to bring down avaricious capitalism was through violent revolution.

In Guatemala, he had met a Peruvian revolutionary, Hilda Gadea. They married, in 1955, and had one daughter. Che had also met a Cuban revolutionary who later introduced him to Fidel in Mexico. Guevara signed on as the July 26 Movement’s doctor. In late 1956, 82 men loaded onto a small motor yacht, the Granma, and sailed to Cuba. Seven days later, on December 2, they landed near Cabo Cruz. They’d lost much of their equipment and food during storms. And then they were ambushed at Alegría de Pío by a far superior force of soldiers and aircraft.

Only Fidel Castro and 12 “disciples” (or 16, according to some accounts) survived. They made a base in the mountains of Sierra Maestra from which they attacked garrisons and recruited peasants to the revolutionary army. Che started promoting land reform and conducted educational courses in areas controlled by the guerrillas. He did less doctoring and more fighting. Despite his chronic asthma, he was not deterred by the harsh conditions and war.

Fidel made Che a major (“comandante,” the highest rank), and he led one of the forces that liberated central Cuba in late 1958. One of Che’s fighting companions was Aleida March, who became his second wife in 1959. After victory, January 1, 1959, Che gained fame as an anti-imperialist orator and as the leading figure next to Fidel in the revolutionary government.

In Che’s well known work, “Socialism and Man”, he asserts that the revolution must create the “new man”:

“To build communism, you must build new men as well as the new economic base…The goal of socialism is the creation of more complete and more developed human beings.”

Cuban revolutionaries defeated the US-equipped army of dictator Fulgencio Batista when I was 19 years old and a lowly airman in the U.S. Air Force, which I was learning to hate for its racism, lies and arrogance towards the entire world outside the U.S., and its military aggression against other nations.

One personal example of its hateful racism is what happened to me because I drank with black airmen at a “blacks only” bar in a Japanese town close to the U.S. radar station where we were assigned. The day after my “betrayal”, several white men in my barracks—all barracks were segregated—tore off my clothes and held me down on a bunk bed while they lit a can of insecticide and burned my public hairs and skin, then held me under the snow until nearly suffocating. The lesson: I was supposed to learn to be racist like them.

Two years later, when I was a college student in Los Angeles, California, I participated in my first demonstration when the Yankees backed a proxy invasion of Cuba, known as the Bay of Pigs. I held tightly onto a picket sign: “US OUT of CUBA”, and marched with a couple hundred others in front of the United States Federal Building. It was April 19, 1961, and the US backed forces were getting their asses kicked in Cuba!

Two days before, US naval ships had landed 1500 exile Cubans on a little beach, Bay of Pigs, in southwest Cuba. The CIA plan was to seize the beachhead and hold it long enough so they could fly in a provisional government of rich Cubans. The US government planned to recognize the new “democratic” government of Cuba and send in military support to smash the revolution.

Unlike the American public, the Cuban government knew such a plan was underway but did not know where it would be launched. Every family had received pamphlets explaining how to defend themselves. Thousands of local defense committees had been organized into armed militias. The CIA had grossly miscalculated the strength of this revolutionary support. It had told the mercenary invaders that they would be welcomed as liberators. Instead they met fierce resistance from civilians before Cuban soldiers could arrive. As we few indignant Usamericans were protesting the US-led invasion, it was being defeated.

I had heard about the invasion over KPFK radio, a non-commercial progressive station, and the in the Guardian. The right-wing Herald Examiner reported that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) had organized the protests, and claimed it was led by the Communist party (CP) and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers party (SWP), which would have been a unique alliance for these ever- feuding groups. On the front page was a photograph of me walking in front of the CP’s southern California chairwoman Dorothy Healey. The paper used her presence to claim that all demonstrators were Communists.

At least one of the demonstrators decided to make the Hearst paper’s fiction a reality: I promptly sent in a membership application to FPCC. (I still have my membership card beside me as I write.) If I were to be accused of being a Communist for defending the right of Cubans simply to live, then I was going to find out what Communists were all about.

Dorothy’s house was in a black working-class area of south central Los Angeles. I walked past tidy houses with a nervous sensation in my stomach. Was I ready to meet a real live Communist, the enemy of my father and of the entire fatherland? I was surprised to be greeted by a tiny, white woman with bushy hair and a remarkably friendly smile. Her living room resembled a library. During the long interchange, I became enthralled with this engaging person. Dorothy had dropped out of school at 14 to become a full-time revolutionary. She knew a great deal about the US’s evil deeds against Cubans and their government. Dorothy never asked me to join her party but I did, in 1964. I resigned a few years later, in 1969, because of CP support for Moscow’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, and because it had long ago ceased being communist or revolutionary or democratic.

President John Kennedy was furious about being dealt a misguided strategy and disinformation by the CIA and the preceding administration. The failed invasion only strengthened Cubans in their drive to socialize society and in their resolve to nationalization of large US and national capitalist properties, as Che had predicted. A frustrated Kennedy fired several leading and operative CIA officers.

It is understandable yet ironic that key CIA figures, some whom JFK had fired, became likely co-conspirators in Kennedy’s assassination two and one-half years after the defeat in Cuba. Their patsy was Lee Harvey Oswald, a scapegoat who faked membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. I watched the assassinations of these two men on TV with my membership card in my wallet. CIA propagandists at first claimed the FPCC was involved in JFK’s murder—part of an alleged Castro conspiracy—but top government leaders decided to go with the lone man assassin lie. Nevertheless, frightened FPCC leaders closed down the committee.

The assassination of Kennedy was especially pertinent to me not only because I was a member of the FPCC but also because I had recently been jailed in Costa Rica and deported back to the US for “attempting to overthrow” the Costa Rican government. I had traveled there in the hope of finding a way to Cuba, where I wanted to learn first hand about the revolution. But the October 1962 missile crisis stopped me en route.

Prison leaders isolated me from all prisoners and forbade inmates and guards from speaking with me because I might subvert them. In a ritual of power, two guards shaved off my guerrilla-inspired black beard with sharp knives before all the prisoners to witness. President Francisco Orlich Bolmarcich used me as a scapegoat for a recent murderous event when national guardsmen had killed several demonstrators. He concocted an incredible story that I’d been trained in Russia and sent to Costa Rica to start a revolution. Having gotten out of my presence there what they wished, authorities deported me to the US.

Mississippi Goddamn

The most moving movement I was part of was with black and white civil rights activists in Mississippi, the Freedom Summer of 1964. Mississippi Goddamn was a 1963-recorded song by the militant singer Nina Simone, which expressed why we organized for civil rights equality there. After that “long hot summer”, as it also became known, another activist-singer, Phil Ochs, wrote the activist song, Going Down to Mississippi.

I later obtained 1000 pages of dossiers kept on me by various of the National Security Council (NSC) intelligence agencies. Some pages dealt with my participation in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) civil rights struggle for black voter registration. Here is a selection:

During the period March 10 through June 7, 1964, RIDENOUR attended the following functions of the Youth Action Union (YAU)…a party sponsored by the YAU for the benefit of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee…According to LA T-3, the purpose of this party was to raise funds for the organization…The April 11, 1964 edition of the PW contains an article which reflects that RIDENOUR was the Vice Chairman of the West Los Angeles Du Bois Club and also the Head of the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination, a group which was conducting demonstrations at various businesses, protesting discriminatory hiring practices.

Unaware of this surveillance, I proceeded to help empower people in Mississippi. After a week’s training in how to withstand violence without using violence, and in Mississippi racist history, conducted at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, I was assigned to a project in Moss Point. I had sat close to Andrew Goodman, who was one of three activists soon to be murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen and sheriffs from Philadelphia, Mississippi. (Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were the other two.)

Four of us who were to initiate the project in Moss Point drove there in my car. A black youth, Charles Glenn, was our director. Howard Kirschenbaum, a white Ivy League college student, was with us. We activists were all put up by brave black residents.

Howard and I stayed together at the Colley’s house. Mr. Colley was a carpenter with a wife and six children. He often dozed through the night in a rocking chair with a shotgun on hand. Howard was one of several activists who prepared black voter candidates for registration. Others taught subjects that black youths were interested in at our after-school Freedom School. I was the project’s administrative secretary and publicist.

One evening Howard and I were out walking, when a police car pulled up and the cops arrested us for “vagrancy, and we’ll see what else”. We spent a harrowing night in jail. We were told by policemen that they knew the three activists had been murdered, before this was public knowledge. We were also told lies that our director had raped a white woman activist and that he had then been tortured to death. We were lucky that our legal support staff was able to get us released the next morning.

In the summer of canvassing, registering and teaching, we were able to make a dent in the numbers of blacks registered, although authorities found devious ways to prevent most from registering. But we were successful in other ways. Bolstering people’s courage was one. Another was what Howard later wrote about as his most significant memory: “the song we sang that summer, night after night, ever so slowly, feeling each word, extending each syllable in the traditional cadence of the Negro spiritual, as we linked arms and swayed to the chant-like melody.”

We have walked through the shadow of death.
We’ve had to walk all by ourselves.
But we’ll never turn back.
No, we’ll never turn back,
Until we all are free,
And we have equality.

We have hung our heads and cried,
Cried for those like the three who died,
Died for you and they died for me,
Died for the cause of equality.
But we’ll never turn back.
No, we’ll never turn back,
Until we all are free,
And we have equality.

One of the most threatening moments, and yet the most moving moments of personal solidarity in my life there was when Senator John Eastland took the floor to speak against me and the civil rights movement because of me. A CIA dossier stated that I was a Communist agitator in Costa Rica two years before, and that I was “armed and dangerous”. This accusation was released to right-wing groups and individuals including Senator Eastland who used it to show that I was this fiend, a factor in the “invasion” in his good state, and that the civil rights movement was communist.

I was devastated by this. It was prime news. Beyond the validity of the content, the damage was to the community. How would this affect our civil rights work; how would the people take it? But when I was next together with people from the community, they stood and applauded me. I was honored. How grateful I felt. How gracious are the sufferers in common.

Once our project was over, I drove my reliable Chevy to New York with comrades from the struggle in Moss Point. I still have the Mississippi license plate, number: J16684. Forty-seven-year-old dirt is ground into the white metal background. It calls to me as I write.

After a short stay in New York, I drove cross-country to Los Angeles. The trip gave me time to reflect on that summer. I concurred with Lawrence Guyot, one of our leaders: “The Freedom Summer was the most creative, concentrated, multi-layered attack on oppression in this country.”

We also made strides in creating space for equality. Decades later it became obvious that because we had fought the good fight, Barack Obama would become president of the United States. Unfortunately and predictably, President Obama does the “man’s” bidding for profiteering labor exploitation and oil wars. Nevertheless, he is black and that is a positive step; as it is that women can also be bankers and “bastards” just like white men. Yes, we have more enemies now, but who can deny the universal right to equality?

Another positive aspect was the participatory democracy practiced by SNCC, and the Students for Democratic Society (SDS). This egalitarian decision-making methodology allowed for the acceptance of differences within the movement. Even in heated debates there was no belittling of those with whom one did not agree. If someone did become aggressively antagonistic, he/she was spoken to, and if necessary isolated. In contrast, in the CP, and other communist parties, there was a heavy atmosphere of self-righteous adherence to “the correct line”. Dissent was tantamount to betrayal.

Our civil rights movement inspired the next phases of the black liberation movement, and all other minority liberation movements: the Mexican-American/Chicano “La Raza” movement, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the Native-Americans’ AIM, Philippines for Philippine sovereignty, and the radical women’s movement. These were the roots of the New Left.

Shortly after the long hot summer, black nationalist Muslims, aided by the New York City Police Department, murdered one of the most articulate black liberationist voices, Malcolm X, on February 21, 1965. He was one of my teachers, indirectly. The other most prominent voice for justice of the races was Martin Luther King. He, too, had to be “taken out” (June 6, 1968). Both men who were dangerous to the white elite, for capitalism and its wars. Malcolm X had come to see the need to unify people of all colors who were exploited by capitalism.

Martin Luther King had long been convinced about racial unity and then, fatally, he began to protest capitalism’s war against Vietnam. It did not aid his chances for survival that he also took up the cause of the working class for its struggle to gain decent working conditions and a living wage. He was in Memphis on this crusade when he was assassinated.

Among my political activities was the on-going protest of police murders and racist brutality. I lived in a century of “acceptable” lynchings of black people. Between 1882 and 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, whites had murdered 4,500 blacks by lynching alone. During the latter part of that period, when J. Edgar Hoover was chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1924-72), half that official number had been lynched, but there were also many more unrecorded lynchings. Like Roman worker-citizens applauding the slaughter of slaves in amphitheaters, whole families gathered picnic-style to watch a lynching and sometimes the burning of a live human being (“Strange Fruit”, Billy Holiday). Hoover did nothing to apprehend these cruel murderers, nor did local police forces in the south—almost never.

This repulsive behavior made me sick. I sought answers. If we are not to be guilty of societal-based crimes, then we cannot be passive about them; we cannot live by my grandmother’s “ignorance is bliss” code. In 1946, Sartre wrote “Existentialism and Humanism”:

When we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men…One ought always to ask oneself what would happen if everyone did as one is doing; nor can one escape from that disturbing thought except by a kind of self-deception.

I chose to accept responsibility for my actions and in so doing I have never felt guilt for the state of “human nature”. And, instead of giving futile alms to poor beggars, I strive to create an economic base, a social structure where poverty would be non-existent. We have enough wealth for all to live well but many humans seek to live better.

Such a philosophy often makes me feel sad and can be isolating from most people—especially when there are lulls in protest movements. It was especially the civil rights movement that gave me the fortitude to struggle onward. It brought me the warmth of fellowship, a sense of the possibility that the goodness in some people can penetrate the hearts and actions of others and eventually win over the death machine.

Our movements had a positive impact on many Europeans too. Movements for democracy in the schools and anti-war movements forced some bourgeois governments to make reforms in schools and to criticize the US’s aggressive war in Indochina. We also helped inspire and support African liberation movements, which felt stronger with our solidarity, and which helped defeat the colonialists.

Anti-war Movement

Many of us activists, of all colors, also supported liberation movements fought by blacks, browns, Native Americans, and radical feminists. I was the organizer of a white support group (Committee United for Political Prisoners) for Black Panther Party political prisoners. I also supported Central American liberation armed struggle movements. For these struggles, I was jailed a dozen times, once for half-a-year, for supporting a textile strike.

The movement that I was most active in for the longest consecutive time was the anti-Vietnam War movement—14 years, until Vietnam freed itself, aided by our solidarity, on Mayday, 1975. I took part in hundreds of actions, advocating a diversity of tactics: mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, leafleting people at public areas, going door-to-door canvassing, direct actions.

One successful direct action was kicking Dow Chemical job recruiters off our campus at California State College at Los Angeles, December 1967. Dow was the producer of scorching-to-death napalm. We forged an alliance with black and white students, and a few Chicanos, against the war in Vietnam and against militarist recruiters. Our boisterous anger, and a dose of stink, scared the Dow men away. In fact, they departed through a window. I was suspended from school and could not graduate until the next year, but Dow Chemical said it would never return.

In a brief period of post-war Vietnam, and during the Watergate scandal, the US government lightened up a bit, hoping to dampen our movements’ anger. One concession the government “gave” to our movements was the release of some of its record-keeping, a result of the Freedom of Information Act. The spies listed me in various categories of subversive “indexes”: chaos, agitator, rabble rouser, and the highest: Security Index Priority I. Agents, and snitches within our groups, recorded my attendance and political positions expressed at innumerable meetings, rallies and demonstrations. They noted first-hand when I changed residences or jobs, and where I traveled. Here is a sample:

On February 4, 1972, a Special Agent of the FBI observed Ridenour boarding Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 351, at 4:50 p.m., at Hollywood-Burbank Airport, en route to Oakland, California.

A few weeks later, I am observed taking off for London, and then to the:

World Assembly for Peace in Versailles, France, as a delegate of the United States during the period February 11, 1972, through February 13, 1972.

The NSC did not limit itself to keeping tabs on “subversives” like me. It also leaked dossiers to civilian friends. Right-wing propagandists used these secret dossiers to fan the flames of “patriotism”. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, known as “the white voice of the south”, used secret dossiers to denounce me as a subversive in an attempt to taint the civil rights movement. LAPD red squad officer Russell D. Meltzer testified in Washington DC before a Senate committee, in 1968, that I was “the leader of that demonstration” in which Dow Chemical was ousted. The “Fire and Police Research Association of Los Angeles”, portrayed me as a “professional agitator.”

I was proud to learn that I was one of 4,000 persons singled out by the Nixon regime to be interned in concentration camps. Before we could be rounded up, however, Nixon fell from grace and had to resign.

Our militant and massive actions both embolded and frustrated US soldiers in Vietnam. Some gave up the imperialists’ war while others lost their humanity. A group of the latter systematically murdered about 500 unarmed civilians at My Lai on March 16, 1968. The then Major Colin Powell was sent to investigate. He secured his future appointment as George Bush’s Secretary of State by whitewashing the wanton murder of mostly children and women, many raped and tortured before being killed.

This is a quote from Powell’s whitewash:

“Relationships between the American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”

After this atrocity finally made news, on November 12, 1969, thanks to a well-researched and documented story by Seymour Hersh (Dispatch News Service), my name was sometimes confused with the original source of information for Hersh: Ronald Ridenhour (with an “h” unlike in my name). He was a soldier elsewhere in Vietnam who had heard about the massacre, which was only one of hundreds but also one of the worst. Ridenhour wrote to politicians about it. After being ignored, he contacted Hersh. Once the story hit the mass media, some of which were becoming critical of the dirty war without end, we held massive and angry demonstrations. This media revelation was a good example of what the “fourth estate” should be about, and this information increased opposition to the war. Middle America began to wake up from its “ignorance is bliss” slumber.

And the Vietnamese took their country back. But then what happened? Slumber has returned, most significantly in the first world but also in the renewed second world. Slumber allows the same corporations to start new wars for wealth and dominance. Today, it is in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Libya…The “masses” in the “democracies” nod their sleepy heads as their rich leaders’ mercenaries launch one deadly missile after another.

What would Che have thought and said? What would he have done? I don’t know the answer for certain. I don’t think there is a “politically correct” slogan. But yes, solidarity must be present, always.

I am certain of one thing: he would not have stood for it!

RON RIDENOUR, who was a co-founder and editor with Dave Lindorff in 1976 of the Los Angeles Vanguard, lives in Denmark. A veteran journalist who has reported in the US and from Venezuela, Cuba and Central America, he has written Cuba at the Crossroads, Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn, and Yankee Sandinistas. For more information about Ron and his writing, go to www,ronridenour.com

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[Black Star News Editorial] / GUEST EDITORIALS SERIES  SHAMEFULLY: NATO Almost Delivered On The Fatwa France's sybaritic president Sarcozy and his model wife Carla Bruni. Good at ordering death at one remove. Not in vain he's been called France's own George Bush. As this newspaper concluded in an editorial last week, it’s a disgraceful shame for President Barack Obama to be involved in the assassination of any foreign leader however detestable the United States may find such a leader to be. It places the U.S. in the same category as Syria which murdered Lebanon’s Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. We made this pronouncement shortly after President Obama authorized the use of armed American predator drones in Libya by NATO. The president had also co-authored a barbaric editorial with warmongering Nicholas Sarkozy and David Cameron, of France and Britain, respectively. In the editorial, published in newspapers around the world, these wise leaders, including Obama, in essence issued a Fatwa against Muammar al-Quathafi. They declared that he must go and “go for good.” As we noted then, the only way a person “goes for good” is when he’s dead. Is it wise for an American president to be calling for the assassination of the leader of any foreign country the U.S. has major disagreements with? What about the leaders of North Korea, Iran and Venezuela? When will Fatwas for those three be issued? NATO tried to deliver on Obama’s and Cameron’s and Sarkozy’s Fatwa today. Al-Quathafi and his wife reportedly survived the bombing on his compound by NATO, which of course was meant to kill him. NATO has been acting like hired MAFIA enforcers for Benghazi. Reportedly al-Quathafi’s youngest son, 29-year-old Saif al-Arab, was killed as were three of his grandchildren. This is how NATO, the U.S., France and Britain are “saving civilian lives” and enforcing a no-fly zone in Libya? Is this really what United Nations Resolution 1973 was intended for? Wake up President Obama. France’s, Britain’s and the U.S.’s lies about caring for the lives of people in North Africa and the Middle East have been exposed by these countries’ silence towards Syria. The leadership in Syria is not even fighting a rebellion financed by the West and Qatar –as Libya is– but massacring with tanks unarmed protestors seeking the ouster of Bashar al-Assad. Revoltingly, the U.S.’s only reaction was to announce “financial sanctions” that don’t even impact Syrian leadership and completely spares al-Assad. Why not take out al-Assad as well? Libya, as we’ve previously pointed before, will turn out to be President Obama’s most shameful mistake. It should, deservedly, haunt him and his legacy even beyond his presidency wether he wins a second term or not. President Obama can still distance himself from France’s and Britain’s posterings. Those former powers have an imperial mentality when dealing with Africa. They will not compromise with people they regard as lesser human beings. That’s also the mentality that guides the editorial pages of corporate newspapers such as The New York Times–big cheerleaders for war on Libya. Obama should call off NATO’s attacks dogs. Stop the bombings. Allow South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma to work with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to revive the African Union (AU) Peace proposal which was rejected by Nicholas Sarkozy and Benghazi. NATO bombs will not rescue civilians in Libya. Assassinating al-Quathafi will not usher democracy. Allow Libyans to ceasefire. Allow Libyans to start negotiations for a constitution and open elections. The government in Tripoli reportedly agreed to these conditions when it accepted the AU plan. France, Britain and the U.S. should curb the insatiable Dracula-like greed for Libya’s sweet crude. Abandon what Russia’s Vladimir Putin referred to as a medieval crusade. Leave Libya for the Libyans.

 

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By Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly, Tomdispatch.com

Posted on April 25, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150719/empire_on_the_rocks%3A_washington%27s_autocrats%2C_aristocrats_and_thugs_are_falling

Ngo Dinh Diem, America's hand picked puppet in South Vietnam, on an official visit to the seat of the empire. When his usefulness was gone so was he. Second from left, J. Foster Dulles, the noxious banker and fanatical anticommunist who shaped the early part of the cold war.

In one of history’s lucky accidents, the juxtaposition of two extraordinary events has stripped the architecture of American global power bare for all to see. Last November, WikiLeaks splashed snippets from U.S. embassy cables, loaded with scurrilous comments about national leaders from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Then just a few weeks later, the Middle East erupted in pro-democracy protests against the region’s autocratic leaders, many of whom were close U.S. allies whose foibles had been so conveniently detailed in those same diplomatic cables.

Suddenly, it was possible to see the foundations of a U.S. world order that rested significantly on national leaders who serve Washington as loyal “subordinate elites”  and who are, in reality, a motley collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs. Visible as well was the larger logic of otherwise inexplicable U.S. foreign policy choices over the past half-century.

thanks to WikiLeaks and the “Arab spring,” this is now so much clearer — is that both were Washington’s chosen subordinates until each became insubordinate and expendable.

Why, half a century later, would Washington betray its stated democratic principles by backing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak against millions of demonstrators and then, when he faltered, use its leverage to replace him, at least initially with his intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, a man best known for running Cairo’s torture chambers (and lending them out to Washington)? The answer again: because both were reliable subordinates who had long served Washington’s interests well in this key Arab state.

Putting the Military in Charge

To understand the importance of local elites, look back to the Cold War’s early days when a desperate White House was searching for something, anything that could halt the seemingly unstoppable spread of what Washington saw as anti-American and pro-communist sentiment. In December 1954, the National Security Council (NSC) met in the White House to stake out a strategy that could tame the powerful nationalist forces of change then sweeping the globe.

After a review of the “threats”  facing the U.S. in Latin America, influential Treasury Secretary George Humphrey informed his NSC colleagues that they should “stop talking so much about democracy” and instead “support dictatorships of the right if their policies are pro-American.” At that moment with a flash of strategic insight, Dwight Eisenhower interrupted to observe that Humphrey was, in effect, saying, “They’re OK if they’re our s.o.b.’s.”

Elsewhere in the Middle East, Washington has, since the 1950s, followed the British imperial preference for Arab aristocrats by cultivating allies that included a shah (Iran), sultans (Abu Dhabi, Oman), emirs (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai), and kings (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco). Across this vast, volatile region from Morocco to Iran, Washington courted these royalist regimes with military alliances, U.S. weapons systems, CIA support for local security, a safe American haven for their capital, and special favors for their elites, including access to educational institutions in the U.S. or Department of Defense overseas schools for their children.

In 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice summed up this record thusly:  “For 60 years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy… in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.”

How It Used to Work

America is by no means the first hegemon to build its global power on the gossamer threads of personal ties to local leaders. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain may have ruled the waves (as America would later rule the skies), but when it came to the ground, like empires past it needed local allies who could serve as intermediaries in controlling complex, volatile societies. Otherwise, how in 1900 could a small island nation of just 40 million with an army of only 99,000 men rule a global empire of some 400 million, nearly a quarter of all humanity?

Following four centuries of relentless imperial expansion, however, Europe’s five major overseas empires were suddenly erased from the globe in a quarter-century of decolonization. Between 1947 and 1974, the Belgian, British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese empires faded fast from Asia and Africa, giving way to a hundred new nations, more than half of today’s sovereign states. In searching for an explanation for this sudden, sweeping change, most scholars agree with British imperial historian Ronald Robinson who famously argued that “when colonial rulers had run out of indigenous collaborators,”  their power began to fade.

During the Cold War that coincided with this era of rapid decolonization, the world’s two superpowers turned to the same methods regularly using their espionage agencies to manipulate the leaders of newly independent states.  The Soviet Union’s KGB and its surrogates like the Stasi in East Germany and the Securitate in Romania enforced political conformity among the 14 Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe and challenged the U.S. for loyal allies across the Third World.  Simultaneously, the CIA monitored the loyalties of presidents, autocrats, and dictators on four continents, employing coups, bribery, and covert penetration to control and, when necessary, remove nettlesome leaders.

In an era of nationalist feeling, however, the loyalty of local elites proved a complex matter indeed.  Many of them were driven by conflicting loyalties and often deep feelings of nationalism, which meant that they had to be monitored closely.  So critical were these subordinate elites, and so troublesome were their insubordinate iterations, that the CIA repeatedly launched risky covert operations to bring them to heel, sparking some of the great crises of the Cold War.

Post-Cold War World

After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, ending the Cold War, Moscow quickly lost its satellite states from Estonia to Azerbaijan, as once-loyal Soviet surrogates were ousted or leapt off the sinking ship of empire. For Washington, the “victor”  and soon to be the “sole superpower” on planet Earth, the same process would begin to happen, but at a far slower pace.

Over the next two decades, globalization fostered a multipolar system of rising powers in Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow, Ankara, and Brasilia, even as a denationalized system of corporate power reduced the dependency of developing economies on any single state, however imperial.  With its capacity for controlling elites receding, Washington has faced ideological competition from Islamic fundamentalism, European regulatory regimes, Chinese state capitalism, and a rising tide of economic nationalism in Latin America.

instructed its embassies worldwide to play imperial police by collecting comprehensive data on local leaders, including “email addresses, telephone and fax numbers, fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans.” Showing its need, like some colonial governor, for incriminating information on the locals, the State Department also pressed its Bahrain embassy for sordid details, damaging in an Islamic society, about the kingdom’s crown princes, asking: “Is there any derogatory information on either prince? Does either prince drink alcohol? Does either one use drugs?”

With the hauteur of latter-day imperial envoys, U.S. diplomats seemed to empower themselves for dominance by dismissing “the Turks neo-Ottoman posturing around the Middle East and Balkans,” or by knowing the weaknesses of their subordinate elites, notably Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s “voluptuous blonde” nurse, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zadari’s morbid fear of military coups, or Afghan Vice President Ahmad Zia Massoud’s $52 million in stolen funds.

urged the White House “to restore the sense of warmth that has traditionally characterized the U.S.-Egyptian partnership.” And so in June 2009, just 18 months before the Egyptian president’s downfall, President Obama hailed this useful dictator as “a stalwart ally… a force for stability and good in the region.”

As the crisis in Cairo’s Tahrir Square unfolded, respected opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei complained bitterly that Washington was pushing “the whole Arab world into radicalization with this inept policy of supporting repression.” After 40 years of U.S. dominion, the Middle East was, he said, “a collection of failed states that add nothing to humanity or science” because “people were taught not to think or to act, and were consistently given an inferior education.”

Absent a global war capable of simply sweeping away an empire, the decline of a great power is often a fitful, painful, drawn-out affair. In addition to the two American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down to something not so far short of defeat, the nation’s capital is now writhing in fiscal crisis, the coin of the realm is losing its creditworthiness, and longtime allies are forging economic and even military ties to rival China. To all of this, we must now add the possible loss of loyal surrogates across the Middle East.

For more than 50 years, Washington has been served well by a system of global power based on subordinate elites. That system once facilitated the extension of American influence worldwide with a surprising efficiency and (relatively speaking) an economy of force. Now, however, those loyal allies increasingly look like an empire of failed or insubordinate states. Make no mistake: the degradation of, or ending of, half a century of such ties is likely to leave Washington on the rocks.

here.

Brett Reilly is a graduate student in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is studying U.S. foreign policy in Asia.

© 2011 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.

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