User:Cgingold/Btrav-Essay@Zinn

Iraq
Zinn is a critic of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He asserts that the U.S. will end its war with, and occupation of, Iraq when resistance within the military increases, in the same way resistance within the military contributed to ending the U.S. war in Vietnam. He compares the demand by a growing number of contemporary U.S. military families to end the war in Iraq to the situation in the South during the War Between the States, when civil unrest broke out due to shortages and profiteering. Zinn points out that the prosecution of the armed conflict by the patrician elites became increasingly impossible "in the Confederacy in the Civil War, when the wives of soldiers rioted because their husbands were dying and the plantation owners were profiting from the sale of cotton, refusing to grow grains for civilians to eat." 

Zinn is a vocal critic of establishment history texts that ignore the actual experiences of common people in order to create a myth of American exceptionalism in which all boats are lifted by the progress of American history. This myth even is extended to those people in countries the U.S. conquers under the mantle of "The White Man's Burden", a racist, xenophobic philosophy that cloaks economic aggression with the ethos of Social Darwinism. The term comes from the Rudyard Kipling poem of the same name, written abou the American conquest of the Philippines, and it became gospel to a generation of jingoists in the 20th century, who disingenuously claimed that imperialist expansion was a noble cause, as it brought enlightenment and American values to backward peoples.

"We are here to help the Vietnamese," the Pogue Colonel in Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film Full Metal Jacket tells the Marine journalist Joker, "because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out." This is an absurdity that has been repeated throughout American history, right into the 21st Century.

In his recent lectures, Zinn links the Iraq war to the multiple cases of aggression the United States government has taken against other countries. Iraq, like these other "savage wars of peace", are rooted in imperialism, a subject Americans not only find hard to deal with, but reject out of hand, claiming that they are incapable of Empire, despite the evidence that includes an aggressive war in which half of Mexico was taken in the Mexican–American War (1846-48), and the Spanish-American War (1898) in which Cuba and the Philippines were liberated, only to be occupied by American forces, installing a dictator in Cuba and brutally putting down the first Philippine Republic in the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) to establish a colony. As Zinn points out, the U.S. always tolerated dictators in Cuba, until Fidel Castro chose "not to play ball" with the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations. Then, dictatorship in Cuba became something odious that had to be eliminated.

Zinn also uses the American government's relations with its neighbors in the Western Hemisphere to elucidate his thesis that U.S. military aggression is focused on promoting American business interests, not in promoting democracy. During the 20th century, the U.S. invaded Mexico during the Pancho Villa Expedition of 1916-17, two years after the bombardment and occupation of Vera Cruz. Yet, in American history books, no background is given explaining the significance of the Zimmerman Telegram that helped hasten U.S. entry into World War I (a war which the "idealist" Woodrow Wilson claimed, during his reelection campaign in 1916, he would keep the country out of, but in fact, plunged the U.S. into one month after his second inauguration). The U.S. treatment of Mexico and the part American economic policies and military interventions have played in the destabilization of Mexico during the past 200 years is ignored by official history, and the full impact of the Telegram's threat is never explained to students, who are never taught why idealistic Americans could be resented by its neighbor south of the border. Thus, American students are denied the opportunity to learn why Americans are resented by the peoples of other countries, when they are being taught that the U.S. is bringing enlightenment and democracy to the countries. The misunderstanding leads to hatred by the Americans for these "others" such as the Iraqis who do not appreciate them and their efforts to better them, thus enabling the U.S. government to make war on innocents abroad in the name of the American people.

To the south of the Mexican border, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Teddy Roosevelt played the major role in shearing the Isthmus of Panama away from Colombia so that the Americans could build the Panama Canal. The U.S. government regularly subverted the governments of Central America, sending in the Marines to overthrow one once-useful dictator to install another who could prove a more proper puppet of the United States for the present. The coups stage managed by the U.S. ambassadors to "banana republics", including Cuba, usually were the result of a dictator's default on bonds underwritten by a major Wall Street brokerage house. The Marines would have to be sent in to seize the custom house to assure that the bonds could be paid off, even at a discount, the loss to be absorbed by the small institutional and individual investors who had placed part of their portfolios in the bonds, sold to them by the same Wall Street firm making a commission over the initial underwriting of the sale. A new bond issue would be floated by the government of the new dictator, and the situation would be repeated when that government failed to keep up on its payments, which were impossible to being with.

The situation of "sending in the Marines" to overthrow Central American dictators was so chronic that by the 1920s, it had become the butt of jokes of the humorist Will Rogers. It represented the sordid nexus between the federal government, the military and Wall Street that was exposed by former Marine Major General Smedley Butler, who won a Congressional Medal of Honor in Vera Cruz in 1914, and a second Medal of Honor the following year in Haiti, during the U.S. United States occupation of Haiti to put down an uprising against the dictator Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam that threatened American business interests. As Zinn points out in his antiwar lectures, the two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner Butler revealed the essence of American imperialism a decade before World War II, in his expose, "War is a Racket"

"War is a racket", General Butler wrote. "It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious." In his book, Butler characterized himself and his Marines as little more than errand boys and tax collectors, tasked by the major Wall Street banks. He claimed that the essence of U.S. foreign policy was, in effect, to use the military to collect debts for the major Wall Street brokers/New York money center banks (which were then one and the same, before the Depression Era legislation that created "firewalls" between banking, stock brokerage, and insurance, laws since repealed). Butler revealed that during wartime, Wall Street was well represented in the War and Navy Departments, enabling them to not let any opportunities to make profits slip past them.

"There are only two things we should fight for," Butler wrote. "One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. The obscene war profiteering of World War I created revulsion amongst the American public when it was revealed after the war, and was the target of Congressional investigations. Despite the revelations of racketeering by the defense industry, the investigations did little to prevent the same war profiteering from occurring during the Second World War, or the wars that have followed, including the Iraq War that has enriched Dick Cheney's Halliburton.

This is not the history taught to students, Zinn contends, though it should be, as it would make them understand such developments as the unnecessary Iraq War, which was launched to bring "democracy" to a benighted people, the same rhetoric American politicians have cloaked all of its imperialist adventures with. The "liberation" of the Philippines in 1898, a part of the Spanish-American War, is taught by American history books, which conveniently overlook the Philippine-American War between the U.S. and the first Republic of the Philippines, which broke out in 1899, the year after its "liberation" by the U.S. A Philippine Republic had first been declared in 1896, and it was to aid these rebels that the Americans ostensibly conquered the Philippines from the Spanish overlord. The Filipinos saw the Americans first as their allies, but the U.S. had decided to make the Philippines its own colony. Fierce fighting in the war, which lasted until the surrender and abolition of the first Philippine Republic, claimed between 750,000 and one million Filipino lives. Skirmishes between U.S. troops and rebels lasted another decade.

To elucidate these atrocities committed by the U.S., in the hopes such tragedies will be averted in the future, to teach the truth of what the Wilsonian penchant for "Making the world safe for democracy" really means rather than teach the consensus-y, consensual mainstream "education for democracy" history championed by Pulitzer Prize winners like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and David McCullough, invites charges of not only a lack of patriotism, but of hatred for America. These charges of "anti-Americanism", and the new charge of "Stalinism" being floated by Vice President Dick Cheney against those opposing the Iraq war, must be ignored, Zinn believes, for there are higher principles at stake, and dissent can be seen as the highest form of patriotism.

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people," Zinn has written.