I've been having some heated debates with a historian friend about American foreign policy. They grant that the U.S. has done plenty of fucked up, unforgivable shit, but still fall back on "I'd rather live in a world under American hegemony than Russian / Chinese / enemy du jour hegemony."
This person's generally into lesser-evilism in all aspects of political analysis - staunch Democrat, disapproves of the status quo and works against it when they can but is still profoundly wary of any kind of disruption, etc. (You'd think that would incline against American interventionism, but no.) They're also more of a deontologist than a consequentialist when it comes to political action in general. This is outrageously frustrating because apparently losing with honor is a lesser evil than winning if winning involves doing anything you'd rather not have done unto you. I shared the Mark Twain quotation about the two terrors and they thought I was a madman.
Frustrations aside, this is a very smart person with whom I often trade book recommendations. If I bite the bullet and read an anti-communist memoir on their insistence I can probably retaliate by pushing any book I want.
My goal isn't necessarily to convert my friend, but to get them to understand where I'm coming from. So what do I pick? Ideas so far include Manufacturing Consent, Inventing Reality, and The Jakarta Method. Right now I'm leaning toward the last one, which I haven't read yet, but looks as though it might be a good fit.
Do any of you have other nominations? Maybe something that deals with U.S. involvement in Latin America, specifically?
Edit - This has been amazingly helpful, thank all of you so much.
To add onto this theme, Arc of Containment goes into Indonesia, as well as other countries in South East Asia.
I read the introduction this afternoon and I think this is what I'm leaning toward. What you say is also promising.
There's something off about the writing in Jakarta method. Content: fantastic, Research: unrivaled, Individual Sentences: 85% fine. I'm sorry I don't remember it well enough to give a more detailed critique but it left me with such a strong feeling I have to say something. Don't give it to an English major I guess.
From a quick glance at my bookshelf
- An Indigenous People’s History Of the United States
- A People’s History Of the United States
- The Jakarta Method
- Manufacturing Consent
- Open Veins of Latin America
- The Shock Doctrine
- Settlers (might be too extreme)
Perhaps understanding domestic policy towards out groups would be helpful to understanding how the US does foreign policy. It might help describe how certain structures are reproduced at smaller and larger scales but with the same aim.
That's the extra-frustrating thing - my friend is very well versed in the domestic crimes against humanity and actively organizes for racial justice. It just either doesn't translate to foreign policy, or it's a "the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know," or something like that.
Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank may be good for them in that it really breaks down how the Democratic Party's "activism" is bullshit, but it was written pre-2016 election and may feel dated even though it's got a lot of neoliberal / dem history.
Two really good excerpts from it.
Thomas Frank, The Inequality Sweepstakes
Nor a Lender Be: Hillary Clinton, liberal virtue, and the cult of the microloan
Bridging that gap will be tricky. Literally anything about Iraq and Afghanistan (like Afghanistan Papers), Iran-Contra, Vietnam (Pentagon Papers) and Korean Wars should help elucidate the situation militarily but I think the financial aspects should also be open to discussion.
I mentioned the domestic policy because a lot of it is mimicked at larger scales. Urban-rural divides mimics metropole-colony dynamics. Banking is a huge method of disciplining and oppressing the poor. Again this is similar to how payday lending works and who is targeted which is also something that occurs at the macro scale of IMF and WB and poor countries.
Evicted is a good book about landlords that has racial dynamics on top of property and ownership issues.
Yeah - I'll make more of a point to emphasize that mimicry in future discussions. Good call.
I'm a bad poster cuz I'm not gonna read other replies here, but the #1 entry way to libs is Howard Zinn imo
Yeah, I was thinking either A People's History of the United States or Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds, but I think Parenti might be #2 on that reading list just because you have to already have some context/leanings, and Zinn will get you most of the way there.
Against Empire by Michael Parenti.
there are parts of it which i don't fully agree with such as the national debt and deficit part but rest is very good.
Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" is a major contender in this category. It 180ed my worldview as a young person
Non Marxist author but the Shock Doctrine was a major turning point for me personally. It was the first I’d heard about the Chilean coup and I think without knowing it I was an anti imperialist before I was a Marxist because of that book. I very much have a soft spot for Naomi Klein
I think your friend needs to read the history of the fall of the Soviet Union and what happened to those who did live under Soviet hegemony and then lived under US hegemony. Spoiler: they received poverty and death.
Another good experiment is to compare IMF loans vs. Chinese like and. The IMF demands austerity, US food imports, cash crops, etc - setting up your entire country to become an extraction point for US interests. Don't pay up? We'll privatize and own entire industries in your country. China just offers direct investment. Can't pay your loan? They might just forgive it. If not, they'll take a greater ownership share of the exact thing they invested in, and negotiate.
Another comparison is simply to look at what happens when a country under US influence does land reform or even just diversifies its food production and nationalizes an industry (Venezuela is an obvious example). China has the power to fuck with its neighbors in the same way, yet it doesn't.
But I'll second The Jakarta Method. Sometimes libs just need to look at the horror they support.
We had an argument a while back where I brought out the life expectancy statistics from before and after the fall of the USSR. Even though they know that "anecdotes are not data" there was a lot of "I know a Ukrainian refugee and they say otherwise." We should never have taught the libs the phrase "lived experience."
The IMF vs BRI issue is one I'd love to have a book for. I just read a history of China which made me think that a great parallel would be the European age of exploration and destruction vs. Zheng He's ships laden with gifts.
I forget whether it says anything about the IMF, but the Chinese debt trap myth stuff by Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire is pretty good.
And yeah it's tough to argue with anecdotes because they'll still discount yours. There are plenty of stats showing that people who were adults in Soviet times say things were better then (aside from Balts maybe). Westerners are so desperate to ignore this that they chalk it all up to nostalgia rather than recognizing that things were safer and more economically secure under the USSR.
Washington Bullets
Blackshirts and Reds
Hitler's American Model
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution
Hammer and Hoe
Blackwater
The Assassination Complex
Jakarta Method
Surveillance Valley
The Hidden History of American Oligarchy
Family of Secrets
Some of these lean lib, some of these lean anarchist, some of these lean ML, but they're all highly critical of the USA
I downloaded Washington Bullets after you talked about it in another thread not long ago. I'll have to move it up on my to-read list. I'll ping you when I read it.
I know Scahill but haven't looked into The Assassination Complex - that looks like it'll belong on the shortlist.
Thanks for all the suggestions.
Washington Bullets is already a winner by my standards by virtue of quoting Nicanor Parra. Prashad's style, too, is a refreshing change from the usual way these things are written. Not sure if it's right for the friend I discussed in the OP but I certainly have some comrades I'll be recommending it to. Thanks again.
Just read Jakarta Method a month or so ago. Fuck. It does a great job of humanizing the victims and connecting the dots directly between them and the actions of the US. Definitely give it a read.
I haven't read it yet, but I've heard good things about Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano.
Alo, if anyone knows a good read like Jakarta Method but for Operation Gladio. That'd be awesome.
Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia or
NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe
Seem to be reasonably legit
Oh, and Blackshirts and Reds is great, but they'd probably be turned off by how pro-communist Parenti is and turn their brain off. You should read it though, if you haven't.
The parts of that I've paraphrased in conversation have not been winners, sad to say.
Thanks. Yeah, I'll definitely read it, whether or not it's the one I insist on to my friend.
I read a great Indonesian novel a few years ago, Eka Kurniawan's Beauty is a Wound, and that was the first I'd heard of the anti-communist genocide. Strongly recommended, if you wish to stay in the region, as it were. (CW - it's best described as "like One Hundred Years of Solitude, but with a lot of rape.")
Kurniawan’s Beauty is a Wound
Adding it to my list, thank you.👍😁
Not by a commie or about just the us, but 1491 was a decent overview of the genocide of the Americas. I recently read Dawning of Apocalyse and Counter Revolution of 1776, which are also great and I dont see listed, but Horne's prose is really dry.
Open veins is written by a journalist like 1491 and the quality of the writing is similarly evocative. Haven't finished memory of fire trilogy
I do recommend the "sequel" to 1491 as well, titled '1493.' It expands on the theories and ideas laid out in 1491. In particular I found the chapter about Maroon culture and society in Brazil to be super fascinating. It wasn't quite as engaging as 1491 as I remember it but I still found it a nice enjoyable read. Definitely something you can pass on to somebody else when you're done who might not be as well-versed in the history of Colonialism and would have difficulty with denser academic texts.
I can't remember if I read it in 1493 or elsewhere but in what is today Chile, about 20-30 years after encountering Spanish conquistadors on horseback, the Mapuche were riding horses in cavalry formations against the Spaniards in battle. Chad as fuck.
They're pretty good, actually. A few misses here and there but 1493, which is the one I've read, treats the birth of globalization in such a way that you can't help but examine the way it works today. The chapter on the rubber trade was particularly resonant in that regard, and when I think of Bolivian lithium mines today I'm inevitably reminded of the chapter on the Spanish and Potosi.
Thanks, I've read the sequel to the Mann but hadn't heard of Horne, whose books look like good ammunition for another historian friend that I argue all the time with. (I expect he's read them or is at least familiar. Should be fun.)
If they’re into lesser-evilism, I think it would be much faster to simply compare unnecessary deaths under each system. They think Soviet or Chinese control killed 100 million people. Well guess what bitch, American control kills that many people every five years.
Considering the 100 million figure from the black book includes never-conceived children, we can absolutely go nuts with it. Every single hypothetical child that someone can't monetarily afford to have? Victims of Capitalism, baby
First off, this historian friend clearly needs a primer in American poet laureate Mark Twain’s eviscerating critique of American foreign policy.
Left Historian Extraordinaire Eric Foner wrote an entire book called “Mark Twain: Social Critic” that attests to this, covering everything from his pointed views on American slavery, lynching, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism and government bribery. Although he rightfully deserves some criticism for not publishing many of these views until after his death he did in many occasions rise to the challenge of taking unpopular stances against the war in the Philippines (“To the Person Sitting In the Darkness “), European pillage of Africa, corporate malfeasance and thuggery, and even against his home state of Missouri “The United States of Lyncherdom”).
Ran into a guy canvassing on a street corner in Queens today. Said he was collecting signatures to get on the ballot this election. I said I liked his shirt that had a peace symbol and an equality one, but that I loathed Libertarians, which is what he said he was. But I agreed with him that AOC needed a challenger.
I suggested he read Sheldon Woolin’s theory of Inverted Totalitarianism if he wanted to know more about the more radical Left.
We need to impress upon people only half paying attention that the whole thing is a sham, pay to play politics, fascism not with brown shirts and political street thugs but corporate omnipotence and a hostile takeover of everything we see, hear, eat and buy. The real power lies with the Wall St Economic Terrorists and Corporate America.
