Tag: North America

Education and the Problem of Historical Denials

There’s a deep reason that guarantees the insipid feel of most historical courses and textbooks used in schools at all levels. The problem is that the underlying savagery of history is never really faced but is always fudged over. The books and courses in schools of all levels tend to be “tangential” to any reality.

One of the underlying “motors” of all history is the land question in its two aspects:

1. The National Land Question

Which groups and buccaneers grabbed which land?

Thus North America (USA & Canada) was “taken” by European settlers and various kinds of “ethnic cleansing” took place. (See, say, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee).

Parallel processes took place everywhere including China, Russia, etc.

The truth of these historo-crimes at the root of all history is then avoided “forever.”

This makes all discussions of who got what and why, where and when escapist at best.

2. The Private Land Question

Countries like those in Central America were characterized by the fact that when the European empires such as Spain were removed from “ownership,” handfuls of elite families took al the best farmland and parlayed that into political power. Those the top coffee growers have dominated Central America for centuries and the landless and indigenous are in a permanent emergency. Questioning this distribution leads to mass murders such as under Guatemala’s Ríos Montt (died 2018) in the 1980s.

These two “land questions”—the national and the private—are at the core of all world history and this means that failure to put these truths on the table of educational analysis, leads to “let’s pretend” “denial detours.”

There is a fundamental historical dishonesty that governs the educational process and since “the truth will make you free,” it follows that “the untruth will make you unfree” (i.e., “captive mind” syndrome everywhere).

Essay 115: Novels as Another University: Joseph Conrad

One can say that the first wave of imperial “neocons” was not the group that got the U.S. into the Iraq War (2003) but the group described by Warren Zimmerman in his classic book on the rise of the American Empire from the 1890s onwards:

First Great Triumph

How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power.

By Warren Zimmermann.

Illustrated. 562 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

“Americans like to pretend that they have no imperial past,” Warren Zimmermann tells us in First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. But they do.

The United States had been expanding its borders from the moment of its birth, though its reach had been confined to the North American continent until 1898, when American soldiers and sailors joined Cuban and Filipino rebels in a successful war against Spain. When the war was won, the United States acquired a “protectorate” in Cuba and annexed Hawaii, the Philippine Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico and Hawaii. “In 15 weeks,” Zimmermann notes, “the United States had gained island possessions on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of its continental mass. It had put under its protection and control more than 10 million people: whites, blacks, Hispanics, Indians, Polynesians, Chinese, Japanese and the polyethnic peoples of the Philippine archipelago.”

John Hay, at the time the American ambassador to Britain, writing to his friend Theodore Roosevelt in Cuba, referred to the war against Spain as “a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave.” He hoped that the war’s aftermath would be concluded “with that fine good nature, which is, after all, the distinguishing trait of the American character.” More than a century later, we are still asking ourselves just how splendid that little war and its consequences really were.

Zimmermann, a career diplomat and a former United States ambassador to Yugoslavia, begins his brilliantly readable book about the war and its aftermath with biographical sketches of the five men — Alfred T. Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay and Elihu Root — who played a leading role in making “their country a world power.”

Ironically, it turns out that any reader of Joseph Conrad’s (died in 1924) famous novel Nostromo from 1904 would have encountered the “manifesto” of the American Empire, very clearly enunciated by one of the characters in the novel:

“Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God’s universe. We shall be giving the word for everything; industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound (i.e., Canada/Greenland), and beyond too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth.

“We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it—and neither can we, I guess.”

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, Penguin Books, 2007, pages 62/63

The political stances of Conrad which seem so denunciatory of imperialism here in Nostromo seem very disrespectful of Africans in his Heart of Darkness as Chinua Achebe (Nigerian novelist, author of Things Fall Apart) and other Africans have shown and decried. Thus one sees layer upon layer of contradiction both in American empire-mongering and Conrad’s anticipation of it in his novel Nostromo.