Andrew Noble charts the rise of American imperialism through the words of the great American writers
Despite the ringing cheers for his Iraq policy from the Tory Party (the best Prime Minister they never had?), Tony Blair is under increasing pressure from both his own backbenchers and the Labour Party countrywide to explain his commitment to Bush’s America. Falling calamitously short, as George W., of Churchillian resonance (presumably the later Churchill and not the aerial gas bomber of Iraq in the 1920s), Blair recently announced that it was because America had stood beside us during the Blitz. It should come as no surprise that Blair was ignorant of the actual entry of America into World War II. Perhaps the single most disturbing thing about New Labour, bringing increasing chaos at home and abroad, is its wilful historical ignorance. Hence the list of redundant words such as class conflict, boom and bust, and now with increasing regularity, anti-Americanism. The Project has always existed in a Mandelson-inspired hothouse cocoon where the only law that operates is that of the current Anglo-American economic practices allegedly derived from the British fiscal libertarianism of the eighteenth century. It gives the relationship, as Blair recently noticed, a near exclusive ownership of “tolerance, democracy and liberty”. It may be some consolation to our manufacturers that we still have something to export, if only at gunpoint.
Not that history is entirely disregarded in the Blair world-view. Two Nazi-derived analogies are obsessively promoted. First, shades of Suez, that Iraq presents us with the threat of Hitlerian proportions; it is time the fascist monster has to be strangled at birth. Ruined by the 1991 Gulf War and twelve years of economic attrition and Allied overflying, Iraq presents no such threat. Second, the success of the Anglo-Americans (Russia’s bloody sacrifice being largely ignored) is that we won the war against fascism which provides a guarantee of our eternal righteousness and a template for our future conduct. Leaving aside the fact that in the early part of the war Joe Kennedy told Washington that the smart money was on Hitler, America’s relationship to its British ally was profoundly ambivalent, given that one of its central war aims was the dismemberment of the British Empire. Even more covert vas its intention, albeit in mufti, to replace the ornamental British Empire with its own equally rapacious one. An abiding American illusion is the wilfully innocent belief that imperialism is a traditional European vice.
The current near absolute historical ignorance in London aped Washington is enforced by a cultural and literary vacuity. Only the Bible seems (mis)read. Blair did once confess to toying with Scott’s Ivanhoe but this seems to have been a spun response to its then TV serialisation. Of classic American literature he knows as much as Bush. Unlike the personal and national certitude they derive from their biblical exegesis of what seems to be increasingly the image of a vengeful, monotheistic Old Testament God, the great writings of the American tradition lead us into anxiety and doubt derived from their analytic condemnation of the economic, psychological and spiritual roots of that nation’s corruptly disguised imperial will.
The root and primary cause of American imperialism is, in fact, English. Fleeing westwards from the lost cause of the Civil War, they, as persecuted people do, sought vengeful compensation in America. Here was to be, utopianly, the New Jerusalem with its City on the Hill despite the harsh rigours of the New England climate and terrain. The initial insecurity of the whole enterprise was so overwhelming that they dreamt of achieving total security from the inner and outer devils who haunted them. Ironically for Christians, violence was the only means to such an unachievable end. As Robert Lowell, their after-clay ambivalent successor, wrote:
“if I have an image of America, it would be one taken from Melville’s Moby Dick: the fanatical idealist who brings the world down in ruins through some sort of simplicity of mind. I reflect that it’s a danger for us.”
Lowell’s ancestral progenitor, Hawthorne, profoundly understood an America self-destructively obsessed with its purity and perfectibility. Superficially a reclusive daydreamer, Hawthorne shielded himself from the radioactive intensity of his livid dreams of American provoked catastrophe by the cooling aesthetic means of tone, symbol and distancing allegory. Hawthorne saw America in the grip of a monotheistic, Old Testament intolerance of anything endangeringly alien to its own purity. From the outset this intolerance was directly related to race. Hawthorne despaired of the fate of the native Indians at the mercy of his Bible and sword-bearing ancestors:
“Their weapons were always at hand, to shoot down the struggling savage. When they met in conclave, it was never to keep up the old English mirth, but to hear sermons three hours long, or to proclaim the bounties on the heads of wolves and the scalps of Indians.”
From the beginning, then, coloured lives were as marketable as beasts. Astonishingly, Hawthorne tells us that The Mayflower’s second coming to the American shore was as a slave ship. Nor for Hawthorne did the Civil War solve the problem of slavery. It was not only followed by the decimation of the Plains Indians but it irreversibly militarised American society and, the first modern war, it created a new technology of industrialised mass slaughter. It also gave America a soon-to-be realised capacity to turn these new forms of imperial violence outwards.
Mark Twain also regarded the Civil War as pregnant with global harm. Racialism unsolved at home, America, Twain noted with Swiftian horror, that utterly against its self-proclaimed democratic doctrines, was an equal partner with the ravages of nineteenth-century European imperialism. Like Lincoln, he saw disaster in the manner in which the insatiable greed of corporate America was calling the tune in both American domestic and foreign policy. He also acutely saw that much of America’s behaviour was modelled on that of its British parent, rival, and, indeed, enemy. British atrocities in the megalomaniac Rhodes seizure of South African goldfields was, for Twain, matched by American’s genocidal conduct in the Philippines as it overthrew the Spaniards only to slaughter the independence-seeking natives. This is his assembly of headlines from the American press in 1900:
“ADMINISTRATION WEARY OF PROTRACTED HOSTILITIES!”
“REAL WAR AHEAD FOR FILIPINO REBELS!”
“WILL SHOW NO MERCY!”
“KITCHENER’S PLAN ADOPTED!”
Kitchener, Twain noted, “knows how to handle disagreeable people who are fighting for their homes and their liberties”.
In terms of pursuit of a fast buck and hence committed to hypocritical savagery, Twain believed the Anglo-Saxon race was peculiarly vicious.
“There must be two Americas, one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with nothing to found it on, then kills him to get his land.”
The complex way in which America’s growing imperialism resented, envied, imitated and, indeed, colluded with its British parent was brilliantly illustrated by Christopher Hitchens in his Blood, Class, Nostalgia, a book written before he signed up as Bushite warrior in the fatwah against Muslim fundamentalism. The point of transition where British dominance gave way to that of America occurred in the 1920s in the oil-bearing Middle East. The Americans watched and then surpassed British methods:
The American prophet of terror bombing was William “Billy” Mitchell. He had gained his military experience in the bloody anti-guerrilla war in the Philippines and believed that flight had created a new age in which the fate of all peoples would be determined from the air. Great Britain leads the world in Winged Defense (1925), and referred to the example of Iraq, where the British Air Force replaced military occupation forces and “put down uprisings quickly”.
Given America’s industrial technology, it could make of air power a far more effective weapon than anybody else. The most acute creative testimony to this comes from the agonised poetic witness of Robert Lowell. He refused the draft in 1944 because he believed that allied bombing of Germany was increasingly defeating German fascism with fascist methods. A nuclear American state preoccupied and terrified him with its secretive manipulation of public opinion. For example, the truth of the missile deficit with Russia on which Kennedy ran for the presidency was that it was 10 to one in America’s favour. All this came to a personal and political head for Lowell in Vietnam with millions of Asian dead from airborne napalm and toxins and America on the brink of civil dissolution. Worse, he saw that war where David beats Goliath as not teaching America anything but, unable to face the defeat of its ‘innocent’ soldiers, psychologically and militarily increasingly bent on revenging the hurt. The planet Lowell’s poetry describes in the late `60s is remarkably our own:
Now on the radio the wars
Blare on, earth licks its open sores,
Fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
Assassinations, no advance!
Only man thinning out his kind
Sounds through the Sunday noon, the blind
Swipe of the pruner and his knife
Busy stripping the tree of life.
For the American right and its global allies, such as Rupert Murdoch, Vietnam is the dog that does not bark. The catastrophe is unmentioned. Yet it is probably the biggest factor in everything imperial America has subsequently done, especially the Gulf War of 1991. Thus Lynda Boose brilliantly connects the two incidents:
With Soviet power in collapse, a war in Iraq allowed America to demonstrate that it was the only big man around. There was now no one to impede American military muscle, block American control of the United Nations or provide an alternative power base around which to rally opposition. But simultaneously, through round the clock saturation bombing, subnuclear weaponry, tactics that flouted the Geneva conventions, overt censorship of media information, intransigence in all negotiations, and the rejection of all thirdparty ceasefire proposals – in short, through the repeated choice of highviolence options gratuitously disproportionate to the level of threat, an unfettered U.S. militarism was internally staging its own rebirth. Freed by history from internal check, it was simultaneously demonstrating its freedom from and throwing off the inhibitions that had been imposed by antiwar sentiment residual from Vietnam. When in January 1991 the United States turned the full power of its conventional arsenal on several hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers trapped underground, George Bush did have a domestic priority: to bury in the desert the antiwar discourse signified by Vietnam.
Now we have a generation in power that wants to take this further. A ‘chickenhawk’ generation who, from the President down, successfully evaded service in Vietnam, but are now hell-bent on flexing their muscle in the cause of killing at a safe distance. This assertion of American omnipotence is, however, subconsciously a response to gross anxiety about an America deeply enervated not least by its leadership’s criminal economic behaviour. As another great poet, the Irishman Derek Mahon wrote:
Not long from barbarism to decadence, not far
From liberal republic to defoliant empire
And thence to entropy; not long before
The great money scam begins its decline
To pot-holed roads and unfinished construction sites,
As in the dark ages a few scattered lights.
Clinton was understandably Tony’s pal but George W. and the evangelical Texas oil mafia? As Tom Nairn has pertinently recently written in Pariah, central to the accelerating dissolution of British government under Blair is his compulsion, as Thatcher’s, to hang on to America’s coat tails so that he can strut the world as an emissary of British power which, without this sycophantic relationship has no substance. Imperial toxins stay in the bloodstream. The impact of this on ‘old’ Europe is immeasurably bad. Blair is under pressure but, given the catastrophe in which, for all the wrong reasons, he has made himself a key player, the possibilities his policy has wrought are more terrifying than we have yet comprehended. What will be the number of Iraqi casualties? UN figures in 1992 postulated the deaths of 170,000 Iraqi infants. How is the country to be ‘pacified’?
What is the cost for a 20,000 British Army of occupation to be there for three years? What if we destabilize the whole Middle East and increase internal racial tensions and disorder here? Ramsay MacDonald and Anthony Eden’s sins will count as little in terms of what our present Prime Minister stands on the very brink of committing.
Dr Andrew Noble is a lecturer in English Literature at Strathclyde University