Ah, quoting communist fellow travelers as authority, eh, elucidator?
Bumping into on the genetic fallacy, eh, Daoloth?
Supporting revolutionary movements in Central America may be about the only the thing the Soviets ever did that was worthy of commendation. A recent biography of Kruschev suggests that late in his life, he became enamored of the various liberation movements. Apparently, he was a very sincere Communist early on, but became increasingly cynical as his career as an apparatchik went forward. Cuba and Castro were instrumental in this newfound zeal, and may account for his disproportionate concern for its defense and his willingness to subsidize Cuba’s economic well being far in excess of its value. Kinda like he “got religion”.
Our own support and cooperation in the oppression of millions of Latin Americans is a matter of historical record, as noted in the quotation above. Any American who is not aware of it is ignorant, any American who is not ashamed of it is heartless. I am neither.
GIGObuster, thanks for posting the link to the Truth Commission report. I tried to bring it to the attention of posters in the Jesse Helms thread, but i don’t think any of the people saying “the rebels were just as bad as the military” ever bothered to read it.
I hope they will this time.
If they don’t, I hope they will at least read these statistics from the report:
While we can’t excuse the FMLN for assassinating mayors, they caused far, far fewer senseless deaths than the other side did. If it comes down to choosing the lesser of two evils, the FMLN wins, hands down.
Even if you believe that the U.S. had to intervene and stop the spread of communism in every country in Central and South America (whether communism came in the form of armed insurrection or through democratic elections), you need to consider that the situation in El Salvador was never just a case of the government fighting against communist rebels. As the Truth Commission report makes clear, the military and the death squads had no moral qualms about massacring entire villages of unarmed men, women, and children, or about assassinating civil rights workers, priests, or nuns.
Indeed, as Guinastasia has pointed out in numerous posts, many poor Salvadorans supported the FMLN because they were fighting against the military that visited so many horrors upon them in the past.
The repression came before the uprising–looong before.
Wait-Smedley Butler was a communist?!?! Since when?
:dubious:
He wasn’t a communist, but merely a fellow traveler. He was a supporter of Norman Thomas (voting for him in 1936) and was also known to share platforms with communist speakers.
Historian and columnist Max Boot has this to say about Butler:
“Butler’s views have been cited over the years by critics intent on “proving” that the Banana Wars were undertaken at the behest of big business. The reality is that Butler was not involved in the decisions to use force; he carried out his orders, and carried them out well, but he often did not know precisely why they were issued. The credibility of his wilder charges should also be viewed in light of the other intemperate views he expressed at the time.”
And, GIGO, I did not say elucidator’s quote was invalid due to its origins. Rather, I was commenting on his usage of it, and not the accuracy or lack thereof.
Max Boot? Columnist and opinion writer for the Wall Street Journal, the Pravda of the Right? That Max Boot? Whom you refer to to bolster your assertion that Gen. Butler’s opinion was tainted by a political slant.
Yes. Quite.
Of course, he was also editor of the CSM and has been a contributing writer to not only the WSJ but also the LA Times, Washington Post, New York Times, Foreign Affairs and The Financial Times. He is also a Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Newt Gangrene has all manner of such accreditations, and a Ph.D. to boot. He’s still so full of shit his eyes are brown. It’s only that if you are to cite the opinion of a clearly right-wing pundit, you might have noted it. As well, I should have made note of such myself, when I cited a source from the notoriously liberal, left-wing United States Marines.
Butler was hardly alone in his assessment that the US was fighting for Big Business in Latin America.
In Tip O’Neill’s memoirs, he quotes a friend who was wounded during in Guatemala in the 1930s.
“We were protecting the interests of United Fruit. I was stabbed for United Fruit.”
shrugs
Besides, Smedley Butler’s record was pretty astounding. I don’t think he was merely pulling these things out of his ass.
He was astounding. Of course, I don’t see how his operations against the Boxers were for the aims of big business. But, to each their own.
A drive by with a fallacy is a comment on the usage… not.
Well, I see the Butler did it with this semi hijack. 
Good, I needed to brush up on my Caribbean history:
Wrong Daoloth, Boot can make his tripe sound good, but in the end that quote remains a genetic fallacy, it is easier to attack the messenger rather than explain in detail how butler is wrong, right wing media is counting on their readers to never reflect or read about the history of those interventions, it is curious that Butler does say that he did not know then why he intervened on those nations THEN, as he was following orders like a good soldier, there remains though the fact that the US did indeed intervene in all the places he describes.
For example the Dominican republic: Woodrow Wilson did intervene in 1914. Before that, Taft had threatened the rival factions with a clear intimation of military action, Wilson delivered an ultimatum: elect a president or the United States will impose one.
Well, you read that and you then realize many things are missing out of the picture, WWI made America dislike unrest, but why the interest there? After reading about the unofficial reasons to intervene in other banana republics (remember United Fruit and Guatemala) There is information that shows sugar and other assets needed for the war effort, were the sources for this “interest”
BYW, before that, the US had intervened in negotiations with the warring factions, time and time again, the parties expected a neutral negotiator, the reality is that the negotiator then approved the party that benefited not the local populations, but the US. (Same thing happened in Mexico at the end of their civil war).
To answer Wilson’s request, (how nice that sounds on the current historical records, no?)
The Dominicans did select a president that unfortunately decided to appoint some opposition members to his cabinet, (he did it as a conciliatory move to the opposition) making the elite armed forces grumble: Desiderio Arias, the Secretary of War, then did a slow coup, (took control of the army and congress and ordered congress to impeach the president) despite that, the US was willing to support the military thug’s new government! For some reason Arias could not work well with the new orders from the US, he then stepped down in 1916, although I suspect it was because he got the heads up: the marines were coming, the US invaded three days after he stepped down.
After World War I, public opinion in the United States began to run against the occupation. Warren G. Harding, in 1921, campaigned against the occupations of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and won. In June 1921, even the United States representatives asked for a withdrawal. A guy like Butler would need to be dumb to not wonder then why it was necessary to invade in the first place and sugar came up as one of the real shameful reasons the US intervened:
Bertleby’s Encyclopedia of world history:
http://www.bartleby.com/67/2313.html
But Americans showed then that there were people willing to prevent the US to turn into an ugly real empire, that was one of the reasons I became an American, I just think it would be shameful to not work to improve it, or to just listen or read media that their main job is to tell people there is no need to improve anything, or to say nothing about what was wrong in the past.
Okay. While financial security was one of the driving reasons, you must also consider the realpolitik attributes as well. In 1914, the Dominican Republic had free elections, and a wealthy man named Juan Jimenez won. After being pressured by Washington, Jimenez yielded to a treaty which granted the US financial control, making the Dominican Republic an economic protectorate. However, in 1916 the Dominican Congress began impeachment hearings, and Jimenez’s War Minister, General Arias, launched an armed rebellion. Arias was widely believed as being pro-German, and was also believed to be shipping arms to anti-US rebels in Haiti.
Woodrow granted permission to Rear Admiral William Caperton to intervene, and on May 15th, 1916, Santo Domingo was taken bloodlessly. A month later, Arias’s last stronghold, Santiago de los Caballeros, was seized by 1,300 Marines. Arias surrendered.
In November of 1916, Rear Admiral Harry Knapp became the US military governor of the Republic. Marines and Dominican civil servants assumed control of the other ministries. Sanitation projects began, student enrollment in free schools expanded by 500%, taxes were revised, and hospitals were modernized, among other things.
However, the eastern provinces of El Seibo and San Pedro de Macoris were in revolt, led by about 600 highwaymen. Their most effective leader was Vicente Evangelista, who in March 1917 captured two American civilians, but them into pieces, and fed them to some boars. He was killed on July 7th of that year, and his followers became suspicious of the Marines.
Marines did commit abuses, though, but this was without permission. Captain Charles Merkel was renowned as the “Tiger of Seibo,” and was known to have tortured people. When this information was let out, he was arrested in October 1918. He committed suicide before his trial.
Despite this, there were never more than 3,000 troops on the island during any given period of occupation. Barely more than 1,000 enemy fighters were killed or wounded during the occupation of 1916-1922. A stable government was in place, and the Dominican infrastructure went through great improval.
So, excluding a few instances of sadism by Americans acting independently of their commanders, the occupation of the Dominican Republic, while largely motivated by fiscal concerns, was one that tended to benefit the Dominican populace as a whole. Furthermore, the eastern provinces, long a hindrance to any prior centralized government, was at last pacified. If you’re going to select an example of brutal American policies in Central America, you might wish to try again.
And thus, the Dominican Republic was pacified, and entered into its Golden Age? Equality and freedom prevailed, a gift at the beneficent hand of the Americans? As it did in Nicaragua, and Honduras, and Guatemala?
No, Daoloth, such revisionism won’t stand analysis.
Is it ever possible for you to compose a post without some sort of hyperbolic sarcasm? Anyway, all I’m stating is that the American occupation of the DR in that period wasn’t some blatant atrocity or gross violation of human rights. You cannot deny that improvements in sanitation and hospitals were made, and that the quality and quantity of public schools were extended.
If it is your intention to prove that this particular incident does not qualify as an atrocity, well and good. If it is your contention that this incident is somehow representative of American influence on Latin and Central America, which implication a reasonable person might draw, then it is false and misleading.
Do you wish to make a case that the effect of America on Central and South America is largely consistent, that is, largely befeficial and conducted with humanity and conscientious care?
It is my contention that precisely the opposite is largely true.
Do you deny it?
No. Merely that intervention in the Dominican Republic was a bad example. An apt example for American brutality in Central America would be the 1914 invasion of Vera Cruz, based largely upon the fact that the local rulers refused to salute the American flag. This cost the lives of 19 Americans and about 200 Mexicans. The whole premise of that invasion was utterly absurd.
Reading Raymond Bonner-one thing struck me about the guerillas in El Salvador-what else could they do?
No matter how hard they tried to change things peacefully, the military still came after them. So they had to take up arms. They had no choice. They were fighting for their freedom.
In many ways, they were no different from those in Ireland, prior to World War II.
Really-they had no alternative. And though many were Marxist, they were, for the most part, patriots and Christians.
I would have to say, based upon my (albeit limited) reading on the El Salvador civil war, that the rebels, whether Marxist or not, were not as much to blame for the violence and brutality as was the government. The rebels, for one, were not as repressive, nor did they employ death squads. No one knows, though, what would have happened if they had taken power at some point, and established formal ties with the Soviet bloc or comrades.
Sorry. Clearly I misunderstood your intent, it seemed to imply a general innocence of American policy, which you clearly did not intend. Frankly, I hardly see the point in defending an isolated incident, but that’s not my call to make.