Average 53 minutes to read

Description: Michael Parenti speaks at the University of Colorado, Boulder: “US interventionism, the 3rd world, and the USSR” April 15, 1986

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP8CzlFhc14

Transcript

A no-growth capitalism that some of the more naïve colleges have argued for is a contradiction in terms. The reason you invest is to accumulate. And your accumulation of capital has no purpose or meaning unless you can mix it with labor to yet increase your wealth further. And of course you use large sums of it for personal consumption and for political power and for control of your culture and for that wonderful, good happy life that you so like. As George Bush’s wife said, “We are millionaires, but we’re not ashamed of it, we enjoy our wealth,” and I thought “at last they say it” - instead of the usual thing is “you know how we rich suffer and we’re misjudged and it’s just terrible being rich.”

Now that nature of expansion - it’s important, imperative, because it means capitalism also can never stay home. It goes abroad. If you ever saw the film, Controlling Interests, there’s a corporate president who says, “those corporations that stayed regional in New England years ago, and decided not to go national, we can’t even remember their names. They died - we had to go national. And those of us who are now national know we have to go international. We have to invest abroad.”

So one of the laws of capitalist motion and development is this inexorable expansion, and that means expansion into and expropriation of the Third World. A process that has been going on for about 400 years. Perpetuated by the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French, the English and most recently, most successfully, most impressively, by the Americans. That is by the ruling classes of these countries, not by the ordinary people. The ordinary people simply paid the costs of empire, the ordinary people simply sent their sons off to die on the plains of India or the jungles of the Congo or in Latin America or where ever else. But that expropriation of the Third World has been going on for 400 years and it brings us to another revelation. Namely, that the Third World is not poor. You don’t go to poor countries to make money. There are very few poor countries in this world. Most countries are rich. The Philippines are rich. Brazil is rich. Mexico is rich. Chile is rich. Only the people are poor, but there is billions to be made there - to be carved out and be taken. There’s been billions for 400 years. The capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flask, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves and the cheap labor. They have taken out of these countries. These countries are not underdeveloped; they are over-exploited.

One of the countries that had a great deal of Western capital in it was Tsarist Russia. Mostly English, French, some German, some American, including one Herbert Hoover who with Leslie Urquhart, famous British millionaire, owned the Russo-Asiatic Corporation. Which, if the Russian Revolution hadn’t happened, Herbert Hoover would’ve been one of the richest men in the world. And years later when he was president of the United States in 1931, when one third of this country was unemployed, when people didn’t have enough to eat, when people were driven to the edge of desperation, President Herbert Hoover said to the San Francisco Examiner, he said, “my greatest ambition in life is to see the overthrow of Bolshevism in Russia.” There came with the Russian Revolution a break in the fabric of international capitalist history. There now was a country where the unwashed, where the workers of Petrograd and Moscow were actually taking over, where they were actually taking over the land, the labor, the technology and the resources of their country, where Communists were coming into power.

And there’s a remarkable correspondence between Secretary of State Lansling and President Woodrow Wilson, in which Lansling says, “the Bolsheviks are wanting in political virtue. They would preach to the ordinary man that he might elevate himself through political means rather than by dent of hard work. This would be a most unfortunate example to the common man in our country and other countries.” They understood what was the threat. The Americans themselves, the American ruling class, had very little cap, didn’t have all that much, I told you about Hoover and a few other speculators, other people like that. But they joined in with 14 other nations to invade the Soviet Union, to overthrow the socialist government that had just been put in after the Tsar was overthrown. That process of invading a revolutionary country is still happening before our eyes. If you want to understand those years after the Russian Revolution, just look at what’s going on in Nicaragua. Invasion, either by directly with troops from your own country or by using surrogate troops - and they use the White Armies and the White Generals, the White Guard Armies. Embargoes, isolation, withholding food supplies, sabotage, encirclement, refusing diplomatic recognition - these are the time-honored methods that are being used right now by Raegan against another revolutionary government, which is Nicaragua.

That process of encirclement and destabilization continued right until World War 2. On the eve of World War 2, Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union named Litvinov went to the Western powers and called for an alliance with England, United States and France, against Nazi Germany. And that if the Germans attacked Czechoslovakia, they would all join in to fight Hitler and contain him. The Western Allies refused those overtures from the Soviet Union. Not because they were appeasers, not because they were simple and naïve, quite the contrary, because they had a plan of their own and that plan was Munich. And the plan was we give Hitler Czechoslovakia and he goes east. And they were waiting for a war and that war was supposed to come, and it was going to be Nazi Germany finishing off Bolshevik Russia. Just as they had sent armies in against Russia just a few years less than a decade before, so now they planned to do the same, and so they’ve done again and again. And that war was fought and most of it was fought on the Eastern Front. 7 out of every 10 German soldiers who died in that war died on the Eastern Front. The scale of fighting was enormous. The battles of Kursk, Stalingrad, the Battle of Berlin, there’s nothing like it that happened in the Western theatre, on the Western Front. In the Battle of Berlin, you saw two million German soldiers against three and a half million attacking Soviet soldiers. The losses were stupendous.

But at the end of that war, the Soviet Union emerged as a major power - very weakened, having lost most of its industries west of the Urals, having lost 20 million people, most of its transportation by the way at that time was still by horse or oxen in most areas for most of its population. But it still had the Red Army, and yet it was not an army that had any intention of marching through Europe, although that was the NATO myth that was cultivated at the time. There’s an interesting set of documents that just came out in the American Historical Review which point out now that the West and the State Department never really believed that the Soviets were going to invade Western Europe - that that was a myth which they consciously propagated. They knew that after an exhausting war, the last thing the Russian people, or the Russian leader themselves, would ever go for was another war. There was no sense, they had no interest in such a war. The war they fought against Germany was defensive, and they wanted to rebuild their country. That was a myth that was consciously propagated, that if we don’t stop them, if we don’t do NATO, if we don’t double, triple, quadruple our defense forces, the Ruskis will be marching under the Arc de Triomphe.

The point of all what I’ve said so far is just to point out to you that the Cold War did not begin in 1947, but it began in 1917. That the Cold War has been going on even before the Russian Revolution, in the sense that the US and other Western countries have been consciously suppressing any kind of revolutionary forces. When Ronald Raegan says that we’ve got to stop the Sandinistas and overthrow them because they are an extension of Soviet power, we might ask ourselves we’ve been in Nicaragua 11 times and at least 5 of those times there was no Soviet Union. We’ve invaded Costa Rica, we’ve invaded Haiti, we’ve invaded Mexico, and there wasn’t a Soviet Union. We invaded these countries long before there was a Soviet Union. It’s not that they’re surrogates of the USSR, but that they are developing revolutionary movements which will bring a competing social order, one that will use the land, the labor, the resources, the technology and capital in a different way for social need, communally, for non-profit public sector development rather than for private capital accumulation. This would mean the death of capitalism, of that class with its power and privileges with life as they love it, and (they will) hold it and will fight tooth and nail to defend it. As Mrs. Bush said, “we enjoy our wealth.”

The US empire at the end of World War 2 replaced Britain. The Brits were eased out of Iran, British oil companies were replaced by American oil companies, British sugar companies in Honduras were eased out by American sugar companies, and American also picked up the tab. An America empire with over 2000 bases around the world, including about 300 major ones. American fleets are on every ocean, American planes fly the skies over every continent - almost. And so we see enormous investment in the Third World, and with that enormous investment since World War 2, an enormous growth in poverty. Now that’s unusual and that really goes against the accepted ideology, which is that “attract investments in here because that will bring prosperity and jobs”. But what investments have brought to Haiti is the immiseration of the small, Haitian farmers. What investment has brought in Latin America and most other countries has been the displacement of the peasantry, their proletarianization. They’re being thrown into shanty towns to suffer poverty wages or chronic under-employment. What investment has brought with it also is increasing illiteracy, sickness, disease, poverty and a dislocation and disfranchisement, a growing foreign debt and indebtedness, growing investment for cash crops. By the way, that’s what the whole Mexican Revolution was about. Was the land going to belong to the Mexicans, so they could grow beans and alfalfa and feed their people, or was the land going to belong to the big sugar companies and latifundio owners, so they could grow sugar to export as a cash crop to make more money to yet make more money, or coffee or whatever else. And with that investment comes a dislocation in the structure of the Third World country, so that the whole infrastructure of it gets built around capitalist extraction, capital extraction. The economist, Ray Brown, when he went to Cuba before the revolution, it was in 1958 he was there about a year or so before, was impressed by how every major road he saw went from a sugar plantation to a refinery to the seaport. While there were whole communities without roads, that couldn’t get to doctors, that couldn’t have schools, couldn’t see a priest. The sugar companies had their roads. And when you send foreign aid to those countries, 9 out of 10 of those dollars goes to build the infrastructure to subsidize the capital investment of the private corporations or to pay for the police and the army of that country, not to defend it from foreign invasion - because Uruguay is not going to invade Bolivia, because Taiwan isn’t going to be invaded by the Philippines - but they need those big armies to defend their rulers from their own people, because their people are in such a state of immiseration. So that’s where our foreign aid goes, and as someone once said, foreign aid is when the poor people - that’s us - of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country.

And when you get brilliant people like Kenneth Boulding, an economist, speaking so naively, you can see the troubles you get into, the swamps you go into, the baby talk silliness you get into when you think without Marx, when you think without class analysis. And Kenneth Boulding says, one of America’s leading economists, he says “empire is irrational, because it costs more than what we get out of it. The British it cost them more in India than what they got out of it. The American investment in the Philippines is only about 3 1/2 billion dollars, but we had to give them about 6 billion dollars in aid. It costs us more than what we get out of it.” And that’s when you think without a class analysis, because as we know, that it’s very profitable. Because the people who have the 3 billion dollar investment aren’t the same ones as the people who pay the 6 billion. As Thorstein Veblen said back in 1909, and Boulding should’ve read him even if he is a Marxist, as Veblen said, “the wealth that’s extracted from imperialism goes into the coffers of the select few, where as the costs of empire are paid out of the common treasure of the people.” And so it was with the British Empire in India. It was the Brits, the ordinary working people, who paid for the costs of empire. It was the Bank of England and East India Trading Company that got the cream. And so with the Philippines, right? Of course, with a good skim to your collaborator, your comprador. I mean, what he got just in shoes for his wife. (laughter)

Another resource in the Third World that attracts capital investment, and you say to yourself, “What is that mysterious resource?” and I’m looking at El Salvador, right? And I’m looking at the companies that are in El Salvador, and I look and I see Pillsbury, Proctor and Gamble, US Steel, Continental, ITT, Firestone, Ford - and I’m saying to myself, what the hell is in El Salvador? Sugar, bananas, what’re all these companies doing there? What they’re doing is manufacturing everything from energy rods to baking powder, from auto tires to computers. They’re in El Salvador because of a very precious resource - which is the cheap labor, which is paying people 50 cents an hour. Instead of having to pay auto-workers $15 an hour up here, you go down there and you pay them 50 cents an hour. That becomes a very attractive thing.

And you go to South Korea. New York Times had a story about the South Korean farm girls who work in the textile companies, companies that used to be in New England until they moved south, and then when the southern workers unionized, they moved to South Korea, where there’s a nice fascist little country where if the workers tried to unionize, they get beaten up and thrown in jail, or they get shot dead. And the Korean farm girls in those textile compounds are working for 18 cents an hour. 18 cents an hour for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. No time off. And if you want a day off, you work a double shift if you want to go see your family again on the farm. And they live in compounds. That’s the Industrial Revolution, that’s the 1870s. But that’s big profit and that’s what they call capital investment, development, friendly nation, staunch ally, good relations, stabilization, stability. And General Motors, when they tell you, ladies and gentlemen that they’ve gotta to pave over Detroit and they’ve gotta close down factories because the cars aren’t selling as well as they should - what they don’t tell you is that in the last 10 years, General Motors has opened up a dozen new factories in other countries, for the reasons I just talked about. So here is another resource, this is in fact the key resource, the resource which is the source of wealth - along with natural resources - which is labor. Because one thing about labor, it’s one of the commodities of production, it’s the one commodity that doesn’t use up it’s own value entirely in that process of production. It creates wealth.

Now there’s another development that’s come with all of this. And that other development is that revolutionary movements have been emerging all around the world - these competing social orders. And so they must be targeted. Now, the United States has given a number of reasons for why, and Ronald Raegan has most vividly recently, for why we must go on with our military build-up and our intervention in Third World, why we must attack countries like Nicaragua, why we must oppose guerilla movements in El Salvador, why we must try to overthrow Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and various other countries where the forces of social change are taking place. And the reason they give is the freedom of the people there, for democracy. We are in Central America to defend democracy. Well, a moment’s reflection would raise some serious questions about that hypothesis. Because it becomes clear that in fact, the US government has a record in recent years of overthrowing democracy. In Chile, Salvador Allende, elected in a free and open election, was overthrown, 10,000 people were executed, tens of thousands of others were driven into exile, others have been put in prison, and you have one of the worst fascist dictatorships, all with the support of the United States, which after Allende’s election cut off all aid except to the Chilean military. In Guatemala in 1954, the Arbenz government was instituted and Arbenz legalized all student organizations. Students were very powerful. The first democratically elected president of Guatemala, Arbenz, legalized trade unions, opposition newspapers, and then he started doing some very dangerous things. He began to nationalize the unused land of United Fruit Company, and that’s when US corporations and the CIA went in and overthrew Arbenz. And that’s a matter of public record, the CIA and the Eisenhower administration admits that. Eisenhower proudly boasted about how the CIA overthrew Arbenz, because he was a serious, leftist influence. And so was Mosaddegh in Iran, so was Goulart in Brazil, so was Bosch in the Dominican Republic… so with a variety of other democratic leaders, at least 6 or 7 in Latin America who were overthrown and generals brought in with the aid and assistance of the US government. So, it can’t be that we’re there to foster democracy, we seem to also make war against democracy. And, in addition we support some of the worst dictators, if Raegan is really against tyranny, if he really hates tyranny, why doesn’t he send freedom fighters in to Paraguay, or Chile, or South Africa? Why doesn’t he start sabotaging there, putting the squeeze on them? In fact the whole fight with Libya might be less of a mystery if you understand that really the worst thing about Colonel Gaddafi, who is kind of a strange guy in some ways, (audience laughter) but not as strange as the media has made him out. He has called, you know, and you don’t know this most of you who laughed, he has called repeatedly for negotiations between him and Raegan, for peaceful negotiations for peaceful settlements of all disputes. And the Raegan administration has repeatedly rebuffed those overtures, that isn’t put in the press - I’m not blaming you for not knowing it, you’re not gonna read it in that rag that I saw out there, that Colorado thing, “Terrorists Targets Hit in Libya.” “He has done that, and he’s done some other things that make him really dangerous”, it’s not the terrorism, it’s not the attack on the Vienna and Berlin airports, for which they have no proof that Libya was involved, and which they have proof that the terrorists came out of Syria. The troublesome thing about Gaddafi is that when he took over in 1969, he took over a country that was like Saudi Arabia. A country of mass misery, a lot of rich oil that went into the pockets of a few rich, and when his colonel’s revolution took over, they got rid of the rich, they took all of their extra houses and gave them to the poor. They put out a land reform program, they put out a public free school program, they started a national health/medical program - something that we Americans still don’t have, the Libyans have it. He planted 40 million trees and started massive irrigation and ecological reclamation. These are some of the things Gaddafi did, and that’s a dangerous example to the Arab world. He took a bigger chunk of the oil revenues and re-invested them into the needs of his own people. And the per-capita earning of the Libyan people are the highest in the Arab world, the highest in the Third World. You didn’t hear that in the media, did you? You didn’t hear that on Dan Rather’s Tonight. That’s what’s dangerous about Gaddafi. And the cue comes, and you know the cue when Raegan says Gaddafi is a tyrant over his own people. Like the Sandinistas were tyrants over their people, like Allende was a tyrant over the Chilean people. The minute they start social reforms, the minute they start tampering with our oil, our bananas, our sugars, our copper, our iron, our bauxite - why, they’re tyrants.

The second myth that is given to us is that these revolutionary governments are hostile to us and that’s why we oppose them. “Right-wing dictatorships get along with us, they’re friendly to us” - why is that though? What is it about right-wing dictatorships that make them so friendly? What are they being so friendly about? What is the community of interests that they have? I’ve already explained it I believe. It’s a common class interest. And the left-wing guys come in but they’re hostile to us. Well, that doesn’t really seem to be true, though. The first thing these left-wing governments do when they come into power is to ask for friendly diplomatic and economic relations with the US. Certainly, that’s what the Sandinistas did. They honored the debt that that swindler Somoza ran up. And they asked for closer economic relations. That’s what the Cubans want. Every socialist country from a huge power like the Soviet Union to a small power like Vietnam or Cuba, to a mini micro power like Grenada under the New Jewel Movement. Every single one of them asked for more trade, normal political, economic, and diplomatic relations with the United States. Not necessarily out of love, but because they start in their self-interests, because their interest was to develop their own economies, and to have peace and security on their borders, to invest less in military defense. There was even an article on that in the New York Times, in which Fidel Castro makes that point: “we want to spend less on our military defense.” It doesn’t make sense to the Cubans, why must they go 16,000 miles away to Japan to buy school buses? That’s where the Cubans get them, they go 16,000 miles away, when they could buy them right from Florida, 90 miles away. Why must they get their medical supplies from China and Czechoslovakia when they could get them from the US? Cuba has the largest import tonnage costs of any country in the world because of the US blockade, a boycott. So it’s very much in their interests to cultivate friendlier relation. There’s a substantive thing there, much firmer for love - no one is claiming they love us, and love after all is a volatile emotion, it comes and goes - much firmer than love is self interest. And therefor the basis for some kind of normal relations with those countries. No, my friends, it’s really the Raegan administration that runs with terror whenever there’s the first sign of friendliness from asocialist revolutionary country. Raegan, as Tom Wicker said, in regards to the Soviet Union for instance in armaments, “Raegan will not take yes for an answer.”

The final reason given is that, “we must contain the Red Tide.” You heard that March speech by Ronald Raegan, vintage stuff, where he talked about a Red Tide lapping our border if we allowed Nicaragua to sustain the kind of government that its people have chosen in free and open elections. If we allow that, our own security is at risk. And you can see that superpower, 60,000 man army of the Sandinistas cutting a swath up through Guatemala, Mexico, Texas, right up into the heartland, right into Boulder, Colorado, dancing with your daughter, and your sisters. Do we want that? (laughter) I hear they’re good dancers. The image of that tiny nation of 3 million being a threat to us, you know, reminds me of the Vietnam War. We used to hear that same stuff, we said, “if we don’t fight them in the jungles of Vietnam, we’ll have to be fighting them on the shores of California.” And Walter Lipmann said, “the image of the Vietnamese getting into their little PT boats and coming across the Pacific and taking California is an insult to the US Navy.” It’s very hard to convince the American people that they should send their sons, and maybe even some day their daughters, to go fight and die in some jungle to make the world safe for United Fruit Company or Chase Manhattan or Proctor and Gamble or ITT. So you say, “it’s to stop the threat of that communist country.” It’s very hard to convince the American people that a tiny country like Nicaragua, or Vietnam, or El Salvador, is a threat to US security. So you say it’s not Nicaragua, they’re the puppets of the Cuban’s, who are the puppets of the big red bear in the Kremlin. And yet again as I just said these countries continually want friendly relations including the Soviet Union. What we hear also is that there’s another pernicious element and the thing we have to stop in these countries is a thing called Communism, and that there are communists in these countries. It’s time, ladies and gentlemen, we ask what’s a communist. What does a communist do that is so dangerous? They would have us believe that communists merely hunger for power rather than wanting the power to end hunger. They would have us believe, well, the New York Times, let me refer to an editorial. Well, they describe the undesirable and offensive “Managua regime.” By the way, these countries don’t have governments, they have regimes - you’ll see that in newspapers all the time - we have governments. And I said to myself, what is undesirable and offensive about Managua? Is it the land reform program, where they took all that massive land owned by those few rich compradors and gave it out to the people who were starved for land? Is it the farm co-ops that they’re setting up? Is it the community industries and the public works program to create jobs for people who have been chronically unemployed? Is it the food program, a ration of beans and rice for every kid in Nicaragua, so that nobody, no matter how poor that country is, they’re all getting fed? Is it having the lowest infant mortality rate in Central America, despite earthquakes, and civil war and foreign invasion and attack and embargo, lower than even Costa Rica which is supposed to be the big show place? What’s so offensive about Managua? It is those things in some degree, it is creating a competing social order. It is people, it is those who have been downtrodden, it has been those that have been used as fodder in the capital accumulation process now claiming back the process of production, claiming back their own land, claiming back their own slag, their own dignity, and saying this country is going to be for us and not for you anymore, gringo! And that’s the communist program and that’s what communists are. I had somebody up in Vermont say - she got up and she was one of those trust funders who works on peace a lot - and she said, “people were saying that the Salvadoran guerrillas are communist, but they’re not communist, they’re just ordinary peasants, so why are we fighting them?” The implication being that if they were communist, it’d be okay to go in and pulverize them. And I pointed out that at least in the FLMN, the Front, there’s at least 2 of those 5 groups, that would not deny the label communist. They would say, ‘yo soy communista.’ And they would say it proudly, and what does it mean to be a communist? It means to fight and devote yourself to people. If communists, if we leftists, if we marxists, if we revolutionaries, if we progressives, if all we want is to hunger for power, then why do we side with the powerless, then why don’t we toady up to power? Why don’t we take the road of the Henry Kissingers and the Daniel Patrick Moynihans, and the Ziggy Brzezinskis, and the Eugene Rostows and the McGeorge Bundys, who toady up and mouth for power? When Henry Kissinger was made National Security Advisor for Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller gave him 50,000 bucks as a going away present. As Nelson Rockefeller testified himself before the Senate Committee, when he was being appointed Vice President of the United States, and they asked - the senators, they really went at Rockefeller really hard - “why’d you do that Mr. Rockefeller?” And Rockefeller said, “well giving has always been a tradition in our family.” (laughter) Giving, they cast their bread upon the waters and more and more came back, didn’t it? He was saying to Henry Kissinger, “Henry, I brought you out of Harvard, I brought you out of that center for Strategic Studies, because I liked the books you were writing, you were writing them for me, Henry, remember you’re going to go work for Tricky Dicky, you remember who you belong to.” And that’s what hungering for power is, it’s climbing, like the political climbers and careerists have done in every country of the world. And we on the left don’t do that, we stand out in the rain, we stand out on the picket line, we put our jobs on the line, we risk our careers, and in many cases we even risk our physical safety and our lives in all sorts of countries! If it’s power we want, why do we take such a circuitous route? If it’s power (???) Galin wants, why is he standing back there? (laughter) 70 years standing like a legion.

Well, these communists do do all of these reform things, yes, and liberal columnists Richard Cohen of the Washington Post says, and I think I’ve heard it about 800 times from different people, “we oughta copy what the communists do, why are we always on the wrong side? Why do we go into these countries and find ourselves on the side of the big landowners, the sweatshop owners, the big corrupt generals who run little prostitution rackets on the side? Why don’t we capture the hearts and minds of the people the way the communists do? Why don’t we copy their techniques?” What are their techniques? Well, communist techniques are very well known. Just the things we just said, they go into the village, they do land reform, they try and bring clean drinking water, they pay for the food they take, they try to help the people organize themselves - that’s what they do. But if we did those things, we’d not only would have stolen their program, we would’ve become them - because that’s what they’re doing, that’s the thing we’re fighting to prevent. Not ‘we’, that’s what our government and our ruling class is fighting to prevent. That’s why we always go in on the wrong side, because the wrong side is the right side for the class interests for this administration and every other administration that’s occupied the White House. So it is the heart of US policy to use fascism to preserve capitalism while claiming to be saving democracy from communism. Now, the Soviet Union is a serious problem for world capitalism. First, it’s the strongest socialist country. As the strongest socialist country, it is a major target. Second, it has assisted other revolutionary movements, mostly just diplomatically, politically, morally but also sometimes with material aid, not much, but rather substantial aid in the case of Vietnam. So, one goal is to try to contain the Soviet Union. The dream is to finally roll back the events of 1917. To undo history, to bring back that time when all the world belonged to us, and there were no problems like this. And there became an encirclement of the Soviet Union, the most targeted socialist country in the world today is not Nicaragua, nor even Libya if you wanna call Libya socialist, I wouldn’t quite call it that, it’s got an erratic leader, he does immature things and says immature things, but he’s also dangerous to class interests but I still wouldn’t call him socialist.. the most encircled and threatened country is the USSR. It is the one that is targeted with all these missiles. Those missiles are not the result of an arms race. I maintain that there is no arms race and there never has been. A race as you know, the model of a race is the two proponents moving each more furiously ahead of the other, trying to put as much (distance between the other) to get to the goal. That model doesn’t explain arms escalation. What we have had rather is an arms chase, with one side - the US - unilaterally escalating each time, and the other side - the Soviet Union - playing catch up, often with a 2 to 7 year lag in the particular weapons system. That was true of the A-bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the long range bomber, submarine launched missiles, the MIRVs, the multiple warheads, the ICBMs, tactical nuclear weapons, solid fuel rockets, and now even today with the MX, the cruise, the Pershing, and the neutron bomb. The race model doesn’t explain it, it’s a chase. As the Soviets said just several years ago, don’t build the neutron bomb. If you build it, then we will have to build it. Don’t build the MX, if you do that, we will escalate on our ICBMs. That’s hardly a race, that’s more of a chase. The other side asking that this escalation not take place, and when the escalation does, it reluctantly moves on and enters it also. Reluctantly I say because the arms race has had a tremendously damaging effect on the Soviet economy. Every time they have to build another tank, that’s one less subway car for their subways. In the USSR, any city that reaches a million people gets a new subway built in it. Every new missile means that much less quality consumer goods. It also, by the way, has the same drain on our country but it’s not as evident given the kind of country it is. The arms race here, the defense spending is of course an enormous shot in the arm to the owning class in terms of profits, guaranteed cost overruns, fat contracts and so forth. The Soviet Union has a capital shortage, unlike the US which has a capital surplus, and so therefor this deprivation. The Soviet Union has a labor shortage, unlike the US where there are 20 million underemployed. It has a smaller industrial base so to match us that’s a greater drain on it. It has scientists who would prefer working in the civilian sector because their work in the military sector reminds anonymous. Managers who would have management jobs in the civilian sector. In short, it has a number of rational reasons why it would like to diminish the arms race. As Gorbachev has said again and again, we have a lot of building in our own country, we have never had a normal year in our history, we have had foreign invasion, revolution, invasion again, forced collectivization, etc etc, armaments race.. and we would like to have some normal years. Again, not necessarily love, but something much stronger, which is self-interest. So I would argue that Soviet escalations have been mostly reactive and defensive to US escalations. This is also true if you look at the Soviet Navy, it has, until very recently, no aircraft carriers for attack and amphibian actions. It now has one, it’s had a few many carries. The Soviet Fleet is built almost entirely to tracking the US fleet to see where it’s going. Soviet interests in disarmament is reflected in the proposals that they have made. You could say, “well words are cheap, I want to see actions.” First of all, words aren’t cheap. Words count too. What a nation says is reflective of what it’s doing, but actual moves have also been taken. For instance, one, the Soviets proposed the eventual disbanding of NATO and Warsaw Pact armies. A proposal of gradual, mutual de-escalation - step by step on each side, one two, one two, like that - the US turned down that proposal, would not even study it. The Soviets proposed, in the last 4 years, nuclear free Europe - reducing their medium range SS20s and all those to match the 162 which France and Great Britain had. That was a proposal made 3 years ago, it was a proposal which Gorbachev has brought forth again. It’s one which Raegan has ignored simply to call for zero-sum and without the reasonable stipulations which Moscow has asked for. Namely, that if we get rid of all our missiles - both sides - we also guarantee that you don’t transfer any of your existing missiles in Europe to the French or British, and the French and British begin to get rid of their missiles, or at least at this stage they freeze them. In fact, the French and British now are increasing their number of intermediate range missiles. And now remember, intermediate range missiles in the west, Cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe are not intermediate range. They can reach Soviet soil, so they are strategic. They can hit Soviet ICBMs. Soviet SS20s are nasty weapons indeed, but they cannot reach the United States. They cannot knock out any MXs or ICMBS. They’re not first strike potential. Another thing to remember, Cruise and Pershing missiles that are now in Europe have a 7 minute strike time. That’s the end of deterrence. And this is why Gorbachev and the Russians are besides themselves about the Cruise and Pershing. This is why they walked out of Geneva in 1983, because Raegan refused to negotiate on the Cruise and Pershing. This allows Raegan to turn around and say, “we went to Geneva but they walked out.” As he’s going to do now with this latest cancellation. What you do is you shove the person away, you act hostile towards them, they get up and say “well you obviously don’t wanna negotiate” they walk out, then you turn to the people and say, “you see they don’t wanna reach an agreement.” If it takes me a half hour to get my missiles over and kill you, and you a half hour to kill me, then in that half hour after I let mine go, you know they’re coming. And you let yours go at me - that is a deterrence to me. However, if I can reduce the striking time to 7 minutes, and they’re so low and fast, and your radar can only pick them up in the last 2 minutes, I now have a first strike capacity on you. You no longer have deterrence, I can no longer fear your missiles. Because my missiles are targeting yours, and I will knock out all of your missiles, and then I’ll have a second strike capacity to hit you. You’ll have a feeble, retaliatory strike. Your feeble, retaliatory strike however will be blocked out by my Star Wars. Ah, is that what Star Wars is all about? Yes. You see the criticisms of our Star Wars are largely irrelevant in that area. People have said, scientists have said, it’s a ridiculous project - it’s going to have to work the first time and work perfectly. Only if the Soviets launch their 10,000 missiles in a fit of peeve one day, they say, “let’s destroy the world” and they send the missiles at us, only then will Star Wars have to work perfectly. But if the function of Star Wars is to be a shield against a feeble, retaliatory strike of the Soviets after a first strike by the US, then Star Wars becomes much more effective. And Ronald Raegan himself let the cat out of the bag last year when he said it doesn’t have to work perfectly, and they got him away from the platform and all that. Because they explained it to him just that morning at breakfast. If I can only block out 90% of 10,000 missiles, I’ll be destroyed by a thousand missiles. But if all the Ruskis have left are 60 or 70 missiles, and I can block out 90% of those, then only 7 or 8 will hit us. And that is called acceptable collateral damage. How do you like that for 1984? 20 million, anywhere from there, from 4 to 20 million, acceptable collateral damage. But we would’ve won for the kipper, eh? There are nuts in the Pentagon who think like this, ladies and gentlemen, and they get big fat military pensions too, and they get big fat salaries, and they got big boards all lit up. They think like that all the time. But short of starting a nuclear war, the grand design is to have a first strike capacity that so puts the Soviets under the gun again, that we’ll be back to 1947, when we could brandish that weapon around and they would have to retreat. They would have to concede, they’d have to pull back in fear. We’d be back to 1962 - the Cuban missile crisis, when Kennedy sat there and thought of a strike against the Soviet Union. And they realized that Khrushchev really had only one, possibly two, ICBMs that could reach the US, and it would only reach the north east corner of the US. But they estimated that this might cause a million, 2 million causalities and that would be politically unacceptable. And so they discarded any idea of a nuclear strike against the Soviets. That one missile may have saved our lives. So it’s not true that the missiles just build up blindly on both sides, they’re caught in this irrational race. That it’s just something in man’s nature for war. I love those songs but there was something about the politics in one of them that didn’t ring right with me - that it’s just ‘people caught up in this meanness, and killing for killing, and when are we going to reach our senses’ - that’s not true, that’s not the way it works. It’s not something that comes in here, if it were something in our nature, why would they have to draft us? Why would they have to use press gangs and drag us in?

The nazi leader, Hermann Goering, said, “nobody, no poor slob, wants a war - not even a German, what does he want to sit in a stinking trench with the smell of blood listening to the screams of his buddies lying there, quivering with cold and terror? What he wants, where does he want to be, he wants to be in his home, he wants to be on his farm, he wants to be with his family, no poor slob wants a war. You gotta drag em out and dress em up, and beat the drums and wave the flag.”

Within the last four years, the Soviets called for the banning of weapons in outer space before the United Nations. A resolution that was voted 124 to 1. Who was the 1? Not the US - Ronald Raegan. It wasn’t the American people, right? It was that coterie that is misrepresenting us. All the opinion polls showed that the American people didn’t want weapons into outer space, at least back in those days before the Star Wars promo. 124 to 1 with 1 abstention, do you know who the abstention was? It was Margaret Thatcher, who as we all know is Ronald Raegan in drag. The Soviets have signed a no-first-use pledge. A pledge that we will not be the first to ever use nuclear weapons. And the only reason they signed that is because they cannot imagine any time when it would be in their interest, ever, to be the first to use nuclear weapons. They haven’t ruled out the possible use of them and they keep building too. That no-first-use pledge, the US has refused to sign it. Well, so what? That means less hypocrisy, because when push comes to shove, when the missiles are going to fly, they’re going to fly, right? No, what nations say is an indication of their interest and their strategy to some degree. Sometimes there’s lies and deception. The US cannot sign a no-first-use pledge, because every administration has threatened the use of nuclear weapons. It’s part of US foreign policy, that’s what Star Wars, that’s what first strike, that’s what Cruise and Pershings are. It’s to gain dominance again, over the socialist countries, over the Third World, by having nuclear superiority. The US threatens first use and thought of using nuclear weapons at Khe Sanh during the Vietnam War, (Nixon did. And so did Eisenhower during that one reservoir battle in Korea.) The Eisenhower administrator not only thought and deliberated using them, but actually decided to at Dien Bien Phu. And said, yes, and offered nuclear weapons to the French, said, “do you wanna use some of these tactical nuclear weapons at the Dien Bien Phu?” And the French refused, they took the defeat instead. So, they were quite ready to use them then. And any number of occasions, by the way, the use of nuclear weapons, the Kennedy administration and the Cuban Missile crisis, seriously considered the use of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union, as I mentioned before. So it is apart of policy, it is one of the weapons that are to be used to maintain imperial hegemony, to keep history from happening, to keep people under the gun. So if they signed a no-first pledge, they could no longer threaten using the weapon. It would show them to be hypocrites and liars, they signed the pledge and here they are threatening to use the weapons. And if they sign the pledge and threaten to use the weapons, this would undercut the credibility of the use of the weapons. Or if they signed the no-first pledge, this would undercut the credibility of the threat of nuclear weapons. And the value of those weapons is the threat. And by the way, it may not be that the US is ready to destroy the USSR, their ultimate plan is really to get such a superiority, with Star Wars, Cruise and Pershing, all that, forward attack planes and submarines and everything else, that they will just be able to dictate terms as I was saying. And no-first-use pledge would certainly not fit into that scheme of things at all. Therefor the policies are not really, totally symmetrical between Moscow and Washington. The Soviet Union, this is one of the best kept secrets in the United States, the Supreme Soviet in February of 1981 voted unanimously to endorse a neutral, bilateral, verifiable nuclear freeze, that was virtually identical to the ones which were passed in those 20 Vermont townships and voted in 9 states and endorsed in 100s of towns and cities in America. And its wording was almost, word for word, the same pledge. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that same month, voted unanimously to endorse a nuclear freeze. The US has in fact ignored any proposal for nuclear freeze despite a massive movement involving millions of people in this country. Probably the biggest mass movement, in such a short time, in our history, was the nuclear freeze movement. You don’t realize, some of you are too young to realize what history you’re making. It’s incredible, it dwarfed in its numbers the Anti-War movement, at least for the first five years. It dwarfed the Civil Rights movement. It dwarfed the union movements and struggles in the 30’s. And the sheer numbers of people who signed up, who marched and demonstrated, who wrote letters, who pledged for nuclear freeze. It was a mass movement and the Raegan administrator simply ignored the whole thing - didn’t exist, wouldn’t hear of it, wouldn’t consider it. It didn’t fit into their ‘very rational plans’ of a different kind of world. The Soviet Union has called for the reduction of ICBMs. The Raegan administrator refused to negotiate it or totally ignored that offer in 1982 and ignored it again, when more dramatically, Gorbachev came up and said, let’s not negotiate but let me give you numbers- a 50% cut, both of us, right off the top, let’s start, with total on sight inspection. Another, by the way, another change in the Soviet policy, total, complete on-sight inspection under any conditions you want. Come on in, look anywhere you want about this sort of thing. And the US, again, won’t take yes for an answer, Ronald Raegan won’t. The Soviet Union had a unilateral and observed and is still observing unilateral moratorium on anti-satellite weapons testing. The Soviet Union called for, last year, cuts in conventional forces, again NATO and Warsaw. The Soviet Union unilaterally observed a moratorium on underground nuclear testing and has called for a total ban of all nuclear testing. Because Gorbachev knows that if you stop nuclear testing, that’s the end of the development of nuclear weapons. You can’t develop nuclear weapons if you can’t test anymore. And Raegan knows that also, and so he’s ignored the proposals. The Soviets unilaterally, last year as you know, said we will not test for the rest of this year. And the Raegan administration said, “Oh, that’s because they do all their testing early in the year and they got ‘em all done already, but we still have a few tests.” Okay, okay, maybe that’s it, so do all your tests, catch up, and when it comes December 31st, you say to them, “we’re going to observe it too” - didn’t do that. January 1st came and Gorbachev said, “we will extend that moratorium several more months.” And the US said, “Oh they extend it because they don’t test in the cold months, January, February, March, they don’t test then.” Although they supposedly do all their testing in the early part of the year - I don’t understand that one. And then, when they extended the moratorium yet a bit further, the argument was “this is a propaganda ploy, they’re trying to appeal to the American people. And we, in order to reach the ultimate point of getting rid of nuclear weapons, we’ll have to continue testing right now.” And what was a masterful phrase of doublethink, I mean that was an actual quote. I wish I had it, I couldn’t find it in my materials on the plane. What I’m arguing here, ladies and gentleman, is that US foreign policy is not foolish, it’s not stupid, it’s quite rational. When someone says, “what’re we doing? we’re opposing guerillas in El Salvador, and we’re supporting guerillas in Nicaragua,” - that’s quite rational, because the guerillas in El Salvador want to change the social order, and the so-called guerillas - they’re not guerillas, they don’t live with the people, and build their bases in the country. The mercenaries and contras who’re attacking Nicaragua want to bring back the old order. This is a very rational system. They’re not foolish, they’re not confused - they know what they’re doing. It is to defend the class order, to make the world safe for hypocrisy.

Star Wars, besides being that defense, that first strike shield, people say, “It’s too expensive.” What’re you talking about, it’s too expensive? That’s one of it’s attractions. It’s going to cost a trillion dollars. It’ll cost more than the entire New Deal WPA program and the Manhattan Project, which gave us the atomic bomb, and the Eisenhower Highway project, put all of those together and the building of the railroads, put all of them together - they won’t cost as much as Star Wars. A trillion is for the first stage, they think, the first stage. That’s what the boys like who have the defense contracts. That’s what they love, they see dollar bills, getting there is all the fun, whether the system works or doesn’t work, it’s the expensiveness that is the major attraction. It will violate the ABM treaty and now we see even it violates the atmospheric testing treaty. What’s wrong with that, Raegan has no loyalty to the ABM or the atmosphere testing, he’s been wanting to violate them since he’s been in office. Now, having said all of this, and giving you this picture, I would like to add something else - that the ruling class rules, but it doesn’t rule quite in the way it wants to. That in fact we must not be overwhelmed by these facts or this analysis, but we must be enlightened. We could understand why they do these things. Ronald Raegan is not stupid, he gets confused, he goes to Ecuador and says “It’s wonderful being here in Colombia”, I mean he does things like that and he muffles unquestions. Raegan, though, has been the most successful and rational and persistent president that I have ever seen in office in every single area, whether it’s MLRB or busting unions or cutting human services or his treatment of environment, or defense spending or foreign policy - he has advanced the appointment of reactionary judges - every single area - defunding the left, whatever. He has not left a stone unturned. He has advanced and pushed persistently, he has a cohesive goal and program - it’s the goal of “Cap” Weinberger and Pat Buchanan. It’s the goal of the radical right and he has been rather successful at it. But not completely, because at the same time in the years that Raegan has been in office, the protests have grown. Democratic forces have grown, changes continue throughout the world. Peace forces in the Soviet Unions - by the way, there are massive peace forces, millions of people marched, Leningrad Peace Committee, the photos of these people marching with these banners “No Missiles, East or West.” And again you should make a distinction between a country which supports and encourages a massive peace movement, and a government like ours which derides it, redbaits it, ignores it, puts it down. A nuclear freeze movement. Democratic forces have grown in power since Vietnam. Do you realize that Ronald Raegan has not invaded Nicaragua? I mean, do you realize that I said before that the United States has invaded Nicaragua 11 times, and has actually occupied Nicaragua 3 times, including for periods of as much as 10 or 13 years, And the Marines went in there and burned huts and killed people and raped and murdered and dismembered people? Colman McCarthy just had a column in the Washington Post of a 78 year old guy who said “I was in there when I was fighting Sandino back in 1928, and when I got out as a young kid, I had nightmares for years after. I shot innocent people, we saw guys getting their genitals cut off and tortured” - the Marines did that. Do you realize that? Do you realize that today the United States has a striking power, a deployment power, a force, a delivery power, that’s a thousand times more powerful than anything Calvin Coolidge had? And you got a president that’s a thousand times nuttier than Calvin Coolidge, who would like to go in there, who WANTS to go in, and yet he hasn’t. Well, what’s held him back? It’s the democratic forces. It’s the same thing that kept Nixon from using nuclear weapons in Vietnam, as the story came out in the White House tapes, where they were afraid of the disruption and the reaction of the people in their own country. It’s the democratic forces in this country, it’s the democratic forces around the world, it’s the Nicaraguan people who are armed and ready. He could go in and carpet bomb it with B-52s, not lose a single man, and just devastate it and destroy it. But then he would have to go in with troops - like that line in Antigone, you know, you would make of it a graveyard and call it peace. But those troops would still find survivors and they would have to fight them, and there would be unacceptable losses, and Americans would die in Nicaragua, and the war might escalate, and all of the Latin America people might raise up. Why do you think those Latin American leaders, those corrupt, rich comprador, collaborationist leaders, say to Ronald Raegan, “we don’t want you in Nicaragua, we oppose that policy, we support the comprador program”? Are they suddenly going left on us? No, they’re worried about the reaction of their own people. The losses in Nicaragua would be unacceptable, but unacceptable to whom? Not to Ronald Raegan, he wouldn’t mind losing 2, 3, 4000 American boys if he can take Nicaragua. That’s no loss to him, he’s got plenty of fodder, he’s got it right in this room. He’d have you down there. He had 261 Marines blown away in Lebanon in one day and he wanted to go back in with more and fight more. Those were acceptable losses to him. That was no skin off his nose. It’s his class interests he’s worrying about. He kept talking about the emergence of a Lebanese left and Lebanese socialism and we must stop it. It was unacceptable losses politically. That means that there are political forces that can fight back. That is too costly to him - not morally. So, we may be stronger than we think and we must never believe what they try to make us believe about ourselves - that we’re weak, that we don’t have it, you see.

Let me just close with just one last little story, okay, because I’ve been going too long. I was living in Washington about 6 years and I asked by some Filipino exiles in 1981, I think it was, or 82, to go speak at Lafayette Park - the White House is right across the street from Lafayette Park. I always tell friends, “I speak at the White House a lot” and there was a big megaphone and I speak at the White House. “You speak at the White House?” “Yes, I speak at the White House with these microphones.” And there I was, speaking, you know, and these Filipinos were so appreciative, it was so moving to me. “Oh, Michael Parenti, would you speak!” And so I give this speech, and I talk about the Philippines, some of what I said to you - the Philippines are not a poor country, only the people are poor, it’s rich and they should deserve their own, blah blah blah, -and I said this whole thing and all that. And here’s this little band, about 200 people, about half Fillipino, half American. And you know, and I look at this, and then I look across at the White House, and I see, I see about 600 police. Their helmets, their guns, guns, rockets, this, everything, cars, whoop whoop, all this stuff, all over there and I see limousines, a fleet of limousines comes up. It’s Marcos, President Marcos coming up to the White House porch. You can’t see the actual porch, it’s blocked off, but you can see limousines go up there to get hugged and kissed by Ronny Raegan, cause he’s a great defender of democracy, this Marcos. And I see it, and I see all this display of power. And I see these Filipino heavys, the securities, they come around, they’re looking, they’re looking at the Filipinos like checking them out, if they recognize anybody and all that. And I’m standing there with our little brave, little band of 200 people with our signs and we’re walking around chanting. And I do what a lot of people do in this situation, I start to bleed inside. I start to say, my god, look at that power, look at that wealth, look at the force. And we got this little band of people, you know, and after I give my talk, I wander over to, we had a fence up and we had a display of pictures of Filipinos who have been tortured and found dead - grizzly photos, by the Marcos people. And a Marcos’ security guy, a Filipino thug, plain clothes, comes walking up, and he looks at the pictures, standing next to me, and he goes “ha”, and he sorta smirks like, you know. And I never had such a feeling of wanting to really give him one upside his head, but I’ve outgrown those days. And I’m saying, look at this, they got it all, what’re we going to do? And look what’s happened three years later. Just look what’s happened, this incredible transition. Democratic forces mobilize and this Marcos just blown away. Just remember who has the source of power. When the people get it together, they have a strength like nothing seen. When the democratic forces move, the forces of reaction must retreat. And these great generals and dictators and presidentes who sit there in their big palaces with their boodle and their corruption and their bayonets and their guns and their spies everywhere - they get thrown off just as a stallion would thrown off a little fly. So we speak truth to power, remember that. Speak truth to power, mobilize, organize, never be sad, remember what the great Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci, said, “You have a pessimism of the mind but an optimism of the will.” You see the worst, you consider the worst, you work against it, but in here you work for what is freedom, what is justice, for what is right, it is our destiny, it is our future, the future itself depends upon it. Thank you.