Up in Ontario

Juntas and Gatherers

Mentioning Adbusters in yesterday's post brought me to their website for the first time in a coon's age. There, I came across a fascinating timeline of 163 US Interventions (Flash player required) around the world.

America was founded by revolutionary ideals: the rejection of tyranny, the embrace of equality and the protection of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." But two hundred years later, what is the promise of America?

This is an archive of 163 US interventions, a multi-faceted catalogue of coups, humanitarian incursions, covert actions, proxy armies, freedom fighters/terrorists and multilateral offensives. Out of this legacy, a complex picture emerges.

To read through the list of interventions is exhausting. But it also offers a glimpse into the supporting mechanisms and costs of US military, economic, cultural and social expansion. The list includes recurring targets in Latin American (Haiti, Mexico, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, El Salvadore, Honduras), the Far East (the Phillipines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, China, Japan), Africa (Angola, Somalia) and the Middle East (Iran, Iraq, Israel). The list grows so long, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, that to exclude the contries not intervene upon would have created a shorter list. The official US doctrine of Manifest Destiny long ago died out as an acceptable justification for expansionism and suppress of peoples, but it continues to provide the most accurate ongoing motif for the promotion of that euphamistic entity, American interests abroad.

So here we see the great value of history. Our present geopolitical situations are not part of a new era, without precedence or context, they are continuations of patterns established over long periods. It's no wonder that whenever a new government comes to power one of the first acts they and their friends undertake is to try to change the popular memory of the people and the education systems, libraries and information sources that go along with that memory. Such as what is happening right now in the US with the war on librarians.