1 de junho de 2005

O poder e a glória

Mitos do excepcionalismo americano

Howard Zinn

Boston Review


A noção de excepcionalismo americano – de que apenas os Estados Unidos têm o direito, seja por sanção divina ou obrigação moral, de trazer civilização, democracia ou liberdade ao resto do mundo, pela violência, se necessário – não é nova. Tudo começou em 1630 na Colônia da Baía de Massachusetts, quando o governador John Winthrop proferiu as palavras que séculos depois seriam citadas por Ronald Reagan. Winthrop chamou a Colônia da Baía de Massachusetts de “cidade sobre uma colina”. Reagan embelezou um pouco, chamando-a de “cidade brilhante em uma colina”.

A ideia de uma cidade sobre uma colina é reconfortante. Sugere o que George Bush falou: que os Estados Unidos são um farol de liberdade e democracia. As pessoas podem olhar para nós, aprender e nos imitar.

Na realidade, nunca fomos apenas uma cidade sobre uma colina. Alguns anos depois que o governador Winthrop proferiu suas famosas palavras, o povo da cidade em uma colina partiu para massacrar os índios Pequot. Aqui está uma descrição de William Bradford, um dos primeiros colonos, do ataque do capitão John Mason a uma aldeia Pequot.

Aqueles que escaparam do fogo foram mortos com a espada, alguns cortados em pedaços, outros atravessados com seus floretes, de modo que foram rapidamente despachados e muito poucos escaparam. Foi concebido que eles destruíram cerca de 400 neste momento. Foi uma visão terrível vê-los assim fritando no fogo e as correntes de sangue extinguindo-os, e horrível era o fedor e o cheiro disso; mas a vitória parecia um doce sacrifício, e eles deram o louvor a Deus, que havia operado tão maravilhosamente por eles, encerrando assim seus inimigos em suas mãos e dando-lhes uma vitória tão rápida sobre um inimigo tão orgulhoso e insultante.

O tipo de massacre descrito por Bradford ocorre repetidas vezes enquanto os americanos marcham para o oeste até o Pacífico e para o sul até o Golfo do México. (Na verdade, nossa célebre guerra de libertação, a Revolução Americana, foi desastrosa para os índios. Os colonos foram impedidos de invadir o território dos índios pelos britânicos e a fronteira estabelecida em sua Proclamação de 1763. A independência americana eliminou essa fronteira. )

Expandir para outro território, ocupar esse território e lidar duramente com as pessoas que resistem à ocupação tem sido um fato persistente da história americana desde os primeiros assentamentos até os dias atuais. E isso foi muitas vezes acompanhado desde muito cedo por uma forma particular de excepcionalismo americano: a ideia de que a expansão americana é divinamente ordenada. Na véspera da guerra com o México em meados do século 19, logo após a anexação do Texas pelos Estados Unidos, o editor e escritor John O'Sullivan cunhou a famosa frase “destino manifesto”. Ele disse que era “o cumprimento de nosso destino manifesto de espalhar o continente designado pela Providência para o livre desenvolvimento de nossos milhões que se multiplicam anualmente”. No início do século 20, quando os Estados Unidos invadiram as Filipinas, o presidente McKinley disse que a decisão de tomar as Filipinas veio a ele uma noite quando ele se ajoelhou e orou, e Deus lhe disse para tomar as Filipinas.

Invocar a Deus tem sido um hábito dos presidentes americanos ao longo da história do país, mas George W. Bush tornou isso uma especialidade. Para um artigo no jornal israelense Ha'aretz, o repórter conversou com líderes palestinos que se encontraram com Bush. Um deles relatou que Bush disse a ele: “Deus me disse para atacar a Al Qaeda. E eu os golpeei. E então ele me instruiu a atacar Saddam, o que eu fiz. E agora estou determinado a resolver o problema no Oriente Médio.” É difícil saber se a citação é autêntica, especialmente porque é tão letrada. Mas certamente é consistente com as afirmações frequentemente expressas de Bush. Uma história mais confiável vem de um apoiador de Bush, Richard Lamb, presidente da Comissão de Ética e Liberdade Religiosa da Convenção Batista do Sul, que diz que durante a campanha eleitoral Bush disse a ele: “Acredito que Deus quer que eu seja presidente. Mas se isso não acontecer, tudo bem.”

A ordenação divina é uma ideia muito perigosa, especialmente quando combinada com poder militar (os Estados Unidos têm 10.000 armas nucleares, com bases militares em cem países diferentes e navios de guerra em todos os mares). Com a aprovação de Deus, você não precisa de padrão humano de moralidade. Qualquer pessoa hoje que reivindica o apoio de Deus pode ficar envergonhada ao lembrar que as tropas de choque nazistas tinham inscrito em seus cintos, “Gott mit uns” (“Deus conosco”).

Nem todo líder americano reivindicou sanção divina, mas persistiu a ideia de que os Estados Unidos tinham uma justificativa única para usar seu poder para se expandir pelo mundo. Em 1945, no final da Segunda Guerra Mundial, Henry Luce, dono de uma vasta rede de empresas de mídia – Time, Life, Fortune – declarou que este seria “o século americano”, que a vitória na guerra deu aos Estados Unidos o direito de “exercer sobre o mundo todo o impacto de nossa influência, para os propósitos que considerarmos adequados e pelos meios que considerarmos adequados”.

This confident prophecy was acted out all through the rest of the 20th century. Almost immediately after World War II the United States penetrated the oil regions of the Middle East by special arrangement with Saudi Arabia. It established military bases in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and a number of Pacific islands. In the next decades it orchestrated right-wing coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, and gave military aid to various dictatorships in the Caribbean. In an attempt to establish a foothold in Southeast Asia it invaded Vietnam and bombed Laos and Cambodia.

The existence of the Soviet Union, even with its acquisition of nuclear weapons, did not block this expansion. In fact, the exaggerated threat of “world communism” gave the United States a powerful justification for expanding all over the globe, and soon it had military bases in a hundred countries. Presumably, only the United States stood in the way of the Soviet conquest of the world.

Can we believe that it was the existence of the Soviet Union that brought about the aggressive militarism of the United States? If so, how do we explain all the violent expansion before 1917? A hundred years before the Bolshevik Revolution, American armies were annihilating Indian tribes, clearing the great expanse of the West in an early example of what we now call “ethnic cleansing.” And with the continent conquered, the nation began to look overseas.

On the eve of the 20th century, as American armies moved into Cuba and the Philippines, American exceptionalism did not always mean that the United States wanted to go it alone. The nation was willing—indeed, eager—to join the small group of Western imperial powers that it would one day supersede. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote at the time, “The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion, and their present defense all the waste places of the earth. . . . As one of the great nations of the world the United States must not fall out of the line of march.” Surely, the nationalistic spirit in other countries has often led them to see their expansion as uniquely moral, but this country has carried the claim farthest.

American exceptionalism was never more clearly expressed than by Secretary of War Elihu Root, who in 1899 declared, “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the world began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.” At the time he was saying this, American soldiers in the Philippines were starting a bloodbath which would take the lives of 600,000 Filipinos.

The idea that America is different because its military actions are for the benefit of others becomes particularly persuasive when it is put forth by leaders presumed to be liberals, orprogressives. For instance, Woodrow Wilson, always high on the list of “liberal” presidents, labeled both by scholars and the popular culture as an “idealist,” was ruthless in his use of military power against weaker nations. He sent the navy to bombard and occupy the Mexican port of Vera Cruz in 1914 because the Mexicans had arrested some American sailors. He sent the marines into Haiti in 1915, and when the Haitians resisted, thousands were killed.

The following year American marines occupied the Dominican Republic. The occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic lasted many years. And Wilson, who had been elected in 1916 saying, “There is such a thing as a nation being too proud to fight,” soon sent young Americans into the slaughterhouse of the European war.

Theodore Roosevelt was considered a “progressive” and indeed ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912. But he was a lover of war and a supporter of the conquest of the Philippines—he had congratulated the general who wiped out a Filipino village of 600 people in 1906. He had promulgated the 1904 “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which justified the occupation of small countries in the Caribbean as bringing them “stability.”

During the Cold War, many American “liberals” became caught up in a kind of hysteria about the Soviet expansion, which was certainly real in Eastern Europe but was greatly exaggerated as a threat to western Europe and the United States. During the period of McCarthyism the Senate’s quintessential liberal, Hubert Humphrey, proposed detention camps for suspected subversives who in times of “national emergency” could be held without trial.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, terrorism replaced communism as the justification for expansion. Terrorism was real, but its threat was magnified to the point of hysteria, permitting excessive military action abroad and the curtailment of civil liberties at home.

The idea of American exceptionalism persisted as the first President Bush declared, extending Henry Luce’s prediction, that the nation was about to embark on a “new American Century.” Though the Soviet Union was gone, the policy of military intervention abroad did not end. The elder Bush invaded Panama and then went to war against Iraq.

The terrible attacks of September 11 gave a new impetus to the idea that the United States was uniquely responsible for the security of the world, defending us all against terrorism as it once did against communism. President George W. Bush carried the idea of American exceptionalism to its limits by putting forth in his national-security strategy the principles of unilateral war.

This was a repudiation of the United Nations charter, which is based on the idea that security is a collective matter, and that war could only be justified in self-defense. We might note that the Bush doctrine also violates the principles laid out at Nuremberg, when Nazi leaders were convicted and hanged for aggressive war, preventive war, far from self-defense.

Bush’s national-security strategy and its bold statement that the United States is uniquely responsible for peace and democracy in the world has been shocking to many Americans.

But it is not really a dramatic departure from the historical practice of the United States, which for a long time has acted as an aggressor, bombing and invading other countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama, Iraq) and insisting on maintaining nuclear and non-nuclear supremacy. Unilateral military action, under the guise of prevention, is a familiar part of American foreign policy.

Sometimes bombings and invasions have been cloaked as international action by bringing in the United Nations, as in Korea, or NATO, as in Serbia, but basically our wars have been American enterprises. It was Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who said at one point, “If possible we will act in the world multilaterally, but if necessary, we will act unilaterally.” Henry Kissinger, hearing this, responded with his customary solemnity that this principle “should not be universalized.” Exceptionalism was never clearer.

Some liberals in this country, opposed to Bush, nevertheless are closer to his principles on foreign affairs than they want to acknowledge. It is clear that 9/11 had a powerful psychological effect on everybody in America, and for certain liberal intellectuals a kind of hysterical reaction has distorted their ability to think clearly about our nation’s role in the world.

In a recent issue of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, the editors write,

Today Islamist terrorists with global reach pose the greatest immediate threat to our lives and liberties. ... When facing a substantial, immediate, and provable threat, the United States has both the right and the obligation to strike preemptively and, if need be, unilaterally against terrorists or states that support them.

Preemptively and, if need be, unilaterally; and against “states that support” terrorists, not just terrorists themselves. Those are large steps in the direction of the Bush doctrine, though the editors do qualify their support for preemption by adding that the threat must be “substantial, immediate, and provable.” But when intellectuals endorse abstract principles, even with qualifications, they need to keep in mind that the principles will be applied by the people who run the U.S. government. This is all the more important to keep in mind when the abstract principle is about the use of violence by the state—in fact, about preemptively initiating the use of violence.

There may be an acceptable case for initiating military action in the face of an immediate threat, but only if the action is limited and focused directly on the threatening party—just as we might accept the squelching of someone falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater if that really were the situation and not some guy distributing anti-war leaflets on the street. But accepting action not just against “terrorists” (can we identify them as we do the person shouting “fire”?) but against “states that support them” invites unfocused and indiscriminate violence, as in Afghanistan, where our government killed at least 3,000 civilians in a claimed pursuit of terrorists.

It seems that the idea of American exceptionalism is pervasive across the political spectrum.

The idea is not challenged because the history of American expansion in the world is not a history that is taught very much in our educational system. A couple of years ago Bush addressed the Philippine National Assembly and said, “America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people. Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.” The president apparently never learned the story of the bloody conquest of the Philippines.

And last year, when the Mexican ambassador to the UN said something undiplomatic about how the United States has been treating Mexico as its “backyard” he was immediately reprimanded by then–Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell, denying the accusation, said, “We have too much of a history that we have gone through together.” (Had he not learned about the Mexican War or the military forays into Mexico?) The ambassador was soon removed from his post.

The major newspapers, television news shows, and radio talk shows appear not to know history, or prefer to forget it. There was an outpouring of praise for Bush’s second inaugural speech in the press, including the so-called liberal press (The Washington Post, The New York Times). The editorial writers eagerly embraced Bush’s words about spreading liberty in the world, as if they were ignorant of the history of such claims, as if the past two years’ worth of news from Iraq were meaningless.

Only a couple of days before Bush uttered those words about spreading liberty in the world, The New York Times published a photo of a crouching, bleeding Iraqi girl. She was screaming. Her parents, taking her somewhere in their car, had just been shot to death by nervous American soldiers.

One of the consequences of American exceptionalism is that the U.S. government considers itself exempt from legal and moral standards accepted by other nations in the world. There is a long list of such self-exemptions: the refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty regulating the pollution of the environment, the refusal to strengthen the convention on biological weapons. The United States has failed to join the hundred-plus nations that have agreed to ban land mines, in spite of the appalling statistics about amputations performed on children mutilated by those mines. It refuses to ban the use of napalm and cluster bombs. It insists that it must not be subject, as are other countries, to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

What is the answer to the insistence on American exceptionalism? Those of us in the United States and in the world who do not accept it must declare forcibly that the ethical norms concerning peace and human rights should be observed. It should be understood that the children of Iraq, of China, and of Africa, children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as American children.

These are fundamental moral principles. If our government doesn’t uphold them, the citizenry must. At certain times in recent history, imperial powers—the British in India and East Africa, the Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, the Dutch and French in Southeast Asia, the Portuguese in Angola—have reluctantly surrendered their possessions and swallowed their pride when they were forced to by massive resistance.

Fortunately, there are people all over the world who believe that human beings everywhere deserve the same rights to life and liberty. On February 15, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, more than ten million people in more than 60 countries around the world demonstrated against that war.

There is a growing refusal to accept U.S. domination and the idea of American exceptionalism. Recently, when the State Department issued its annual report listing countries guilty of torture and other human-rights abuses, there were indignant responses from around the world commenting on the absence of the United States from that list. A Turkish newspaper said, “There’s not even mention of the incidents in Abu Ghraib prison, no mention of Guantánamo.” A newspaper in Sydney pointed out that the United States sends suspects—people who have not been tried or found guilty of anything—to prisons in Morocco, Egypt, Libya, and Uzbekistan, countries that the State Department itself says use torture.

Here in the United States, despite the media’s failure to report it, there is a growing resistance to the war in Iraq. Public-opinion polls show that at least half the citizenry no longer believe in the war. Perhaps most significant is that among the armed forces, and families of those in the armed forces, there is more and more opposition to it.

After the horrors of the first World War, Albert Einstein said, “Wars will stop when men refuse to fight.” We are now seeing the refusal of soldiers to fight, the refusal of families to let their loved ones go to war, the insistence of the parents of high-school kids that recruiters stay away from their schools. These incidents, occurring more and more frequently, may finally, as happened in the case of Vietnam, make it impossible for the government to continue the war, and it will come to an end.

The true heroes of our history are those Americans who refused to accept that we have a special claim to morality and the right to exert our force on the rest of the world. I think of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist. On the masthead of his antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, were the words, “My country is the world. My countrymen are mankind.”

Colaborador

Howard Zinn (1922-2010), autor de A People's History of the United States, foi historiador e dramaturgo. Este ensaio é adaptado de uma palestra que ele deu para o Programa Especial de Estudos Urbanos e Regionais do MIT.

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