Addicted To Deception: What Passes For History These Days

I ran into a most peculiar book the other day--a comic book presentation of American foreign policy, titled, Addicted to War: Why The U.S. Can't Kick Militarism. What worries me is that a piece of inaccurate and deceptive trash like this has been adopted by the San Francisco Board of Education. As I've mentioned in the past:

I have some sympathy for the point of view that says that U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of other countries have often been counterproductive to democracy, capitalism, and human rights. Libertarian critics of U.S. foreign policy claim that our intervention in Central American countries in the early twentieth century was driven by commercial interests. Major General Smedley Butler's War is a Racket makes this claim concerning Nicaragua and Haiti--both places where Butler played a major role in the operations. (There's nothing quite as gauche as Butler walking into the Haitian Congress in 1915 and telling them to go home; he was now in charge.)

However: when I have dug through newspapers of the period, for example, the 1909 intervention at Bluefields, Nicaragua, I often find that the evidence as to intent is complex. Yes, there were often commercial interests that had a clear reason to encourage those interventions. The U.S., for example, ran Nicaragua's customs service for a couple of decades until the tariffs paid off the debts that Nicaragua owed to certain U.S. banking interests.

But there were often legitimate reasons for U.S. intervention as well, such as protection of U.S. citizens in the midst of chaotic civil wars. Sometimes, we stepped in because the locals were behaving in a manner that was offensive to any proper notion of civil rights--for example, when the President of Haiti was literally ripped limb from limb in the streets of Port-au-Prince. And sad to say, in many of these countries, it wasn't that we were intervening on the side of bad guys at the expense of the good guys. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti, and Cuba are all examples of places where the differing factions were arguing over who got to exploit and brutalize the peasants.

Cold War realpolitik took a bad situation in many parts of the world, and made it worst. Lyndon Johnson's famous remark, "He may be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch" captures this rather well. We often chose one thug over another thug because the other thug had allied himself with Moscow. Aggravating this was that local thugs played Moscow vs. Washington for their benefit as well--and usually to the detriment of the peasants who just wanted to be left alone.

There are serious criticisms of our pragmatic foreign policy out there, not only by academics, but by politicians:

We seek democracy in that region for the same reasons we spent decades working for democracy in Europe -- because freedom is the only reliable path to peace. If the Middle East continues to simmer in anger and resentment and hopelessness, caught in a cycle of repression and radicalism, it will produce terrorism of even greater audacity and destructive power. But if the peoples of that region gain the right of self-government, and find hopes to replace their hatreds, then the security of all free nations will be strengthened. We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability. We have learned our lesson; no one's liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend on the freedom of others. And so, with confidence and resolve, we will stand for freedom across the broader Middle East.

Addicted to War, however, does not qualify as a serious criticism--it is such a distorted and inaccurate portrayal of U.S. foreign policy history that even though many of the individual facts contained within it are true (or at least appear to be true), it is in total, a lie.

The entire book is visible starting here. For example, page 1 blames the problems of local schools not having enough toilet paper on military spending--ignoring that nearly all school funding is from state and local governments--not the federal government. But as part of the author's deception, page 1 claims that "A huge part of the money that the IRS takes out of our paychecks goes to support the military," and shows a pie chart that claims that 51% of all discretionary spending in 2004 is for the military.

But that's a very misleading statement, because discretionary spending is less than half the budget. I couldn't find the 2004 budget data, but the 2008 budget data is here. On page 4 of that document you can see a breakdown of 2007 federal spending, with 20.1% of the federal spending going to defense spending, 18.5% going to non-defense discretionary, 20.4% going to Medicare/Medicaid, and 20.9% to Social Security. Defense spending is actually less than we spend on Medicare/Medicaid. (A minor quibble--but payroll taxes aren't the only source of federal revenue. This spreadsheet shows the breakdown of revenue sources, and all payroll taxes combined for 2004 are about 82% of the federal receipts.)

On page 2, Addicted to War claims that cutbacks in social programs "have caused far more devastation than any foreign army ever has." That's a strong claim--but where are these cutbacks in social programs? Over what period of time? Could we get some specifics?

I ask because this table shows spending by budget function from 1940 to 2011. Here's the inflation adjuster data; from 1940 to 2007, inflation has caused a 14.56 times decrease in the value of the dollar. Therefore, the 1940 Human Resources budget category spending of $4,139,000,000 would be equivalent to $60,273,368,000 in 2007. But the 2007 Human Resources budget estimate is 1,787,609,000,000--or 29x larger. Our population has more than doubled since 1940, but even adjusting the Human Resources budget for both inflation and population change, we are spending more than 12x as much per person on social spending today as we did in 1940.

Page 4 is a statement of how the Indians were slaughtered and driven off their lands--but the problem is that it is a statement that is only partly correct, and often quite incorrect. There's some pretty shameful history in this area, but many of the lands east of the Mississippi were acquired by purchase. Sometimes the persons selling the lands weren't authorized by the rest of the tribe to make the sale; sometimes, the people doing the buying were breaking federal law by doing so (which required Congressional approval of such purchases); sometimes, alcohol was used to "lubricate" the process. Many of the lands that Indian tribes legitimately sold were because the presence of so many settlers had driven much of the game away, and the tribe decided that they were better off moving west. To make a single bald statement such as this one about Indian removal is so often false that it qualifies as deceptive.

Page 5's version of the Spanish-American War is so sloppy as to be inaccurate. It is precisely "progressive" Democratic sorts like William Randolph Hearst who pushed the U.S. to invade and liberate Cuba--and Republicans like President McKinley resisted those calls as long as they could. The claim that Spain was already on the verge of defeat by independence movements in Cuba and the Philippines is nonsense.

For example, Addicted to War devotes most of pages 10 and 11 to World War II--and asserts that our involvement in World War II was because of our desire to expand our economic empire. There is no mention that Japan attacked the U.S., and that Germany declared war on the U.S. before we declared war on them. Addicted to War neglects to mention that liberating Europe from German military forces was one of the goals--and of course, there's no mention of that little unpleasantness that Allied forces broke up at Auschwitz, Dachau, and hundreds of lesser known concentration camps across Europe. (After all, that's something that only military intervention could have stopped.)

Page 12 reduces the entire Cold War to a struggle for world domination. There's no mention of one fundamental difference between the Soviet Union and the United States: one of them censored opposing political ideas; prohibited its citizens from leaving the country; murdered millions of its own people, sometimes because they were political dissenters, but often because it was a police state built around paranoia; and in general, did not tolerate dissent such as Addicted to War.

To give you some idea of how utterly delusional Addicted to War is, go look at the first page of chapter 7, where he explains that the reason that Americans support our foreign policy is because news organizations are cheerleaders for it.

Addicted to War has a list of notes, but looking through the notes makes you realize that this guy started out with a conclusion, and then looked for sources that would agree with him. Hence, the grossly distorted history. He relies very heavily on Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and a number of books by Noam Chomsky, and several books published by International Publishers, the Communist Party USA's publishing arm.

Now, there's nothing wrong with using sources such as these to get a broad range of viewpoints--but reading his list of sources makes you realize that the author did not even try to get more than one perspective--hence, it is not just the layout that is a comic book, but also the ideas contained therein.

One of the great weaknesses of Marxist reductionism (of which Addicted to War is a prime example), is that the real world is more complex than simple formulae. What is especially troubling is not that this is amateur history written by someone who hasn't a clue about the expectations of intellectual integrity, like certain other books of similar accuracy, but the author turns out to be a professor:

Joel Andreas began following his parents to demonstrations against the Vietnam War while in elementary school in Detroit. He has been a political activist ever since, working to promote racial equality and worker's rights inside the United States and to stop U.S. military intervention abroad.

After working as an automobile assembler, a printer, and a civil engineering drafter, he completed his doctoral degree in sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles, studying the aftermath of the 1949 Chinese Revolution. He now teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

I am also aware that there are some universities that are using this dishonest piece of trash; it says quite a lot about the low standards of the academic community, doesn't it?