25 Books That Should Be On Every Progressive's Reading List

(Editor's note from 2013: Back in the day, somebody asked me for a list of books they should read, and here's what I came up with. Feel free to let me know what else should be included.)

U.S. Power Structure

1. Democracy For The Few (1974) by Michael Parenti

2. Who Rules America Now (1983) by G. William Domhoff

3. The Power Elite (1956) by C. Wright Mills

4. Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (1980) by Bertram Gross

5. The Democratic Facade (1991) by Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R. Judd Brooks

Race, Sex, and Class in America

1. Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement (1970) by Robin Morgan, ed.

2. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991) by Susan Faludi

3. The New American Poverty (1984) by Michael Harrington

4. A People's History of the United States (1980) by Howard Zinn

5. America's Struggle Against Poverty, 1900-85 (1986) by James T. Patterson

6. Two Nations: Black and White, Separate and Unequal (1992) by Andrew Hacker

7. Race Matters (1994) by Cornel West

The Mass Media - Ownership, Control, and Effects on Democracy

1. The Media Monopoly (1983) by Ben Bagdikian

2. Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media (1986) by Michael Parenti

3. Manufacturing Consent (1988) by Noam Chomsky

4. The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives (1989) by Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis

5. Make Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment (1992) by Michael Parenti

6. Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985) by Neil Postman

7. Don't Blame The People: How the News Media Uses Bias, Distortion, and Censorship to Manipulate Public Opinion (1972) by Robert Cirino

U.S. Foreign Policy/International Relations

1. The Age of Imperialism: Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy (1969) by Samuel Magdoff

2. The Political Economy of Human Rights: Washington and Third World Fascism (1979) by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman

3. Betraying The National Interest: How U.S. Foreign Aid Threatens Global Security By Undermining The Political and Economic Stability of the Third World (1982) by Frances Moore Lappe, Rachel Schurman and Kevin Danaher

4. The Vast Majority: A Journey To The World's Poor (1977) by Michael Harrington

5. How The Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons For World Hunger (1976) by Susan George

6. The World Since 1945 (1987) by T.E. Vadney

The Revolt by Menachem Begin: Legitimizing Terrorism

Menachem Begin was the prime minister of Israel from 1977-1983, while leader of the conservative Likud party. Earlier, he had played a key role in the establishment of Israeli statehood as one of the primary leaders of the Irgun organization, a private Zionist army formed in the late 1930s which "advocated terrorist tactics equal to those used by Arabs who attacked individual Jews." (Smith, p 100). Begin's book The Revolt, which documented Irgun's development, was first published in English in 1951.

Chapter IV - We Fight, Therefore We Are

Here, Begin explores the reasons behind what he terms the Jewish "revolt" that led to the founding of the state of Israel. Note that the title of his book itself implies that this struggle was mainly a Jewish-British conflict in which the Jews of Palestine rose up against their British oppressors. This is the overriding theme of Begin's entire narrative, which functions to downplay the historical importance of Arab-Israeli conflict over Palestine.

In addition to the implicit desire of the Jews to escape what Begin paints as British colonial control, Begin identifies two additional reasons for the "revolt" - the ongoing slaughter of millions of European Jews in Hitler's concentration camps during WWII and Britain's simultaneous refusal to permit more Jewish immigration to Palestine.

Begin thus directly blames Britain for at least part of the death toll of the Holocaust. He claims that British Intelligence knew what was happening to Jews in the concentration camps, "but they remained silent" (p 26). He discusses British complicity in the fate of several refugee ships bound for Israel that sank in the Mediterranean (p 35). According to Begin, this was all part of Britain's overall plan to ensure continued postwar control of Palestine, by "achieving the maximum reduction in the number of Jews liable to seek to enter the land of Israel" (p 28). Methodically, Begin builds a case for Britain's interest in Palestine. He mentions the large numbers of Englishmen among the earliest Zionist emigres to Israel (p 29), and the geo-political significance of Palestine, situated astride the Suez Canal and "athwart the road to India" (p 31).

Begin explains British policies such as extending protection to Jews in Palestine before the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and issuing the Balfour declaration in 1917 as Machiavellian maneuvers designed to designed to shroud her colonial interests in a cloak of benevolence (p 29). He outlines for his readers his vision of what he terms "the British Master Plan" (p 32), whereby Britain would maintain control of Palestine by pitting Jews and Arabs against one another, which would allow the British to continually pose as a neutral adjudicator between warring parties (p 31).

Begin thus blames growing Arab resistance to Zionism in the decades preceding WWII on British provocation. "Arab riots and attacks could be easily brought about...the Arabs were encouraged, sometimes quite openly (by the British), to organize attacks on the Jews" (p 31). Begin concludes his description of the "British Master Plan" for Palestine by portraying Britain's intentions behind limiting Jewish immigration into Ersatz Israel (as outlined in the final 1939 White Paper) as yet another attempt to "ghettoize" the Jews, this time in their own homeland, by granting them "a strictly proportional share - about one third - in the government" (p 33). A compelling parallel is thus drawn with the previous historical experiences of oppression faced by European Jewry. This allows Begin to neatly sidestep the question of whether it was legitimate for Zionist forces to maneuver to gain a numerical majority in a land already occupied by another people, the Palestinian Arabs.

He concludes this chapter by constructing a narrative that casts the Israeli "revolt" in historic, heroic terms with religious underpinnings. He explains that the struggle was a natural outgrowth of events (i.e., global anti-semitism culminating in the Holocaust) having forced the Jews to take up arms in order to defend their existence as a people. Begin describes the "new generation (which) grew up and turned its back on fear...it began to fight instead of plead" (p 40).

"For nearly two thousand years, the Jews, as Jews, had not borne arms...we gave up our arms when we were exiled from our country. With our return to the land of our fathers our strength was restored" (p 40).

Simultaneously, Begin's narrative invokes the right of a people to self-defense and the historic Jewish "right" to Palestine in order to justify the creation of the state of Israel.

Chapter V - Logic of The Revolt

Next, Begin purports to matter-of-factly describe several of the socio-political factors important to the success of the "revolt." As I see it, Begin's three primary objectives in writing this chapter were slightly less dispassionate than this, but very important to the overall themes of his book. These objectives were to (1) further the idea that the Zionist conquest of Palestine was an anti-colonial struggle waged against the British, (2) assign all blame for the conflict over Palestine to British imperialism and undue Arab hostility towards the Jews, and (3) to dehumanize the Palestinian Arabs and make them appear to be a more "backwards" people than the Israeli Jews.

By weaving an analysis of British imperialism into his narrative (p 52), Begin skillfully furthers the notion that the conflict in Palestine should be seen as a classic anti-colonial struggle. The proof that this analysis is used for purposes more rhetorical than factual comes in the following few paragraphs, when Begin reveals that this insightful analysis of British imperialism taught the Israeli forces...not much, only that it was necessary to destroy the British government's "prestige" in order to undermine its authority (p 52).

At every opportunity, Begin absolves the Jews of any and all blame for the conflict over Palestine. He again blames the British for inciting Arab violence against Jews - "throughout the revolt, the Government spared no effort to turn back the tide, to convert the Anglo-Jewish struggle into an Arab-Jewish conflict. The Arab contacts of both the Haganah and the Irgun Zvai Leumi often told of the visits of government agents to Arab villages and of their inciting speeches to the Arabs" (p 48). He also wastes no time in assigning the remaining blame for the conflict on undue Arab hostility towards the Jews, usually using inflammatory, obviously biased language.

"The historical facts of the Arab attacks are known: the pogrom in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1920, the murderous attack in Jaffa in 1921, the blood-bath of 1929, the incessant campaign of violence from 1936 to 1939...these one-sided attacks" (emphasis added) (p 48).

Again and again, Begin uses negative descriptive language and makes sweeping, stereotypical generalizations that tend to dehumanize the Palestinian Arabs. For example, "the Arabs who, while they cannot be accused of undue cowardice, are not regarded as particularly courageous" (p 48), or "the Arabs, it is true, do not read much" (p 49). Repeatedly, Begin paints a picture of the Palestinian Arabs as childlike, uneducated, easily excitable, prone to violence and the pleasures of the flesh.

"Their (the Arabs') only subject of conversation was the attack on the headquarters of Authority. They were full of wonderment. Their excitable imagination was fired" (p 49). "The fact that the mighty British government...failed to put an end to our struggle...exercised a very healthy influence on the Arabs. Their imagination did the rest" (p 50). "They anticipated that Tel Aviv, its buildings, and its daughters, (emphasis added) would be delivered up to the Palestine Arabs" (p 50).

Chapter XI - The "Altalena" Affair

This chapter actually provides only background information to Begin's full discussion of the "Altalena" affair, which involved a shipment of arms to Israel aboard the vessel "Altalena" in June, 1948, which left port in France later than planned and was thus due to arrive in Israel immediately following the first United Nations declared truce. Begin's objectives in this chapter seem to be to describe the circumstances that Israeli forces found themselves in during this period of the struggle (i.e., to provide reasons why more armaments were needed), and to discuss another incident crucial to the founding of the state of Israel: the conquest of Dir Yassin, the first Arab village to be captured by Jewish forces.

Begin precedes his discussion of Dir Yassin with an almost parallel exploration of the Arab conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem. His sharply differing treatments of both events are unintentionally revealing. Whereas Begin stresses that inhabitants of the Old City caught in the battle were "a section of the civilian population among whom were many women and children" (p 161), regarding Dir Yassin, repeated references are made to the "Arab troops," "the fire of the enemy," "to overcome the enemy...our troops were forced to fight for every house." Furthermore, he claims that civilians at Dir Yassin were given evacuation warnings by attacking Israeli troops. In other words, Begin does everything possible to downplay the significance of civilian casualties at Dir Yassin.

Source: The Revolt (1951) by Menachem Begin

Female Support Systems: Buffering The Effects of Patriarchal Oppression

An Analytical Paper based on Incidents In The Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs and Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog

Since Europeans first invaded the New World five hundred years ago, America has been a patriarchal society. Men have held most of the strings of true power, occupying central positions in the ownership and management hierarchies of government, business, educational institutions, and the church. The system of patriarchal control derives its greatest strength from the false notion that there are two distinct spheres of human activity. The first is the public sphere of politics, business, etc., which is meant to be the domain of men; the second is the domestic sphere of raising children, cooking, and housework, supposedly ordained to be the domain of women.

Patriarchy thus has served the interests of all males by providing a legitimate social framework for men to avoid primary responsibility for performing some of life's hardest, most repetitive daily work, as well as denying women full access to opportunities that might place them on an equal footing with men in their intellectual, personal, and sexual relations, such as education and economic independence. It has also specifically served the interests of elite males by functioning as a mechanism of social control. Although the majority of men in America and throughout the world are economically exploited by a capitalist ruling class, under the ideological frameworks of male-dominated societies, even the most oppressed males can always feel superior to the women in their lives.

Compelling narratives of resistance to such oppression include works by Harriet Ann Jacobs (Incidents In The Life of a Slave Girl), Mary Crow Dog (Lakota Woman), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings), and Agnes Smedley (Daughter Of Earth).

Collectively, these four largely autobiographical narratives reveal how different American women living in different times were forced to confront sharply diverging oppressive experiences under an omnipresent patriarchal system. A close reading of the texts reveals that all four women authors responded to and resisted the individual circumstances of their oppression in often similar ways.

One of the most recurring paths of resistance shared by these women authors was to buffer themselves from the system's most debilitating and dehumanizing effects. This was often done by forming close friendships with others around them who were being similarly oppressed for reasons of gender, namely, other women. By closely examining two of these narratives, Harriet Ann Jacobs' Incidents In The Life of a Slave Girl and Mary Crow Dog's Lakota Woman, I hope to provide an overview of how women's friendships with other women helped create protective social enclaves - female support systems within an overall gender-oppressive social order.

Mary Crow Dog's resistance was shaped from early on by the examples set by strong, independent women in her own family. Her grandmother, although a staunch Catholic and very set in her beliefs that "she was helping me (Mary) by not teaching me Indian ways" (Crow Dog, p 22), was very influential in making Mary aware of her heritage.

"When it came to basics, (she was) all Sioux, in spite of the pictures of Holy Mary and the Sacred Heart on the wall...She also spoke the Sioux language, the real old-style Lakota, not the the modern slang we have today. And she knew her herbs, showing us how to recognize the different kinds of Indian plants, telling us what each of them was good for" (Crow Dog, p 19).

She also learned of traditional Sioux ways from other female members of her family, such as her great aunt, and Elsie Flood, her grandmother's niece. Elsie Flood was a medicine woman, a "turtle woman," and she was very instrumental in Mary's early spiritual development (Crow Dog, p 23-25).

Her mother, although at first adamantly opposed to Mary's involvement with the Native American Church and the American Indian Movement (AIM), later expressed support for the choices her daughter had made. This conversion took place after the birth of Mary's daughter at Wounded Knee and her subsequent arrest and separation from her baby (Crow Dog, p 167). The potential inherent in female solidarity was underscored by this event. It was a time of crisis sparked by the system's injustice and intimately connected to the gender-specific oppression her daughter faced that resulted in this reconciliation.

A fairly well-developed female support system sustained Harriet Ann Jacobs (writing under the pen name Linda Brent) throughout her struggle against the hardships of slavery. Her early life was similar to Mary Crow Dog's in that she was blessed with a family network of close female relatives, several of them strong, independent women who she could model her own behavior after.

Harriet's grandmother, or "Aunt Marthy," as she was known, was the most notable. The daughter of a South Carolina planter who was freed upon his death but then captured and sold back into slavery (Jacobs, p 3), Aunt Marthy was extremely intelligent and hard-working. She hired out her baking services to other households in her mistress' community, saving the profits in order that she might eventually purchase her children (Jacobs, p 4). Upon her mistress' death, it looked as if Aunt Marthy might again be sold, but instead she benefitted from the kindness of another woman. She was purchased for $50 by the seventy-year old sister of her deceased mistress, who then proceeded to free her (Jacobs, p 10).

Through unrelenting toil, Harriet's grandmother was able to purchase her own house (p 15). Later, as Harriet grew older, this would be a place where she would take frequent refuge from her daily routine of servitude to her cruel master, Dr. Flint. When Harriet finally escaped from slavery, at the age of twenty-one (Jacobs, p 100), her grandmother's household became an even more literal place of refuge for her, as she hid in an attic crawl space above Aunt Marthy's shed for seven long years.

Harriet's Great-Aunt Nancy was also one of Dr. Flint's slaves. She provided Harriet with constant support and assistance during the years she spent as a slave, and an important refuge from her master's attempted sexual advances (Jacobs, p 31). She encouraged Harriet in her hopes for freedom, consoled her in times of distress and served as a source of information for her concerning Dr. Flint's doings during the period of Harriet's confinement.

Harriet's relationships with women beyond her circle of relatives and the important roles they played in her fight for freedom reveals the possibilities for struggle inherent in such a female community of resistance. Her close slave friend Sally aided her when she ran away from Dr. Flint's plantation (Jacobs, p 98). During her concealment at the house of a (female) friend of her grandmother's, a slave named Betty assists her repeatedly and conceals her presence from other less trustworthy slaves (Jacobs, p 101-114). Her friend Fanny escapes towards the end of Harriet's confinement in her grandmother's garret, and provides her with much needed company and support during their mutual voyage Northward as stowaways (Jacobs, p 153-164).

In particular, her relationships with white women show how the female solidarity created in response to one form of oppression carried over into another battleground. When Harriet's free-born lover wanted to purchase her, she enlisted a woman friend of her master's to intercede and try to persuade Dr. Flint to sell her (Jacobs, p 37-38). Dr. Flint's great aunt Miss Fanny, the woman who had manumitted Harriet's grandmother by purchasing her for $50, maintained an ongoing interest in the condition of her children and grandchildren (Jacobs, p 91). A friend of Harriet's grandmother who had known her from childhood, whose husband was a slaveholder himself, was the first person to hide Harriet immediately following her escape (Jacobs, p 101). Mrs. Bruce, who employed Harriet in the North after hes escape from slavery, became her close friend and supported her attempts to overcome racial prejudice and discrimination (Jacobs, p 180).

The numerous white women, Southern and Northern, who reached across racial lines to help Harriet at various stages of her struggle is in keeping with the massive female involvement in the anti-slavery petition-gathering movement of the 1820s and 1830s (Zinn, p 121). It suggests that women responded to the patriarchal oppression their sex resigned them to by finding common cause with victims of other forms of injustice.

In contrast, Mary Crow Dog's relationships with white women were fewer and less important to her narrative. When she was seven or eight, she made friends with a little white girl, still untainted by the racism of her parents, whose mother chased Mary out of her house with a butcher knife. (Crow Dog, p 21) When her husband Leonard was imprisoned in a maximum security prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, she lived with a white couple in New York order to be near him (Crow Dog, p 112). In 1969 or 1970, Mary met a white girl around eighteen or twenty years old who had hitchhiked onto the Rosebud Reservation from New York.

"She was different from any other white person we had met before...I think her name was Wise. She was the first real hippie or yippie we had come across. She told us of people called the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Weathermen. She said, 'Black people are getting it on. Indians are getting it on in St. Paul and California. How about you?' She also said, 'Why don't you put out an underground paper, mimeograph it. It's easy. Tell it like it is. Let it all hang out.'" (Crow Dog, p 36).

It was this meeting that inspired Mary and her full-blood friends Charlene and Gina to rebel against their Catholic mission school's power structure by publishing just such an underground newspaper.

For Mary, these white women (and others who she met through movement activities) were the exceptions. Most whites, men and women alike, who she encountered growing up in the Dakotas were racist and incapable of true empathy or solidarity with the battles she faced as an Indian woman. The real source of the strength she derived from her own female support system came from her close relationships with Indian women. Her Catholic school friendships with Charlene Left Hand Bull and Gina One-Star (Crow Dog, p 36-37) helped her to realize she was not alone in her suffering at the hands of the school authorities, and encouraged her to rebel. She became close friends with a Blackfoot woman named Bonnie from Seattle (Crow Dog, p 50) who she shoplifted with and experienced sexual harassment. Her closest friend was a MicMac Indian named Annie Mae Aquash, who Mary met at the occupation of Wounded Knee, and who was later killed under suspicious circumstances. "She (Annie Mae) was a remarkable woman, strong hearted and strong-minded, who had a great influence on my thinking and on my way of life." (Crow Dog, p 138-139).

On one level, Mary Crow Dog faced more hardships than Harriet Ann Jacobs in her struggle against sexism because patriarchy was also present in her own culture. This is not to suggest that male domination was absent in the slave community Harriet sprang from, simply that under slavery, male domination in the form of unequal division of physical labor and sexual exploitation between male and female slaves was imposed from above, an injustice inherent in the slave system itself. For Mary Crow Dog, the broader white society was patriarchal, but in some respects, so was her own culture. The traditional Sioux view of women's role in society and religion was somewhat more open and accomodating than white society's, but there were limits.

"Just as men competed for war honors, so women had quilling and beading contests. The women who made the most beautiful fully beaded cradleboard won honors equivalent to a warrior's coup. The men kept telling us, 'See how we are honoring you...' Honoring us for what? For being good beaders, quillers, tanners, moccasin makers, and child bearers. That is fine, but..." (Crow Dog, p 66).

She articulated her own rejection of this ideology. "Some of those old macho Sioux proverbs like 'Woman should not walk before man' I did not think were meant for me" (Crow Dog, p 200). However, it deprived her of a cultural support system that would have complemented the relationships that comprised her female support system.

Despite what the corporate-owned media would like us to believe, the fight for equality between the sexes is hardly won. American women still face sex discrimination at nearly every level of society, and still must struggle daily against the all-pervasive patriarchal mythology which would resign them to lives spent barefoot and pregnant in the bedroom and the kitchen, forsaking education and employment to focus on wifehood and motherhood. This ongoing struggle has characterized American women's history since our country's inception, and in the process has crippled many women's lives and minds.

However, as happens so often when the indomitable human spirit is faced with oppression, some women have always endured, fought back, and triumphed against the patriarchal system bent on destroying them. We can find extensive evidence of this resistance in the lives of such American women as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Emma Goldman, Mother Mary Jones, Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, Helen Keller, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Rosa Parks, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and countless others (Zinn, p 322-339). To this list, the names of Harriet Ann Jacobs and Mary Crow Dog should be forcefully added.

Sources:

Incidents In The Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Ann Jacobs

Lakota Woman (1990) by Mary Brave Bird (formerly Mary Crow Dog)

A People's History of The United States (1980) by Howard Zinn

Unintended Consequences of U.S. Involvement in the Korean War

The U.S. Response to the Korean Invasion of 1950: A Study of Predetermined Policy Implementation and Unintended Consequences

On June 25, 1950, the Cold War turned hot. The battleground was Korea, a country divided into U.S.-Soviet spheres of influence since 1945, and hostilities were initiated when North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. Acting on the assumption that the North Korean government was a Kremlin puppet regime, and the invasion therefore a clear case of Soviet-backed Communist aggression (Hunt, p 5), the U.S. response was swift. President Truman committed U.S. air and naval forces to the defense of Korea on June 27, and ordered U.S. ground troops based in Japan to proceed to Korea on June 30 (Ambrose, p 121).

However, the U.S. response to the June 25 invasion also included a series of other regional foreign policy steps which went far beyond what was necessary for the immediate defense of South Korea. The U.S. Seventh Fleet was dispatched to the waters surrounding Formosa (Taiwan), ostensibly to prevent any Chinese communist attack on Formosa. U.S. forces stationed in the Philippines were strengthened and increased military aid was provided to the Philippine government, at the time engaged in crushing the nationalist peasant Huk movement (Ambrose, p 119/Document 14). U.S. military aid was also further extended to the French, then fighting Ho Chi Minh's nationalist Vietminh in Indochina.

Taken together, these additional steps lend credence to the hypothesis that the outbreak of fighting in Korea presented U.S. policymakers with a pretext for implementing previously-agreed upon Cold War foreign policy objectives. Meeting with President Truman and his other advisors on June 25 and 26, Secretary of State Acheson was quick to spell out the numerous additional steps he thought should be taken to ensure regional security as part of the U.S. response to the Korean invasion, obviously initiatives long-planned and agreed to without debate or surprise from the President.

No wonder, since they fit perfectly with the foreign policy prescriptions contained within the Truman Administration's own NSC 68 of April, 1950, which essentially called for the U.S. "to assume unilaterally the defense of the non-Communist world...to assume the role of world policeman" (Ambrose, p 113). This meant a doubling or tripling of the U.S. defense budget, which stood at less than $13 billion in 1950 (Ambrose, p 112).

At this point in Cold War history, two of Truman's political objectives converged: the need to justify such greatly increased defense expenditures and his political need in the face of then-emerging McCarthyism to prove to the country that he and the Democrats were not soft on Communism. A Communist tide seemed to be rising in the Far East: Japanese Communist demonstrations against American military bases in Japan; the fall of China to the CCP and subsequent Nationalist retreat to Formosa, where a Chinese Communist invasion seemed imminent; full-scale civil war in Vietnam between the French and Communist/Nationalist Vietminh; "petty dictator" Syngman Rhee's loss of popular support in U.S.-backed South Korea and growing demands for immediate unification from the Communist-controlled North (Ambrose, p 116-118). It was obvious to Truman that bolstering his anti-Communist credentials and "the whole package envisioned in NSC 68, in short, could be wrapped up and tied with a ribbon by an Asian crisis" (Ambrose, p 116).

This does not imply that the North Korean invasion was a U.S.-fabricated event, as most historians have labeled the Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964 - although a case could be made that U.S. officials such as Secretary of State Dean Acheson may have encouraged the North Koreans to act by making public statements to the effect that South Korea was strategically peripheral to the U.S. Nor does it point to the existence of a conspiracy in the Truman Administration to hide these other regional foreign policy initiatives from the U.S. public. The additional steps taken by the U.S. in the days following June 25 were initially justified as necessary in case the Korean invasion was only a prelude to a wider regional conflict (Hunt, p 5). In any event, these measures were all in keeping with previous publicly stated U.S. Cold War containment aims.

Regardless, these additional security measures had long-range consequences for U.S. foreign policy. Specifically, increased military and intelligence aid to the Philippine government resulted in U.S.-guided suppression of the nationalist Huk movement, a peasant movement based more around legitimate land reform grievances than Marxist-Leninist ideology. It laid the groundwork for direct U.S. involvement in the election of a string of Philippine rulers more responsive to U.S. interests than the interests of their own people, the first being Ramon Magsaysay (elected in 1953), and later, the corrupt dictator Ferdinand Marcos (Bonner, p 38-44).

In Vietnam, the extension of U.S. military aid to the French announced by President Truman on June 27, 1950 marked the beginning of three decades of tragic U.S. involvement in Indochina. This particular initiative, ostensibly aimed at containing communism and thus protecting U.S. interests, would ultimately bear fruit in the form of more than 58,000 American lives lost, over 300,000 wounded, an estimated 1.6 million civilian and military Vietnamese deaths, more than 2 million killed in Cambodia during the turmoil of the 1970s, and a total cost to the U.S. government over twenty-five years of more than $150 billion in pre-1975 dollars (Vadney, p 341).

The preceding facts and statistics underscore the lesson inherent in this tale of unintended consequences. In the long-term interests of our nation's security and relations with the world around us, American policymakers must learn the wisdom of allowing policies conceived behind closed doors to undergo vigorous public debate before proceeding with their implementation.

The War in Vietnam Was Censored by the Mainstream Media

The U.S. press, particularly television news, is credited with bringing the Vietnam War home to millions of Americans, thus inciting their impassioned opposition. Walter Cronkite's doubts about the war, which he voiced on-air following the 1968 Tet offensive, are often considered to have turned the tide of public support against the war.

However, before mid-1967 not even tentative criticism of U.S. war aims or policies appeared in the mainstream media. Even when many respected sources began to express their dissent, the media continued to give the administration's views on the war the largest amount of coverage.

From 1945 to 1954, the United States spent several billion dollars supporting a ruthless French colonialism in Vietnam, but the American public was never informed of this. In the following decade Washington assumed full responsibility for the maintenance of the South Vietnamese right-wing dictatorship, but the public neither read nor heard a word of debate in the media about this major policy commitment.

In 1965 the U.S. government began a massive buildup of ground forces in Vietnam, but Americans were told the troops were merely a small support force. The New York Times and other major news agencies knew the real nature of the escalation but felt it was in the "national interest" to keep this information from the public.

As press critics have pointed out, the media, with few exceptions, censored the worst of the war, saying almost nothing about the massive saturation bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the "free-fire" zones, U.S.-sponsored torture, the Phoenix death squad program, the massive destruction of Indochinese rural life, the indiscriminate killing of the civilian population, and the dumping of 12 million tons of Agent Orange and other toxic chemicals on the countryside.

Even in the final years, media coverage was remarkably unwavering in its support for the war. A survey of the editorial stance of thirty-nine leading American newspapers at this time found that while several eventually became more critical of the U.S. military escalation, not one advocated withdrawal from Vietnam, despite the strong antiwar sentiments expressed by millions of people in the U.S. and abroad.

A study of TV coverage between 1968 and 1973 found less than a quarter of the stories of a 180-program sample concerned Vietnam, and only rarely did the stories include pictures of combat. Pictures of the dead or wounded were featured in only about 2 percent of war-related reports; American battlefield dead were never shown; body counts appeared only as pictureless statistics. A study funded by the U.S. Army in 1988 rejected the notion that negative press coverage was responsible for eroding public support for the war. The American people were alienated not by the news coverage but by the casualties.

After the war, the news media tried to put the best face on U.S. involvement, describing it as either a well-intentioned venture gone awry or a foolish mistake.

"Left out of this view was any thought that (our leaders) had waged a horrific war in support of a dictatorship and against a largely civilian population to prevent a popularly supported but (communist) social order from gaining power." (Parenti, p 176).

Relying on the establishment news media, America was left with the impression that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, rather than the murderous intervention itself, was the only thing Americans needed to regret.

Source: Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media by Michael Parenti (1986)

Fire From The Mountain by Omar Cabezas: The Mountain as Revolutionary Motivator

Everyone needs some sort of meaning in their lives. Humanity's search for guiding principles around which to structure and make sense of our existence on earth is perhaps our oldest intellectual pursuit. For some, this meaning is found in adherence to religious beliefs. The notion that a higher spiritual order exists is a powerful one. To think that our earth and all its inhabitants were created by a supreme being provides many people with the universally sought after sense of being a part of things, of having some understanding of the true meaning of life.

For the revolutionary social movement, religion may play a part in providing a pre-existing framework around which to organize recognition of and resistance to whatever injustices the movement is battling. It is likely, however, that during the course of the struggle, alternative conceptions of life's meaning will also need to be formulated. There are many reasons why people might need additional, more temporal motivations beyond religious ones in order to engage in revolutionary activity, if only because not everyone believes in religion!

Religion is also a contradictory social force; on one hand, most religions are theoretically forthright in condemning injustice, but in everyday practice tend to be conservative and status quo-affirming. Some faiths go as far as to proclaim that if injustice exists, it must be God's will, and in any event, things will be better for true believers once they reach the afterlife. In this respect, religion offers little hope as a motivating force for earthbound social revolution.

As revealed in the pages of Omar Cabezas' Fire From The Mountain, the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua found inspiration and motivation from a variety of sources. Their revolution was not anti-clerical in nature; indeed, like many Latin American social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, it drew particular strength from the emerging doctrines of liberation theology, which harkened back to early Christianity's emphasis on confrontation with earthly injustice. But the revolution was also a very temporal one, drawing on a nationalist, patriotic tradition of resistance to outside occupiers and internal tyrannies, and hopes for socialist-oriented redistributive economic measures (although not all Sandinistas were Marxist-Leninists).

The nature of the Nicaraguan revolution thus almost mandated that its participants maintain a very down to earth, temporal focus on the revolutionary struggle. This is not to say that the Sandinistas came to see the revolution as an end in of itself, but that they had to remain tightly focused on their daily functioning as guerrillas if they were ever to realize the revolution's broader goals. It was a reality of the struggle made even clearer by the overwhelming nature of the odds they faced, as evidenced by Cabezas' bravado-tinged but truthful admissions that "to decide to join the Frente in those days...was a very extraordinary thing to do, I really believe that" (p 14), since "the Frente was just a few people and probably didn't exist outside of Managua, Leon, and Esteli where a few, bold heroic people had taken up the challenge of history and started to work" (p 15).

Thus, there had to be some primal, temporal motivating force that the revolutionaries could bring to bear on themselves and their recruits in order to maintain a disciplined focus on the struggle, in the true spirit of the Sandinista slogan "Free Homeland or Death." For Cabezas and many of his guerrilla counterparts, this motivating force came from the myth of the mountain.

"When I left for the mountain I went with the idea that the mountain was a tremendous power. We had this myth of the companeros in the mountains, the mysterious, the unknown...and in the city both the people in the underground and those of us working legally always talked about the mountain as a sort of mythical force. It was where our power was, and our arms and our best men; it was our indestructability, our guarantee of a future, the ballast that would keep us from going under in the dictatorship; it was our determination to fight to the end, the certainty that life must change." (p 17)

But the mountain was more than just a source of hope to the Sandinistas. Cabeza came to realize this by coming to grips with his disillusionment when he finally ascended to the main guerrilla camp, and discovered there were no more than fifteen or twenty other Sandinistas in the mountains at that time (p 80-81). Ultimately, the mountain's strength sprang from its transformative powers.

By going into the mountains and undergoing rigorous, unrelenting physical and mental guerrilla training, the first Sandinistas were able to transform themselves into a true revolutionary vanguard, disciplined and totally committed to the struggle. The mountain's power was not merely symbolic, but rather, sprang from the concrete changes it affected in the men who sought refuge in its folds. It was this unswerving focus on the revolution, and the simultaneous rejection of the Sandinistas' past lives that it demanded, that rested at the core of the mountain's power to be a revolutionary motivating force.

The process of transformation began for Cabezas when he first set foot on his physical trek into the mountains.

"And there my Calvary began...a new phase began in my physical life, in my beliefs, in the development of my personality, in everything, in maturity, in everything, everything" (p 53).

It would ultimately involve the endurance of great physical and mental hardships, leading to a toughening of Cabezas' physical strength, agility and stamina, a hardening of his mental resolve and convictions, and ultimately, a wholesale rejection of his former life, replaced by an unswerving focus on the revolutionary struggle.

The physical hardships were many. Marching through the brush and jungles of the mountain provided an abrupt introduction to the rigors of guerrilla life for Cabezas. By dawn of his first night in the mountains, marching with a pack weighing twenty-five pounds, "I was half covered with mud, soaked to the skin, my hands were totally screwed, and wewere starved" (p 57). The guerrillas had to obey many time-consuming and physically debilitating rules in order to escape detection by National Guard patrols, such as not breaking branches (p 58-59), or leaving only one set of footsteps while marching, "over rugged topography...sometimes for half a day" (p 62). All trace of fires had to be hidden (p 71), and to take a shit meant digging a hole and wiping yourself with leaves (p 73-74). Sometimes they would march on the slopes of ridges, rather than the highest ground, "of course the hardest possible place to march" (p 129). Cabezas develops lesymaniasias, or mountain leprosy, which further adds to his sense of physical trial (p 106-109).

Hunger was also a constant companion of the guerrillas. At first a disgusting proposition, eating monkey meat eventually became an everyday fact of life (p 66-70). The guerrillas were lucky, in fact, to eat meat. Usually, rations on marches were more along the lines of "three pathetic tortillas and a few beans for the lot of us, a little bite for everybody" (p 73). "When the meat was gone, we started in on the powdered milk. At first the ration was three little spoonfuls, which we ate as it was, as powder" (p 131).

As unbearable as they were, these hardships physically transformed the Sandinistas who struggled to survive in the mountains. They became physically hardened, and better able to endure the hardships that would lie ahead of them. "Gradually you are mastering the environment, learning to march. Your legs are getting stronger. You learn how to swing a machete...this, in a way, was what helped to forge in each of us the steel that was needed to overthrow the dictatorship" (p 84-85).

The mental transformation that the mountain made possible was just as important. Paradoxically, while the rigors of guerrilla life toughened and hardened the Sandinistas both physically and mentally, it also heightened their sensitivity and capacity for empathy. As Cabezas poetically claims, it was as if "the lack of sugar had created a great inner sweetness, which made it possible for us to be touched to the quick, to make our hearts bleed for the injustices we saw" (p 85). Again and again, Cabezas explains how the guerrillas became like animals in the wilderness, "a few more creatures of the mountain" (p 84), "like animals, prowling in our natural habitat" (p 90).

In the process, their senses were sharpened.

"Day by day you make out the sounds of nature with more clarity and precision, all kinds of sounds...the same thing happens with your eyesight...the same with your sense of smell" (p 101-102).

As happened with their senses, the guerrillas' sense of revolutionary purpose and motivation was similarly heightened. When inspired to find the strength within himself to go further by his superior Tello's exhortations about the "new man," Cabeza realizes that "sometimes not being clear about things makes you give up at the first sign of tiredness, or back down before the first obstacles. It's not true; a man can always give more" (p 94). "And so a spirit was forged that enabled us to endure all the mental and physical hardship. We were developing granite wills in the face of the environment" (p 85).

The physical and mental transformations the mountain effected in the guerrillas were what made the final transformation possible, allowing them to shed their past lives completely and focus solely on the revolutionary struggle. This process began with the casting away of habits and behaviors necessary for survival in the city, but hindrances in the mountains. Cabezas learns no longer to clean his bag when it gets dirty (p 59), his hair gets longer, he "belches right in front of everybody" (p 84). Slowly but surely, the sights and sounds of city life fade from his memory (p 83).

He realizes that in order to become the "new man," fully committed to the revolution, he must kill the old man within himself (p 94). But this will come at a cost, at the cost of "the destruction of his faults, of his vices" (p 94). Cabezas reflects on the nature of his previous life, doing aboveground work for the revolution but falling short of total commitment. "Don't forget where I was coming from - drinking, staying up late, smoking, eating junk, never exercising, then all of a sudden, bam! I was right in the middle of something that called for men" (p 64). And finally, it is his experiences in the mountains that allow him to make this total commitment to the struggle.

"The mountain and the mud, the mud, and also the rain and the loneliness...all these things were cleansing us of a bunch of bourgeois defects, a whole series of vices; we learned to be humble, because you alone are not worth shit up there. You learn to be simple; you learn to value principles. You learn to appreciate the strictly human values that of necessity emerge in that environment. And little by little all our faults faded out"(p 86).

Even before he left for the mountain, Cabezas had felt committed to the revolution. "Once you join (the struggle), and as your work and responsibilities multiply, it's like entering a whirlwind...and you're in to the hilt - you're totally screwed! - and glad of it" (p 13). Yet after his experiences there, Cabezas' commitment would become all consuming.

"That present, though it existed here, did not belong to me. It was the past...and it was too late to recover it, since I wasn't going back. I wasn't going to be able to see my mother or my brothers. I would have to see them on down the line, in the future" (p 215-216).

The mountain became Cabezas' ultimate revolutionary motivation; not as symbol but through the mental and physical transformative struggle it forced him to endure.

Source: Fire From The Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista (1986) by Omar Cabezas