IMPERIALISM AND THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST MIND
Lewis Feuer
Prometheus Books, 1986
265 pp.
THE TEARS OF THE WHITE MAN
Pascal Bruckner
The Free Press, 1986
244 pp., $17.95
Of all the words that expressed the revolt against Western civilization that broke loose in the 1960s, "imperialism" was the most loaded, the mot convenient, the most popular. To be classified as an imperialist was just about the worst thing that could happen to you or your nation. Remember:
·The U.S. intervention in Vietnam, which, in view of everything that has been learned (and relearned) about the intentions and deeds of the communist North Vietnamese, can only be called heroic and selfless - though it ended in ignominious failure - was referred to by elites throughout the Western world as an instance of brutal and unnecessary "imperialism."
·The unfair way blacks and other minorities were treated in the United States was said to be a consequence of "imperialism," of which racism was merely a side effect. According to the influential book Black Power, by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, blacks constituted an "internal colony" of the American empire, and they had more in common with other "Third Worlders," such as the Vietnamese (at least the Vietnamese of Carmichael's imagination), than with other Americans.
·Something called "U.S. imperialism" suddenly became the unexamined cause of problems such as - and this is a short list - racial segregation in South Africa; imperfect democracy in South Korea and the Republic of China; authoritarianism in Iran and kleptocracy in Nicaragua; low wages in Brazil; overcrowding in Mexico City; unhappiness in general.
This all-purpose whipping boy, U.S. imperialism, was a gift from heaven for anyone either too lazy to look at facts objectively or too ambivalent about his own worth to entertain the notion that his nation and civilization might not be entirely guilty for the world being the way it is. If the truth be told, however, it was really a gift from the Comintern: for it was in the early years of the international communist movement, after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, that Lenin and Trotsky and their followers reversed the traditional Marxist view of the essentially benign effects of Western colonialism in undeveloped parts of the world and decided that "the way to Berlin was through Kabul." This justified their own revolution, which by Marxist reasoning should not have happened in backward Russia before advanced western Europe, and also gave them a long term world strategy: encirclement of the wealthy cities by way of the poor countryside.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the communists were concerned with establishing political presences wherever they could, and 'imperialism' was a term they sued to denigrate their enemies - in Asia, when the communists faced the Japanese and the British, this was not entirely inappropriate. In the era of decolonization following World War II, however, the only power that actively tried to
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