David Brooks Never Saw This Coming
In recent decades, David Brooks has been one of the great
apologists for the U.S. based empire. You may know Brooks from his weekly chinwags
on the PBS News Hour or from his regular columns in the New York
Times. Anyway, he
wrote recently in The Atlantic:
… all my
life I have had a certain idea about America. I have thought of America as a
deeply flawed nation that is nonetheless a force for tremendous good in the
world. From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and
beyond, Americans fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny; we
promoted democracy, funded the Marshall Plan, and saved millions of people
across Africa from HIV and AIDS. When we caused harm—Vietnam, Iraq—it was
because of our overconfidence and naivete, not evil intentions.
But since January 20 of this year, Brooks has started
to wonder.
as I have
watched America behave vilely—toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward
our friends in Europe, toward the heroes in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office—I’ve had trouble describing the anguish
I’ve experienced.
In other words,
it took Brooks until Trump’s second term to suspect something was
amiss. But since then, he says,
I’ve had trouble
describing the anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I’m living through
some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is
moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and
painful.
This all strikes me as a large helping of
self-delusional sheep dip. If anyone had ever been in a position to “see this
coming,” it should have been Brooks.
He might have seen “what was coming” when Congress
passed the so-called Patriot Act in 2001, which contributed directly – long
before Trump – to the intrusive surveillance apparatus that Brooks is finally noticing.
Or he might have seen what was coming in
2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Citizens United v. SEC, “reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions
and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on
elections.”
Or he might have seen it coming in July of 2024 when
the Supreme Court declared
presidents immune from prosecution for any crimes they
might commit as President.
All Those Noble Intentions
Regarding the U.S.’s behavior toward other nations,
Brooks seems to be especially aghast at the rude manner in which Trump and
Vance berated Ukraine president Zelensky on TV.
But apparently, actually invading third
world countries, with the attendant killing of hundreds of thousands of
civilians and the destruction of a nation’s infrastructure, is okay. Visiting
terrible misery on the citizens of Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Serbia,
Kosovo, Palestine, Somalia, and Syria, to name a few, seems never to have caused
Brooks to question the benevolent role of the U.S. in the world.
(We should mention that, after advocating for the
Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq, Brooks later admitted it was a “mistake.” But he
could never get past the official line that the disaster was merely a matter of
“bad intelligence” and nothing more sinister. So a half million Iraqis were
killed and their country completely destroyed? Oops, sorry Iraq. Our intentions
were good.)
Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has dropped
bombs on a minimum of 32
countries. No other country – not Russia, not China, not North
Korea or Iran – has come close to that record.
Speaking of Korea, Brooks should be aware that, in a kind
of dress rehearsal for Viet Nam, the
U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of explosives – including
nearly 33,000 tons of napalm -- on Korea in the early 1950s. Both sides in that
conflict committed war crimes. But the United
States – the supposed protector of human dignity,
"killed
off” by one estimate, “20 percent of the population of North Korea.”
That estimate
was from General Curtis Lemay, coordinator of the bombing campaign and the
prototype for the mad General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove. Lemay
also added this
observation:
"we
eventually burned down every town in North Korea... and some in South Korea
too. We even burned down [the South Korean city of] Pusan -- an accident, but
we burned it down anyway."
If all of this carnage was, as Brooks claims, with no
evil intentions, it’s still hard to explain away the dozens of “regime change”
operations the U.S. has conducted all over the world since World War II. One
study documented 72 regime change efforts before 2016. Another identified
81 interventions in foreign elections.
In practically all cases, these operations resulted in
the installation or protection of psychopathically murderous dictators. One
that Brooks must surely be aware of occurred in Chile in 1973. This was the
famous military coup, generously funded and carefully orchestrated by the
American CIA, in which the legitimately elected president, Salvador Allende,
was replaced by the mass murderer and torturer Augusto Pinochet. Henry
Kissinger summed up the thinking behind that intervention. Said Henry:
The issues are much too important for
the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
No evil intentions there, of course, although, as
later reported
by a Chilean human rights group:
What followed was violent repression on a massive scale. Pinochet’s
military dictatorship defined segments of the Chilean population as
ideological enemies—the “subversives”—and targeted individuals who fit this
profile. The Chilean Army detained thousands of individuals at Chile Stadium,
tortured and murdered hundreds, and organized death squads that traveled
throughout the country executing suspected opponents of the dictatorship.
It should be mentioned
also that, with direct guidance and generous financing from the U.S., Pinochet started
a program of violent repression way beyond Chile.. It was called Operation
Condor, and besides Chile, at least five more of the biggest South American
countries signed up: Uruguay,
Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil.
It’s been estimated that Condor resulted directly in 60,000
deaths, with as many as 30,000 in Argentina alone. Thus the U.S., as Brooks
says, “fought for freedom and human dignity and
against tyranny.”
Reagan
Paves the Way
It’s telling that
Brooks cites Ronald Reagan in particular as one of the great champions of
freedom and human dignity. In his campaign to undermine the leftish government
of Nicaragua, Reagan demonstrated a disdain for U.S. and international law much
like Donald Trump does today. Reagan’s CIA trained and outfitted the so-called Contras to the
point where, as one ex-Contra wrote, in the New York Times:
…the ''contras''
were, and are, a proxy army controlled by the U.S. Government.
If U.S. support
were terminated, they would not only be incapable of conducting any military
activities against the Sandinistas, but would also immediately begin to
disintegrate. I resigned rather than continue as a Central Intelligence Agency
puppet.
In the same piece, the writer, Edgar
Chamorro, observed that the Contra’s main strategy was to terrorize civilians:
During
my four years as a''contra'' director, it was premeditated policy to terrorize
civilian noncombatants to prevent them from cooperating with the Government.
Hundreds of civilian murders, mutilations, tortures and rapes were committed in
pursuit of this policy, of which the ''contra'' leaders and their C.I.A.
superiors were well aware.
In 1986 the International
Court of Justice ruled that the U.S. was violating international law by bankrolling
the Contras, mining Nicaraguan harbors, and attacking Nicaraguan infrastructure.
The U.S. was to cease such operations and pay reparations to the Nicaraguan
government.
Reagan, however, did
not care about international laws that interfered with his vision for the
Western Hemisphere. He kept right on with his proxy war and – surprise! – paid
no reparations. The U.S still owes Nicaragua the money.
Nor did Reagan care
about the laws of his own country as regards Nicaragua. Through a series of
legislative amendments known collectively as the Boland Amendment, Congress increasingly
limited aid to the Contras and specifically forbade any assistance intended to
overthrow the Sandinista government. So Reagan’s people funded them in various
illegal ways, including selling weapons parts to Iran and helping the Contras traffic illicit drugs into U,S.
So much for law and
order.
The
Salvador Option
Meanwhile, in El
Salvador, Reagan found another recently begun civil war and made the violence
worse. That
war, as
one writer said, “pitted leftist revolutionaries against the alliance of
countries, oligarchs, and generals that had ruled the country for decades —with
U.S. support—keeping peasants illiterate and impoverished.”
Reagan, naturally
enough, backed the oligarchs and generals. He spent four billion U.S. dollars
to train and equip death squads whose purpose was to murder and torture
peasants who might be even thinking about joining the revolutionaries.
The war
resulted in some 75,000 civilian deaths. A UN inquiry determined that 85 percent of those murders were conducted by the Reagan-backed Salvadoran
government.
In one incident, U.S.-trained Salvadoran forces
were sent to terrorize the small town of El Mazote. As one
report summarized the action:
They burned
houses and animals, separated the women and children from the men and executed
them. About one thousand people were massacred, with almost half of the victims
being minors. To this day, the El Mozote Massacres mark the largest massacre to
occur in Latin America.
Since the 1980s “the Salvador Option” has entered
the lexicon of strategists in high places. Wikipedia
defines it as “an approach to counter-insurgency warfare involving the use of death squads. “
Reaganomics
If Brooks never noticed
that the U.S. wasn’t the beacon of hope for humanity he wanted it to be, he
ought to have at least noticed the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor
here at home. That gap can easily be traced right back to Reagan’s ridiculous “trickle-down”
economic approach.
Brooks
probably never read an
article from 2019 in a publication called Duke [University] Today
titled “The Road to Trump Began With
Reaganomics & the Loss of the Middle Class, Economist Says”
The economist referred
to is one John Komlos, a professor emeritus of economics and economic history at the University of Munich. “[Reaganomics]
paved the way for Trumpism,” Komlos told an audience at Duke. “That to me is
where our problems started, because it created a great amount of inequality.”
As reported by Duke Today, Komlos went on to cite
… a three-decade process that started with Reaganomics and its tax cuts,
which [Komlos] says favored the rich by increasing their wealth and political
clout. In tax year 1985, for example, he said the top 1 percent gained a
$350,000 windfall while the typical household received $3,500, and the poor
received a couple of hundred dollars (all in today’s dollars).
Komlos went on to explain how Reagan further “hollowed
out” the middle class and paved the way for what was to come.
And what came included the following:
1) “financial deregulation and hyper-globalization
under President Clinton” as he “continu[ed] to pamper the superrich with his
tax policies”;
2) George
H. W. Bush ‘continu[ing] to pamper
the superrich with his tax policies”and
3) “Barack
Obama’s bailing out the super-rich and his disregard of Main Street.”
That last item refers to the enormous bailouts to the very
banks and finance companies who caused the financial crash of 2008. Komlos sees
that event as the last chance to restructure the economy into something less
top-heavy.
“The rich and powerful were on their knees, they were bankrupt,”
Komlos said. “That’s the only time when you could have really put the economy
on a bigger path.”
But instead, the American oligarchs got “the biggest transfer of wealth from
bottom to the top in history of mankind.”
Finally
I confess to having relied heavily in that last section on just
one reference. A few others I would recommend
are here, here, and here.
You can otherwise find all the praises of Reagan you want without
hardly trying, as he has been repackaged by various empire cheerleaders to fit
the childish mythology that too often passes for American history.
To return to David Brooks: Yes, David, you sure as hell should
have seen this coming. It’s too bad your own columns contributed to the
large-scale denial of it.
It is true that Trump has contributed greatly to the takedown of
the U.S. Constitution, to the enormous income gap that threatens the stability
of the country, and to the U.S.’s contempt for human rights abroad.
But none of that started with him, as Brooks wants to believe,
and wants us to believe. Instead, as Christopher
Hedges has noted:
Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not the
cause. He is something vomited up out of [the] decay.