The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (96 page)

The Soviets had a further advantage. They knew better than anyone how to arm illiterate peasants with cheap, reliable and user-friendly weapons. Mikhail Kalashnikov made his first rifle in 1947 – hence the abbreviated name AK-(
Automat Kalashnikov
)47 – just as the pace of decolonization was quickening and superpower relations were worsening. Such weapons were shipped in crate-loads to Third World countries, part of a low-profile small arms race running parallel to the headline-grabbing nuclear arms race. It was not long before the AK-47 became the Marxist guerrilla’s weapon of choice. What could the Americans do in response? Aside from simply yielding the southern hemisphere to Khrushchev and his successors, there were three possibilities. They could prop up or resuscitate the old colonial regimes that the Third World Lenins were aiming to destroy. That did not come easily to US leaders, with their deep-rooted anti-imperial assumptions, but there were places where they were willing to try it. No one complained in Washington, for example, when the British defeated the Communists in Malaya. The Americans also encouraged the British to prolong their informal sphere of influence in the smaller states of the Persian Gulf. A more appealing response was to find pro-American freedom fighters – in other words, to back democratic political parties that favoured multi-party elections, not to mention free markets. But experience in Eastern Europe and Asia immediately after the Second World War tended to suggest that true liberals were perilously weak in relatively backward societies. Fresh in the memories of all American policy-makers were the examples of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the rest, where all the non-Communist political parties had effectively been snuffed out or emasculated. And, lest these memories fade, the Soviets did not hesitate to crush outbreaks of popular dissent in their European satellites – in East Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968 and Gdańsk in 1981.

The third option for American foreign policy was to fight dirty – as dirty, in fact, as the Soviets. In practice, Soviet victories always meant dictatorship and the repression that comes with it. For the Americans,
it was therefore tempting to back anyone who showed signs of being able to beat the Soviet-backed revolutionaries, even if it meant imposing a capitalist dictatorship instead. The problem with this was that very quickly the United States found itself tainted by association with and support for regimes that were every bit as vicious as the worst Communist tyrannies of Eastern Europe or Asia. Worse, it was seldom clear beyond all reasonable doubt that the dictators backed by Washington were always the lesser evil, since the popular movements they crushed generally did not have the chance to show their true colours in power. Those left-wing leaders who were overthrown or murdered by CIA-backed regimes swiftly became martyrs not only in Soviet propaganda but also in the liberal press of the West. While experience strongly suggested that Marxists showed scant respect for human rights once in power, those who never made it to power or who held it only briefly could always be given the benefit of the doubt. Like Jekyll and Hyde, then, American foreign policy in the Cold War seemed to come in two guises: by day talking the language of freedom, democracy and the shining city on a hill; by night using dirty tricks to stymie suspected Soviet clients and to promote local ‘strongmen’ – a polite term for dictators. Nowhere was this more obvious than in what the United States regarded as its own geopolitical backyard: Central America, the birthplace of the dictum: ‘It doesn’t matter if he’s a sonofabitch, so long as he’s our sonofabitch.’ This was the hard essence of what some commentators called realism.

In their last days in power in Guatemala, the Communists had resorted to mass arrests, torture and executions. Now the tables were turned. With American encouragement, a list was compiled of 72,000 suspected Communist sympathizers. Yet, just as the Soviets had found in Cuba, the Americans were soon reminded that Central (and South) American puppets came with few strings attached. By the mid-1960s, paramilitary death squads like the
Mano Blanca
(White Hand) were roaming the Guatemalan streets and countryside, engaging in what the US State Department admitted were kidnappings, torture and summary executions. Soon the Americans had to admit that, in the words of Thomas L. Hughes, the ‘counter-insurgency’ was ‘running wild’. CIA agent John Longan was sent in to bring the situation under control. But his Operation Cleanup was anything but clean. Between
March 2 and 5, 1966, more than thirty leftist leaders, among them the former trade union leader Victor Manuel Gutiérrez, were arrested and taken to the Guatemalan military’s headquarters at Matamaros. There they were tortured and killed. The Guatemalan military then put their bodies in sacks and dropped them out of a plane into the Pacific. The CIA memo outlining the operation stated simply: ‘The execution of these persons will not be announced and the Guatemalan government will deny that they were ever taken into custody.’ That was what the CIA meant by a cleanup: a dirty war that left no incriminating fingerprints. Operation Cleanup introduced what was to become the signature tactic of proxy Cold War violence in Latin America, the ‘disappearance’ of opponents. Over the next thirty years more than 40,000 people would disappear in Guatemala. It was the same story in other military regimes in the region – in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile.
Los Desaparacidos
became a euphemism for those murdered by the military. With good reason, Viron Vaky, second-in-command of the US embassy in Guatemala, lamented the ‘tarnishing’ of America’s image in the region.

Yet who exactly was being made to disappear? As far as the CIA was concerned, the answer was simply Communist sympathizers, potential revolutionaries whom Moscow might already have recruited to its side in the Cold War. In reality, however, the social conflicts that bedevilled the Third World throughout the Cold War were often as much ethnic conflicts as they were ideological. In this respect, the Third World’s War had much in common with the War of the World; it was the old violence in new premises. Just as the Cold War in Angola was essentially a tribal battle for power between the primarily Kimbundo MPLA and the mainly Ovimbundu UNITA, so too in Guatemala the struggle between government and ‘subversion’ had a distinctly ethnic character. Guatemalan society was hierarchically ordered, with the relatively well-off Ladino descendants of conquistadors and their native concubines at the top, and the land-hungry indigenous peoples at the bottom. The proxy war that the CIA was underwriting in Guatemala was therefore not so much a war between capitalists and communists as a war between Ladino
latifundista
and Mayan peasants. Accused of sympathizing with the communist Guerrilla Army of the Poor, Mayan tribes like the Ixil and Kekchí were
subjected not only to wholesale massacres but also to forced relocation and incarceration in ‘strategic hamlets’. Hundreds of villages identified as ‘red’ were literally obliterated; their inhabitants tortured, raped and murdered; their homes destroyed and the surrounding forests burned. When the civil war was finally brought to an end in the 1990s, the total death toll had reached around 200,000. Because so many of the victims were Mayan, the Guatemalan military was deemed by the UN-sponsored truth commission to have committed an act of genocide.

The truth about the Cold War, then, is that in most of the southern hemisphere the United States did almost as little for freedom as the Soviet Union did for liberation. American policy involved not only the defence of West European democracies like Italy, France and West Germany, which there is no doubt the Soviets tried their level best to subvert; it also meant the maintenance of dictatorships in countries like Guatemala where Communism–sometimes real, sometimes imagined – was fought by means of the mass slaughter of civilians. This meant that the supposed ‘long peace’ of the Cold War was on offer only to American and Soviet citizens and those in immediate proximity to them in the northern hemisphere. For a large proportion of the world’s citizens, there was no such peace. There was only the reality of a Third World War, a war that involved almost as much ethnic conflict as the First and Second World Wars before it. It was a war that by the late 1960s the United States showed every sign of losing.

When Richard Nixon was inaugurated as President on January 20, 1969, it was becoming hard for Americans to feel optimistic about the Cold War. Their much vaunted capitalist system, which Nixon himself had proudly showcased in Moscow ten years earlier, was faltering. Inflation was rising but, contrary to the Keynesian economic rules of the 1960s, unemployment was refusing to come down. Imports were growing faster than exports; meanwhile, foreigners were rapidly losing their fondness for the dollar, making it harder to finance the resulting deficits. American society itself seemed to be fragmenting. There were race riots in the inner cities and demonstrations in the
universities; young fought old, black fought white, redneck fought hippy, student fought cop. Race was one of the main bones of contention. During the 1960s, an alliance of educated African-Americans and white liberals had waged a successful campaign to overthrow the system of racial segregation still operating in the states of the South. As late as 1967, for example, sixteen states still had laws prohibiting racial intermarriage. It was only with a Supreme Court judgment, in
Loving v. Virginia
, that legal prohibitions on interracial marriage were ruled unconstitutional throughout the United States, though Tennessee did not formally repeal the relevant article of its constitution until March 1978 and Mississippi only in December 1987. The political effects of these struggles were in fact more profound than their social effects, for racial integration advanced relatively slowly even when permitted. Nixon won the 1968 election mainly because the Democratic vote was split over the civil rights issue, with nearly ten million voters (13.5 per cent of the total) backing the racist Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, and his American Independent Party.

The biggest source of domestic conflict, however, was not race but Vietnam, the location of one of those many civil wars that were blown out of all proportion by the Cold War. From a military point of view, the war was not unwinnable, but from a political point of view it was already lost before Nixon took office, because of waning popular support. Nixon knew he had to end the war; from an early stage, it was the key to his strategy for re-election in 1972. But he did not want to end it on North Vietnamese terms. He therefore adopted an elaborate strategy of carrots and sticks. The carrots were American troop reductions. The sticks were strategic bombing raids on a scale that ultimately matched the combined efforts of all the air forces in the Second World War. Unfortunately, the more carrots Nixon offered, the more the North Vietnamese became convinced it was worth holding out, no matter how many explosive sticks he threw at them. It was time to change Cold War tactics; to abandon the strategy of war by proxy in favour of great-power diplomacy.

During the spring and summer of 1969, US government officials had watched the ideological and political split between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China escalate into fighting on
the border in Manchuria – proof that this region remained as prone to strategic earthquakes as ever. There was a real possibility that the Soviet Union might launch attacks on Chinese nuclear weapons facilities. But to Nixon and his National Security Adviser, the Harvard historian Henry Kissinger, this was not a crisis, but an opportunity. Kissinger had never wholly accepted the idea that the world since 1945 had been divided into two mutually antagonistic blocs. In reality, he believed, the twentieth century was, for all its polarized political rhetoric, not all that different from the nineteenth. Others might see the Cold War as a crude game of chicken. To Kissinger, it was more like classical diplomatic chess. Just as Bismarck had sought to enhance German power by playing the other powers off against one another, Kissinger now sought to improve America’s position by exploiting the Sino-Soviet antagonism. ‘The deepest rivalry which may exist in the world today’, he declared in September 1970, ‘is that between the Soviet Union and China.’ It had been one thing for Yugoslavia, Romania or Albania to break away from the embrace of Moscow. None counted as a great power and, as long as their dictators stuck to the principles of one-party rule and the planned economy, the Soviets could afford to shrug their shoulders. China, with its vast population, was a different matter. It was not so much that Kissinger expected the Chinese to bale the Americans out in Vietnam; rather, he believed an opening to Beijing would force the Soviets to listen to American proposals for a Strategic Arms Limitation agreement.
Detente
was Kissinger’s watchword: a reduction in superpower tension aimed at halting the increasingly burdensome nuclear arms race. Both sides now had enough warheads to obliterate each other’s populations several times over. First strikes were out because both sides were clearly capable of retaliatory second strikes. What was the point in building ever more numerous, ever more lethal missiles?

The problem was that this plan meant doing business with China, where no American official had set foot since 1949. Nor did this seem an especially opportune moment to re-establish diplomatic ties. In the late 1960s China was in the grip of a second wave of Maoist radicalism, the Cultural Revolution. Officially, this was an attempt by Chairman Mao to resist bureaucratic tendencies and revive revolutionary fervour. In reality it was a lethal power struggle at the top of the
Communist Party which unleashed a ghastly generational conflict. Formed into Red Guards and later Revolution Committees, young militants were encouraged by Mao to subject their teachers and other figures of authority to beatings, torture and ritualized humiliation. In the summer of 1966, more than 1,700 people were beaten to death in Beijing alone. Some victims were killed by having boiling water poured over them; others were forced to swallow nails. More than 85,000 people were exiled to the countryside, where they were forced to work in ‘reform-through-labour’ camps. At Beijing University during the ‘Cleansing the Class Ranks’ campaign of 1968, suspect teachers were forced publicly to confess their ‘problems’ and to denounce each other. Those identified as counter-revolutionaries were subjected to investigation by so-called
zhuan an
groups, which often involved torture. Teachers were held in an improvised jail called the
niupeng
(ox shack). The teachers themselves were referred to as
niuguisheshen
(‘ox ghosts and snake demons’). Many were driven to suicide. Pan Guangdan, a professor of anthropology and translator of Darwin’s works, told a friend: ‘I used to follow a three S’s strategy: surrender, submit and survive. Now I added a fourth S: succumb.’ At least twenty-three faculty members at Beijing University were ‘persecuted to death’ in this way. (The Red Guards referred to suicide as ‘alienating oneself from the Party and people’.) In 1970, during the campaign against the ‘Four Olds’ (old ideals, culture, customs and habits), around 280,000 people were labelled as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ or ‘capitalist-roaders’ and arrested. All this was done in the name of and at the instigation of Mao, who was revered as a god. In the morning and evening, people had to line up in front of his portrait and chant: ‘May the great leader Chairman Mao live ten thousand years’. They sang songs like ‘Chairman Mao is the Sun That Never Falls’. In all, between 400,000 and a million people are believed to have died in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. In the words of William Buckley, a Republican journalist close to Kissinger, rapprochement with Beijing meant dealing with murderers who put South American dictators in the shade. Indeed, Mao’s totalitarian regime was now clearly on a par with Stalin’s Soviet Union when it came to persecuting its own citizens.