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The
Colonial Revolution
- While weapons have accelerated man's opportunity for self-destruction, the
counter-impulse to life and creation are superbly manifest in the revolutionary
feelings of many Asian, African and Latin American peoples. Against the individual
initiative and aspiration, and social sense of organicism characteristic of
these upsurges, the American apathy and stalemate stand in embarrassing contrast.
- It is difficult today to give human meaning to the welter of facts that
surrounds us. That is why it is especially hard to understand the facts of
"underdevelopment": in India, man and beast together produced 65 percent of
the nation's economic energy in a recent year, and of the remaining 35 percent
of inanimately produced power almost three-fourths was obtained by burning
dung. But in the United States, human and animal power together account for
only one percent of the national economic energy -- that is what stands humanly
behind the vague term "industrialization". Even to maintain the misery of
Asia today at a constant level will require a rate of growth tripling the
national income and the aggregate production in Asian countries by the end
of the century. For Asians to have the (unacceptable) 1950 standard of Europeans,
less than $2,000 per year for a family, national production must increase
21-fold by the end the century, and that monstrous feat only to reach a level
that Europeans find intolerable.
- What has America done? During the years 1955-57 our total expenditures
in economic aid were equal to one-tenth of one percent of our total Gross
National Product. Prior to that time it was less; since then it has been a
fraction higher. Immediate social and economic development is needed -- we
have helped little, seeming to prefer to create a growing gap between "have"
and "have not" rather than to usher in social revolutions which would threaten
our investors and out military alliances. The new nations want to avoid power
entanglements that will open their countries to foreign domination -- and
we have often demanded loyalty oaths. They do not see the relevence of uncontrolled
free enterprise in societies without accumulated capital and a significant
middle class -- and we have looked calumniously on those who would not try
"our way". They seek empathy -- and we have sided with the old colonialists,
who now are trying to take credit for "giving" all the freedom that has been
wrested from them, or we "empathize" when pressure absolutely demands it.
- With rare variation, American foreign policy in the Fifties was guided
by a concern for foreign investment and a negative anti-communist political
stance linked to a series of military alliances, both undergirded by military
threat. We participated unilaterally -- usually through the Central Intelligence
Agency -- in revolutions against governments in Laos, Guatemala, Cuba, Egypt,
Iran. We permitted economic investment to decisively affect our foreign policy:
fruit in Cuba, oil in the Middle East, diamonds and gold in South Africa (with
whom we trade more than with any African nation). More exactly: America's
"foreign market" in the late Fifties, including exports of goods and services
plus overseas sales by American firms, averaged about $60 billion annually.
This represented twice the investment of 1950, and it is predicted that the
same rates of increase will continue. The reason is obvious: Fortune said
in 1958, "foreign earnings will be more than double in four years, more than
twice the probable gain in domestic profits". These investments are concentrated
primarily in the Middle East and Latin America, neither region being an impressive
candidate for the long-run stability, political caution, and lower-class tolerance
that American investors typically demand.
- Our pugnacious anti-communism and protection of interests has led us to
an alliance inappropriately called the "Free World". It included four major
parliamentary democracies: ourselves, Canada, Great Britain, and India. It
also has included through the years Batista, Franco, Verwoerd, Salazar, De
Gaulle, Boun Oum, Ngo Diem, Chiang Kai Shek, Trujillo, the Somozas, Saud,
Ydigoras -- all of these non-democrats separating us deeply from the colonial
revolutions.
- Since the Kennedy administration began, the American government seems to
have initiated policy changes in the colonial and underdeveloped areas. It
accepted "neutralism" as a tolerable principle; it sided more than once with
the Angolans in the United Nations; it invited Souvanna Phouma to return to
Laos after having overthrown his neutralist government there; it implemented
the Alliance for Progress that President Eisenhower proposed when Latin America
appeared on the verge of socialist revolutions; it made derogatory statements
about the Trujillos; it cautiously suggested that a democratic socialist government
in British Guiana might be necessary to support; in inaugural oratory, it
suggested that a moral imperative was involved in sharing the world's resources
with those who have been previously dominated. These were hardly sufficient
to heal the scars of past activity and present associations, but nevertheless
they were motions away from the Fifties. But quite unexpectedly, the President
ordered the Cuban invations, and while the American press railed about how
we had been "shamed" and defied by that "monster Castro," the colonial peoples
of the world wondered whether our foreign policy had really changed from its
old imperialist ways (we had never supported Castro, even on the eve of his
taking power, and had announced early that "the conduct of the Castro government
toward foreign private enterprise in Cuba" would be a main State Department
concern). Any heralded changes in our foreign policy are now further suspect
in the wake of the Punta Del Este foreign minister's conference where the
five countries representing most of Latin America refused to cooperate in
our plans to further "isolate" the Castro government.
- Ever since the colonial revolution began, American policy makers have reacted
to new problems with old "gunboat" remedies, often thinly disguised. The feeble
but desirable efforts of the Kennedy administration to be more flexible are
coming perhaps too late, and are of too little significance to really change
the historical thrust of our policies. The hunger problem is increasing rapidly
mostly as a result of the worldwide population explosion that cancels out
the meager triumphs gained so far over starvation. The threat of population
to economic growth is simply documented: in 1960-70 population in Africa south
of the Sahara will increase 14 percent; in South Asia and the Far East by
22 percent; in North Africa 26 percent; in the Middle East by 27 percent;
in Latin America 29 percent. Population explosion, no matter how devastating,
is neutral. But how long will it take to create a relation of thrust between
America and the newly-developing societies? How long to change our policies?
And what length of time do we have?
- The world is in transformation. But America is not. It can race to industrialize
the world, tolerating occasional authoritarianisms, socialisms, neutralisms
along the way -- or it can slow the pace of the inevitable and default to
the eager and self-interested Soviets and, much more importantly, to mankind
itself. Only mystics would guess we have opted thoroughly for the first. Consider
what our people think of this, the most urgent issue on the human agenda.
Fed by a bellicose press, manipulated by economic and political opponents
of change, drifting in their own history, they grumble about "the foreign
aid waste", or about "that beatnik down in Cuba", or how "things will get
us by" . . . thinking confidently, albeit in the usual bewilderment, that
Americans can go right on like always, five percent of mankind producing forty
percent of its goods.