The Battle for the Hemisphere

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The New York Sun

If New York University professor Greg Grandin were a better writer, he’d be having a field day with what he surely intends as a polemical broadside on U.S. foreign policy in Central America. As it is, he has produced an unreadable tract; it doesn’t even succeed as screed, with its half-developed characters, dazed and confused narratives, turgid and academic prose. Tom Paine, he’s not. Gore Vidal, he’s not either.


What Mr. Grandin does have in “The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War” (University of Chicago, 336 pages, $22) is evidence obtained from the CIA and other government files that suggests considerable and serial U.S. meddling in what is usually referred to as the “internal affairs” of Guatemala. One of the countries that put the banana in republic before there was a shop, Guatemala has a particularly nasty and violent history. And even though you can hear the axe grinding, or in Mr. Grandin’s case boring, all through this humorless and earnest volume, let’s assume for the moment that he has the goods.


Let’s assume that the United States engaged in a sustained effort to prevent the Marxist left from capturing another country in this hemisphere. In sustaining this effort, let’s also assume that bad things happened and injustices occurred. Although Mr. Grandin never proves his case for the book’s title – that the massacre of Mayan activists was the inevitable result of escalating U.S-sponsored violence – let’s even assume that some U.S. policymakers were complicit in some of the more unsavory activity.


As Mr. Grandin himself points out repeatedly, the United States was at war with the Soviet Union and its surrogates throughout this period. It was a cold war, but a dangerous one. Just because it was finally won doesn’t mean there weren’t close calls and it certainly doesn’t mean that victory was guaranteed. Even Mr. Grandin makes no pretense that Marxists and their fellow-travelers weren’t actively engaged in the struggle for Guatemala. But whenever possible he gives them the benefit of the doubt, and he certainly has been less than diligent in researching communist strategy and machinations.


The Freedom of Information Act does not yet apply in Havana, so it may be understandable that we have much more information on the CIA’s role in Guatemala than Cuba’s. We do know that Che Guevera had a hand in the Guatemala movement and that he was concerned that Cuba not turn out the way Guatemala did. What is curious, however, is the lack of research in Soviet archives. Surely there must be some interesting insights there into Soviet attitudes, motives, and “active measures.” These archives have been especially helpful recently in shedding light on the Spanish Civil War, for example. Oh well, that’s a very different book, and almost anyone in town could write it better than Mr. Grandin.


Here with, a representative sample of the prose:



Rather than dissolving his identity in a larger ideological solution, as Marxism is often accused of doing, the Communist Party helped Reyes emerge from an exploitative, deeply deadening system to develop a sharpened sense of himself as a critical being able to observe, act in, and change the world.


The book begins with a reference to Ariel Dorfman, the leftist playwright who served in the government of the deposed Chilean president, Salvador Allende. Mr. Dorfman likens the events of September 11 to the fall of Mr. Allende (also on September 11, in 1973) at the hands of Augusto Pinochet. Whatever one thinks of Mr. Pinochet and/or Allende, Mr. Grandin’s uncritical appreciation of this analogy sets the tone and establishes the political compass for this book. The book ends with a meditation on the fate of a Chilean peasant and political activist who was forced underground by the Pinochet regime. He concludes with a statement that the collateral damage from Cold War politics in Latin America is that “Democracy is now but a shade of its former substance.”


There is a palpable yearning in this book for the return of Popular Front politics – the kind that animated the left almost from the beginning of Bolshevism in Russia. It reached its apogee in the struggle against Franco in Spain and it was finally discredited, as Mr. Grandin concedes, when many liberals and even socialists increasingly saw the totalitarian left as conservatives always had – namely as a mortal threat to liberty and basic human rights.


In a revelatory note to the book’s preface, Mr. Grandin has a “Who’s Who” of scholars who have contributed to what he calls “the assaults on the belief that individual freedom and socialism (are) mutually reinforcing.” The list includes not only the usual suspects like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, but many more contemporary names like Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Ronald Radosh, who have written recently and powerfully on the efforts of the Communist Party to penetrate and influence U.S. and European institutions after World War II. Much of their evidence has come from the Soviet archives, which became available after the fall of the Berlin Wall.


There is a good book to be written on U.S. policy blunders and successes in Central America. This certainly isn’t it. On the larger question of whether the Cold War was a struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of tyranny, Mr. Grandin clearly is straining to find moral equivalence. I would refer him to the more tempered view of Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote this in the 1950s, when the world was in the early stages of that long struggle:


If I accept, as millions of other Western Europeans do, that America is destined to be the mainstay of freedom in this mid-twentieth century world, it does not follow that American institutions are perfect, that Americans are invariably well-behaved, or that the American way of life is flawless. It only means that in one of the most terrible conflicts of human history, I have chosen my side, as all will have to choose, sooner or later.



Mr. Willcox, the former editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest magazine, is a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Bush administration.


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