UH, NIALL, WITH FRIENDS LIKE YOU...

Do the sums, then compare US and Communist crimes from the Cold War Niall Ferguson (The Telegraph, December 11th, 2005)

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false."

No, that wasn't Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, half-answering questions in Europe last week about the CIA's alleged prison camps in Poland and Romania and the "extraordinary rendition" of terrorist suspects to countries where they are likely to be tortured. It was actually Harold Pinter, explaining the difference between drama and politics in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In the lofty realm of dramatic art, Pinter asserted, there can be nothing so clear-cut as truth. It is, however, a very different matter when it comes to American foreign policy. There, the distinction between true and false is as clear as that between day and night. It's simple. Everything the United States says is false, and everything its critics say is true.[...]

Here are Pinter's five charges:

1. The United States engaged in "low intensity conflict… throughout the world", causing "hundreds of thousands" of deaths. Pinter cites the case of Nicaragua, where American aid helped overthrow the "intelligent, rational and civilised" government of the Sandinistas.

2. "The United States supported and in many cases engendered every Right-wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War", specifically those in Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Greece, Haiti, Indonesia, Paraguay, the Philippines, Turkey and Uruguay. The deaths of all the people murdered by these regimes were "attributable to American foreign policy".

3. These "systematic, constant, vicious [and] remorseless" crimes bear comparison with those committed during the Cold War by the Soviet Union (no mention, be it noted, of China, Vietnam or North Korea).

4. But these crimes "have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged". It is as if "it never happened", thanks to "a highly successful act of hypnosis".

5. This mass hypnosis has been achieved by repeated use of the phrase "the American people", which "suffocates [the] intelligence and… critical faculties" of all Americans - apart from "the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag [sic] of prisons, which extends across the US".

First, the true part. Thousands were indeed killed by US-backed dictatorships, especially in Central and South America. What is demonstrably false is that this violence is comparable in scale with that perpetrated by Communist regimes at the same time.

It is generally agreed that Guatemala was the worst of the US-backed regimes during the Cold War. When the civil war there was finally brought to an end in the 1990s, the total death toll may have been as high as 200,000. But not all these deaths can credibly be blamed on the United States. Most of the violence happened long after the 1954 coup, when the regime was far from being under the CIA's control.

By comparison, the lowest estimate for the number of people who were killed on political grounds in the last seven years of Stalin's life is five million, and the camps of the gulag - which only a fraud or a fool would liken to American prisons today - kept on killing long after his death. In their new biography, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday reckon Mao was responsible for anything up to 70 million deaths in China. The number of people killed or starved by the North Korean regime may be in the region of 1.6 million. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia killed between 1.5 and 2 million people. For further details, I refer Pinter to The Black Book of Communism, published in 1997.[...]

Nobody pretends that the United States came through the Cold War with clean hands. But to pretend that its crimes were equivalent to those of its Communist opponents - and that they have been wilfully hushed up - is fatally to blur the distinction between truth and falsehood. That may be permissible on stage. I am afraid it is quite routine in diplomacy. But is unacceptable in serious historical discussion.

Crimes? As much as the charge that the U.S. killed more than the regimes it confronted (who mostly killed their own citizens) is an outrageous slander that demands constant refutation, the truth about numbers is really just a derivative of the main point that the U.S. was all that stood between the new dark ages its adversaries were so keen on ushering in. It’s hard to imagine a defense of Roman civilization resting on the argument that they killed fewer than the Visigoths and that therefore their “crimes” were of less import.