Grenada As Looking Glass: Playing the “Russian Game” in the Americas

CHRISTIANITY & CRISIS, Vol. 44, No. 7 (30 April 1984), 154-160 Grenada as looking glass: Playing the “Russian game” in the Americas By Andrew Reding “LOOKING BACK on Grenada,” James Finn has suggested (C&C, April 2), is a useful exercise. It is indeed—but not, as Finn would have it, so that those who criticized the U.S. invasion of last October can now be led to confess their error. Rather because the invasion was a revealing symbol of a fundamental misdirection in U.S. foreign policy— how far it departs from our national ideals, how fundamentally it distorts the relationship between elected leaders and the citizenry, how dangerous it is to this nation and the world. Grenada is a problem not because U.S. actions there were unjustly criticized but rather because the lessons of the event may be neglected or forgotten. If that happens, it will not be for the first time. To understand Grenada it will be helpful to look even further back, because the 1983 invasion is in many disturbing ways reminiscent of this country’s conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century. Both actions were justified on grounds that appeared to be expressions of basic American tenets. It was said that we were taking action to rescue peoples who were being hopelessly brutalized by governments imposed upon them by outside forces—Spain in the case of the Philippines, Cuba and the Soviet Union in the case of Grenada. In both instances assurances were given at the outset that we were seeking no selfish gains for ourselves, but only to extend to others the blessings of freedom and democracy. In both cases, these assurances were false. And here we come upon a more ominous parallel. In both cases, the American public and the U.S. Congress were deliberately kept in the dark regarding the facts of the invasion, and regarding conditions on the islands prior to invasion. Press freedoms were curtailed at critical periods when the president (McKinley in the former case, Reagan in the latter) sought to mislead the public so as to obtain its acquiescence in policies that betrayed our most distinctive national values. In response to the earlier betrayal, Mark Twain was moved to write a satirical essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” in which he compared the application of two very different foreign policy norms to the Philippine situation—one of them rooted in traditional “American” values of self-determination, the other in “European” values of imperial domination. Faced with this choice, he suggests, President McKinley was too attracted to the material rewards of European-style realpolitik to do justice to our own revolutionary principles: For presently came the Philippine temptation. It was strong; it was too strong, and he [McKinley] made that bad mistake: he played the European game…It was a pity; it was a great pity, that error; that one grievous error, that irrevocable error. For it was the very place and time to play the American game again. And at no cost. Rich winnings to be gathered in; rich and permanent; indestructible; a fortune transmissable forever to the children of the flag. Not land, not money, not dominion—no, something worth many times more than that dross: our share, the spectacle of a nation of long harassed and persecuted slaves set free through our influence; our posterity’s share, the golden memory of that fair deed. The game was in our hands. With the sinking of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, the United States had a unique opportunity to assist the spread of the principles of 1776. A Filipino republic was proclaimed, a congress elected, and the Spanish were forcibly removed from the entire archipelago except Manila by Filipino armies under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo. At this point Filipinos held the warmest feelings for the Americans who, they believed, had come to assist them in their independence struggles. They were sadly mistaken. For unlike the French forces that helped us secure our independence, the American armies turned on their Filipino allies as soon as the Spanish had been vanquished. With the American public deliberately kept in the dark about the already established independent and democratic government in the Philippines, the decision was made to seize the archipelago for its geopolitical and economic advantages. The U.S. Army was ordered to invade the islands and crush the infant republic. Of course they [the Filipinos] wore surprised—that was natural; surprised and disappointed; disappointed and grieved. To them it looked un-American; uncharacteristic; foreign to our established traditions. And this was natural, too; for we were only playing the American game in public—in private it was the European. Brezhnev in the Americas Twain’s concluding words may have a familiar ring for correspondents covering the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon during the U.S. invasion of Grenada. For even as President Reagan described the invasion to the nation as a “rescue mission” to evacuate American medical students and to free Grenadians from Cuban and Soviet tyranny, administration sources were privately admitting that the real purpose was to replace a Marxist government with one friendlier to our interests. It was further admitted that the action had been contemplated for years, and awaited only a suitable pretext for execution. Once again we’ve begun to play the American game in public while playing our adversaries’ game in private. Only this time it was not the “European game” of the Spanish and British empires, but rather that other “European game” of the Russian socialist empire, known also as the “Brezhnev Doctrine.” For this kind of enterprise, secrecy and disinformation are essential tools. Though McKinley allowed American correspondents into the Philippines, he saw to it that their dispatches were censored so that embarrassing material could not get through. Reagan achieved the same purpose by barring newsmen from Grenada during the invasion. In both cases the news media were supplied with government-managed “news” carefully tailored to fit the president’s pronouncements, so that in the crucial periods all that reached the American public was a combination of falsehoods and misrepresentations— backed, if at all, by selective documentation and manufactured statistics. In each of these episodes, much of the truth emerged, but only in bits and pieces, and only after the conquest was a fait accompli and had been accepted by most of the public as the glorious achievement the administration proclaimed it to be. This reliance on disinformation is not a minor aspect of the Grenada episode but rather a principal reason why we should look at the event in very close detail, beginning with the stance taken by the U.S. toward the People’s Revolutionary Government set up in Grenada by Maurice Bishop following the overthrow of Sir Eric Gairy. In terms of civil and political rights, Bishop’s PRG was hardly modeled on our own democracy, but it would be difficult to conceive a more fitting description of its origins than the rationale Thomas Jefferson provided for the American Revolution: “[W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.” For Prime Minister Gairy had transformed a nominal parliamentary democracy into a brutal dictatorship; he organized a secret police, rigged elections, seized opponents’ properties, squandered public funds, and imprisoned, tortured, and murdered political adversaries. Yet under the Carter administration our government was friendly to the regime of terror and hostile to the popular revolution that brought it down in March of 1979. Characteristically, the hostility was expressed in the language of the “American game”: It was charged that Bishop’s government was violating human rights. What had been tolerable in extreme form under a right-wing dictatorship became intolerable in a milder form under a socialist government. Gairy could get away with controlling the media, bullying the churches, denying free elections, and imprisoning political adversaries; Bishop could not. It made no difference that Bishop did not use torture, order killings, or seize the land and property of adversaries, as Gairy had done; what mattered most was that radical elements had overthrown an “elected parliamentary democracy” by force of arms. (It is ironic that armed revolution should earn automatic condemnation in a city named after a rebel general, where tourists pay homage at a memorial to the author of one of history’s greatest revolutionary manifestos.) With Gairy threatening a countercoup, Bishop asked the U.S. for defensive arms and economic aid. The Carter administration coupled its refusal with a warning to Bishop not to turn to Cuba. When Grenada then asked and got help from Castro, the U.S. used that fact as a sufficient reason for continuing hostility. Under Reagan, hostility became malevolence. Bishop’s efforts to seek accommodation— first by a letter to Reagan promising elections, then during a visit to Washington— brought no improvement. Bishop’s brand of socialism was focused on infrastructure (the airport, roads, public housing) and public services (health care, schools). It allowed room for the private sector; according to the International Monetary Fund, private investment increased 130 percent in the first year after Bishop’s New Jewel Movement (NJM) took power. Yet the administration not only refused bilateral aid but fiercely opposed all proposals for multilateral assistance and took steps to discourage tourist visits to Grenada. It was ideologically motivated economic warfare. One of its effects was to nurture the Cuban connection.

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