riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle) (11/27/84)
> >Secondly, even supposing that the crates do in fact contain a shipment of > >MiG-21 aircraft, how on earth is that a justification for the U.S. to use > >force or threats of force against Nicaragua? > > Haven't you heard of the Monroe Doctrine? The issue is not whether > Nicaragua has advanced military aircraft, but who is doing the supplying of > such aircraft... Ah, yes, the good old Monroe Doctrine. It's a funny thing, that Doctrine. As taught in history books between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, north of the Rio Grande and south of the Great Lakes, the Monroe Doctrine was a courageous and noble act in defense of democracy and self-determination. As taught almost anywhere else, it was a self-interested grab of turf away from European imperialism for the benefit of U.S. imperialism. Come on... How would you feel if the government of, say, Brazil were to announce one day that it had the a God-given right (a "Manifest Destiny") to unilaterally decide who the U.S. could and couldn't do business with? You would say that such a doctrine was absurd. If, however, Brazil had the military and economic power to enforce its doctrine against U.S. will, your sense of the absurd wouldn't count for much. True, the behavior of the European powers toward the nations of Latin America at the time of the Monroe Doctrine was one primarily of exploiting them for all they were worth. That allowed the democrats and one-time colonial rebels of the U.S. to invent the myth that the Monroe Doctrine was for Latin America's own good. Unfortunately, we don't have to look very far to see that it was just a myth. From Monroe's time onward, the thrust of U.S. policy toward Latin America has been to do an even better job of exploitation than the Europeans were capable of. We wasted no time in stealing half of Mexico's territory (including the place where I'm sitting now) and turning Central America and the Caribbean into our "backyard" to toy with as we pleased. When a declining European power like Spain got in our way, we fabricated an excuse (remember the Maine?) and took what we wanted from them by force. The application of the Monroe Doctrine was massacre, theft, and economic slavery, not democracy and freedom. That's all in the distant 19th century, you may say. Fine, but things don't look so different in the latter 20th century. Our Spanish, German and English rivals have been replaced by Russian ones. Democracy and self-determination are at best rationed out in carefully measured doses as rewards to the more docile of our children, and at worst are nightmarishly twisted buzzwords of Orwellian proportions. (Witness our support for the death-squad plagued "democracy" in El Salvador and for the "freedom fighters" using terrorism to try to overthrow a popular goverment in Nicaragua.) The fundamentals haven't changed: the U.S. views the Western Hemisphere as its own playground, and no appeal to democracy, international law, human rights, or the suffering of generations of Latin American peasants will sway the U.S. from its conviction that no nation in the region should be permitted to follow a course we happen not to like. Phooey on the Monroe Doctrine. [For more examples of U.S. relations toward Latin America and documentation that can't fit in a Usenet article, take a look at the book "Inevitable Revolutions" by historian Walter LaFeber.] --- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.") --- {ihnp4,harvard,seismo,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle
david@fisher.UUCP (David Rubin) (11/30/84)
One must remember that the nature of the Monroe doctrine was drastically changed by the Roosevelt (Teddy) Corollary. Until McKinley, US Presidents were uniformly anti- (and un-) imperialist. David Rubin