The first part of Book One, the Boot, offers a comprehensive picture of the military history of U.S. interventions in Central America, the Caribbean, South America and Indochina (South East Asia).
Although this book does not cover U.S. involvement in the Middle East or Africa, the common picture that emerges from those regions that are covered here present a clear and consistent picture.
The objectives of this first part are two-fold. Firstly to demonstrate that Imperialism’s past proceeds in an unbroken line to the present – that there is no mythical point in time at which the U.S. Government suddenly had a change of heart and began a benevolent and democratic foreign policy to pursue freedom and world peace. Any claim is propaganda if it doesn’t fit the facts and any honest investigation should attempt to separate truth from lie, fact from illusion.
The second objective is to show the global pattern of U.S. foreign policy and that the tactics do not vary from country to country, or sub-continent to sub-continent. The Boot is as painful reading as you are likely to encounter. But only an accurate knowledge of the problem can yield a solution.
I will introduce U.S. Foreign Policy year by year, and then look at it again country by country, starting with the United States itself. Some repetition is therefore inevitable but the purpose of this cross-examination is to challenge the notion that atrocities that are written off rather frequently as one-offs incidents are actually not deviations from the pattern. They are the pattern.
If you are an avid student of U.S. Foreign Policy then you may be able to skip through this first part and proceed to part two, the Coin, which looks at subsequent economic approaches once military objectives have been secured. You may nevertheless wish to remind yourself of Guatemala in the countries section since this one country shows in microcosm probably the most grisly history of Imperialist advance. Or review the evidence from Chile where the source cannot be questioned since it is the criminal confessing his own crimes. Bolivia, Venezuela and Burma are also of current interest. The chapter entitled “National Prosperity” compares outcomes in countries that have succumbed to foreign intervention and those that have resisted. And the final chapter of the Boot lists the tools necessary to derail Imperialism.
History has many useful applications. Most importantly as the enemy of propaganda and as the best guide to understanding and predicting political decisions in the present. But what follows can not only be called history. To many readers, this will also be News.
Time is the father of truth as the man said. Let the record speak. Far, far away from the newsrooms where loyal journalists report Foreign Office views as fact, here is the News from the scene…