Sometime ago, I coined the term Ivy League Imperialism to describe the sense of entitlement that the Power Elite in our country have enjoyed for nearly sixty years after WWII ended. That term described for me why we have seen the steady downward drift of our society away from the original majestic sentiments expressed in our Constitution and the Bill of Rights.It also distilled for me the vainglorious pursuit of imperial wars by our ruling class over the same period.The best example of those sentiments was uttered by none other than Henry Kissinger in one of his conversations with Richard Nixon when the two were plotting the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile after he was elected.To wit,” Latin America is such a third rate place”.
Kissinger might be forgiven for expressing this contempt for foreign peoples because he and many others of our ruling class had a mentor, George.F.Kennan, a Princeton pooh-bah, who at the end of WWII wrote an article that set the stage for the many evil acts committed in our name.When the world as a whole was rejoicing at the downfall of the Nazi tyrants in Europe, Kennan was worried about how best to maintain U.S. hegemony in the emerging post war world. His first contribution was to propose a policy of “Containment”, to isolate the Soviet Union which, despite the enormous loss of 25 million of its people in the war against the Nazis, was from that point onward to be viewed as a rival to the U.S.The second, and a more lasting contribution to our downward spiral was his statement (paraphrased) that goes something like this:”We are only 6% of the world’s population and use more than 35% of the world’s resources.It is our job to make sure that the rest of the world does not see this as an unfair state of affairs”.
Given his stature as a so called statesman, Kennan laid the foundations of our warfare state through his remarks and ensured that any one who opposed the framework presented in these two remarks would become a pariah in the U.S. caste system.All subsequent Presidents,Secretaries of State and Defense Secretaries were required to pay homage to the wise sage from Nassau Street.That begat Rusk, McNamara,Kissinger,Schlesinger,Laird,Brzezinski and numerous others, big and small, in the service of those tenets.
The role of the Ivy League Schools like Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Columbia cannot be overemphasised IMO
in the entrenchment of this viewpoint.The ivy league schools inculcated in the sons and daughters of the rich the view that they were superior not just to ordinary Americans but to the people of the world at large.These indolent young people were sent abroad as agents of our spying agencies where they could indulge in their wild fantasies, described in some of the lurid novels by Howard Hunt (of Watergate fame) and William F.Buckley.In those assignments they nourished a contempt for the peoples who were not born to wealth or power.To them dethroning or assassinating the elected leader of a Third World country like Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, and replacing him with a tyrant, the Shah of Iran, was an exciting exercise that their boring lives back home could not match.
As our intelligence agencies grew in power because of the presence of men like George Bush, William Casey, William Colby and others,and the duly elected representative government receded in power,it became necessary to clothe our institutions in respectability and this began the process of conversion of the Press/Media as propaganda organs of the ruling class.The man who was ready with a solution was Walter Lippman who accurately perceived what he was required to deliver was a way to ensure that unpalatable questions or opinions were not given a platform within our political structure.From that insight emerged a whole class of Press courtiers such as James Reston, the Alsop brothers,Bob Woodward,and their many clones who inhabit and pollute our political discourse.
As this class of power wielders and their interpreters became entrenched, the emergence of men like Cheney ( Yale dropout), Rumsfeld ( Princeton) and Bush (Yale and Harvard) could have been predicted.All these men share a contempt for our institutions and look at our constitutional processes as impediments to wielding power.It is not for nothing that they want to set aside the Constitution and steal elections,launch wars,concoct fantasy tales with the aid of the Press,torture prisoners,violate all international norms,and now spy on Americans using the powerful instruments of government.Their sense of entitlement,their belief that power and money could solve all problems and that threats and coercion will cow all opponents into silence has led them to the current impasse.
While I blame each of these men for our current state of atrophy and malaise,the institutions that have fostered this elitist mentality without any restraints are also to blame.I find it significant that none of the Presidents of the schools I have mentioned has seen fit to criticize our policies in the Middle East lest they lose precious grants.The lure of grants in silencing Presidents of our prestigious universities was expressed by Bartlett Giamatti, then President of Yale,in a conversation with Lewis Lapham wherein he says,”the President of Yale is now a song and dance man lstening to jokes by rich donors”.
In the downward spiral that Bush has led us in the past few mercifully short years,he has recruited a new class of apologists for his war and predatory policies: the PNAC signatories and the DLC.They all subscribe to the notion that America can do no wrong,that we have the right to kill and maim thousands of innocent people who meant us no harm and when the President orders us to kill we should simply obey and send our sons and daughters in the service of an illegal regime.
The vast gulf between the Bush regime and our people, is evidence that the time has come for us to discard the elitist mentality fostered by the Ivy League approach to education.It fills our minds with facts without questioning why we are required to learn these “facts” and fosters in people like George Bush, the idea that he is somehow superior to other Americans, because, as Ann Richards said”he was born on third base and thinks he has hit a triple”.
Don’t get me started on how the Ivy League B-Schools have destroyed a vibrant economy like ours in the same time frame.
Disclaimer: I was a product of one of these schools in the undergraduate years, saw the light and escaped to the UK to continue my graduate work and, believe that act saved my brain from atrophying completely.
Interesting diary. I’d be interested to see you write more about the transmission system that takes that elitist sense of superiority and pumps it down to the Rush Limbaughs and the evangelical churches. They, of course, all believe that the Ivy League is a hotbed of Jewish Communist gay destroyers of civilization.
I suspect you may be exaggerating the role of the Ivy League based on your personal experience. I don’t think those schools are really that important. I think the jingoism you (and I) decry has deeper roots. But your diary is an interesting read.
I have to agree with you that in our current condition, “Ivy League Imperialism” is more properly a state of mind rather than the schools I referred to.The attitudes that originated in those schools have so thoroughly permeated and infected our society it is no longer limted to those august institutions.
I will add a couple more instances of that state of mind. In the late 60’s Justice Lewis Powell was commissioned by the Republicans to list ways by which blacks, Hispanics and assorted “low lifes” in our society could be effectively disenfranchised despite what the 1964 Voting Rights Act promised them.It was the beginning of a series of acts including voter intimidation, gerrymandering,wholesale voter tampering and voting machine rigging.
That a large minority of the people would be denied their Constitutionally guaranteed rights has come about because that minority is different from the likes of George Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.The ruling classes are alarmed that a big bloc of our society was going to sit at the seat of power and demand equality not just in name but in actual terms.This is how Bush was able to achieve his electoral victory in 2000 and 2004.The effective disenfranchisement of the minority requires a state of mind inspired by the Ivy League school of thought.
The second instance of that mindset was during the VP debates between Lieberman and Cheney.During that debate, Cheney made the statement that his wealth had nothing to do with government largesse, a statement so ridiculous on its face I was struck that Lieberman did not ridicule Cheney right away.Instead, he sat grinning there sheepishly as though Cheney had one upped Lieberman.It has been clear, that despite their professions of fidelity to capitalism, both Cheney and Rumsfeld, had profited immensely from the revolving door between government and industry.Neither of them had taken any risks that traditional entrepreneurs do.Neither of them have created any wealth and yet continue to deride the same government at whose teats Halliburton feeds.
Of course, the ultimate poster boy for the Ivy League mindset is Bush himself and his lack of work ethic, his mendacity and his complete indifference to the plight of the shareholders in his numerous failed enterprises are documented ad nauseam by many, including his Harvard B-School professor Tsurumi.
Even among the rogue’s gallery of people who populate our government, these men occupy a special niche.Their depraved indifference to the lives of helpless people either in New Orleans or Fallujah makes them unique.
you reference, but if you took it all the way back your fingers would be tired, and I think there may be a length limit on diaries ๐
I wanted to bring out the fact that at the end of WWII, a window of opportunity had opened up to bring the peoples of the world together, especially because the war had made us all sacrifice together, with the Soviet Union, or more properly Russia bearing the brunt of that sacrifice.That opportunit was sabotaged by men like Kennan whose vanity and sense of privilege could not tolerate sharing power with the Untermenschen of the world.
Another window of opportunity that opened up when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 80’s has now been sabotaged by the thugs of the PNAC and the DLC who are hell bent on seeking American hegemony in the new century.The Iraq war may very well presage more wars and, if thse come to pass the twenty first century could well surpass the twentieth in bloodletting.
but there was a window of opportunity when the people did not rise up in a body and overthrow Andrew Jackson.
And before that….
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Ironically, one of the neocon fabulists, Osama Bin Ledeen, may have said it best:”We are a war like people;from time to time, we feel the need to recharge our batteries by findinga third world tin horn dictator and throw him against the wall just to satisfy our urge for combat.”
Of course, Bin Ledeen never saw a day of combat even during the Vietnam War when he was the right age.
I would be interested to hear your opinion of the influence you mentioned on the right-wing think tanks and the disputable ‘facts’ that have been accepted. I’m sure it goes back further but a critical time seemed to be around 1982 in an organized push to create and document a worldwide Islamic terrorist threat. Most of it seems to be based originally in unsubstantiated claims and then repeated so often they are accepted as fact.
To me the rightwing think tanks are infested not so much by the old line WASP establishment types of the Ivy League schools but the Israeli supporters and propagandists who have made common cause with the old line WASP establishment and the religious nut cases.That has changed the emphasis from the kind of random violence inflicted on the peoples of Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and others to pressing the U.S. military into the service of Israel’s endless wars against the Arabs.
The PNAC, which is made up of the WASP establishment types like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Woolsey etc, and the Israeli supporters ike Perle, Wolfowitz,Abrams,et.al,share what I have called the IVY League Imperialist mindset.
Thanks. That makes sense but I’m not an historian so maybe you can help me out in understanding these forces at work. What if the random violence of those countries’ people weren’t exactly random and those primary dominant powers actually joined earlier?
What is the possibility of the combined power deliberately demonizing Islam as a policy from at least post WWII if not earlier? Where did the 20th century Islamic terrorist threat originate and what precise verifiable evidence do we have of it’s origins?
I think you may be right that what appears to be random unrelated violence against the countries mentioned is not random at all but violence in furtherance of the need of our corporations to establish access to resources to maintain economic hegemony. In this sense our armed forces perform the same role as our police do in keeping the people in our black ghettoes constantly on edge and are quick to draw the guns against them with or without any provocation.
The terrorist threat from the Islamic countries is real and the two countries directly affected by those threats, India and Israel,are U.S. client states.The Islamic countries see that so long as the U.S. continues its support for these two countries, they have no choice but to inflict damage on those two societies.As the terrorism in those countries escalated in the past few years,the Israeli supporters recruited the U.S. via George Bush to do their work for them.
No matter, the war Bush has foisted on Iraq is not merely illegal but totally disproportionate to the violence inflicted by the isolated terrorists in Kashmir and Israel.
How does the influence of intelligence services from various countries figure into your original analysis? Along those lines, what about false flag operations through the years? Does the competition and industrial espionage also come into play and that brings up the question of how Israeli intelligence has been predominant in the US?
Many Keenanites like Bresinsky and Schlesinger opposed the war.
I think this crowd has its roots in the philosophy of William Mckinley.
I think their opposition is more like turf wars among gang members.They all subscribe to the notion of global hegemony and people like Brzezinski want to pick a more appropriate time to strike at the enemies than in Iraq.