Crucial Comix logo on a green background
$0.00 0

Cart

No products in the cart.

Published December 9, 2024

How Do Textbooks Discuss the U.S. Trying to Overthrow Foreign Governments?

This is an excerpt from the book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen, adapted into comics by Nate Powell. The book critically examines how 18 current textbooks analyze incidents from U.S. history. 

Textbook authors portray the U.S. government’s actions as agreeable and nice, even when officials admit to the contrary. I looked at all 18 textbooks’ treatment of six modern attempts to subvert foreign governments. (In order to make sure these incidents were adequately covered, I chose only events before 1973.) Let’s take a look. Our assistance to the Shah’s faction in Iran, when Prime Minister Mossadegh was deposed to return the Shah to the throne in 1953, Our role in overthrowing Guatemala’s elected government in 1954, Our rigging of the 1957 election in Lebanon, which entrenched the Christians on top—leading to a Muslim revolt and civil war the next year, Our involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Zaire in 1961, Our repeated attempts to assassinate Cuba’s premier, Fidel Castro, to bring down his government by terror and sabotage, and Our role in overthrowing the elected government of Chile in 1973.When other nations commit these acts, the U.S. government calls it “state-sponsored terrorism.” After all, Americans should be indignant to learn of Russian or Saudi attempts to influence our politics or destabilize our economy. Our government expressed outrage at Iraq’s Saddam Hussein for allegedly arranging an assassination attempt on former president George H.W. Bush in 1993—and retaliated by bombing Baghdad—yet the U.S. has repeatedly orchestrated similar assassination attempts. 8 of the 12 older textbooks omitted all mention of the CIA’s 1953 Iran coup which put the Shah in power, but all 6 of the newer books do include coverage. As The American Pageant covers the event: “The government of Iran, supposedly influenced by the Kremlin, began to resist the power of the gigantic Western companies that controlled Iranian petroleum. In response, the… CIA helped to engineer a coup in 1953 that installed the youthful Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, as a kind of dictator. Though successful in the short run in securing Iranian oil for the West, the American intervention left a bitter legacy of resentment among many Iranians.” The above sentences do give some understanding for why Iranians took over the American embassy in 1979, imprisoning its occupants for over a year—and Iran’s continuing hostility to U.S. policies in the Middle East may explain why books now cover our actions in 1953 more fully.Other than Iran, though, textbooks have not improved in their treatment of our foreign entanglements. Let’s move on to Guatemala in 1944, where college students, urban workers, and the middle class joined to overthrow their dictator and set up a democracy. Over the next decade, elected governments extended the vote to Indigenous people, the nation’s women, and the poor, as well as ending forced labor on coffee plantations, and other reforms. All of this ended in 1954 when the CIA threatened Jacobo Arbenz’s administration with an armed invasion. Arbenz had antagonized the United Fruit Company by proposing land reform—and planning a highway and railroad that might break their trade monopoly. The U.S. then chose an obscure Army colonel as Guatemala’s newly installed president. Arbenz sought asylum in the Mexican embassy as the U.S. flew its his forced replacement to the capital in an ambassador’s private plane. The end result: a repressive regime which brutally oppressed Guatemala’s Indigenous majority population for the next 40 years. The American Journey offers a standard treatment of this overthrow, naming anticommunism as the sole motive. 70 years later, this textbook maintains its McCarthyist rhetoric. So do other books—if they mention Guatemala at all.Besides “communism”, “chaos” is what history textbooks usually offer to explain the actions of the other side. This is standard textbook rhetoric: Chaos! Chaos always seems to be breaking out, or about to break out or something! As as we all know, America only intervenes reluctantly. Since textbook authors are unwilling to criticize the U.S. government, they present opponents of the U.S. as unintelligible. “Reasons! Stuff! and Chaos!” This misleads and mystifies students. Land of Promise describes a series of happy results from America’s backfired fix of Lebanon’s 1957 election, followed by U.S. Marines sent in to secure the results of that fixed election against a rightly outraged, armed Muslim population: “Although there was no immediate communist threat to Lebanon, Eisenhower demonstrated that the United States could act quickly. As a result, tensions in the area receded.” In reality, a civil war in Lebanon broke out again in 1975, with a whole lot more “chaos” to follow in 1983—resulting in President Reagan sending in the Marines again— A truck bomb then killed 241 Marines in their barracks, prompting Reagan to withdraw the rest. Several textbooks describe this incident, but none offers any substance about the continuity of the conflict in Lebanon, or our role in causing it.Searching for coverage of the 1961 incident in which the CIA urged the assassination of Congoese leader Patrice Lumumba, I only found Zaire or Congo listed in the index for 2 of the older textbooks. As Triumph of the American Nation puts it: “A new crisis developed in 1961 when Patrice Lumumba, leader of the pro-Communist faction, was assassinated.” As you may guess, neither book says anything about America’s involvement with that assassination. Triumph then tacks on a happy ending: “By the late 1960s, most scars of the civil war seemed healed. The Congo (Zaire) became one of the most prosperous African nations.” If only! In reality, the CIA helped bring to power a former soldier named Joseph Mobutu—and by the end of the 1960s under Mobutu had become one of the most wretched African nations, both economically and politically. No book mentions our repeated attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba: by the U.S. Senate’s own account, 8 times by 1965, and according to Cuba, a total of 24 attempts by 1975. (including poison milkshakes!) Undaunted by its failures in Cuba, the CIA turned its attention farther south to Chile—only mentioned in 6 of the 18 textbooks. At least Life and Liberty says it bluntly: “President Nixon helped the Chilean Army overthrow Chile’s elected government because he did not like its radical socialist policies.” This single sentence is buried in another section about President Carter’s human rights record. But it’s still the best account available in any textbook. 12 books omit it completely.Do textbooks need to include all government skullduggery? Certainly not. But some analysis of these incidents is important. Defending these acts on moral grounds isn’t easy to do—these actions diminish U.S. foreign policy to the level of a mafia state at times, strip the U.S. of its claim to lawful conduct, and reduce our prestige around the world. As a counterpoint, covert violence may be defensible, on realpolitik grounds, in arguing that the U.S. should be destabilizing certain governments to achieve its own political objectives. The 6 operations included here do not support this view, however. Covert action always risks blowback—retaliation from abroad that we can’t effectively counter, because these actions were taken without the knowledge or support of the American people. If we had a public debate about how to handle Mossadegh or Castro, maybe we could’ve avoided Khomeini or the Bay of Pigs debacle. But we can’t have the debate in history class when most books leave out all 6 incidents! Instead, textbook authors portray the U.S. as an idealistic actor, responding generously to other nations’ crises.These interventions raise another question: are these actions compatible with democracy? American citizens can’t critique government policies if they don’t know about them—thus, covert actions usually subvert the popular will. These actions also threaten our long-standing separation of powers, which textbooks justly praise in their chapters on our Constitution. Covert actions are always undertaken by the executive branch, which typically lies to the legislative branch abou the actions, thus preventing Congress from doing its constitutional duty. The U.S. government lied about most of these examples of foreign interference. On the very day in 1961 that our Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs in a failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, our Secretary of State Dean Rusk said: “The American people are entitled to know whether we are intervening in Cuba or intend to do so in the future. The answer to that question is no.” Days later, among the dead found were 4 American pilots. And when Henry Kissinger was asked about Chile in his 1973 Senate confirmation hearings, he said: “The CIA had nothing to do with the coup, to the best of my knowledge and belief—and I only put in that qualification in case some madman appears down there who, without instruction, talked to somebody.” Later statements by CIA director William Colby and Kissinger himself directly contradicted this testimony. The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee eventually denounced our campaign against the Allende government.President Eisenhower used national security as his excuse when he was caught in an obvious lie: he denied the U.S. was flying over Soviet airspace, only to have captured U2 pilot Gary Powers admit the truth, live on Soviet TV. Later, we learned that Gary Powers was just the tip of the iceberg: In the 1950s, at least 31 U.S. flights were downed over the USSR, with more than 170 men aboard. For decades, the U.S. lied to these servicemen’s families—and never made substantial effort to get them back from the Soviets, because the flights were illegal and thus secret. On a related note, our Constitution states that only Congress can declare war—yet over and over, presidents have chosen not to risk their popularity by campaigning for popular support of these secret military policies. In 1918, Woodrow Wilson tried to hide our Russian invasion from Congress and citizens, but Helen Keller helped get the truth out: “Our governments are not honest. They do not openly declare war against Russia and proclaim the reasons—they are fighting the Russian people half-secretly and in the dark with the lie of democracy on their lips.” President Wilson failed to keep the invasion secret, but he was able to keep it hidden from American history textbooks. That’s the problem: textbooks can’t accurately describe any of these incidents without mentioning that the U.S. government covered them up.The only criminal U.S. government activity covered in most textbooks is a series of related scandals known as Watergate: in the early 1970s, the American people learned that President Nixon both had knowledge of multiple criminal acts—including robberies of the Democratic National Committee and the office of psychiatrist Lewis Fielding—and that Nixon helped cover up these crimes in an attempt to gain an advantage during the 1972 election. Textbooks do blame Nixon—as they should—in their accounts of Watergate, but they stop there, keeping their rosy view of the government: “When members of the executive branch violated the law instead of enforcing it, the judicial and legislative branches stepped in and stopped them.” Most important, getting rid of Nixon didn’t solve the bigger problem of imbalanced power from our executive branch. In some ways, the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan and first Bush administrations showed an executive branch even more out of control—and with some of the same people involved. Executive abuse of power has only gotten more brazen within readers’ lifetimes, and students will continue to face this crisis and its impact on our democracy. As textbooks increasingly fail to accurately cover these events, students will still be shocked by our history, but will also be unprepared to think critically about it.

Check out Lies My Teacher Told Me.

Related Comics

© 2024 Crucial Comix
Privacy policy terms of use