Many societies have not come to terms with dictators or political violence in their past. Some countries have faced up to such crimes through truth commissions, groups that investigate and expose the misdeeds of a criminal regime.
The United States has had, and still has, a criminal regime that has regularly committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and other abuses. Most Americans don’t know it since our crimes were usually against people from other countries, and because the political discourse of our politicians, media and pundits maintains a stony silence about our past.
We need a truth commission to end this silence. It could begin with the unnecessary use of nuclear weapons to murder 250,000 innocent Japanese. By 1955 the United States had intervened in the Korean civil war to support a dictatorial elite, manipulated democracy in France and Italy and overthrown it in Iran and Guatemala.
U.S. control over Central America and the Caribbean has been very similar to Soviet imperialism in Eastern Europe (though much bloodier). A few examples: The United States invaded the Dominican Republic to end a people’s rebellion, financed death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador, and attacked the Sandinistas of Nicaragua as they tried to rebuild their nation.
In perhaps the greatest crime against humanity since World War II, the United States laid waste to Indochina. Three million Indochinese were killed, 13 million made refugees, and the region’s environment and infrastructure were devastated. Twenty-five years later, people still die from unexploded ordinance and suffer the world’s highest birth defect rate from Agent Orange.
These are only a few examples of U.S. crimes and atrocities, and much information remains secret. We do know that the United States has given weapons, financial aid and diplomatic support to criminal regimes in Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Thailand, Israel, Zaïre, South Africa, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Venezuela, Panamá, Honduras and Haiti among others.
America’s worst crimes occurred during the Cold War, but competition with the USSR was more an excuse than the cause. Our leaders wanted a world in which elite Americans could prosper and dominate, and usually the status quo (corrupt, murderous dictators) served that ambition best. Today, less repressive regimes will suffice because opponents of the status quo were largely eliminated by the United States and local elites.
This only means America’s crimes are fewer. They continue with little public notice: bombing civilians from Yugoslavia to Iraq; bankrolling death squads in Colombia; denying medicine to Cubans and Iraqis; supporting gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia. Now that communism is gone, new excuses are found the war on drugs, free trade, even human rights.
A truth commission would make us aware of past crimes committed in our name and expose those that are occurring right now. It would help wrest the foreign policy-making process from a narrow elite only concerned to advance its interests. As resistance to the American global order re-emerges, our history must be known to ensure that our country’s imperial crimes never happen again.