The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.
In early 1968 I tried with insistence to make some of my friends understand this image of the American overseas. I was speaking mainly to resisters engaged in organizing the march on the Pentagon. I wanted to share with them a profound fear: the fear that the end of the war in Vietnam would permit hawks and doves to unite in a destructive war on poverty in the Third World.
The qualified failure of the war on poverty, with its fruits of urban riots, has begun to open the eyes of Americans to the reasons for the failure of the Alliance for Progress, with its fruits of threatened rebellion. Both are related to the failure to win the hearts and minds of the people of Asia by an outpouring of money and human lives that Americans perceive as an expression of heroic generosity, in the defense of South Vietnam. Failure in Harlem, Guatemala, and Vietnam has a common root. All three have miscarried because the United States gospel of massive material achievement lacks credibility for the world’s overwhelming majorities. I believe that insight into the meaning of United States good will as perceived by Latin Americans or Asians would enable Americans to perceive the meaning of the problem of their own slums; it could even lead to the perception of a new and more effective policy.
I have had the opportunity to observe this growing awareness of a common root of failure in my contacts with students at Cuernavaca. There, at the Center of Intercultural Documentation, for the past two years we have offered a sequence of workshops to compare the experience of poverty in capital-rich and capital-starved societies. We have witnessed the initial shock in many Americans dedicated to the war against poverty, when they observed and studied Latin America and realized for the first time that there is a link between minority marginality at home and mass margination overseas. Their emotional reaction is usually more acute than the intellectual insight that produces it. We have seen more than one man lose his balance as he suddenly lost the faith that for him had previously supported that balance, the faith that says: “The American way is the solution for all.” For any good man, whether he is a social worker in Watts or a missioner on his way to Bolivia, it means pain and panic to realize that he is seen by 90 per cent of mankind as the exploiting outsider who shores up his privilege by promoting a delusive belief in the ideals of democracy, equal opportunity, and free enterprise among people who haven’t a remote possibility of profiting from them.
At this stage of the war in Vietnam the violent symptoms are too horrible to permit a lucid analysis of the causes that produce them. It is therefore more important to focus United States attention on the other two programs, the war on poverty and the Alliance for Progress: one, a war conducted by social workers; the other, an alliance that has maintained or swept into power military regimes in two-thirds of the Latin American countries. Both originated in the name of good will; both are now seen as pacification programs; both are pregnant with violence.
The war on poverty aims at the integration of the so-called underprivileged minorities of the United States into the mainstream of the American way of life; the Alliance for Progress aims at the integration of the so-called underdeveloped countries of Latin America into the community of industrialized nations. Both programs were designed to have the poor join in the American dream. Both programs failed. The poor refused to dream on command. The order to dream and the money they got only made them rambunctious. Huge funds were appropriated to start the United States minorities and the Latin American majorities on the way of integration into a United States-style middle class: the world of college attendance, universal consumer credit, the world of household appliances and insurance, the world of church and movie attendance. An army of generous volunteers swarmed through New York ghettos and Latin American jungle canyons, pushing the persuasion that makes America tick.
The frustrated social worker and the former Peace Corps volunteer are now among the few who explain to mainline America that the poor are right in rejecting forced conversion to the American gospel. Only seven years after the majority missionary enterprise of the Alliance was launched, riot squads at home, military governments in Latin America, and the army in Vietnam keep asking for more funds. But now it can be seen that the money is needed not for the uplift of the poor, but to protect the frail beachhead into the middle class that has been gained by the few converts who have benefited here or there by the American way of life.
Comparison of these three theaters of United States missionary effort and war will help bring home a truism: the American society of achievers and consumers, with its two-party system and its universal schooling, perhaps befits those who have got it, but certainly not the rest of the world. A 15 per cent minority at home who earn less than $3,000 a year, and an 80 per cent majority abroad who earn less than $300 a year are prone to react with violence to the schemes by which they are fitted into coexistence with affluence. This is the moment to bring home to the people of the United States the fact that the way of life they have chosen is not viable enough to be shared. Eight years ago I told the late Bishop Manuel Larrain, the president of the Conference of Latin American Bishops, that I was prepared if necessary to dedicate my efforts to stop the coming of missionaries to Latin America. His answer still rings in my ears: “They may be useless to us in Latin America, but they are the only North Americans whom we will have the opportunity to educate. We owe them that much.”
At this moment, when neither the allure of money nor the power of persuasion nor control through weapons can efface the prospect of violence, during the summer in the slums and throughout the year in Guatemala, Bolivia, or Venezuela, we can analyze the analogies in the reactions to United States policy in the three main theaters of its defensive war: the war by which it defends its quasi-religious persuasion in Watts, Latin America, and Vietnam. Fundamentally this is the same war fought on three fronts; it is the war to “preserve the values of the West.” Its origin and expression are associated with generous motives and a high ideal to provide a richer life for all men. But as the threatening implications of that ideal begin to emerge, the enterprise grinds down to one compelling purpose: to protect the style of life and the style of death that affluence makes possible for a very few; and since that style cannot be protected without being expanded, the affluent declare it obligatory for all. “That they may have more” begins to be seen in its real perspective: “That I may not have less.”
In all three theaters of war the same strategies are used: money, troopers, teachers. But money can benefit only a few in the ghettos, and a few in Latin America, and a few in Vietnam; and the consequent concentration of imported benefits on a few requires their ever tighter protection against the many. For the majority of marginal people, the economic growth of their surroundings means rising levels of frustration. On all three frontiers of affluence, therefore, the gun becomes important to protect the achiever. Police reinforcements go hand in hand with bands of armed citizens in the United States. In Guatemala the recently murdered military attaché of the United States had just admitted that the American Embassy had to assist in arming right-wing goon squads because they are more efficient in maintaining order (and certainly more cruel) than the army.
Next to money and guns, the United States idealist turns up in every theater of the war; the teacher, the volunteer, the missioner, the community organizer, the economic developer. Such men define their role as service. Actually they frequently wind up numbing the damage done by money and weapons, or seducing the “underdeveloped” to the benefits of the world of affluence and achievement. They especially are the ones for whom “ingratitude” is the bitter reward. They are the personifications of Good Old Charlie Brown: “How can you lose when you are so sincere?”
I submit that, if present trends continue, from now on the violence in Harlem, in Latin America, in Asia, will increasingly be directed against the foreign and native “persuasion pusher” of this kind. Increasingly the “poor” will slam the door in the face of salesmen for the United States system of politics, education, and economics as an answer to their needs. This rejection goes hand in hand with a growing loss of faith in his own tenets on the part of the salesman of United States social consensus. Disaffection, helplessness, and the response of anger at the United States have undermined the thrust of the formerly guileless enthusiast of the American way and American methods.
I submit that foreign gods (ideals, idols, ideologies, persuasions, values) are more offensive to the “poor” than the military or economic power of the foreigner. It is more irritating to feel seduced to the consumption of overpriced sugar-water called Coca-Cola than to submit helplessly to doing the same job an American does, only at half the pay. It angers a person more to hear a priest preach cleanliness, thrift, resistance to socialism, or obedience to unjust authority, than to accept military rule. If I read present trends correctly, and I am confident I do, during the next few years violence will break out mostly against symbols of foreign ideas and the attempt to sell these. And I fear that this violence, which is fundamentally a healthy though angry and turbulent rejection of alienating symbols, will be exploited and will harden into hatred and crime. The recent violence in Detroit, Washington, and Cincinnati after the murder of Martin Luther King shows how the impatience of the ghetto dwellers in the United States can erupt into violence and vandalism at the slightest spark.
Violence, therefore, covers a broad spectrum of experience: from the explosion of frustrated vitality to the fanatical rejection of alienating idols. It is important to stress this distinction. But as United States thinkers are horrified by the heartless slaughter in Vietnam, and fascinated by the inability of a white majority to suppress the life of a people, it is not easy to keep the distinction clear. The emotional involvement of the average United States student with Vietnam and the ghettos is so deep, it is almost taboo to call his attention to the distinction. For this reason we must welcome any educational effort that allows United States students to perceive reactions to the United States way of life in the third theater of the war against poverty: Latin America.
In the mirror of Latin America, violence in American ghettos and on the borders of China can be seen in its new meaning, as a rejection of American values. From experience of years in Cuernavaca, dealing with United States “idea salesmen,” I know this insight is costly to come by. There is no exit from a way of life built on $5,000-plus per year, and there is no possible road leading into this way of life for nine out of ten men in our generation and the next. And for the nine it is revolting to hear a message of economic and social salvation presented by the affluent that, however sincerely expressed, leads the “poor” to believe that it is their fault that they do not fit into God’s world as it should be and as it has been decreed that it should be around the North Atlantic.
It is not the American way of life lived by a handful of millions that sickens the billions, but rather the growing awareness that those who live the American way will not tire until the superiority of their quasi-religious persuasion is accepted by the underdogs. Living violence always breaks out against the demand that a man submit to idols. Planned violence is then promoted as justified by the need to reduce a man or a people to the service of the idol they threaten to reject. Francisco Juliao, the peasant leader from Northeast Brazil who now lives in exile in Cuernavaca, recently made a statement that clarifies these principles. “Never,” he said, “but never put weapons into the hands of the people. Whosoever puts weapons into the hands of the people destroys. Weapons put into the hands of the people will always be used against them. Weapons always defeat the poor who receive them. Only the brick and the stick a man picks up in anger will not defile him as a man.”
In this light it is important for the North American citizen to learn from the insight gained these years by Latin American thinkers. Let him look at Colombia where there are bandits who kill for gain, and soldiers and guerrilleros who kill each other for the sake of discipline or in the service of a flag, and there is the angry man who kills in a mob that erupts in riot; and finally there is the witness, like Camilo Torres, who purposefully withdraws to the mountains to demonstrate his ability to survive in the face of an oppressive regime and thus wants to prove its illegitimacy. Soldier and bandit can organize; riots can be incited and their frustrated vitality can go stale or be channeled with deadly rationality into the service of some “ideal.” Testimony will always remain a lonely task that ends up on a hill like Calvary. True testimony of profound nonconformity arouses the fiercest violence against it, but I do not see how such witness could ever be organized or institutionalized.
The study of violence in Latin America deeply touches the life of the United States observer, but—for a moment still—allows him to stay disengaged. It is always easier to see the illusions in one’s neighbor’s eyes than the delusions in one’s own. A critical examination of the effect that intense social change has on the intimacy of the human heart in Latin America is a fruitful way to insight into the intimacy of the human heart in the United States. In the capital-starved economies of Latin America, a great majority live excluded, now and forever, from the benefits of a thriving United States-style elite middle class. In the immensely rich economy of the United States, a small minority clamors that, in the same way, it is excluded from the mass of the middle class. The comparison should enable the United States observer to understand the world-wide growth of two societies, separate and unequal, and to appreciate the dynamics that provoke violence between them.