On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation

^{Chapter 2} The Post–World War II Order

Oliver Stone: You’ve written that the self-sufficiency in essential raw materials that characterized the United States came to an end after the Second World War. The United States found it needed to import oil, iron ore, bauxite, copper, manganese, nickel, oil. Can you talk a bit about the US need for raw materials after World War II and what happened after it had become the richest country in the world?

Tariq Ali: After the war, people’s expectations were much higher than they had been in earlier periods. The manufacture of cars, for instance, the explosion of that particular industry, the explosion of the military-industrial complex, was on the scale that no American leader could have conceived of prior to the First World War. So they were making sure that they were never short of supplies in order to keep the country going, and in order to protect and preserve US imperial interests, especially oil. So they needed raw materials. Eisenhower actually once even spoke in terms of the importance of Vietnam in terms of the raw materials the United States needed. And the deal with Saudi Arabia, which later came to haunt the United States in the twenty-first century, was very interesting because it showed the transition from one empire to another before the first empire had officially collapsed. The United States took over the role of guarding the Saudi royal family and all their interests from the British during the Second World War. The meeting where this took place was on a boat, a special boat in the Suez Canal. That’s where the deal was signed.

Protect the family from who?

To protect the family from its own people.

Even then?

Even then. The Saudi royal family, and especially the brand of religion that it believed in, the Wahabi faith, represented a tiny number of people in Saudi Arabia. So they used the strength they gained first from their deals with the British Empire and subsequently with the United States in order to preserve their stranglehold over their own people and to impose this particular religion on the people in Saudi Arabia, who really didn’t share it. So that goes back to the Second World War. But increasingly the United States was thinking, even while the war was going on, the French have collapsed, what is happening to the French colonies? The Dutch can’t fight, they’re occupied by the Germans. What’s going to happen in Indonesia? What is going to happen in Indochina? What is going to happen to India? Can we let the Japanese take India? Because at one point there was a real danger.

Can you talk about that briefly?

After the fall of Singapore in 1942, the Indian nationalists, Gandhi in particular, and Nehru, felt that they might end up discussing Indian independence, not with the British, but with the Japanese. So for the first time Gandhi made a strategic error, or a tactical error. He said, let us call on the British to leave India now. And the British said to him, wait until the war is over. We’re going to go. He said, no, you have to go now. So they withdrew all their people from governments within Indian provinces, and waged a civil disobedience movement called Quit India. Now people see this just as a national movement, which it was, but it was linked to the big Japanese offensive after the fall of Singapore, which was seen as the biggest defeat for the British military in Asia. And the British felt the Japanese are moving on, they’re reaching Burma. Soon they will occupy Bengal. And after they occupy Bengal, well, who knows? They might take Delhi. So the British government, Churchill in particular, panicked and sent left-wing politicians from Britain to see Gandhi, and say to him, look, we’ll give you whatever you want, but just hang on a bit. We’re giving you a blank check. And Gandhi replied, what is the point of a blank check from a bank that is failing? He really thought that the Brits were finished. But of course, the Japanese never made it to Delhi, though it is worth remembering that lots of Indian soldiers captured by the Japanese were transformed into an Indian national army. And there was one central leader of the Indian Congress Party, Subhas Chandra Bose, who flew to Tokyo and Berlin on the nationalist slogan “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and did deals with Hitler and the Japanese to launch a military offensive within India against the British. This was the Indian National Army, which was very popular.

What happened?

They didn’t get very far. They did fight against the British. Many of them were arrested. And after the war, when they were being brought to trial, top Indian politicians, including Nehru, donned their lawyers’ clothes and went in to defend them, saying they were nationalist patriots. We didn’t agree with them, but they did what they did against a country that was occupying them.

Since Japan had Burma, why didn’t they send more troops over to India?

It is another of these mysteries, why they gave up on India, why they didn’t invade the Soviet Union. They just gave up at one point in time, and felt that they had to concentrate everything elsewhere. I think, by that time, they probably felt that their supply lines were a bit overstretched.

Did India have any wealth for Japan?

Well, India had enormous wealth, potential wealth.

Potential, but not at the moment.

Not at the moment. It was wealth which would have to be exploited, but they had a massive labor force.

Yes, but they would’ve had to be fed, and the Japanese did have food problems.

You’ve written that, after the Second World War, essentially the United States struck a deal with Japan to run a form of one-party state, am I correct?

People talk a great deal about General MacArthur writing the Japanese constitution. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, people proposed a “Japanese-style” occupation of Iraq. But the occupation of Japan was by no means progressive. First, why keep the Japanese emperor around? Normally the United States did not have too much time for that, nor did the French because of their republican traditions. Rule through monarchs is more of a British tradition. But in the case of Japan, I think MacArthur and the US government decided that removing the emperor from the throne of Japan and making Japan a republic might unleash social and political forces in the country that they couldn’t control. They always needed people to control these countries on their behalf, and they felt they stood a better chance with the emperor. In fact, the astonishing thing is that the emperor was already preparing the speech he expected to make when he was tried as a war criminal, because he was centrally involved in the war. And when MacArthur went to see him, he thought this was the end. In fact, MacArthur said, hang on, we’re keeping you on, your position is safe.

The other thing to bear in mind is that, after the Second World War, in all three Axis countries, Japan, Germany, Italy, the bulk of the military structure of these countries was kept intact, and the same personnel who had fought against the United States continued to play prominent roles. In Japan, for example, they removed very few people. There was a war crimes tribunal to prosecute Tojo and some others, but by and large they kept the army in force. In Italy, 60 to 65 percent of Mussolini’s structure in the judiciary, in the military, in the police force was kept in place. In Germany, you probably have the biggest purge, but still a lot of former Nazis joined the Christian Democratic Party, and played a part in the police force and the judiciary, because by this time, the enemy was communism. And so anything that could be used against the communists was used.

Was there a moment during the Second World War when the United States became an imperial power of the magnitude to inherit the British mantle?

From the moment it began, really, something had to give. If the First World War was a decisive event for making the United States a world power, bringing it onto the world stage, the Second World War was a decisive event in terms of making the United States an imperial power, which meant it had to fight wars to preserve its dominion. This soon led to the interventions in Korea, in Vietnam, and so on. Of course, the United States had always been an empire in North America, as we know, expanding its territory at the expense of Mexico. Buying Louisiana from the French, kicking the Brits out. Controlling South America indirectly, by and large, even though the marines went in time and time again, as General Smedley Butler reminds us in his wonderful book War Is a Racket. By and large, the way the United States preferred to rule the world was to find local relays who would do their bidding. Where they did intervene directly, the results weren’t always happy, like in the Philippines.

You have pointed out that Britain ruled India with only, I think, thirty thousand soldiers.

That is amazing, yes. At the height of the British rule in India, there were thirty-six thousand white English soldiers. But the Brits, because they decided to stay there, ruled this vast and populous subcontinent by doing deals with wings of its ruling class in different parts, and creating a “new model army,” the British Indian Army, which was staffed with people from the poorest sections of the Indian countryside. They avoided recruiting in the towns, recruiting mainly poor peasants, or mountain people, like the Gurkhas, instead, who were paid and looked after. It was a sort of paternalistic army. They troops weren’t just left to rot, and that was a very successful operation, which no imperial power could ever repeat again.

And they developed a landlord class?

They did indeed. In previous centuries, during the Mughal empire, landlordism hadn’t been encouraged. The state was dominant. The British created a class of landlords by giving larger states to people who were already notables in these regions but who exercised power through collecting taxes, rather than ownership of land, though in many cases they had slowly begun to accumulate landholdings. So the British institutionalized all this by saying to these people, you’re the landlords, you control these areas, you control the tenants under you, and we need your support. A lot of tenants from these estates often went and fought for the British army in China, in Indochina, and elsewhere in the world. Lots of Indian soldiers died in the Second World War in the fields of Europe.

So you’re saying the United States inherited, with certain exceptions, this colonial legacy?

They inherited this colonial legacy from the British, but they didn’t operate the way the British did. When the British occupied Africa, British civil servants were stationed around the country. The queen was the head of the country. I mean, it was a traditional, old-fashioned colonialism. If you were a French colony in Africa, you were part of the French commonwealth. All the deals were essentially done in Paris. The United States didn’t go down that route. One reason they didn’t is because the early ideology of the United States was we are an anticolonial country because we had to get rid of a colonial power, the Brits, ourselves. And this played a very important part in how the United States formulated its thinking about its own empire. They could never admit they were an empire. It is only recently, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that they’ve begun to do that. And so that played some part in it, and that didn’t encourage them to send Americans around to staff the customs service of country X or country Y. They’ve always been unhappy when they’re forced to do that, as in Iraq today. So it was a different type of an empire. As a matter of fact, the British got more financially out of controlling Argentina indirectly than they got out of occupying Africa. And for the United States, I think it is this financial aspect that is paramount when US interests are concerned—what their corporations can do, what is the best possible atmosphere for them to function. That has dominated US thinking for a long time.

More of a neoliberal, free-market philosophy?

Much more of that, even before these words were invented. That is how the United States has tended to operate. I mean, that is how they built up the Saudi oil industry. ARAMCO went in, and actually built the oil industry in Saudi Arabia, which the Saudis later took over with very handsome compensation, and permanent tribute basically to Washington. US companies would go in, personnel attached to their companies would go in, intelligence agents would go in to keep Washington informed of what was going on, but they didn’t like direct occupations or sending in troops unless it became absolutely necessary.

You’ve observed that England was very clever in using the antislavery platform to colonize Africa.

It’s quite interesting that the argument the British gave for the colonization of Africa, and for sending British troops, was that this is the only way we can end slavery, ignoring the fact that Britain and fortunes had been made in Britain from the slave trade for many, many decades. But that was the argument they used, and I compare it to the argument used by the United States that we’re taking this country or that country to defend human rights. These are ideological justifications, given largely to their own people at home, to make something that is unseemly more palatable. But the British were the cheekiest, actually.

Would slavery have ended otherwise, or did the British actually end it?

No, slavery was coming to an end, more or less. The process had begun in the nineteenth century, especially after the defeat of the South in the American Civil War. And in Europe, it was ending. The French Revolution had ended it. The Haitian slaves had revolted. So what the British said was very typical of British imperialism, a lot of bogus, hypocritical talk. The way they ruled Africa was totally racist. I mean, if you look at what they did when they ruled Africa, they imposed an apartheid system on the country. They built whites-only clubs, whites-only segregated areas. People say the Afrikaners did that in South Africa, but the British did it all over the world, in India as well, but largely in Africa.

I’d be curious, what do you think of Dr. Livingston, the Scottish missionary doctor?

Once you belong to an imperial country, an imperial race, you think the world is yours. And even good people, you know, they decide that they can go and explore the world, and discover things. In the back of their mind is the fact that we are the empire, everything I’m doing is for the empire. And Livingston was not immune to that. The Scottish are now very hostile to the English. But in terms of the British Empire, the Scotts sometimes tended to be the most die-hard imperialists. They played a big role in establishing the British Empire, and in administering it.

And there was a religious component, too. That was always part of it. We are bringing civilization and the Christian religion to the heathens. We will help them, but in return they have to become Christians. A lot of the missionaries believed that, and they believed it quite genuinely without any bad motives. In order to save these souls, we have to make sure the body is kept alive, too. The Brits did it in Australia to a certain extent, as well, converting the Aboriginals, bringing them to our way of life. And, of course, most of them were wiped out.

Would Sir Richard Burton be on your bad-guy list?

Well, Burton was a very interesting guy, and my bad-guy list isn’t so big, you know. I mean, there were lots of British scholars who went out into the world and did good things, discovered languages, wrote about them. Some of these individuals were Orientalists in the best sense of the word, that they wanted to learn about “Oriental” culture, learn the languages, translate them into English. And, for me, it is always a good thing when you begin to learn what other people are thinking. The early scholars who went to China provide us with insights into what fiction was being written in China in the eleventh century, for example, which we would never know otherwise. So, for me, these are, by and large, good guys.

Could you discuss your views of Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

Roosevelt was, I think, probably one of the most intelligent presidents produced by the United States in the twentieth century. When he decided something had to be done, he did it. He surrounded himself with very good people, strong-minded people, some of whom he trusted, some he didn’t, but by and large he took a decision and pushed it through. Whether or not you agree with the particular decision, that’s what he did. He was helped by the fact that, at the time of the Great Depression, the United States also had a strong labor movement. Today it’s difficult to think about trade unions playing a big part in national public life in the United States, but they did at the time. There were factory occupations taking place in Flint, Michigan, where autoworkers were occupying their factories, and women were setting up the women’s auxiliary, helping the strike, taking food for their men, building solidarity. And this pressure from below enabled Roosevelt to take on the giant corporations when he did, and pushed through the New Deal, which was essentially a social-democratic program for the United States. He couldn’t have done this at a different time. He had this ability to communicate with people through the wireless, before the age of television, and became an effective war leader.

Howard Zinn seems to think less of Roosevelt, seeing him more as a capitalist front man who was preserving a decayed system.

This is true on one level of course, but one can say this about every politician in the Western world. Sometimes people ask me questions about Obama. And I say, well, if you wear Caesar’s clothes, and you sit on Caesar’s thrown, you have to behave like Caesar. But there are choices even in how to be Caesar. You can be Caligula, or you can be Claudius. You can be Constantine, or you can be Julian. So you can say that about all politicians. They are capitalists, they serve capitalist interests, and it is true. But when there are no other alternatives, then you’re a bit stuck. So the question is: were there any big alternatives for Roosevelt? Looking back on the history of the twentieth century, at that point in time, Roosevelt was probably the best the United States could get. And his vice president, Henry Wallace, was a genuinely progressive soul, with genuinely radical ideas. And Roosevelt hung onto him until he was too ill and sick to fight the elements of his own party that wanted to get rid of Wallace. And the Democrats put in Harry Truman. I mean, what if Wallace had become president after Roosevelt died? Who knows how the Cold War would have unfolded, whether it would have started in that particular way or not, or whether Wallace would have used nuclear weapons against Japan.

Would Roosevelt have used nuclear weapons?

That’s an interesting question. I think there was a side of him that reflected the common views in the United States about the Japanese. That was not his strong point, Japan.

He came to accept terror bombing, it seems.

He did. You know, the terror bombing that took place in German towns—Dresden, and so on—was it militarily necessary? I don’t think so. But once you accept that, then the jump from the terror bombing of Dresden and Hamburg to using and testing these new weapons in Japan is not a big leap. I always wonder whether they would’ve tested these weapons out on a white race. Let’s put it bluntly. Somehow the Japanese had been demonized so much that wiping out two whole cities didn’t really matter. Everyone agreed to it. It wasn’t just the Americans. The British agreed, the Russians agreed to it. Left-wing—

You say the Russians agreed to it?

The Russians agreed to it.

To Hiroshima?

Stalin agreed to it. Even though it was a shot across their own bow, the Russians were informed that these weapons were going to be tested on Japan and they didn’t protest.

Postwar anticommunism took root more in the United States than in France or other parts of Europe. What was the reason behind that?

I think in France, of course, you had a large resistance during the Second World War. And there were two components of that resistance. There was a nationalist resistance under General de Gaulle. He was greatly admired because he had stood firm when France fell, and said we will fight these guys until the end. Then, after the Soviet Union was attacked—and only after then—did the French Communist Party throw itself heart and soul into the resistance, and they lost many, many people. So the traditions of that resistance remained very strong in France right until the 1980s. And the communist role in that resistance meant that it wasn’t easy to vilify or demonize them. And the French intelligentsia that grew up in that particular period, whether they were members of the Communist Party or not, were in general sympathetic to Marxist ideas. I talk particularly of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, the whole school of younger people around them and Les Temps modernes, the magazine they set up. In addition, you had with de Gaulle a president who, in later years of the Cold War, didn’t want to be part of the American plans for global domination. He took France out of NATO, and he opposed the war in Vietnam. He came to Montreal, not far from the United States and said, “Vive le Québec libre!” You know, what more could he do? So that meant that France was never part of the Cold War ideology in the same way as the United States.

McCarthyism in that exact form in which it formed in the United States couldn’t have been found in too many countries in Europe, Scandinavia excluded. Italy had a giant communist party, largely because of the role it had played in the resistance.

Yet in the United States we had numerous strikes during World War II, and the question is why we changed so abruptly from 1944 to 1947, when Truman signed the antilabor Taft-Hartley law? Looking back, Eugene Debs ran for president, and he ends up in jail. Big Bill Haywood ends up running away from America because he’s sentenced to jail. It seems that we broke the back of the labor unions with Emma Goldman’s deportation and the Palmer Raids. There seems to be an ongoing war against labor.

There was a total war against the American labor movement, especially from the beginning from the 1920s onward. And if you look at the statistics of the number of physical attacks on striking workers, either by the police or by private companies and goons hired by the corporations, it’s quite astonishing. Repression backed by the state, or accepted by the state, was used to crush a labor movement in this country. In this time, the “Bolshevik threat” played a very big part, too. And it’s at this same time that US leaders began to use religious imagery. The motto “In God We Trust” was put on the dollar in the 1950s. And increasingly presidents who were not deeply religious started paying lip service to religion. Why? Because religion was seen as a weapon against communism. And the state began to use religious emblems, as well. That is quite an interesting feature of the Cold War, which has led us partially where we are today. The United States has become a much more religious country than it used to be, with religion being taken far more seriously. Before the Cold War, religion was a sort of private matter; it didn’t really enter into the functioning of the life of the state.

But instead of Wallace as president, we had Truman.

The removal of Henry Wallace and the election of Harry Truman meant that the United States had decided to embark on a certain course. That course was an aggressive foreign policy, taking on the Russians. The first big outbreak as a consequence of this was the Korean War. With the defeat of the Japanese, Korea became vulnerable to nationalism, to communism, to radical currents. Had the United States not intervened, there is very little doubt that the whole of the peninsula would have fallen to the communists, who interestingly were more popular in what is now South Korea than what is now North Korea. In Seoul, for example, you had much more genuine popular support for the Korean communists. Kim Il-sung didn’t like many of the communists of Seoul because they reminded him of a period when communism was genuinely popular, and he didn’t like to be reminded of that. So a lot of communists from the South were repressed by Kim Il-sung when he established this parody of a Stalinist dictatorship in North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Many communists from the South were not given positions. Many were killed, some were imprisoned.

So, the United States decided that it wasn’t going to allow Korea to “fall” to communism. The United States had sent troops into Korea and a border had been established on the forty-ninth parallel between North and South Korea. The North Koreans then decided on a raid, and crossed the border, which gave the United States a pretext for a war. This war went on for three years. It was the first of the hot wars of the Cold War. And had the Chinese armies not entered, North Korea would have fallen to MacArthur. MacArthur had started saying we are going to win against the communists of North Korea, and if necessary we’ll cross the Yalu River and go into China. This sort of talk was very dangerous. The Chinese Revolution had succeeded in October 1949. We talked earlier about the wave of enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution in Europe. There was a similar wave of enthusiasm for the Chinese Revolution in Asia—the Chinese way, the Chinese path. Mao Zedong was a popular hero. They had taken the world’s largest country, not a small thing. So when the Korean War began, the Chinese decided we can’t allow North Korea to fall, and sent in Chinese. The Chinese army fought the United States to a standstill, ultimately leading to an armistice in 1953. But it produced a lot of casualties. Mao Zedong’s son died fighting in the Korean War. So that was the first of these wars. The early period of the Cold War saw the breakup of old empires, with the United States essentially increasingly taking over the role of these empires. The Korean War, the breakup of the Japanese Empire. The Vietnam War, the breakup of the French Empire.

Iran.

Events in Iran in the early 1950s showed the weakness of the British, who could no longer control Iran. The election of a nationalist government in Iran, the National Front Party, a very democratic movement led by Mohammed Mosaddegh, was a turning point. The first thing Mosaddegh did when he was elected in Iran was nationalize the oil. He said Iranian oil is not going to remain under the control of the British. And at that point the United States decided to back the British, so the CIA and British intelligence organized the toppling of the Mosaddegh regime, bringing the shah back, who had fled, to Iran, and mobilizing religious people. All the demonstrations in Tehran against Mosaddegh were organized in the mosques. And with the shah in power, and all other political parties banned, torture used regularly as a weapon, the only space that could be used was the mosque.

The toppling of Mosaddegh in 1953 in Iran was part of a wider pattern. In Latin America, all attempts by South American nationalist leaders, such as Arbenz in Guatemala, to break away from Washington’s embrace, from US corporations, to defend their own countries, to favor poor people, was seen as a communist outrage. The US response was to use any means available to topple them, get rid of them. We have to do virtually anything, including fighting wars, to preserve US power in these domains. And if it means linking up with the worst elements in South America, or Iran, or Asia, we will do it. We have one enemy, communism, and everything we use against that enemy is justified. This was also the period of the Vietnam War, the most striking manifestation of that impulse. It is important to remember about the Vietnam War that it escalated soon after a big American victory in Indonesia, when they organized a coup in 1965 that wiped out one million communists, ousting the independent nationalist leader Sukarno and imposing the brutal dictator Suharto. Time magazine openly said this is a big, big victory for the United States—and it was.

But the Vietnam War produced its own contradictions. This was a war without end, and a war fought by conscripts, and that conscript army represented what the United States was in the 1960s. A revolt within the army began to erupt when Black and white GIs said, “Hell, no, we won’t go.” We ain’t gonna fight in Vietnam. The Pentagon was defeated. They knew they could no longer persecute this war because they had lost the confidence of their own soldiers. The antiwar movement was very important. I would never begrudge that. But the spreading of the revolt inside the ranks of the US Army, the GIs against the war, I thought was absolutely fundamental. And there is no other event quite like that in the history of the United States, or in the history of most other nations. You have to go back to the First World War and the Russian Revolution, which happened in part because the soldiers threw down their guns and revolted. The big demonstration by GIs outside the Pentagon was quite incredible. These are soldiers in uniform on their crutches with their medals, some of the most decorated soldiers in US history, saying, we don’t want to win this war, and we don’t want you to prosecute this war. Unheard of. And that showed the best face of the United States. And whenever I argue with religious fundamentalists, I say basically you guys have no idea what the United States is because this is a country whose leaders are largely frightened of its own people and no one else. So you have to understand what the American citizens are, what motivates them, how they think. They brought the Vietnam War to a halt—obviously helped by the Vietnamese—which is why I think they will never have a conscript army again. That they have understood. We can’t fight wars with conscript armies.

What was the relationship between Sukarno and the Non-Aligned Movement? Was that why he was seen as such a threat to the United States?

Well, the United States, as we’ve been discussing, believed the world was black and white. They never thought there could be gray, a leadership that was neither communist nor pro-US. The Indian government, which started Non-Alignment under Nehru, Tito in Yugoslavia, Nkrumah in Ghana, Sukarno in Indonesia, who all said, look, we don’t want to be part of the Cold War. You know, we’re not communists, but we don’t agree with what you’re doing. And a rational government in the United States would have said it’s not such a bad thing to have some space between us and the communists, to have a general third way of people trying to promote their own path. But, no, the hysteria of that period was such that anyone who said we’re not on their side, but we’re not on your side either, was treated as an enemy. So they toppled government after government. In Indonesia, Sukarno was seen as an enemy because he would hop on a plane and go and see the Chinese. He would talk to the Vietnamese. He spoke out against the war in Vietnam. So he had to be toppled.

Suharto, as we know, was working very closely with the United States, and began to prepare a coup d’état. In the preparation of a coup d’état they usually have a provocation. Some event happens, which is seen as a provocation, and then the military strikes. They organized that pretext in Indonesia, and the military struck. They were totally prepared. Sukarno was put under house arrest. The entire Communist Party leadership was arrested. They had lists. Vigilantes were set up, mainly Islamist fundamentalist vigilantes, who went from house to house on the beautiful island of Bali, saying, that’s a communist family living in that house, bring them out, kill the women.

There were lists provided by—

—The CIA and the local intelligence. One of the things the CIA used to do in every country, as Philip Agee informed us, was to prepare lists of the subversives, the communists, the guerrillas. Often they compiled these names by grabbing people and torturing them. In Iraq, they worked with people inside the Baath Party, such as Saddam Hussein, who supplied them with the lists of communists to wipe out, which Hussein did. Similar lists were provided to Suharto.

Many of the people killed in Indonesia in 1965 were Chinese, am I right?

And many of the poorest—

Was there a racial component to this?

Well, after the victory of the Chinese Revolution, many of the local Chinese were very sympathetic to the revolution, and that made them sympathetic to the Indonesian Communist Party. So in Jakarta, and places where you had a large Chinese population, even in Vietnam; by the way, in Saigon, the United States utilized this fact to encourage xenophobia toward Chinese minorities. They’d say, we are defending South Vietnamese interests against the Chinese who live in Cholon, or we are defending the Indonesian interests against these wicked evil foreign Chinese. But the main objective was to wipe out the Indonesian Communist Party as a political force. This was the largest Communist Party in the world outside the official communist countries. And Indonesia was the largest Muslim country in the world. When they wiped the party out, they created a big political vacuum.

One million people were killed?

One million people.

Men, women, children?

Men, women, children. And the descriptions of that are horrendous—

Across the whole country?

Across the whole country, in villages, including this idyllic island of Bali, where communists were quite strong. I’ve read the most horrendous descriptions of these massacres. The men who were killed were disemboweled, and their genitals were hung out on display in certain areas to create fear. There were descriptions of the rivers running red with blood for days, packed with corpses.

And this was viewed by the United States, the CIA, and the government as a great victory at the time?

This was regarded by the United States as a tremendous victory because empires historically tend to be very short-term in their thinking. They rarely think ahead strategically.

If they’re willing to dispense with Sukarno, who is a major non-aligned leader, why weren’t they willing to go after Nehru in India?

They were not prepared to go after Jawaharlal Nehru in India because India was a country that commanded a lot of respect in those days, particularly throughout the Western world and especially by the Europeans. Nehru was seen as a sort of social-democratic leader. He was elected, there was an opposition, and the Indian army was independent. It would have been very difficult for the United States to manipulate the Indian army. So they couldn’t do anything about India, but what they could do was transform Pakistan into a US base in October 1958, by organizing a coup d’état and making the Pakistani military heavily dependant on them. Links between the Pakistani military and the Pentagon date back to the 1950s, to the Cold War period, when the ruling elites used the military to prevent a general election from taking place that they were fearful might produce a government that would take Pakistan out of all the US security pacts. The United States knew they couldn’t do much about India, so they concentrated on Pakistan.

Pakistan becomes a key component in our Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.

Yes, and the Pakistani military henceforth becomes a very valued asset of the United States, with direct links to the Pentagon. Large numbers of Pakistani officers are sent for training to Fort Bragg and other American military academies. And links are established between the Pakistani military in the United States to create a special commando unit inside the Pakistani army for emergency actions. And the Indians know all this.

Who was a political threat in Pakistan at this point?

There was no immediate individual leader as a threat, but you had political parties in both West Pakistan and East Pakistan whose manifesto said we will take Pakistan out of the US security pacts if we win the election scheduled for April 1959. We should be a non-aligned country like India. And that was the fear. A totally crazy fear in many ways, but it was the fear.

Your own life was marked by coup in 1958, was it not? You were fifteen then. Were you still in Pakistan at the time?

Yes.

Your life could not be the same again.

It wasn’t the same again. It was changed. We were very angry. And I was very active against the military leadership. We were organizing study circles and cells on campuses. I also organized the first demonstration of the time. When the military takes over, all political parties and trade unions are banned, all public demonstrations, all public gatherings of more than four people are not allowed. And once news came through to us, I think it was 1961, that Patrice Lumumba, the leader of Congo, had been killed—by the Belgians, or by the United States, or by both, we didn’t know—Nehru in India said this is the biggest crime of all, the West will pay for this crime, having killed an independence leader. But our government remained silent. So at my university I said we have to have a meeting on the campus to defend Lumumba and demand something. So we put our little leaflets all over the campuses saying Patrice Lumumba is dead. Half the students didn’t know who he was, but we explained it to them, and we had about five hundred students who assembled in this big hall. I spoke and said, look, Congo has produced its first independent leader, and they’ve killed him because they found him a threat. We can’t sit still, so let’s go out onto the streets. So they said, let’s. And so we marched, we just marched out of the university to the US consulate general and said, you know, who killed Lumumba? We want answers. “Long live Lumumba!” The police were totally taken by surprise. This was the first public demonstration, defying all the military law. And then, on the way back from the US consulate in Lahore, as we approached our college, the first slogans we chanted were “death to the military dictatorship, down with the military”—and nothing happened to us. So Lumumba’s assassination was one of the things that then triggered a big student movement in the country.

When did you leave Pakistan? You’re now basically in exile?

I live in London. I came to study at Oxford in 1963, and then I wasn’t allowed back by two different Pakistani dictators. I became an exile.

So 1958 to 1965 is a defining period if your life, and you’re cut off from your roots.

I was nineteen when I came to study at Oxford.

I was around sixteen when Kennedy was killed in the same year, 1963. I think that was a turning point for me, too, because I don’t think I would’ve gone to Vietnam if Kennedy had been in office.

Well, that war might not have developed to that extent.

I don’t think it’s possible.

These things are formative.

And in the same sense I don’t think that Roosevelt would have dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that’s speculation. Certainly Wallace would not have.

Wallace certainly wouldn’t have dropped the atomic bomb. So, these events which happen do change people’s lives. They’ve changed our lives, and they’ve changed the lives of millions.

I was on the colonialist side of the picture. I was in New York City. I didn’t have any concept of what we were doing around the world in your country, in Pakistan. We were interfering in all these countries, and your life—it’s your life—would be different now. Perhaps it’s been improved by the turbulence and exile, and the social movement was created. But if you had been born in Indonesia, you would’ve had the same issue. Your life would’ve been like an earthquake.

Well, if I’d been born in Indonesia, and I had the same political views, I’d be dead.

An entire generation of people were shaken by US policy.

Including American citizens. Let’s go back to the Vietnam War. That was probably the most formative event for an entire generation. It changed people, even people who supported the war, and many who fought in it, it changed them forever. They couldn’t be the same again. I mean, it made them think. And it brought about this shift that the United States would never be able to fight a conscript war again, because if you conscript people, it affects the whole country. So the war in Iraq is a war is later fought largely by a voluntary army and mercenaries recruited from abroad.

It’s ironic. The British Empire has been perhaps the most influential in terms of culture in Pakistan. You speak with an English accent. But, in reality, the American Empire is the one that changed your life by trying to determine politics in your country.

It’s absolutely true. I find it difficult to imagine what life would have been like in Pakistan had there not been a military coup, had that first general election taken place. Would Pakistan have split up in 1971? It’s one of those interesting counterfactuals that will remain with us forever. I mean, you know, these counterfactuals sort of intrigue me more and more. The older you become, the more you think of how these moments in history have changed your life and those of others.

We don’t think about this when we’re young.

No, when we’re young, we don’t think about these things. You know, you’re prepared to do anything. I remember when I was in North Vietnam during the war, and the bombs were dropping on us every day, I just said once to the Vietnamese, we feel really bad. You know, I’m in my twenties. Can’t we do something to help you? Can we help man the anti-aircraft battery? And the Vietnamese general Pham Van Dong took me aside and he said, I’m really touched you say that, but this is not the Spanish Civil War, where people from abroad can come and fight, and die. This is a war being fought between us and the most technologically advanced nation in the world. Having foreigners coming in to fight with us would require a great deal of effort keeping you people alive, which would be a distraction from the war. So please don’t make this request of us.