- Apparently to McNamara's mortification, Errol Morris,
whose film The Fog of War I recently discussed here, passes over his subject's
thirteen-year stint running the World Bank, whither he was dispatched by
LBJ, Medal of Freedom in hand.
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- McNamara brandishes his bank years as his moral redemption,
and all too often his claim is accepted by those who have no knowledge
of the actual, ghastly record. No worthwhile portrayal of McNamara could
possibly avoid his performance at the World Bank, because there, within
the overall constraints of the capitalist system he served, he was his
own man. There was no LeMay, no LBJ issuing orders.
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- And as his own man, McNamara amplified the blunders,
corruptions and lethal cruelties of American power as inflicted upon Vietnam
to a planetary scale. The best terse account of the McNamara years is in
Bruce Rich's excellent history of the bank, Mortgaging the Earth, published
in 1994.
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- When McNamara took over the bank, "development"
loans (which were already outstripped by repayments) stood at $953 million
and when he left, at $12.4 billion, which, discounting inflation, amounted
to slightly more than a sixfold increase. Just as he multiplied the troops
in Vietnam, he ballooned the bank's staff from 1,574 to 5,201. The institution's
shadow lengthened steadily over the Third World.
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- From Vietnam to the planet: the language of American
idealism was just the same. McNamara blared his mission of high purpose
in 1973 in Nairobi, initiating the World Bank's crusade on poverty. "The
rich and the powerful have a moral obligation to assist the poor and the
weak." The result was disaster, draped, as in Vietnam, with obsessive
secrecy, empty claims of success and mostly successful efforts to extinguish
internal dissent.
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- At McNamara's direction the bank would prepare five-year
"master country lending plans", set forth in "country programming
papers". In some cases, Rich writes, "even ministers of a nation's
cabinet could not obtain access to these documents, which in smaller, poorer
countries were viewed as international decrees on their economic fate".
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- Corruption seethed. Most aid vanished into the hands
of local elites, who very often used the money to steal the resources-pasture,
forest, water-of the very poor whom the bank was professedly seeking to
help.
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- In Vietnam, Agent Orange and napalm. Across the Third
World, the bank underwrote "Green Revolution" technologies that
the poorest peasants couldn't afford and that drenched land in pesticides
and fertilizer. Vast infrastructural projects such as dams and kindred
irrigation projects drove the poor from their lands, from Brazil to India.
It was the malign parable of "modernization" written across the
face of the Third World, with one catastrophe after another prompted by
the destruction of traditional rural subsistence economies.
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- The "appropriation of smaller farms and common areas,"
Rich aptly comments, "resembled in some respects the enclosure of
open lands in Britain prior to the Industrial Revolution-only this time
on a global scale, intensified by "Green Revolution agricultural technology."
As an agent of methodical destruction, McNamara should be ranked among
the top tier earth-wreckers of all time.
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- Back in 1994 (you can find the remarks on page 409 of
my The Golden Age Is in Us) I had a conversation with Noam Chomsky, in
which McNamara's name cropped up. "If you look at the modern intelligentsia
over the past century or so," Chomsky said, "they're pretty much
a managerial class, a secular priesthood. They've gone in basically two
directions. One is essentially Leninist. Leninism is the ideology of a
radical intelligentsia that says, we have the right to rule. Alternatively,
they have joined the decision-making sector of state capitalist society,
as managers in the political, economic and ideological institutions. The
ideologies are very similar. I've sometimes compared Robert McNamara to
Lenin, and you only have to change a few words for them to say virtually
the same thing."
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- True enough.
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- "Management," McNamara declared in 1967, "is
the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed
change in every direction, is diffused throughout society." Substitute
"party organization" for "management" and you have
Lenin. From "democratic centralism" to bureaucratic centralism.
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- The managerial ideal for McNamara was military dictatorship.
McNamara threw money at Pinochet's Chile after Allende's overthrow and
at the military dictators of Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, the Philippines
and Indonesia. The darker the dictatorship, the more lavishly McNamara
rewarded it.
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- He showered money on Romania's Ceausescu-$2.36 billion
between 1974 and 1982. As McNamara crowed delightedly about his "faith
in the financial morality of socialist countries", Ceausescu razed
whole villages, turned hundreds of square miles of prime farmland into
open-pit mines, polluted the air with lignite coal , and turned Romania
into one vast prison, applauded by the bank in a 1979 economic study as
being a fine advertisement for the "Importance of Centralized Economic
Control".
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- This same report hailed as "an essential feature
of the overall manpower policy" Ceausescu's stimulus of "an increase
in birth rates". The reality? Ceausescu forbade abortions and cut
off distribution of contraceptives. Result: tens of thousands of abandoned
children dumped in orphanages.
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- In the weeks after Errol Morris's film was launched,
McNamara scurried to Washington to participate in forums on the menace
of nuclear destruction with the same self-assurance with which he'd gone
to Vietnam and Cuba to review the record.
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- He and Morris turned out for a dog-and-pony show at the
Zellerbach auditorium at the University of California, Berkeley. "Condemned
out of his own mouth" indeed! If Morris had done a decent job, McNamara
would not dare to appear in any public place. It's as though Eichmann had
launched a series of lecture-circuit pillow fights with a complaisant biographer.
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- http://www.counterpunch.org/
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