Book Review: America, América: A New History of the New World
by Greg Grandin
Bartolomé de las Casas over Milton Friedman
This book will both break your heart and stir up righteous anger as it chronicles one failure after another to turn the advance of European conquest of the Western Hemisphere from exploitation and enslavement to mutually beneficial human interaction. Greg Grandin exposes a through line running from the Spanish conquest to the 21st Century of domination for greed and profit that justified the dispossession and suppression of those considered to be lesser peoples. Aspects in this book of historical figures not usually seen in popular accounts are sure to adjust readers’ assessments of major actors such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Harry Truman—and these aspects intensify in the aftermath of World War II.
Grandin chronicles the evolution of an initial vision of a common America encompassing both continents into one in which the new United States saw itself as the dominant hemispheric hegemon as early as the end of the Revolutionary War against Great Britain. The Monroe Doctrine, which had some beneficial features if applied judiciously, eventually became a bludgeon for imposed will until the US no longer found it useful in its original form. The seeming roller coaster success and setback of significant figures such as Simón Bolívar illustrates the many disappointments of things not gone right. One point of structure that Grandin mentions frequently is the principle of “uti possidetis juris,” which was based in Roman law and stipulated that the new South American states would preserve the territorial boundaries they held as administrative units under their former colonial powers—it served to provide legal and territorial continuity to avoid useless conflicts, and has served well in avoiding some unnecessary wars.
In the narrative that Grandin presents, things turned notably for the worse during the Cold War and neoliberal Globalization. The South American countries were not helped in developing their domestic industries, primarily due to US companies preference to keep them instead as extractive sources of raw materials. The wave of right wing coups and dictators propped up by US operatives has impeded any meaningful social and economic progress—Augusto Pinochet’s rule of terror in Chile is a well known example, and it served as a model that fellow travelers of the neoliberal Chicago Boys used to guide Vladimir Putin to emulate in Russia. Many of these coups were assisted by Frank Wisner’s 1940s “Mighty Wurlitzer” of propaganda, which is still playing its hits on more technologically advanced platforms today.
We need something that can outperform Wisner’s “Wurlitzer,” and negate the vast amount of right wing disinformation that has been flooding the zone for far too long—it’s past time to start calling up the songs of humanity. One may readily perceive from Grandin’s skillful description how Bartolomé de las Casas had in the early 16th Century something better than 19th Century Marxism in his insistence that all people share a common humanity that cuts across cultural and racial divides. This is a view rooted in Christian doctrine, natural law, and empirical observation. For ourselves, we need to see that Bartolomé de las Casas outshines Milton Friedman in our own time—the case is easy to make.