Jordan Flaherty - No More Heroes: Grassroots Challenges to the Savior Mentality

by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz

As an organizer of womens liberation and against the United States war in Southeast Asia, in 1969, I accepted an invitation to meet women representatives of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) near Montreal, Quebec. There were a hundred or so other such organizers present, mostly women, about half of them young like me, and half from an earlier generation of womens peace organizations. The three NLF representatives, through a translator, spoke clearly, explaining in considerable detail the military situation in South Vietnam: U.S. massive expulsion of people from the countryside into refugee camps, with a kill everything that moves program in effect. They told us of their commitment and determination to drive the U.S. invaders out and thanked us for our solidarity and efforts to end the war. When the women opened the discussion, the first speaker, an older U.S. woman, asked how we might contribute funds to the NLF cause. Several other women, including the young, followed up with the same question and offers of checks right then and there. The translator explained the questions and offers to the NLF representative, then talked among themselves, selecting one of their number to respond. She said, We do not want your money, we do not need your money. We need you to love your own sons who are fighting and dying there and bring them home.

There was considerable confusion among the U.S. American women present, both young and old, a sort of desperate begging to provide material aid. This was the first time that I deeply understood what Jordan Flaherty dubs the savior mentality. Just having finished graduate school in the field of history, pieces of the puzzle of the apparent contradictions of U.S. imperialismthe populist urge to help the benighted around the world and the method for doing that always including making war on themfell into place.

The author correctly begins this book with the Christian Crusades in 1096, and jumping across the Atlantic in 1492, as the foundation for the founding of a Republic (the United States) to rescue the Native. The very origin story of the United States forms the core of the savior project. In November 1620, English religious dissidents (Pilgrims) landed on the shore of what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Forty-one of the Pilgrims, all men, wrote and signed the Mayflower Compact, named after the ship they arrived on. Invoking Gods name and declaring themselves loyal subjects of the king, the signatories announced that they had journeyed to North America to plant the First Colony and did therefore Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic to be governed by just and equal Laws enacted for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. A decade later, when additional English settlers founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they adopted an official seal designed in England prior to their journey. The central image depicts a near-naked native holding a harmless, flimsy-looking bow and arrow and inscribed with the plea, Come over and help us. Nearly three hundred years later, the official seal of the U.S. military veterans of the Spanish-American War (the invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines) showed a dark, naked woman kneeling before an armed U.S. soldier and a sailor, with a U.S. battleship in the background. One may trace this recurrent altruistic theme into the early twenty-first century, when the United States still invades countries under the guise of rescue.

Today, U.S. American taxpayers believe they carry an enormous burden of development and crisis financial aid to peoples in need in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but in reality such aid accounts for only 0.19 percent of the U.S. GDP, and much of that is in kind or in loans. And, as I witnessed in 1969, U.S. Americans rush to contribute dubious calls for charity, often in tandem with U.S. sites of intervention, which then involves U.S. citizens emotionally in the cause, under the guise of humanitarian intervention.

Following the crushing defeat of the United States military by the Vietnamese and the U.S. emergency withdrawal in 1975, the mainstream press and educational institutions had embraced much of what the antiwar/anti-imperialism movement of the preceding decade had formulated, and a majority of the population opposed future interventions. And, although the U.S. Congress and many politicians made gestures in the form of investigations into the illegal activities of both the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency for domestic abuses, armed interventions continued covertly in Afghanistan, Africa, the Middle East, the Philippines, Central America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. In the wake of post-war recession, inflation, skyrocketing interest rates, the oil crisis, and general malaise identified with the positive reforms by Governor Jerry Brown in California and President Jimmy Carter, by 1980, Sunbelt quasi-fascism and the military-industrial complex had found the perfect candidate to restore confidence through militarism and extreme nationalism: Ronald Reagan. Yet the interventions in Nicaragua and El Salvador and in Southern Africa were widely opposed in the 1980s, with fears of another Vietnam, but were sapped of energy by intensive Cold War anticommunist propaganda. When Vice-President George H. W. Bush, former CIA chief in the 1970s, took the presidency, he tested the mood by launching a lightning invasion of Panama in December 1989, removing the sitting president and imprisoning him in a federal penitentiary, with little protest, and general mainstream media support.

The following summer plans (Desert Shield) for the invasion of Iraq began with a troop build up of a half-million U.S. professional volunteers poised to launch the invasion in early 1991 (Desert Storm). This was conceived by the Bush administration as a way to end the Vietnam Syndrome. It was also presented, like the invasion of Panama, as ridding the country of a brutal dictator. The highly publicized story (fabrication) that the administration created of Iraqi soldiers invading a Kuwaiti hospital and pulling the tubes out of premature babies awakened the savior mentality, eliciting fervent support for the U.S. invasion. It was accompanied by the drumbeat of Support our Troops, advertised as a reversal of the presumed maltreatment of Vietnam veterans, although no such treatment, least of all hippies spitting on returning vets, was ever documented.

At the same time, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed and broke down into independent republics, and the stage was set for the resurgence of U.S. military domination through the North American Treaty Alliance (NATO). The United Nations, cowed by the Bush administration audacity, and absent previous Soviet objections, passed a resolution to legalize the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

What followed in the 1990s, as the author recounts, billionaire George Soros bankrolled non-governmental organizations and actors, such as the journalist Samantha Power, to push for a policy of humanitarian intervention, achieving success in the United Nations by 2005, with the institutionalization of the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect.

This, then, is new U.S. imperialism, supported by both Neoconservatives and Neoliberals, twisting the argument about U.S. military expansion around the world and endless wars as one between isolationism and internationalism, between generosity in helping beleaguered populations and selfishness in arguing the U.S. cant afford it, with their populist calls to let those people take care of their own demons. So, the savior mentality is key to the continuation of brutal United States militarism and the phantom war on terror.