Published by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
2016 Stephen P. Reyna
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Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Reyna, Stephen P., author.
Title: Deadly contradictions : the new American empire and global warring / Stephen P. Reyna.
Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015047954| ISBN 9781785330797 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781785330803 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: United StatesForeign relations19451989. | United StatesForeign relations1989 | United StatesMilitary policy. | World politics19451989. | World politics1989 | War and society.
Classification: LCC E744 .R458 2016 | DDC 327.73009/04dc23
LC record available at hhp://lccn.loc.gov/2015047954
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78533-079-7 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-78533-080-3 (ebook)
This book is dedicated to Nina and our familya feisty bunch, creators all.
PREFACE
The whole world is covered with nations of which we know only the names, yet we dabble in judging. Let us suppose a Montesquieu, a Buffon, a Diderot traveling in order to inform by observing and describing Turkey the interior of Africa China, Tartary Mexico, Peru, Chile, and finally the Caribbean. Let us suppose these new Hercules then wrote at leisure the natural, moral, and political history of what they would have seen; we ourselves would see a new world and we would thus learn to know our own. (Rousseau, in Lvi-Strauss 1976: 34)
In an essay about the origins of anthropology, Claude Lvi-Strauss credited Rousseau with a delineation of the discipline. The idea behind Rousseaus anthropology was to send new Hercules out and about, traveling to inform compatriots about different people in the world, the better to know our own. This book is Rousseauian in spirit. It is a real trip, a journey to other peoples and places to know the United States and its global entanglements. A word on how this peregrination came about is in order.
I received a draft deferment to attend an Ivy League university in the 1960s and so avoided the Vietnam War. In 1968, as a privileged graduate student, I went instead to live among the Barma in Chadthen as isolated a place as existed on the globeto conduct research into descent groups. There I went from person to person, asking, So, what about clans? They didnt know. Chad, it turned out, was in the midst of civil war. One evening in 1969 in a tiny village, two months into fieldwork, Musa woke me with the words Malatol debg kid, which translated as The masters of killing have come or maybe as The masters of killing are comingsoon! We waited for them under the old bili tree where the road into the village stopped and under which the chief held courta motley crew of six, all over sixty except for the guy swollen from elephantiasis. We were armed with a shotgun (no shells), an ancient sword (pretty short), and a fishing lance (jagged).
They did not come that night, but they kept coming elsewhere. At a roadblock a few years later, a soldier maneuvered the barrel of his automatic weapon to push up my companions sunglasses, the better to see his faceand the better to kill him (if necessary). After some very fast talk, the gun was removed and the glasses slid back into place. During one period in NDjamena, Chads capital, if you woke up in the morning and saw birds in the tree, you knew there had been fighting near the Presidential Palace the previous night. At the time a friend recounted how an old man near the palace had raised his arm above his shoulder, brandishing a knife, and been machine-gunned by soldiers who then approached the body and threw hand grenades at it. They blew him into mini-pieces, he said, and kept repeating, mini-morcaux, mini-morcaux. Why? This led me to understand that unilineal descent groupsthen the regnant anthropological conceptual boytoyswere not of pressing significance to Chadians, whereas understanding why portions of their agnates kept flying off in blasted, bloody chunks was.
This realization was followed by another. Maybe Chad was not so isolated. Americans and Europeans were involved in the violence. After all, in that first village an old American World War II fighter plane, piloted by a Frenchman, would fly out of the eastern dawn, bank sharply over the village at strafing levelthe pilots silver glasses glinting in the sunand head northward. Once, on the way to a funeral, I drove through a line of French legionnaires retreating from the area where the funeral was to be held. In 1970 at a parade in NDjamenas Independence Square, celebrants of the tenth anniversary of Chads independence watched a tank roll by. Actually, it was Chads only tank, the Gaurang. Standing in the Gaurangs main turret, facing and saluting the reviewing stand, was a Chadian soldier; at another opening up front, a European officer stared straight ahead, saluting no one. Fast-forward ten years: on one battlefield in the 1980s there were reports of a Bob, said to be a CIA officer. Fast-forward another quarter of a century: there was still warfare. As we traveled to the small city of Abech near the Sudanese border, high, high above a French Jaguar jet left a contrail pointing east, toward the hostilities.
Such memories are disquietingBob and Europeans haunting imaginations shadows. But as readers will learn, Bob and the Europeans doing their thing in Chad was not a singularity. Rather, they were, and are, a global imperial phenomenon characterizing our times. I had gone to Chad to study Chadians worlds, and in so doing had learned our own world was part of theirs. Bob and his compatriotsmasters of killing who have come or are comingsoon!were out there. Among other matters, this text provides theory and evidence to argue that since the end of World War II, a New American Empire has emerged in our world to choreograph Bob and his allies operations in other worlds across the globe.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The project that became this book began as a series of articles (Reyna 2005; 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2013) derived from presentations at a number of conferences, including the Ernest Gellner Seminar (Prague, Czech Republic, June 2004); a Presidential Session of the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (San Jose, CA, 1519 November 2006); the Anthropology of Globalization Symposium, held by the Bremer Institut fr Kulturforschung, University of Bremen (Bremen, Germany, 25 April 2008); the Humboldt University Social Science Seminar (Berlin, Germany, 19 June 2008); the Free University Social Anthropology Seminar (Berlin, Germany, 26 June 2008); the international workshop Re-Appraising World Market Production, held at the University of Bern (Bern, Switzerland, 18 June 2009); the colloquium Cosmopolitanism in the Landscape of Modernity, held at the Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University (Princeton, NJ, 26 September 2009); and the Culture, Power, Boundaries Seminar at Columbia University (New York, NY,15 April 2013). I would like to thank the participants in these sessions for their helpful comments.