Knowing Thy Enemy and Not Yourself: Why American History Should Be Taught Like Soviet History

"There's a good reason why nobody studies history; it just teaches you too much."- Noam Chomsky

Why don't American schools teach 20th century American history like they teach Soviet history? It's an honest question, based on two propositions: 1) We should, obviously, assess our conduct according to the same standards with which we assess our enemies, if not more harshly, and 2) There are enough similarities between the trajectories of Soviet and 20th century American history that they sometimes seem to even mirror each other (both were societies defined by social engineering projects on an unprecedented scale, both were dominant world powers presiding over the post-war period, both fought the Cold War through the maintenance of regional spheres of influence, etc.). And don't give me any of that "moral equivalency" crap. Soviet domestic conduct may have been far worse than ours, but we topped the Soviets in foreign policy horrors, if only because we had more power than them.

I’m inspired to ask this question based on my public school history education as well as two Oberlin classes, one on Russian history and the other on US foreign policy focusing largely on the Cold War. The first class was solid; the second was bullshit tantamount to indoctrination. The Russian history professor taught with affection for her subject, but she was also sober and unsentimental. The other professor, on the other hand, somehow forgot to mention things like the United States’ control over geographical spheres of influence that encompassed entire subcontinents, continents, and almost the entire Western hemisphere. We somehow avoided or barely discussed Israel, East Timor, Nicaragua, Haiti, Indonesia and Suharto, the IMF, the military-industrial complex, the fake-missile gap, etc. But we did get an entire class devoted largely to the influence of Western culture on the Eastern Europe, how East German kids went batshit for American blue jeans, etc. Otherwise, it was mostly top-down history, reverse Kremlinology, court stenography describing in tedious detail how The Best and the Brightest dueled with the Soviets amidst the fog of war.

I'll tell a revealing anecdote: during a class discussion comparing Soviet and American conduct during the Cold War, I said that I saw no substantial moral difference in the way that Americans treated their clients (Guatemala) and the way that the Soviet Union treated theirs (North Korea). To which the professor responded as a challenge: would I rather live in Western or Eastern Europe during the Cold War? Unprepared, I fumbled my answer and embarrassed myself, but the retort should have been immediate and obvious: would I rather live in Eastern Europe or Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador, etc.? The idea that Our policies were comparable to Theirs was just not even entertained by him. And as Norman Finkelstein pointed out, when history is not subject to comparison, it becomes a totem to be worshipped at rather than understood.

If we taught American history like we teach Soviet history- that is, if we gave similar weight to issues in American history that we do to similar issues in Soviet history - we would actually confront major issues such as the termination of Arab nationalism, the destruction of Indochina (our class only discussed Vietnam and possibly Cambodia, amazingly, even though those invasions were only part of a war on the entirety of Southeast Asia), and general attempts by the US to prevent third world countries across the world from fully realizing the decolonization granted to them by World War II.

And that's just foreign policy. Below are other issues common to both Soviet history and 20th century American history. We discuss these issues as a matter of course when studying Soviet history, but we don't even know that these are issues in American history. The following list is almost certainly incomplete:

Soviet propaganda vs. American propaganda: American corporate and state propaganda was much more prevalent than Soviet propaganda and the propaganda of any other nation, as Alex Carey discusses. (This is partly a credit to the United States; it was a free enough country that the government could not use force to control people except under more extreme circumstances and had to resort to propaganda instead.) This includes corporate propaganda against unions and big society programs, war propaganda, Democrat and Republican campaign management by public relations firms, media propaganda produced in accordance with Chomsky's "propaganda model," and advertising- the latter openly referred to before World War II as propaganda.

Yet while Soviet propaganda is reflexively and correctly described as such, American propaganda is euphemistically referred to as advertising, campaign rhetoric, PR, talking points, or is simply normalized and thus dismissed as being a natural part of politics. A Soviet-approach to American history would've exposed Obama's "Hope" and "Change" slogans as propaganda and would allow us to be more critical of the commercial advertising that permeates our society- initially designed quite consciously to control mass behavior (see Adam Curtis's excellent documentary The Century of the Self).

The Soviet Gulag vs. The Golden Gulag: The Soviet gulags might beat out American prisons in terms of horror and brutality (despite consistent rape and torture in American prisons), but America wins this contest in terms of scale. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes in Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, the prison construction program America embarked on in the 80s was the largest of its kind in history, built not for existing criminals, but in anticipation of the criminals that would emerge as a predictable byproduct of draconian drug laws and Reagan’s neoliberal order. None of my history classes taught this. They never told us that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. But we were assigned Solzhenitsyn in a high school English class and read about their prisons. I suppose that was supposed to be more edifying then learning about our own.

The KGB vs. the FBI and COINTELPRO: No contest here: the KGB was, of course, worse than the FBI. Nevertheless, while it's household knowledge that the KGB disappeared innumerable Russians, operations like COINTELPRO, an FBI program of surveillance and disruption that included political assassination, is virtually unheard of in this country. As Chomsky points out in this interview, we were all made well aware of Watergate but not of COINTELPRO, in spite of the fact that the latter was overwhelmingly more significant for having actual consequences (sometimes fatal) for those who were under surveillance. We're also unaware of the FBI's use of RICO against groups like the Black Panthers, as described by Christian Parenti. We know that the KGB was the USSR's political police; we don't even know that we have a political police, or that it waged a covert campaign against members of its own population.

Students can’t be taught this. They would be confronted with the demoralizing rapidity and totality with which rebellions, even minor ones such as the Black Panther revolts, are crushed in American history; they would suspect that even American political power ultimately rests on violence; and they would define the 60s not by the patronizing version of Martin Luther King that’s spoon-fed to them but by the milieu of communist, black nationalist, militant, and radical student groups that represented an almost wholesale revolt against society as it was.

Soviet social engineering projects vs. American social engineering projects: Besides their foreign policies, this is the most significant similarity between the US and the USSR. Their social engineering projects include the dissemination of propaganda and the mass building of prisons described above. For America, they also include projects such as the National Highway Act (far and away the largest social engineering project in human history), suburbanization, the G.I. bill, military infiltration into American higher education, the New Deal and the Great Society (which are discussed, but not as social engineering projects), NAFTA, etc. Not to mention Pentagon spending, which, as Alexander Cockburn described it, is "the fundamental ballast" to the American economy. (I also doubt that American economics courses teach this.) Many of these programs are larger in scale than anything in Stalin's Five Year Plan- yet we don't even know that there were social engineering projects in this country, much less their details.

As I wrote earlier: "Imagine being a Russian student and never learning about the Five Year Plan or a Chinese student never learning about The Great Leap Forward (and the parallels of the US to these massive state-controlled behemoths are frequent and often unflattering), and you're beginning to get a sense at how fucking stupid American education is." But imagine if we were taught about these things: we would see that our common destiny does not unfold according to deterministic market logic that exists over and above human control as something holy, but is to a great extent shaped by an identifiable elite who can be targeted and then challenged. And- this might be the best part- knowledge of how much of America's progress is due to social engineering (including slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans) would hopefully dispel that obnoxious trope that "free market capitalism is what made this country great" and other Tea Party bullshit.

Afghanistan vs. Vietnam: Both conflicts are discussed- Americans did die in Vietnam, making it worthy of attention in American history classes in the way that East Timor is not- but they’re discussed differently. The Russian history professor never once took seriously the official Soviet claim that the invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken to defend the Afghan people from “agents of western reaction.” Rather, our primary text dealing with Afghanistan and the USSR’s resulting collapse was written by a New Republic liberal who spoke in the refreshing language of realpolitik (as we always do when discussing enemy nations): the Soviets invaded to crush an uprising and thereby send a warning to its other constitutive territories not to attempt secession and disintegrate the union.

Official propaganda, on the other hand, was taken at face value in our discussions of Vietnam: we invaded- sorry, we intervened- in South Vietnam to contain communist expansion and win the Cold War. Never mind that the NLF was a purely nationalist group at it’s outset and only became Stalinist and aligned with the Soviet Union when western forces made such an alliance necessary for self-defense. But the official explanation justifies what I think most students intuitively understand was an evil as a defense against a greater evil. Teaching that American policy by its nature always acts in accordance with some objective moral standard is a form of religious initiation, not education.

My Russian and American history courses did share flaws: many American academics seem too hesitant to intimately examine societal dynamics and the power bases of dominant groups- to approach education as sociology, as Theodor Adorno put it- out of fear that such analysis would be pigeonholed as “Marxist.” For example, we didn’t assess class in either course beyond discussion of the Kulaks and Russian peasants. But when scholars of Russia note a major event or overarching historical theme in their studies, they actually talk about it with their students, if sometimes superficially. Given that so many of the major events and overarching themes in American history are so similar to those of Soviet history (and should be much more important, give that we’re Americans), the only plausible explanation for the unique academic silence concerning them must be ideological. Underneath all the academic prestige, this is ultimately nothing more complicated than rooting for the team.