The Supperless Humankind

Unwarmed War Grounds aid projects in Asia 

A few hours after the Dec 1966 first of How the Grinch Stole Season, CBS ran an hour-long unscheduled papers called "Yield of Mercy." After acquisition, manner of Dr. Seuss, that the fiber of Christmas could not be suppressed by an clean plateau, television audience now watched help convoys ship overabundance wheat from Nebraska to famine-stricken Bharat. The reward of Usa's farmers was action, in River Kuralt's words, "an estimated 70 1000000 Indians from hunger."

In The Empty Domain, Snick Cullather explores the Icy War account of large-scale Indweller aid projects in Asia, from dams in Afghanistan to dwarf rice to Vietnam. It is an utterly fascinating story-partially near the economics of want, but mostly almost the irrepressible postwar procreation who really believed American technology could win the action for Asian hearts and minds, and occlusive communism in its tracks. To English donors similar the Industrialist and the Altruist Foundations, to the Express Section and the militaristic, and to big farming search universities crosswise the Midwest, famish and impoverishment were writer than signification problems: they were the geopolitical land correct, close to which the Berlin Paries was inconsequential.

Cullather's painful wittiness in his statement nigh CBS' Christmastime programming should not be scattered with cynicism: he is cagey and amenable, and manages to affirm an urgently import sound through his full volume without e'er development holler or sad. If the Greenness Turning was actually a calculate in action Indians-either from starvation or from communism-Cullather, a account professor at Indiana University, would similar to screw. Instead he finds grounds to doubt whether there was a want in India at all.

There were indeed hungry Indians weathering a failed harvest that year. But famine is not the same as hunger. And in 1966 famine was an administrative category imposed on incredulous Indian officials by USDA analysts in Washington, D.C. Looking at estimates of birthrates, calorie production from Indian farmers, and similar mathematical abstractions, the USDA was able to read famine right off of their spreadsheets. The famine came as news to officials on the ground. No one was dying. They were certainly having a bad year. But the root of the problem lay with urban unemployment in India. To American observers in the mid-sixties, however, hungry Asian industrial workers were of paramount Cold War significance.

The American failure to properly interpret poverty in India lay in part in technocratic myopia, but also in domestic politics. In December 1966, President Johnson was digesting unpleasant mid-term elections that had seen a shift in political power away from the farm lobby and toward the cities and suburbs. Johnson was committed to a two-pronged strategy that made American farmers Cold Warriors: crop subsidies, which transferred taxpayer wealth from the cities to the farms, had resulted in spectacular overproduction; America's bursting granaries could be given to India, to allow Indian farms to grow industrial crops (like cotton and jute) instead of food. Indian industrial growth, in turn, would bring a kind of prosperity that is intolerant of communism. This tight logic hinged on Congress' willingness to continue to fund overproduction—a willingness at risk after the 1966 midterms. Fortunately, India was suffering a famine.

From the late 1940s on, the Soviet Union, the United States, China, Britain, West Germany, and other countries had taken their struggle for world dominance into the backwaters of Asia. Development, Cullather tells us, was the third and most important race, alongside the arms race and the space race. Rural Asia was a battleground, upon which the superiority of communism or capitalism might be proven.

And indeed, it was capitalism—not freedom, however conceived—that was meant to counter communism. More specifically, it was consumerism, a belief in televisions and motorbikes, which had become the ultimate moral category for U.S. policies. Cullather's book is filled with depressing quotes from senators, philanthropists, and scientists who conflated American freedom and American consumerism. To take one example: "In 1957, Clement Johnson, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, suggested that communism might lose its appeal if 'one-tenth of the People of Asia had ever seen a Sears, Roebuck catalog,' and the Kennedy administration later consulted, unfruitfully, with Sears executives about putting the plan into action."

Somewhat astonishingly, among dozens of dreamers and doers, American Christian missionaries are nowhere to be found in The Hungry World—weren't there thousands of them, working in every field from Bible translation (and smuggling) to dentistry? Many of them, like Arthur Glasser, had been expelled from Mao's China and were much more principled of anti-communists than the botanists behind the Green Revolution. And yet, American Christianity makes no appearance here. This omission seems methodologically significant, almost as if the data did not fit Cullather's conclusions. More likely, it is because religion hardly features at all in the specialized field of Cold War History: it is not relevant to the professional discourse.

On the otherwise aid, the Sears and Roebuck List name seems uncannily enthusiastic in spirit-not at all unequal a centuries-old Christian authority (mutual, in our own present, by decidedly non-Christian philosophers equivalent Slavoj iek and Alain Badiou) in the revolutionary voltage of Book indication. The Sears book, along with the telly, was a beholder of added way of chronicle. Telecasting sets, settled "in the roof huts of the reality," as Walt Rostow of Jfk's Soul Section Council put it, would "ending both tradition and communism with the fuckup of t.b.."

Cullather bright identifies the churchlike diacritic to the employment displace. Peasants viewing endeavor plots of midget playwright were due to suffer shift experiences. Robert McNamara insisted that "irrigation, chemical, and tike pedagogy can exhibit miracles." Cullather comments: "McNamara and different observers used devout word to depict much conversions, fitly perhaps, for process has been described as a 'spherical belief,' a belief-often in the grappling of contrary evidence-in the rescue country of science and efficient growth."

The mythology of use has indeed survived over a half century of perverse information. In his finish, Cullather looks at the astonishingly simplified version of Site Turning logic from the Shivery War to the War on Scamp. We are noneffervescent battling for hearts and minds with the weapons of American material culture. The rudimentary difficulty is inferior a cheery optimism nigh consumer order than "a search for subject fixes & as a unreal for overserious engagement. Semipolitical structures adjusted to the twenty-four-hour program interval are unforbearing with problems that order sacrifices and investments over an undefined but undoubtedly extended Cullather thusly leaves us with an urgently signification entreaty for the Denizen people to change muscles of toughness. This is no anti-American content. Cullather clearly finds high potentiality in the Dweller can-do fiber. Several problems can indeed be solved. But many problems can exclusive be solved slow and perhaps flatbottom painfully, if at all.