In my travels through the Greater Middle East for the Afterparty book project, I went out of my way to meet Muslims. I visited mosques in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, met with the leading Afghan Islamic scholar at his mosque in Kabul between afternoon prayers, discussed religion with secular, Shia and Sunni Muslims in Iraq. Interviews with Muslims, from army officers and a hospital CEO to a former mujahedin fighter and a frustrated Afghan housewife, permeate the Afghanistan and Iraq chapters. In the final chapter, I explore the notion of Islam as a violent religion. Here is an excerpt from the closing chapter of “WAR: The Afterparty.”

Islam is not the problem.

Unequivocally, the Muslims I encountered during my trip insisted on the peaceful intentions and practices of their religion, and fiercely insisted that ISIS, the Taliban and al-Qaeda were violators of Islamic tradition. It’s a personal choice to embrace tolerance and non-violence, or to provide a rich education for one’s children, regardless of gender. Hate, anger and domination are part of the human condition, free to breathe inside or outside of religious tradition, tribe or nationality.

If you’re looking for scriptural justification for violence, that’s easy to find.

As the United States prepared to invade and occupy Iraq, I accompanied my ex-wife, Paula, and my daughter to the Auburn Parkside Church of the Nazarene. Andrea, 16, had been “witnessed” to by a friend and so spent some months exploring Parkside’s fundamentalist brand of Christianity. Paula’s Brazilian Presbyterianism preached a less austere but no less faithful practice. Her fiercest complaint was that the music sucked, understandable for a music-obsessed Carioca.

As I fidgeted in my church pew, I was already perplexed by the stated mission of the impending Iraq adventure. Sitting in my car in the parking lot of Jerry’s Deli in Marina Del Rey some days prior, I heard President George W. Bush articulate seven separate reasons as to why we were going to war. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said after the invasion, “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction.”[i]

Jews have a habit of skipping to the back of the book; Hebrew scripture goes from back to front. Parkside’s pastor focused his sermon on war. He exhorted us to pray for the troops (no prayers for the soon to be slaughtered and displaced Iraqis), imploring the congregation to be “prayer warriors.” To complete the martial framing of the sermon, the reverend quoted from the Book of Joshua. There is a YouTube video with rosy-cheeked pre-teens singing “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho.” A commenter on the video page objected to the warlike implications of the song, and another responded, “God was responsible for blessing the Israelites. They wouldn’t have been successful without God. God loved. The Israelites listened. Joshua led them.” The Israelites circled Jericho, the Lord exhorting His people to blow down the city walls with trumpet blasts and, then . . . what? Skipping ahead of the pastor’s liturgical reading of chapters four and five, here is what the One True God demands of His chosen people in Joshua, Chapter Six.

Verse 20. When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city.

Verse 21. They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys . . .

Verse 24. Then they burned the whole city and everything in it, but they put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the Lord’s house . . .

Verse 27. So the Lord was with Joshua, and his fame spread throughout the land.

The choice of scripture, God’s injunction to commit genocide in Jericho, stayed with me through the years of Iraq’s subjugation, humiliation and devastation. As I visited museums and historical landmarks in western Europe on my way to Serbia, I noticed a similar claim of divine providence inspiring the British, French, Belgian, Dutch and German colonial empires. Justification for wanton violence, for the mission civilisatrice, by those chosen as exceptional by providence, whether historical or divine, goes something like this:

God has chosen us,

to bring our superior values, code and way of life,

to inferior races, cultures or political systems,

justifying the overwhelming application of violence,

and the looting of the treasury on behalf of the chosen.

We Americans see others as having diabolical aims, and see our own instincts as noble. In Sven Lundqvist’s travel classic, “Exterminate the Brutes,” he documents the disgust of British colonials at the rapacious behavior of the Spaniards in the Americas. Over 90 percent of the population under Spanish rule was extinguished in a hundred years. But, in bringing Christian civilization to new lands, the outcome was no different in “El Norte.”

In 1492, Columbus arrived in America. The extent of the so-called demographic catastrophe that followed has been estimated differently by different scholars. Certainly it was without equivalent in world history . . .

About five million of the indigenous American population lived in what is now the United States. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, half a million still remained. In 1891, at the time of Wounded Knee — the last great massacre of Indians in the United States — the native population reached rock bottom: a quarter of a million, or five percent of the original number of Indians . . . When the same phenomenon occurred as a result of Anglo-Saxon occupation of North America, other explanations were required. “Where the English come to settle, a Divine Hand makes way for them by removing or cutting off the Indians, either by Wars one with the other or by some raging, mortal Disease,” Daniel Denton wrote in 1670.[ii]

Abrahamic religions have endorsed wholesale murder in the name of God since Abraham himself nearly slaughtered his son Isaac to slake the divine will. When communism was ‘just cause’ for global power projection and expanded military budgets, we heard little of Muslims as an existential threat due to a millennium-old mandate to convert the world. When the Soviet Union revealed itself to be a crippled economic basket case, politicos and broadcasters replaced the worldwide communist conspiracy with the global plot to create a caliphate and impose Sharia law.

[i] Packer, G. (2005). The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 60.

[ii] Lindqvist, S.& Tate, J. (1997). “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide. New York: The New Press.

To support the Afterparty project and to read full chapters, interviews and new book-related content, go to www.patreon.com/briangruber.

Part Two of my conversation with Guatemalan political veteran Julio Gonzalez. Part One can be read here.

And find out the latest on the Afterparty project here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wartheafterparty/war-the-afterparty

“Why do you think, as a seasoned political veteran, that the United States needed to maintain the justification that the action was needed to defend the freedom and security of the Guatemalan people, and keep out communism?”

He considers my question, then responds.

“The first reason was the economic interests they had in Central America. Guatemala was the most important. Shell, all the gas companies, car companies…we only had American cars, Chevrolet, Ford. Also because of the business that they had with the politicians. And because of the wood that they took out of the country. Everything was sold in the United States. After the English left the region, then all the wood went to the United States through Belize.

“You have agricultural products produced with poorly paid laborers. They right now buy a hundred pounds of coffee for a hundred dollars. They sell a cup of coffee in your country at four dollars. You can get fifty cups from one pound. So there would be two hundred dollars revenue for one pound. And then the people with the crops have to pay poor wages to their workers. So the war was between the owners of the land and the workers, because they were not paying good salaries. And, then, anyone who protested was called a communist.”

Gonzalez pauses. “Some people say 250,000 people were killed. I know of 175,000, and from that 6,000 were killed by the guerrillas, and the rest by the Army.

“People were not allowed to organize themselves. They were trying to form unions. The military started killing the students from the national university, San Carlos, the one you were at yesterday, and that’s why the students joined the guerrillas. While they talked about freedom of the press, in one year, nine radio journalists were killed.

“Rios Montt killed 16,000 in one year. That’s why they supported him. He wiped out small villages.”

I mentioned that I talked to someone who said that Rios Montt was innocent, that he had no blood on his hands. The former General and President was convicted last year of genocide and crimes against humanity. His conviction was overturned by a Guatemalan court.

Gonzalez laughed grimly. “Even though he was being judged in Spain. By a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Instead of being in jail, he is at home, but he cannot go out of the country. There is another case involving the killing of 280 adults and kids.”

I ask, “It sounds like there may be two interpretations of the communism issue. One was that the Soviet Union was going to come into our backyard, that there might be another Cuban missile crisis. But you are saying that the real issue regarding communism is the resistance to any changes in the economic environment that would affect profits of domestic and multinational companies.”

Gonzales explains, “Communism did not prosper in Guatemala. What matters here is money, capital.”

I mention that, after a US arms sales embargo to Guatemala, Arbenz bought weapons from communist Czechoslovakia. Gonzales responds, that, when he was a child, all the weapons he saw were made in the U.S.

I ask, “Am I to understand if this is all about money, that all the talk about ideology is bullshit?”

“It is because of the power the U.S. had on all of our countries. When you opened the archives, you could find the history there.”

I respond, “The Freedom of Information Act. Yes, ‘Bitter Fruit’ co-author Stephen Schlesinger forced the United States government to open many of those archives.

“Your father was very close to Arbenz. If it’s not too sensitive to ask, can you tell me about your father and brother? What stories do you remember your father telling you about Arbenz at that time?”

“That Jacobo Arbenz was a righteous person. My father was a loved leader, loved by a lot of people. There are a lot of people that say he was more loved than Jacobo Arbenz. And they were afraid that he was going to be in politics and again in the government. There was a list of politicians at that time and they started killing them. That way, they killed the leaders. My brother joined a strong man, Manuel Colon Marietta, the uncle of the last president, Colon. Manuel Colon Marietta went against the military directly. The military government killed my father and killed Marietta. When Arana was president, a colonel, they say that he killed 25,000 people during his government.”

“When you look today at United States actions in the Middle East, does any of that look familiar to you?”

“It’s the same tactic, but now they are at war for petroleum. It’s not the U.S., but the individual politicians. Because that’s the way they control the world, with oil, and that can take us to a Third World War. But now the countries have atomic bombs. And the one that throws the first one will be followed by others.”

“So the George W. Bush claim that it is freedom and democracy which motivated the US in Iraq is not persuasive to you?”

He laughs heartily.

“Iraqis tell me there is so much oil in Iraq, you can see it seep from the ground.”

“If you were President of the United States, how would you change the way the country behaves on the world stage?”

“They have to defend the position they have as being the most powerful country. In that way, they need to have their people inside our countries. They won two world wars. The Cold War was in order to remove all the leaders that they didn’t want, who were opposing them.”

I ask, “American thinkers like Kagan and Wolfowitz and Kristol say America has a moral obligation to bring freedom to the people of the world. Therefore we need a large military, and we need to be aggressive, with preemptive wars if necessary. What do you think of that idea?”

Gonzalez answers, “Look what they did with Saddam Hussein. They didn’t find any WMD. There is no excuse. They are focused on being the owners of the land. Of the whole world.”

“But I asked YOU if YOU were the President of the U.S., with all the knowledge and wisdom and experience that you have, what would you do differently?”

“In the first place, I’m not American.”

I smiled and exclaimed, “We can change the law! I’m speaking from a moral point of view, obviously.”

Julio smiles. “You can conquer the world with love and not by force.”

I laugh. “That’s a good way to close.”

Julio Gonzalez Gamarra, Vice President and Deputy of the Parlamento Centroamericano, head of the monetary and finance committee, former president of the Parliament, settles into his seat at the head of the conference table. Carmen Aida, daughter of Cesar, will translate for us.

“Why do you think Arbenz was overthrown?”

Julio is dressed formally, in a brown suit and matching tie. He considers the question, sizing me up. He is a statesman, and a seasoned veteran of both Guatemalan and Central American politics. He measures his words carefully.

Carmen Aida, says, “OK, he is going to tell you.”

“I’m going to tell you first who I am.”

I ask him to tell me if any of the questions are too sensitive, if he would rather not answer.

He answers, “No, for me, it is fine. First, I am going to show you this picture. This is Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, ex-president of Guatemala. And this on the right is Juan Jose Arevalo and this in the center is my father. My father was the second most important person in Guatemala at this time. Humberto Gonzalez Juarez. He started the first radio station in Guatemala. At this moment, we have 65 radio stations. My father started the station that became the large group that exists today. Then, my father was the secretary, at this time the only secretary to the president.

“When I was in the Congress in 1994, we made a resolution saying these men were heroes in Guatemala. My family was exiled and went to Uruguay and Mexico for five years. My father had permission from the next president to return, but with the condition that he not get into politics. In the seventies, they killed my father. In the nineties, they killed my brother. That’s why I started in politics. If somebody knows the real truth, it is me.”

Julio looks again at the picture.

“The United States conducted a coup. And for three reasons.

“One was because of the agrarian land reform. With the land that was unused from the United Fruit Company.

“The only road that we had was the road to the Pacific. And all the Pacific coast was controlled by the United Fruit Company. One of its associates was the Secretary of State under Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and his brother was CIA head Allen Dulles.”

I mention the Stephen Kinzer book, “The Brothers.” He is familiar with it but has not read it. I tell him he must read it and it is likely available in Spanish.

“There was an ambassador here, Peurifoy, and he was the contact with Foster Dulles. That’s one reason.

“Second. The railroad. Owned by the same group. United Fruit. When Arbenz was going to build the road to the Atlantic, then people were not going to use the railroad anymore. United Fruit didn’t want the road to the Atlantic built.

“And the third was the hydroelectric dam project. They were in opposition to the project. For the agrarian reform, there were like 25-30 rich families in Guatemala, very strong and allied with U.S capital. The government didn’t touch their land. Only the land that was not being used, which they offered to pay for. That land was to be distributed to 100,000 families.

“There was a group of Guatemalans who were not happy with the U.S. invasion. The U.S. had people in Honduras prepared to attack Guatemala, and they came every night with guns and bombs. The driver of the invasion was Foster Dulles supported by the President of the United States. The Arbenz government provided education with no cost and opened schools in the mountains and all over Guatemala. That was the more aggressive effort, education. But people, and especially the U.S., wanted to continue having slaves.”

I press the issue further. “With respect, the U.S. narrative in 1954 was that the CIA invaded to keep out godless Soviet communism. You’ve not mentioned this as a reason thus far, only economic reasons.”

He laughs.

“Guatemala already had a communist party that never had been in the government. It was very small.

I ask if he heard that Dulles sent a message through Peurifoy to Arbenz that the U.S. wanted no communists in the national life of the country, not the government, not the party.

“We already had a democracy in Guatemala because we had thrown out a dictator that we had for 23 years. Jorge Ubico. When they threw out Ubico, they gave participation to all the sectors. That was in 1945, when they came into the government. The revolution was in October of 1944.”

I ask, is there a link from the overthrow of Arbenz to the thirty-five years of civil war?

He gestures, “Definitely. The Army colonels were paid by the United States with ten thousand dollars per month. They were very well paid so they wouldn’t let in any communists.”

Each? (I had heard it was two thousand per month). Ten thousand per month? Yes, he answers. I exclaim, “Very nice!” We laugh.

“That is a secret. But everybody knows it. And they did that in all of Central America. They put a base in Honduras.

“After Arbenz, they went to the Dominican Republic to throw out their president. In Guatemala, the civil war was for thirty-six years. Then they started killing people who didn’t think the same as them. The guerrillas started because a group of young military officers went to the mountains.”

I ask, “So these are not communists, these are military men who were upset at the takeover of their country?”

“Yeah, that’s it. They were patriots who didn’t like what was going on.”

Part Two of the interview will be posted tomorrow.

Week One in Guatemala. A big success on a few fronts. Extraordinary encounters with prominent and everyday witnesses to the overthrow and civil war. Getting the recording tools and publishing process down. Making the travel process more efficient.

Traveling by bus across Guatemala to Livingston today, a 5-6 hour trip. I’ll be reviewing and transcribing the hours of interviews on the bus. Week one is on-budget, with travel, lodging, food and incidentals coming in under $60 per day. I am adjusting to the joys and challenges of near constant travel. My biggest adjustments so far are balancing time spent on logistics versus hunting down interviews versus writing, editing and posting. I’ve focused on gathering the content and now need to focus on pushing out a consistent volume and quality of posts.

Some of the week’s highlights:

Creating a spontaneous social network here via introductions from my airbnb hosts. Intros beget more contacts beget encounters with remarkable people.

Speaking to classes in the rural town of Santa Lucia, getting stories and political perspectives from middle schoolers. Experiencing both the frightening innocence with which they relate tales of horror from the civil war, and the passion with which they question the motives of American intervention. Going to the market to buy provisions for a spontaneous BBQ and sharing food and drink with teachers and neighbors.

Visiting the Universidade de San Carlos, scenes of student protests through the coup and civil war years. Successive military governments invaded the school and shot teachers and students on campus. The military and the campus were primary sources of guerrillas who left their lives behind and moved to the mountains to oppose the government. Talking to prominent historian and professor Dr. Oscar Pelaez Almengor about the conflicts and the killing of three of his faculty. The mural honors the victims. Cesar, my host, a former congressman and architect, was friends with the fellow painted on the left. Almengor organized the first ever conference on the Arbenz overthrow last year and gifted me with a program.

Visiting the Parliamento Centro Americano to meet with Julio Gonzalez Gamarra, former head and current deputy of the EU-like regional assembly. The picture we are holding is of Jacobo Arbenz on the left, the president deposed in the 1954 CIA coup, Juan Jose Arevalo, the first democratically elected president on the right, and his father in the middle. Humberto Gonzalez Juarez was Arbenz’ secretary, his right hand man. A widely loved national figure who had to escape the country with his family when Arbenz was overthrown. When he returned in the sixties, he was assassinated by the government. Humberto’s son, Julio’s brother, entered politics and was killed by the military in the seventies. Julio entered politics to honor and continue the legacy of his family. The two hour conversation took a dramatic change in tone when the conversation shifted to his father’s story. At the end, when I asked for other contacts, he paused for a long while and began to instruct his secretary and peruse his phone. There will be a meeting of past and present Central American presidents in the Parliamento later this month and he said he would invite me to attend and get more interviews.

Visiting the ASIES policy institute and getting fresh historical insights from Hugo Novales, who wrote his thesis on the life of Arevalo. Hugo was the only interview in English, and as a younger man, provided a more contemporary perspective.

A surreal, amusing and poignant evening chat with politician, preacher and businessman Jorge Fuentes, who swept things off the table and leapt out of his chair for dramatic effect, waved his arms to make key points and diagrammed Guatemalan politics in my notebook. He also wrote down the personal email and cell phone number of his uncle, a former president, who I will contact for an interview.

Coming back from Santa Lucia, teacher Marco Antonio had his mother’s friend Wilma meet me in a dirt lot at 6:45am to catch a bus to Guate (Guatemalan City). She led me around like a little boy with a backpack, holding my hand, sharing treats out of her bag, paying for my bus ticket and wiping away seeds spilled on my book. The bus, a brightly painted, decades old blue Bird school bus, broke down on the highway en route. And we were entertained by a preacher who spontaneously got up in front of my seat, pulled out a bible, then closed his eyes and recited verses for us.

LiAnne is on my case for not posting regularly. Consider me chastened! I have reams of notes and recordings and intend to use this first regional tour to lock down process and style.

Thanks to all the Kickstarter pledgers. We are approaching 40% of the way there after the first 10 days. The Europe, Middle East and Southeast Asia legs of the trip will rely on funding the $10,000 goal. Pledge now!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wartheafterparty/war-the-afterparty

Thirty-six hours after landing in Guatemala City, I find myself at the home of Marco Antonio Senior, son of airbnb host Cesar.  All three kids successfully completed the City Marathon–Cesar and wife Carmen take me along–and are now challenging each others’ results. I am invited to join Marco and son Javier in the hot tub before lunch and opt to write inside. I cannot imagine being in a hot tub in this heat but all the activity is in the backyard by the pool, so I change into my swimsuit and join them.

After getting the political point of view of father Cesar and grandson Marco, I’m curious as to Marco Senior’s attitudes. He holds the more conservative views in the family and is happy to share them.

The 1954 overthrow was before his time but the vicious civil war that followed was not. Thirty-five years. Two hundred thousand dead, ninety-three percent killed by the military. And the Reagan administration enthusiastically supporting the Rioss Montt scorched earth years.

A word about partisan politics.

The first person with whom I shared this project idea was Kristi Vandenbosch, who encouraged me to write my first book and is IMHO the finest advertising executive, ever. She asked a direct question: do you have predetermined conclusions? I assured her, no, I don’t. I suspect she will monitor that commitment.

Already, my discussions here in Guatemala have challenged my assumptions. Things are more complicated than they seem from a distance. But there is an extensive public record on the overthrow and civil war.

My intent, as befits my training by Brian Lamb at C-SPAN and then at FORA.tv, is to aggressively invite and share conflicting views. That will include strong tonic such as this 2004 piece from Corey Robin in the London Review of Books.

On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. ‘Well, I learned a lot,’ he told reporters on Air Force One. ‘You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.’ It was also a useful meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him ‘a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy’, and claimed that the Guatemalan strongman was getting ‘a bum rap’ from human rights organisations for his military’s campaign against leftist guerrillas. The next day, one of Guatemala’s elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs, swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and umbilical cords on the ground.

I asked “Bitter Fruit” co-author Stephen Schlesinger if there was a racial component to the killing, if it was rooted in the history of Spanish conquest and the historical control of the country by a small number of descendent families.

“All of that is true. Humanizing (the civil war is) the most important thing. Mayans would have benefited most from agrarian reform. They suffered the worst. They were exterminated.

“The Spanish hierarchy created an aristocratic class that became the overseers of the land. There was some inter-marriage. The more light-skinned they were, the more dominant in the society. Mayans were scorned as sub-human, getting in the way of people, while white individuals were taking over the land. Mayans became the workers on these plantations. They lived in terrible conditions. Slave-like conditions. Always the aliens, not regarded as human by the aristocratic Spanish. The racial factor compounded the conflict, as Mayans were viewed as short, swarthy, animalistic, not human beings.”

This, from Wikipedia’s entry on Rios Montt:

Indigenous Mayas suffered disproportionately during Ríos Montt’s rule, and it is documented that his government deliberately targeted thousands of indigenous people… The UN-backed Historical Clarification Commission found that the resulting counterinsurgency campaign, significantly designed and advanced during Ríos Montt’s presidency, included deliberate “acts of genocide” against the indigenous population… On 10 May 2013, Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, and was sentenced to 80 years imprisonment.

Cesar Jr. just gave me a different view from his brother Marco. I’ll write that down and continue in another blog post later tonight. Your comments are welcome.

More on Three Guatemala Generations in the next blog post here:
http://thevisionproject.com/2014/09/02/buses-and-rain-and-the-children-of-civil-war/

Visit the Kickstarter page here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wartheafterparty/war-the-afterparty