In Your Spare Time: From the Blog of Ursula K. Le Guin
Amanda Nelson reads "Against Eisenhower"
Oct 7, 2026 · 12 min · 6 segments
Amanda Nelson reads post 26, "Against Eisenhower," from June 12, 2011. You can read the original blog post here…
In Your Spare Time: From the Blog of Ursula K. Le Guin
Oct 7, 2026 · 12 min · 6 segments
Amanda Nelson reads post 26, "Against Eisenhower," from June 12, 2011. You can read the original blog post here…
Stuart PerkinsHostMy name is Amanda Nelson, and I'm reading Post twenty-six, Against Eisenhower, from June thirteenth, two thousand and eleven.
From Ghosts of Guatemala's Past by Stephen Schlesinger in the New York Times, June third, two thousand and eleven.
A faux invasion force consisting of a handful of right-wing Guatemalans used fake radio broadcasts and a few bombing runs flown by American pilots to terrorize the fledgling democracy into surrender.
Soon afterward, a Guatemalan colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas took power and handed back United Fruit's lands.
The covert American assault destroyed any possibility that Guatemala's fragile political and civic institutions might grow.
It permanently stunted political life, and the destruction of Guatemala's democracy also set back the cause of free elections in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras." End quote.
This is the president who for decades has been praised for telling us as he left office that we should be aware of giving the military-industrial complex too much power or letting it direct our national policies.
To destroy democracy in Guatemala, he used American military or paramilitary force in the interests of an enormous American corporation, United Fruit.
After employing militarism to serve industrial capitalism for eight years, his pious warning against both seems incredibly hypocritical.
Yet on it has been built a whole tower of adulation of Eisenhower as a far-seeing statesman above party politics.
He was an Army general accustomed to using violence to gain his goals, accustomed to the undemocratic, unquestioning obedience of the military, and fiercely opposed to any control over industrial capitalism, let alone any social alternative to it.
He might not like some of its present forms, the open religious and racial bigotry, the fiscal irresponsibility, but these demagogues are his political descendants, and though he might wince at their hate talk and shameless lying, his own policy was built on xenophobic fear called anti-communism and protected by deception and hypocrisy.
I have felt for a long time that Eisenhower's election in nineteen fifty-two, defeating Adlai Stevenson in a landslide, was a crossroads.
We took the road that led us away from a rational future towards a mythical past, that led us away from hope, which is such hard work, towards fear, which is so easy, that led us to give up social justice as a guiding principle in favor of short-term profit capitalism.
Nixon, Reagan, Bush all came to power along that road, and each took us farther along it.
Another notable thing Eisenhower said as he left office was to the effect that the future lies in packaging.
Not what is produced, not why or how it is produced, not who it is produced for, but how it is packaged, disguised, presented, represented, misrepresented in order to be sold.
My name is Amanda Nelson, and I'm reading Post twenty-six, Against Eisenhower, from June thirteenth, two thousand and eleven.
From Ghosts of Guatemala's Past by Stephen Schlesinger in the New York Times, June third, two thousand and eleven.
A faux invasion force consisting of a handful of right-wing Guatemalans used fake radio broadcasts and a few bombing runs flown by American pilots to terrorize the fledgling democracy into surrender.
Soon afterward, a Guatemalan colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas took power and handed back United Fruit's lands.
The covert American assault destroyed any possibility that Guatemala's fragile political and civic institutions might grow.
It permanently stunted political life, and the destruction of Guatemala's democracy also set back the cause of free elections in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras." End quote.
This is the president who for decades has been praised for telling us as he left office that we should be aware of giving the military-industrial complex too much power or letting it direct our national policies.
To destroy democracy in Guatemala, he used American military or paramilitary force in the interests of an enormous American corporation, United Fruit.
After employing militarism to serve industrial capitalism for eight years, his pious warning against both seems incredibly hypocritical.
Yet on it has been built a whole tower of adulation of Eisenhower as a far-seeing statesman above party politics.
He was an Army general accustomed to using violence to gain his goals, accustomed to the undemocratic, unquestioning obedience of the military, and fiercely opposed to any control over industrial capitalism, let alone any social alternative to it.
He might not like some of its present forms, the open religious and racial bigotry, the fiscal irresponsibility, but these demagogues are his political descendants, and though he might wince at their hate talk and shameless lying, his own policy was built on xenophobic fear called anti-communism and protected by deception and hypocrisy.
I have felt for a long time that Eisenhower's election in nineteen fifty-two, defeating Adlai Stevenson in a landslide, was a crossroads.
We took the road that led us away from a rational future towards a mythical past, that led us away from hope, which is such hard work, towards fear, which is so easy, that led us to give up social justice as a guiding principle in favor of short-term profit capitalism.
Nixon, Reagan, Bush all came to power along that road, and each took us farther along it.
Another notable thing Eisenhower said as he left office was to the effect that the future lies in packaging.
Not what is produced, not why or how it is produced, not who it is produced for, but how it is packaged, disguised, presented, represented, misrepresented in order to be sold.
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