Editors' forword
Noam Chomsky is a major figure in twentieth-century linguistics. Born in
In addition to his work as a linguist, Chomsky has written many books on contemporary issues. His political talks have been heard, typically by standing-room-only audiences, all over the country and the globe.
In a saner world, his tireless efforts to promote justice would have long since won him the Nobel Peace Prize, but the committee keeps giving it to people like Henry Kissinger.
If you're used to thinking of the
It was very hard to compress the vast sweep of Chomsky's social thought into so small a book. You'll find a list of his other political books, which cover the topics introduced here in infinitely greater detail, on The material in this book was compiled from the following talks and interviews. Dr. Chomsky then made extensive additions, deletions and changes to the edited draft.
A talk included in a teach-in on WBAI radio in
A telephone interview conducted by Kris Welch and Philip Maldari on KPFA radio, Berkeley, California on December 12, 1990
The Sociopolitical Context of the Assassination of Ignacio Martín-Baró, a talk given on August 13, 1990 at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Boston
US Still at War Against the World, an article (excerpted from a talk given to the Central America Solidarity Association) published in the May, 1990 issue of the Resist newsletter
Interviews conducted by David Barsamian in
The Roots of US Intervention, a talk given at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon on January 24, 1989, and the question-and-answer period following
United States International and Security Policy: The "Right Turn" in Historical Perspective, a talk given at the
The main goals of
foreign policy
Protecting our turf
Relations between the
While most of our industrial rivals were either severely weakened or totally destroyed by the war, the
Even before the war, the
The people who determine American policy were well aware that the
American planners -- from those in the State Department to those on the Council on Foreign Relations (one major channel by which business leaders influence foreign policy) -- agreed that the dominance of the
At the hard-line extreme, you have documents like National Security Council Memorandum 68 (1950). NSC 68 developed the views of Secretary of State Dean Acheson and was written by Paul Nitze, who's still around (he was one of Reagan's arms-control negotiators). It called for a "roll-back strategy" that would "foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system," so that we could then negotiate a settlement on our terms "with the
The policies recommended by NSC 68 would require "sacrifice and discipline" in the
These policies were, in fact, already being implemented. In 1949,
These operations included a "secret army" under US-Nazi auspices that sought to provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and
The liberal extreme
NSC 68 is the hard-line extreme, and remember: the policies weren't just theoretical -- many of them were actually being implemented. Now let's turn to the other extreme, to the doves. The leading dove was undoubtedly George Kennan, who headed the State Department planning staff until 1950, when he was replaced by Nitze -- Kennan's office, incidentally, was responsible for the Gehlen network.
Kennan was one of the most intelligent and lucid of US planners, and a major figure in shaping the postwar world. His writings are an extremely interesting illustration of the dovish position. One document to look at if you want to understand your country is Policy Planning Study 23, written by Kennan for the State Department planning staff in 1948. Here's some of what it says:
we have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population....In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity....To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives....We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
PPS 23 was, of course, a top-secret document. To pacify the public, it was necessary to trumpet the "idealistic slogans" (as is still being done constantly), but here planners were talking to one another.
Along the same lines, in a briefing for US ambassadors to Latin American countries in 1950, Kennan observed that a major concern of US foreign policy must be "the protection of our [i.e. Latin America's] raw materials." We must therefore combat a dangerous heresy which,
This point is also made clear in the public record. For example, a high-level study group in 1955 stated that the essential threat of the Communist powers (the real meaning of the term Communism in practice) is their refusal to fulfill their service role -- that is, "to complement the industrial economies of the West."
Kennan went on to explain the means we have to use against our enemies who fall prey to this heresy: The final answer might be an unpleasant one, but...we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government. This is not shameful since the Communists are essentially traitors....It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists.
Policies like these didn't begin with postwar liberals like Kennan. As Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State had already pointed out 30 years earlier, the operative meaning of the Monroe Doctrine is that "the
Wilson also acted on this thinking by, among other things, invading Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where his warriors murdered and destroyed, demolished the political system, left US corporations firmly in control, and set the stage for brutal and corrupt dictatorships.
The "Grand Area"
During World War II, study groups of the State Department and Council on Foreign Relations developed plans for the postwar world in terms of what they called the "Grand Area," which was to be subordinated to the needs of the American economy.
The Grand Area was to include the Western Hemisphere, Western Europe, the Far East, the former British Empire (which was being dismantled), the incomparable energy resources of the Middle East (which were then passing into American hands as we pushed out our rivals France and Britain), the rest of the Third World and, if possible, the entire globe. These plans were implemented, as opportunities allowed.
Every part of the new world order was assigned a specific function. The industrial countries were to be guided by the "great workshops,"
The
Kennan even suggested that Europe might get a psychological lift from the project of "exploiting"
The Vietnam War emerged from the need to ensure this service role. Vietnamese nationalists didn't want to accept it, so they had to be smashed. The threat wasn't that they were going to conquer anyone, but that they might set a dangerous example of national independence that would inspire other nations in the region.
The
The government's second role was to organize a public subsidy for high-technology industry. For various reasons, the method adopted has been military spending, in large part.
Free trade is fine for economics departments and newspaper editorials, but nobody in the corporate world or the government takes the doctrines seriously. The parts of the
The same is true of other industrial societies. The
Restoring the traditional order
Postwar planners like Kennan realized right off that it was going to be vital for the health of US corporations that the other Western industrial societies reconstruct from wartime damage so they could import US manufactured goods and provide investment opportunities. (I'm counting
The traditional, right-wing order had to be restored, with business dominant, labor split and weakened, and the burden of reconstruction placed squarely on the shoulders of the working classes and the poor.
The major thing that stood in the way of this was the antifascist resistance, so we suppressed it all over the world, often installing fascists and Nazi collaborators in its place. Sometimes that required extreme violence, but other times it was done by softer measures, like subverting elections and withholding desperately needed food. (This ought to be Chapter 1 in any honest history of the postwar period, but in fact it's seldom even discussed.)
The pattern was set in 1942, when President Roosevelt installed a French Admiral, Jean Darlan, as Governor-General of all of French North Africa. Darlan was a leading Nazi collaborator and the author of the antisemitic laws promulgated by the
But far more important was the first area of Europe liberated -- southern
US planners recognized that the "threat" in
To prevent an economic collapse that would enhance their influence, and to rebuild Western Europe's state-capitalist economies, the US instituted the Marshall Plan (under which Europe was provided with more than $12 billion in loans and grants between 1948 and 1951, funds used to purchase a third of US exports to Europe in the peak year of 1949).
In
The very first National Security Council memorandum, NSC 1 (1948), specified a number of actions the
Some people, particularly George Kennan, advocated military action before the elections -- he didn't want to take a chance. But others convinced him we could carry it off by subversion, which turned out to be correct.
In
This war was complete with torture, political exile for tens of thousands of Greeks, what we called "re-education camps" for tens of thousands of others, and the destruction of unions and of any possibility of independent politics.
It placed
Our successful defense of
In
When
A fascist coup in
In 1954, the CIA engineered a coup that turned
One aspect of suppressing the antifascist resistance was the recruitment of war criminals like Klaus Barbie, an SS officer who had been the Gestapo chief of
When Barbie was finally brought back to France in 1982 to be tried as a war criminal, his use as an agent was explained by Colonel (ret.) Eugene Kolb of the US Army Counterintelligence Corps: Barbie's "skills were badly needed....His activities had been directed against the underground French Communist party and the resistance," who were now targeted for repression by the American liberators.
Since the
There they became military advisers to US-supported police states that were modeled, often quite openly, on the Third Reich. They also became drug dealers, weapons merchants, terrorists and educators -teaching Latin American peasants torture techniques devised by the Gestapo. Some of the Nazis' students ended up in Central America, thus establishing a direct link between the death camps and the death squads -- all thanks to the postwar alliance between the
Our commitment to democracy
In one high-level document after another, US planners stated their view that the primary threat to the new US-led world order was Third World nationalism -- sometimes called ultranationalism: "nationalistic regimes" that are responsive to "popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses" and production for domestic needs.
The planners' basic goals, repeated over and over again, were to prevent such "ultranationalist" regimes from ever taking power -- or if, by some fluke, they did take power, to remove them and to install governments that favor private investment of domestic and foreign capital, production for export and the right to bring profits out of the country. (These goals are never challenged in the secret documents. If you're a
Opposition to democracy and social reform is never popular in the victim country. You can't get many of the people living there excited about it, except a small group connected with US businesses who are going to profit from it.
The
The
Another problem that's pointed to over and over again in these secret documents is the excessive liberalism of
This is a constant lament right through the Kennedy period (after that, the documentary record hasn't yet been declassified). The Kennedy liberals were adamant about the need to overcome democratic excesses that permitted "subversion" -- by which, of course, they meant people thinking the wrong ideas.
The
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles agreed, telling President Eisenhower that to keep Latin Americans in line, "you have to pat them a little bit and make them think that you are fond of them."
Given all that, US policies in the
A study of the inter-American system published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in
Parliamentary governments were barred or overthrown, with US support and sometimes direct intervention, in Iran in 1953, in Guatemala in 1954 (and in 1963, when Kennedy backed a military coup to prevent the threat of return to democracy), in the Dominican Republic in 1963 and 1965, in Brazil in 1964, in Chile in 1973 and often elsewhere. Our policies have been very much the same in
The methods are not very pretty. What the US-run contra forces did in
The threat of a good example
No country is exempt from this treatment, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria.
Take
But as soon as a very low-level social revolution began to develop there,
From the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 till the collapse of the Communist governments in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, it was possible to justify every
The attack against
As far as American business is concerned,
There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?"
This was even true in
If you want a global system that's subordinated to the needs of US investors, you can't let pieces of it wander off. It's striking how clearly this is stated in the documentary record -- even in the public record at times. Take
Despite 40 years of CIA subversion,
US planners from Secretary of State Dean Acheson in the late 1940s to the present have warned that "one rotten apple can spoil the barrel." The danger is that the "rot" -- social and economic development -- may spread.
This "rotten apple theory" is called the domino theory for public consumption. The version used to frighten the public has Ho Chi Minh getting in a canoe and landing in
Sometimes the point is explained with great clarity. When the
In other words, what the
That's why even the tiniest speck poses such a threat, and may have to be crushed.
The three-sided world
From the early 1970s, the world has been drifting into what's called tripolarism or trilateralism -- three major economic blocs that compete with each other. The first is a yen-based bloc with
Back in the thirties and forties,
There's a lot of nonsense written about how the fact that
The other option was to keep out of the region and allow
Furthermore, after WW II,
A few of the early postwar planners were more far-sighted, George Kennan among them. He proposed that the United States encourage
That's one of the main reasons the
That's one reason why we have maintained military bases in the
The second major competitive bloc is based in Europe and is dominated by
If it ever gets its act together and becomes an integrated power, the
The third bloc is the
We've always assumed that
Unless you understand our struggles against our industrial rivals and the Third World,
Devastation abroad
Our Good Neighbor policy
How well have the precepts put forth by George Kennan been followed? How thoroughly have we put aside all concern for "vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization"? I've already discussed our "commitment to democracy," but what about the other two issues?
Let's focus on
Broader studies by economist Edward Herman reveal a close correlation worldwide between torture and
How about raising living standards? That was supposedly addressed by President Kennedy's
This agro-export model of development usually produces an "economic miracle" where GNP goes up while much of the population starves. When you pursue such policies, popular opposition inevitably develops, which you then suppress with terror and torture.
(The use of terror is deeply ingrained in our character. Back in 1818, John Quincy Adams hailed the "salutary efficacy" of terror in dealing with "mingled hordes of lawless Indians and negroes." He wrote that to justify Andrew Jackson's rampages in
The first step is to use the police. They're critical because they can detect discontent early and eliminate it before "major surgery" (as the planning documents call it) is necessary. If major surgery does become necessary, we rely on the army. When we can no longer control the army of a Latin American country -particularly one in the Caribbean-Central American region -- it's time to overthrow the government.
Countries that have attempted to reverse the pattern, such as
The second step is to use the military. The
Before the coups, we were very hostile to the Chilean and Indonesian governments, but we continued to send them arms. Keep good relations with the right officers and they overthrow the government for you. The same reasoning motivated the flow of US arms to
During the Kennedy administration, the mission of the US-dominated Latin American military was shifted from "hemispheric defense" to "internal security" (which basically means war against your own population). That fateful decision led to "direct [
The Kennedy Administration prepared the way for the 1964 military coup in
(I think, legally speaking, there's a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They've all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes.)
The military typically proceeds to create an economic disaster, often following the prescriptions of US advisers, and then decides to hand the problem over to civilians to administer. Overt military control is no longer necessary as new devices become available -- for example, controls exercised through the International Monetary Fund (which, like the World Bank, lends
In return for its loans, the IMF imposes "liberalization": an economy open to foreign penetration and control, sharp cutbacks in services to the general population, etc. These measures place power even more firmly in the hands of the wealthy classes and foreign investors ("stability") and reinforce the classic two-tiered societies of the Third World -- the super-rich (and a relatively well-off professional class that serves them) and an enormous mass of impoverished, suffering people.
The indebtedness and economic chaos left by the military pretty much ensures that the IMF rules will be followed -- unless popular forces attempt to enter the political arena, in which case the military may have to reinstate "stability."
The Ministry of Education reports that over a third of the education budget goes to school meals, because most of the students in public schools either eat at school or not at all.
According to South magazine (a business magazine reporting on the Third World),
That's
The situation is similar throughout
The crucifixion of El Salvador
For many years, repression, torture and murder were carried on in
One was that Somoza, the dictator of
In February 1980, the Archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, sent a letter to President Carter in which he begged him not to send military aid to the junta that ran the country. He said such aid would be used to "sharpen injustice and repression against the people's organizations" which were struggling "for respect for their most basic human rights" (hardly news to
A few weeks later, Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying a mass. The neo-Nazi Roberto d'Aubuisson is generally assumed to be responsible for this assassination (among countless other atrocities). D'Aubuisson was "leader-for-life" of the ARENA party, which now governs
Thousands of peasants and urban poor took part in a commemorative mass a decade later, along with many foreign bishops, but the
All of this passed with scarcely a mention in the country that funded and trained Romero's assassins. The New York Times, the "newspaper of record," published no editorial on the assassination when it occurred or in the years that followed, and no editorial or news report on the commemoration.
On March 7, 1980, two weeks before the assassination, a state of siege had been instituted in
Peasants were the main victims of this war, along with labor organizers, students, priests or anyone suspected of working for the interests of the people. In Carter's last year, 1980, the death toll reached about 10,000, rising to about 13,000 for 1981 as the Reaganites took command.
In October 1980, the new archbishop condemned the "war of extermination and genocide against a defenseless civilian population" waged by the security forces. Two months later they were hailed for their "valiant service alongside the people against subversion" by the favorite US "moderate," José Napoleón Duarte, as he was appointed civilian president of the junta.
The role of the "moderate"
The incoming Reaganites went much further, seeking to justify the atrocity, notably Secretary of State Alexander Haig and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. But it was still deemed worthwhile to have a show trial a few years later, while exculpating the murderous junta -- and, of course, the paymaster.
The independent newspapers in
In November 1989, six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter, were murdered by the army. That same week, at least 28 other Salvadoran civilians were murdered, including the head of a major union, the leader of the organization of university women, nine members of an Indian farming cooperative and ten university students.
The news wires carried a story by AP correspondent Douglas Grant Mine, reporting how soldiers had entered a working-class neighborhood in the capital city of San Salvador, captured six men, added a 14-year-old boy for good measure, then lined them all up against a wall and shot them. They "were not priests or human rights campaigners," Mine wrote, "so their deaths have gone largely unnoticed" -- as did his story.
The Jesuits were murdered by the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite unit created, trained and equipped by the
In December 1981, the Battalion took part in an operation in which over a thousand civilians were killed in an orgy of murder, rape and burning. Later it was involved in the bombing of villages and murder of hundreds of civilians by shooting, drowning and other methods. The vast majority of victims were women, children and the elderly.
The Atlacatl Battalion was being trained by US Special Forces shortly before murdering the Jesuits. This has been a pattern throughout the Battalion's existence -- some of its worst massacres have occurred when it was fresh from
In the "fledgling democracy" that was
The nature of Salvadoran army training was described by a deserter who received political asylum in
According to this deserter, draftees were made to kill dogs and vultures by biting their throats and twisting off their heads, and had to watch as soldiers tortured and killed suspected dissidents -- tearing out their fingernails, cutting off their heads, chopping their bodies to pieces and playing with the dismembered arms for fun.
In another case, an admitted member of a Salvadoran death squad associated with the Atlacatl Battalion, César Vielman Joya Martínez, detailed the involvement of US advisers and the Salvadoran government in death-squad activity. The Bush administration has made every effort to silence him and ship him back to probable death in
The results of Salvadoran military training are graphically described in the Jesuit journal
The assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they nailed the hands onto it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood was tastefully displayed in the center of the table.
According to Rev. Santiago, macabre scenes of this kind aren't uncommon.
People are not just killed by death squads in
their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just
disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into
their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are
cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are
dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to
watch.
Rev. Santiago goes on to point out that violence of this sort greatly increased when the Church began forming peasant associations and self-help groups in an attempt to organize the poor.
By and large, our approach in
Teaching
It wasn't just
From 1960 through 1978, the New York Times had three editorials on
When his rule was challenged, by the Sandinistas in the late 1970s, the
The National Guard had always been remarkably brutal and sadistic. By June 1979, it was carrying out massive atrocities in the war against the Sandinistas, bombing residential neighborhoods in
Our ambassador to the Organization of American States also spoke in favor of "Somocismo without Somoza," but the OAS rejected the suggestion flat out. A few days later, Somoza flew off to
The Carter administration flew Guard commanders out of the country in planes with Red Cross markings (a war crime), and began to reconstitute the Guard on
Reagan used them to launch a large-scale terrorist war against
And yet, despite astronomical levels of military support, the
Why did the
Of the four Central American countries where Oxfam had a significant presence (
Other agencies told a similar story. In the early 1980s, the World Bank called its projects "extraordinarily successful in
The success of the Sandinista reforms terrified US planners. They were aware that -- as José Figueres, the father of Costa Rican democracy, put it -- "for the first time,
The hatred that was elicited by the Sandinistas for trying to direct resources to the poor (and even succeeding at it) was truly wondrous to behold. Just about all
Back in 1981, a State Department insider boasted that we would "turn
George Shultz called the Sandinistas a "cancer, right here on our land mass," that has to be destroyed. At the other end of the political spectrum, leading Senate liberal Alan Cranston said that if it turned out not to be possible to destroy the Sandinistas, then we'd just have to let them "fester in [their] own juices."
So the
Second, we launched the contra war along with an illegal economic war to terminate what Oxfam rightly called "the threat of a good example." The contras' vicious terrorist attacks against "soft targets" under US orders did help, along with the boycott, to end any hope of economic development and social reform.
One of the most respected
We even refused to send disaster relief. After the 1972 earthquake, the
This devastating hurricane, with its welcome prospects of mass starvation and long-term ecological damage, reinforced our efforts. We wanted Nicaraguans to starve so we could accuse the Sandinistas of economic mismanagement. Because they weren't under our control, Nicaraguans had to suffer and die.
Third, we used diplomatic fakery to crush
For
Arias, the White House and Congress never had the slightest intention of implementing any aspect of the plan. The
As the election campaign opened, the
If anything like that were ever done by our enemies... I leave the media reaction to your imagination. The amazing part of it was that the Sandinistas still got 40% of the vote, while New York Times headlines proclaimed that Americans were "United in Joy" over this "Victory for US Fair Play."
US achievements in Central America in the past fifteen years are a major tragedy, not just because of the appalling human cost, but because a decade ago there were prospects for real progress towards meaningful democracy and meeting human needs, with early successes in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua.
These efforts might have worked and might have taught useful lessons to others plagued with similar problems -- which, of course, was exactly what
Making
There was one place in Central America that did get some
That caused virtual hysteria in
A CIA memorandum of 1952 described the situation in
As mentioned above, José Figueres was the founder of Costa Rican democracy and a leading democratic figure in
In the political rhetoric of the
Worse yet, the same CIA memorandum continued, the "radical and nationalist policies" of the democratic capitalist government, including the "persecution of foreign economic interests, especially the United Fruit Company," had gained "the support or acquiescence of almost all Guatemalans." The government was proceeding "to mobilize the hitherto politically inert peasantry" while undermining the power of large landholders.
Furthermore, the 1944 revolution had aroused "a strong national movement to free
In short, the situation was pretty awful. So the CIA carried out a successful coup.
By the late 1970s, atrocities were again mounting beyond the terrible norm, eliciting verbal protests. And yet, contrary to what many people believe, military aid to
Under Reagan, support for near-genocide in
In 1988, a newly opened Guatemalan newspaper called La Epoca was blown up by government terrorists. At the time, the media here were very much exercised over the fact that the US-funded journal in Nicaragua, La Prensa, which was openly calling for the overthrow of the government and supporting the US-run terrorist army, had been forced to miss a couple of issues due to a shortage of newsprint. That led to a torrent of outrage and abuse, in the Washington Post and elsewhere, about Sandinista totalitarianism.
On the other hand, the destruction of La Epoca aroused no interest whatsoever and was not reported here, although it was well-known to US journalists. Naturally the
A year later, a journalist from La Epoca, Julio Godoy, who had fled after the bombing, went back to
while the Moscow-imposed government in
the Washington-made government in
genocide that has taken more than 150,000 victims [in what Amnesty International calls] "a
government program of political murder."
The press either conforms or, as in the case of La Epoca, disappears.
"One is tempted to believe," Godoy continued, "that some people in the White House worship Aztec gods -- with the offering of Central American blood." And he quoted a Western European diplomat who said: "As long as the Americans don't change their attitude towards the region, there's no space here for the truth or for hope."
The invasion of Panama
In 1981, Torrijos was killed in a plane crash. By 1983, the effective ruler was Manuel Noriega, a criminal who had been a cohort of Torrijos and
The
The
And yet, when Noriega was finally indicted in Miami in 1988, all the charges except one were related to activities that took place before 1984 -- back when he was our boy, helping with the US war against Nicaragua, stealing elections with US approval and generally serving US interests satisfactorily. It had nothing to do with suddenly discovering that he was a gangster and a drug-peddler -- that was known all along.
It's all quite predictable, as study after study shows. A brutal tyrant crosses the line from admirable friend to "villain" and "scum" when he commits the crime of independence. One common mistake is to go beyond robbing the poor -- which is just fine -- and to start interfering with the privileged, eliciting opposition from business leaders.
By the mid 1980s, Noriega was guilty of these crimes. Among other things, he seems to have been dragging his feet about helping the
Since we could no longer trust Noriega to do our bidding, he had to go.
Next a military coup was tried, but failed. Then, in December 1989, the US celebrated the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War by invading Panama outright, killing hundreds or perhaps thousands of civilians (no one knows, and few north of the Rio Grande care enough to inquire). This restored power to the rich white elite that had been displaced by the Torrijos coup -- just in time to ensure a compliant government for the administrative changeover of the Canal on January 1, 1990 (as noted by the right-wing European press).
Throughout this process, the
But Noriega hadn't yet become disobedient. He was our man in
The Washington-media alliance and the major journals refrained from criticizing the fraudulent elections, but dismissed as utterly worthless the Sandinistas' far more free and honest election in the same year -because it could not be controlled.
In May 1989, Noriega again stole an election, this time from a representative of the business opposition, Guillermo Endara. Noriega used less violence than in 1984. But the Reagan administration had given the signal that it had turned against Noriega. Following the predictable script, the press expressed outrage over his failure to meet our lofty democratic standards.
The press also began passionately denouncing human rights violations that previously didn't reach the threshold of their attention. By the time we invaded
In 1988, for example, Americas Watch published a report on human rights in
Take
Or consider US-backed dictators like
In fact, at exactly the moment it invaded
On the same day -- the day
The Department continued with the pose as Bush rebuffed the Iraqi democratic opposition (bankers, professionals, etc.) and blocked congressional efforts to condemn the atrocious crimes of his old friend Saddam Hussein. Compared to Bush's buddies in
After the invasion, Bush announced a billion dollars in aid to
The
In general, everything's pretty much the same, only now more reliable servants are in charge. (The same is true of
Inoculating
The
There was fear the Viet Minh might succeed, in which case "the rot would spread" and the "virus" would "infect" the region, to adopt the language the planners used year after year after year. (Except for a few madmen and nitwits, none feared conquest -- they were afraid of a positive example of successful development.)
What do you do when you have a virus? First you destroy it, then you inoculate potential victims, so that the disease does not spread. That's basically the
If possible, it's advisable to have the local military destroy the virus for you. If they can't, you have to move your own forces in. That's more costly, and it's ugly, but sometimes you have to do it.
Right into the late l960s, the
Instead, we installed a typical Latin American-style terror state in
The Kennedy administration escalated the attack against
While the
Suharto's 1965 coup in
The West was very pleased to do business with
After the Vietnam war was ended in 1975, the major policy goal of the
When the Mennonites tried to send pencils to
When
In order to bleed
Contrary to what virtually everyone -- left or right -- says, the
Of course, it wasn't a total victory for the
But our basic goal -- the crucial one, the one that really counted -- was to destroy the virus, and we did achieve that.
The Gulf War
The Gulf War illustrated the same guiding principles, as we see clearly if we lift the veil of propaganda.
When
First, it told us that
Second, these same authorities proclaimed in a litany that the UN was now at last functioning as it was designed to do. They claimed that this was impossible before the end of the Cold War, when the UN was rendered ineffective by Soviet disruption and the shrill anti-Western rhetoric of the
Neither of these claims can withstand even a moment's scrutiny. The
Saddam Hussein is a murderous gangster -- exactly as he was before the Gulf War, when he was our friend and favored trading partner. His invasion of
Our ambassador to the UN at the time (and now Senator from
The Australian Foreign Minister justified his country's acquiescence to the invasion and annexation of East Timor (and
As for the UN finally functioning as it was designed to, the facts are clear -- but absolutely barred by the guardians of political correctness who control the means of expression with an iron hand. For many years, the UN has been blocked by the great powers, primarily the
Our record in the General Assembly is similar. And the "shrill, anti-Western rhetoric" of the
The UN was able to respond to
But even after allowing sanctions, the
A smaller, deterrent force could have been kept in place long enough for the sanctions to have had a significant effect; an army of half a million couldn't. The purpose of the quick military build-up was to ward off the danger that
Why was a diplomatic resolution so unattractive? Within a few weeks after the invasion of
There appear to have been two issues: first, Iraqi access to the Gulf, which would have entailed a lease or other control over two uninhabited mudflats assigned to
The
The last known offer before the bombing, released by US officials on January 2, 1991, called for total Iraqi withdrawal from
The latter issues include
The
Saddam Hussein was then Bush's friend and ally, so he received a response, which was instructive.
There was no mention of the "other weapons systems," and there's a reason for that.
Independent of Iraq's invasion, the
The
As already discussed, the
Take the South African occupation of
The Cuban forces that had defended
Meanwhile,
More generally, opposing "linkage" amounts to little more than rejecting diplomacy, which always involves broader issues. In the case of
Well, that's linkage. The simple fact is that the
By refusing diplomacy, the
The
But the Bush administration has not yet succeeded in achieving what its spokesman at the New York Times, chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman, calls "the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein." This, Friedman writes, would be a return to the happy days when Saddam's "iron fist...held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia," not to speak of the boss in Washington. The current situation in the Gulf reflects the priorities of the superpower that held all the cards, another truism that must remain invisible to the guardians of the faith.
The Iran/contra cover-up
The major elements of the Iran/contra story were well known long before the 1986 exposures, apart from one fact: that the sale of arms to
The shipment of arms to
In February 1982, the main Israeli figures whose names later appeared in the Iran/contra hearings appeared on BBC television and described how they had helped organize an arms flow to the Khomeini regime. In October 1982, the Israeli ambassador to the
As for the contra war, the basic facts of the illegal North-CIA operations were known by 1985 (over a year before the story broke, when a
So what finally generated the Iran/contra scandal? A moment came when it was just impossible to suppress it any longer. When Hasenfus was shot down in
We then move to the next phase: damage control. That's what the follow-up was about.
The prospects for Eastern Europe
What was remarkable about the events in
It didn't happen because the Soviets are nice guys -- they were driven by internal necessities. But it did happen and, as a result, the popular movements in
The
The one country in Eastern Europe where there was extensive violence as the tyrannies collapsed was the very one where the Soviets had the least amount of influence and where we had the most:
Ceausescu was just as brutal and crazed then as he was later, but because he'd largely withdrawn from the Warsaw Pact and was following a somewhat independent course, we felt he was partially on our side in the international struggle. (We're in favor of independence as long as it's in other people's empires, not in our own.)
Elsewhere in
I think the prospects are pretty dim for
There used to be a sort of colonial relationship between Western and
There are a lot of resources to be taken, and lots of cheap labor for assembly plants. But first we have to impose the capitalist model on them. We don't accept it for ourselves -- but for the
In many ways, Eastern Europe is more attractive to investors than
More significantly, Eastern Europe has much higher general health and educational standards than
One reason for this disparity between Eastern Europe and
According to
The situation in
In a global economy designed for the interests and needs of international corporations and finance, and sectors that serve them, most of the species becomes superfluous. They will be cast aside if the institutional structures of power and privilege function without popular challenge or control.
The world's rent-a-thug
For most of this century, the United States was far and away the world's dominant economic power, and that made economic warfare an appealing weapon, including measures ranging from illegal embargo to enforcement of IMF rules (for the weak). But in the last twenty years or so, the
As long as the Soviet Union was in the game, there was a limit to how much force the US could apply, particularly in more remote areas where we didn't have a big conventional force advantage. Because the
In any confrontation, each participant tries to shift the battle to a domain in which it's most likely to succeed. You want to lead with your strength, play your strong card. The strong card of the
Diplomacy is a particularly unwelcome option, unless it's pursued under the gun. The
As a result, negotiations are something the
Against this background, it's natural that the Bush administration should regard military force as a major policy instrument, preferring it to sanctions and diplomacy (as in the Gulf crisis). But since the
The financial editor of the conservative Chicago Tribune has been stressing these themes with particular clarity. We must be "willing mercenaries," paid for our ample services by our rivals, using our "monopoly power" in the "security market" to maintain "our control over the world economic system."
We should run a global protection racket, he advises, selling "protection" to other wealthy powers who will pay us a "war premium."
This is
To be sure, the use of force to control the
Our rent-a-thug role also causes suffering at home. All of the successful industrial powers have relied on the state to protect and enhance powerful domestic economic interests, to direct public resources to the needs of investors, and so on -- one reason why they are successful. Since 1950, the
Reaganite military Keynesian excesses added further problems. The transfer of resources to wealthy minorities and other government policies led to a vast wave of financial manipulations and a consumption binge. But there was little in the way of productive investment, and the country was saddled with huge debts: government, corporate, household and the incalculable debt of unmet social needs as the society drifts towards a Third World pattern, with islands of great wealth and privilege in a sea of misery and suffering.
When a state is committed to such policies, it must somehow find a way to divert the population, to keep them from seeing what's happening around them. There are not many ways to do this. The standard ones are to inspire fear of terrible enemies about to overwhelm us, and awe for our grand leaders who rescue us from disaster in the nick of time.
That has been the pattern right through the 1980s, requiring no little ingenuity as the standard device, the Soviet threat, became harder to take seriously. So the threat to our existence has been Qaddafi and his hordes of international terrorists,
These are not laws of nature. The processes, and the institutions that engender them, could be changed. But that will require cultural, social and institutional changes of no little moment, including democratic structures that go far beyond periodic selection of representatives of the business world to manage domestic and international affairs.
Brainwashing at home
How the Cold War worked
Despite much pretense, national security has not been a major concern of US planners and elected officials. The historical record reveals this clearly. Few serious analysts took issue with George Kennan's position that "it is not Russian military power which is threatening us, it is Russian political power" (October 1947); or with President Eisenhower's consistent view that the Russians intended no military conquest of Western Europe and that the major role of NATO was to "convey a feeling of confidence to exposed populations, a confidence which will make them sturdier, politically, in their opposition to Communist inroads."
Similarly, the
(Recall that "Communism" is a broad term, and includes all those with the "ability to get control of mass movements....something we have no capacity to duplicate," as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles privately complained to his brother Allen, CIA director, "The poor people are the ones they appeal to," he added, "and they have always wanted to plunder the rich." So they must be overcome, to protect our doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.)
Of course, both the
According to the conventional view, the Cold War was a conflict between two superpowers, caused by Soviet aggression, in which we tried to contain the
On the Soviet side, the events of the Cold War were repeated interventions in Eastern Europe: tanks in East Berlin and
On the
On the domestic front, the Cold War helped the Soviet Union entrench its military-bureaucratic ruling class in power, and it gave the
The Cold War provided that too. No matter how outlandish the idea that the
In crucial respects, then, the Cold War was a kind of tacit arrangement between the Soviet Union and the United States under which the US conducted its wars against the Third World and controlled its allies in Europe, while the Soviet rulers kept an iron grip on their own internal empire and their satellites in Eastern Europe -- each side using the other to justify repression and violence in its own domains.
So why did the Cold War end, and how does its end change things? By the 1970s, Soviet military expenditures were leveling off and internal problems were mounting, with economic stagnation and increasing pressures for an end to tyrannical rule. Soviet power internationally had, in fact, been declining for some 30 years, as a study by the Center for Defense Information showed in 1980. A few years later, the Soviet system had collapsed. The Cold War ended with the victory of what had always been the far richer and more powerful contestant. The Soviet collapse was part of the more general economic catastrophe of the 1980s, more severe in most of the
As we've already seen, the Cold War had significant elements of North-South conflict (to use the contemporary euphemism for the European conquest of the world). Much of the Soviet empire had formerly been quasi-colonial dependencies of the West. The
But while this particular phase has ended, North-South conflicts continue. One side may have called off the game, but the
Nor did it take great insight for Elliott Abrams to observe that the US invasion of Panama was unusual because it could be conducted without fear of a Soviet reaction anywhere, or for numerous commentators during the Gulf crisis to add that the US and Britain were now free to use unlimited force against its Third World enemy, since they were no longer inhibited by the Soviet deterrent.
Of course, the end of the Cold War brings its problems too. Notably, the technique for controlling the domestic population has had to shift, a problem recognized through the 1980s, as we've already seen.
New enemies have to be invented. It becomes harder to disguise the fact that the real enemy has always been "the poor who seek to plunder the rich" -- in particular,
The war on (certain) drugs
One substitute for the disappearing Evil Empire has been the threat of drug traffickers from
The effect on public opinion was immediate. When Bush won the 1988 election, people said the budget deficit was the biggest problem facing the country. Only about 3% named drugs. After the media blitz, concern over the budget was way down and drugs had soared to about 40% or 45%, which is highly unusual for an open question (where no specific answers are suggested).
Now, when some client state complains that the
So internationally, "the war on drugs" provides a cover for intervention. Domestically, it has little to do with drugs but a lot to do with distracting the population, increasing repression in the inner cities, and building support for the attack on civil liberties.
That's not to say that "substance abuse" isn't a serious problem. At the time the drug war was launched, deaths from tobacco were estimated at about 300,000 a year, with perhaps another 100,000 from alcohol. But these aren't the drugs the Bush administration targeted. It went after illegal drugs, which had caused many fewer deaths -- over 3500 a year -- according to official figures. One reason for going after these drugs was that their use had been declining for some years, so the Bush administration could safely predict that its drug war would "succeed" in lowering drug use.
The Administration also targeted marijuana, which hadn't caused any known deaths among some 60 million users. In fact, that crackdown has exacerbated the drug problem -- many marijuana users have turned from this relatively harmless drug to more dangerous drugs like cocaine, which are easier to conceal.
Just as the drug war was launched with great fanfare in September 1989, the US Trade Representative (USTR) panel held a hearing in Washington to consider a tobacco industry request that the US impose sanctions on Thailand in retaliation for its efforts to restrict US tobacco imports and advertising. Such
The
Thai witnesses also protested, predicting that the consequence of US sanctions would be to reverse a decline in smoking achieved by their government's campaign against tobacco use. Responding to the US tobacco companies' claim that their product is the best in the world, a Thai witness said: "Certainly in the Golden Triangle we have some of the best products, but we never ask the principle of free trade to govern such products. In fact we suppressed [them]." Critics recalled the Opium War 150 years earlier, when the British government compelled
Here we have the biggest drug story of the day. Imagine the screaming headlines: "
Another aspect of the drug problem, which also received little attention, is the leading role of the
In
The task required strikebreakers and goons. There was an obvious supplier: the Mafia. Of course, they didn't take on this work just for the fun of it. They wanted a return for their efforts. And it was given to them: they were authorized to reestablish the heroin racket that had been suppressed by the fascist governments -- the famous "French connection" that dominated the drug trade until the 1960s.
By then, the center of the drug trade had shifted to Indochina, particularly
The clandestine war against Nicaragua also provided a shot in the arm to drug traffickers in the region, as illegal CIA arms flights to the US mercenary forces offered an easy way to ship drugs back to the US, sometimes through US Air Force bases, traffickers report.
The close correlation between the drug racket and international terrorism (sometimes called "counterinsurgency," "low intensity conflict" or some other euphemism) is not surprising. Clandestine operations need plenty of money, which should be undetectable. And they need criminal operatives as well. The rest follows.
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
The terms of political discourse typically have two meanings. One is the dictionary meaning, and the other is a meaning that is useful for serving power -- the doctrinal meaning.
Take democracy. According to the common-sense meaning, a society is democratic to the extent that people can participate in a meaningful way in managing their affairs. But the doctrinal meaning of democracy is different -- it refers to a system in which decisions are made by sectors of the business community and related elites. The public are to be only "spectators of action," not "participants," as leading democratic theorists (in this case, Walter Lippmann) have explained. They are permitted to ratify the decisions of their betters and to lend their support to one or another of them, but not to interfere with matters -- like public policy -- that are none of their business.
If segments of the public depart from their apathy and begin to organize and enter the public arena, that's not democracy. Rather, it's a crisis of democracy in proper technical usage, a threat that has to be overcome in one or another way: in
Or take free enterprise, a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich. In fact, in acceptable usage, just about any phrase containing the word "free" is likely to mean something like the opposite of its actual meaning.
Or take defense against aggression, a phrase that's used -- predictably -- to refer to aggression. When the US attacked South Vietnam in the early 1960s, the liberal hero Adlai Stevenson (among others) explained that we were defending South Vietnam against "internal aggression" -- that is, the aggression of South Vietnamese peasants against the US air force and a US-run mercenary army, which were driving them out of their homes and into concentration camps where they could be "protected" from the southern guerrillas. In fact, these peasants willingly supported the guerillas, while the
So magnificently has the doctrinal system risen to its task that to this day, 30 years later, the idea that the
Or take the term peace process. The naive might think that it refers to efforts to seek peace. Under this meaning, we would say that the peace process in the Middle East includes, for example, the offer of a full peace treaty to Israel by President Sadat of Egypt in 1971, along lines advocated by virtually the entire world, including official US policy; the Security Council resolution of January 1976 introduced by the major Arab states with the backing of the PLO, which called for a two-state settlement of the Arab-Israel conflict in the terms of a near-universal international consensus; PLO offers through the 1980s to negotiate with Israel for mutual recognition; and annual votes at the UN General Assembly, most recently in December 1990 (voted 144-2), calling for an international conference on the Israel-Arab problem, etc.
But the sophisticated understand that these efforts do not form part of the peace process. The reason is that in the PC meaning, the term peace process refers to what the
The peace process is restricted to US initiatives, which call for a unilateral US-determined settlement with no recognition of Palestinian national rights. That's the way it works. Those who cannot master these skills must seek another profession.
There are many other examples. Take the term special interest. The well-oiled Republican PR systems of the 1980s regularly accused the Democrats of being the party of the special interests: women, labor, the elderly, the young, farmers -- in short, the general population. There was only one sector of the population never listed as a special interest: corporations and business generally. That makes sense. In PC discourse their (special) interests are the national interest, to which all must bow.
The Democrats plaintively retorted that they were not the party of the special interests: they served the national interest too. That was correct, but their problem has been that they lack the single-minded class consciousness of their Republican opponents. The latter are not confused about their role as representatives of the owners and managers of the society, who are fighting a bitter class war against the general population -- often adopting vulgar Marxist rhetoric and concepts, resorting to jingoist hysteria, fear and terror, awe of great leaders and the other standard devices of population control. The Democrats are less clear about their allegiances, hence less effective in the propaganda wars.
Finally, take the term conservative, which has come to refer to advocates of a powerful state, which interferes massively in the economy and in social life. They advocate huge state expenditures and a postwar peak of protectionist measures and insurance against market risk, narrowing individual liberties through legislation and court-packing, protecting the
It's really not that hard, once one understands the rules.
To make sense of political discourse, it's necessary to give a running translation into English, decoding the doublespeak of the media, academic social scientists and the secular priesthood generally. Its function is not obscure: the effect is to make it impossible to find words to talk about matters of human significance in a coherent way. We can then be sure that little will be understood about how our society works and what is happening in the world -- a major contribution to democracy, in the PC sense of the word.
Socialism, real and fake
One can debate the meaning of the term "socialism," but if it means anything, it means control of production by the workers themselves, not owners and managers who rule them and control all decisions, whether in capitalist enterprises or an absolutist state.
To refer to the
These developments came as no surprise to leading Marxist intellectuals, who had criticized Lenin's doctrines for years (as had Trotsky) because they would centralize authority in the hands of the vanguard Party and its leaders. In fact, decades earlier, the anarchist thinker Bakunin had predicted that the emerging intellectual class would follow one of two paths: either they would try to exploit popular struggles to take state power themselves, becoming a brutal and oppressive Red bureaucracy; or they would become the managers and ideologists of the state capitalist societies, if popular revolution failed. It was a perceptive insight, on both counts.
The world's two major propaganda systems did not agree on much, but they did agree on using the term socialism to refer to the immediate destruction of every element of socialism by the Bolsheviks. That's not too surprising. The Bolsheviks called their system socialist so as to exploit the moral prestige of socialism.
The West adopted the same usage for the opposite reason: to defame the feared libertarian ideals by associating them with the Bolshevik dungeon, to undermine the popular belief that there really might be progress towards a more just society with democratic control over its basic institutions and concern for human needs and rights.
If socialism is the tyranny of Lenin and Stalin, then sane people will say: not for me. And if that's the only alternative to corporate state capitalism, then many will submit to its authoritarian structures as the only reasonable choice.
With the collapse of the Soviet system, there's an opportunity to revive the lively and vigorous libertarian socialist thought that was not able to withstand the doctrinal and repressive assaults of the major systems of power. How large a hope that is, we cannot know. But at least one roadblock has been removed. In that sense, the disappearance of the
The media
Whether they're called "liberal" or "conservative," the major media are large corporations, owned by and interlinked with even larger conglomerates. Like other corporations, they sell a product to a market. The market is advertisers -- that is, other businesses. The product is audiences. For the elite media that set the basic agenda to which others adapt, the product is, furthermore, relatively privileged audiences.
So we have major corporations selling fairly wealthy and privileged audiences to other businesses. Not surprisingly, the picture of the world presented reflects the narrow and biased interests and values of the sellers, the buyers and the product.
Other factors reinforce the same distortion. The cultural managers (editors, leading columnists, etc.) share class interests and associations with state and business managers and other privileged sectors. There is, in fact, a regular flow of high-level people among corporations, government and media. Access to state authorities is important to maintain a competitive position; "leaks," for example, are often fabrications and deceit produced by the authorities with the cooperation of the media, who pretend they don't know.
In return, state authorities demand cooperation and submissiveness. Other power centers also have devices to punish departures from orthodoxy, ranging from the stock market to an effective vilification and defamation apparatus.
The outcome is not, of course, entirely uniform. To serve the interests of the powerful, the media must present a tolerably realistic picture of the world. And professional integrity and honesty sometimes interfere with the overriding mission. The best journalists are, typically, quite aware of the factors that shape the media product, and seek to use such openings as are provided. The result is that one can learn a lot by a critical and skeptical reading of what the media produce.
The media are only one part of a larger doctrinal system; other parts are journals of opinion, the schools and universities, academic scholarship and so on. We're much more aware of the media, particularly the prestige media, because those who critically analyze ideology have focused on them. The larger system hasn't been studied as much because it's harder to investigate systematically. But there's good reason to believe that it represents the same interests as the media, just as one would anticipate.
The doctrinal system, which produces what we call "propaganda" when discussing enemies, has two distinct targets. One target is what's sometimes called the "political class," the roughly 20% of the population that's relatively educated, more or less articulate, playing some role in decision-making. Their acceptance of doctrine is crucial, because they're in a position to design and implement policy.
Then there's the other 80% or so of the population. These are Lippmann's "spectators of action," whom he referred to as the "bewildered herd." They are supposed to follow orders and keep out of the way of the important people. They're the target of the real mass media: the tabloids, the sitcoms, the Super Bowl and so on.
These sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable -- if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.
That's not to say that the media can't be influenced by the general population. The dominant institutions -- whether political, economic or doctrinal -- are not immune to public pressures. Independent (alternative) media can also play an important role. Though they lack resources, almost by definition, they gain significance in the same way that popular organizations do: by bringing together people with limited resources who can multiply their effectiveness, and their own understanding, through their interactions -- precisely the democratic threat that's so feared by dominant elites.
The Future
Things have changed
It's important to recognize how much the scene has changed in the past 30 years as a result of the popular movements that organized in a loose and chaotic way around such issues as civil rights, peace, feminism, the environment and other issues of human concern.
Take the Kennedy and Reagan administrations, which were similar in a number of ways in their basic policies and commitments. When Kennedy launched a huge international terrorist campaign against
It wasn't until hundreds of thousands of American troops were deployed and all of
Leaders may crow about the end of the "
By now, classical intervention is not even considered an option. The means are limited to clandestine terror, kept secret from the domestic population, or "decisive and rapid" demolition of "much weaker enemies" -- after huge propaganda campaigns depicting them as monsters of indescribable power.
Much the same is true across the board. Take 1992. If the
In other areas too, there's more openness and understanding, more skepticism and questioning of authority. Of course, the latter tendencies are double-edged. They may lead to independent thought, popular organizing and pressures for much-needed institutional change. Or they may provide a mass base of frightened people for new authoritarian leaders. These possible outcomes are not a matter for speculation, but for action, with stakes that are very large.
What you can do
In any country, there's some group that has the real power. It's not a big secret where power is in the
One of the things they want is a passive, quiescent population. So one of the things that you can do to make life uncomfortable for them is not be passive and quiescent. There are lots of ways of doing that. Even just asking questions can have an important effect.
Demonstrations, writing letters and voting can all be meaningful -- it depends on the situation. But the main point is -- it's got to be sustained and organized.
If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organizations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.
Any system of power, even a fascist dictatorship, is responsive to public dissidence. It's certainly true in a country like this, where -- fortunately -- the state doesn't have a lot of force to coerce people. During the Vietnam War, direct resistance to the war was quite significant, and it was a cost that the government had to pay.
If elections are just something in which some portion of the population goes and pushes a button every couple of years, they don't matter. But if the citizens organize to press a position, and pressure their representatives about it, elections can matter.
Members of the House of Representatives can be influenced much more easily than senators, and senators somewhat more easily than the president, who is usually immune. When you get to that level, policy is decided almost totally by the wealthy and powerful people who own and manage the country.
But you can organize on a scale that will influence representatives. You can get them to come to your homes to be yelled at by a group of neighbors, or you can sit in at their offices -- whatever works in the circumstances. It can make a difference -- often an important one.
You can also do your own research. Don't just rely on the conventional history books and political science texts -- go back to specialists' monographs and to original sources: national security memoranda and similar documents. Most good libraries have reference departments where you can find them.
It does require a bit of effort. Most of the material is junk, and you have to read a ton of stuff before you find anything good. There are guides that give you hints about where to look, and sometimes you'll find references in secondary sources that look intriguing. Often they're misinterpreted, but they suggest places to search.
It's no big mystery, and it's not intellectually difficult. It involves some work, but anybody can do it as a spare-time job. And the results of that research can change people's minds. Real research is always a collective activity, and its results can make a large contribution to changing consciousness, increasing insight and understanding, and leading to constructive action.
The struggle continues
The struggle for freedom is never over. The people of the
The courage they show is quite amazing. I've personally had the privilege -- and it is a privilege -- of catching a glimpse of that courage at first hand in Southeast Asia, in Central America and on the occupied
When I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure
hunger, fire, the sword and death to preserve only their independence, I feel that it does not
behoove slaves to reason about freedom.
People who think that these are mere words understand very little about the world.
And that's just a part of the task that lies before us. There's a growing
Notes
Sources for the facts in this book are listed below by page numbers and brief subject descriptions.
7-8. On "Grand Area" planning for the postwar period by the State Department and the CFR, see Laurence Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, Monthly Review, 1977. There is extensive literature on the development and execution of these plans. An early work, of great insight, is Gabriel Kolko, Politics of War,: Random House, 1968. One valuable recent study is Melvyn Leffler, Preponderance of Power, Stanford University Press, 1992. For further sources and discussion, specifically on NSC 68, see Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, Chapter 1. NSC 68 and many other declassified documents can be found in the official State Department history, Foreign Relations of the United States, generally published with about 30 years delay.
8-9. "Secret army." See Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, Knopf, 1979; and Mary Ellen Reese, General Reinhard Gehlen: the CIA Connection,
10. William Yandell Elliot, ed., The Political Economy of American Foreign Policy, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1955. For further discussion, see Chomsky, At War with
10-11. Kennan,
11-18. Postwar planning. Chomsky, Turning the Tide, Chapters 2, 4; and Deterring Democracy, Chapters 1, 11 and sources cited.
15. Marshall Plan. See Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan,
1 Kolb. Letter, New York Times, July 26, 1983.
2 Ultranationalism quote. National Security Council Memorandum 5432, 1954.
19-20.
20-21.
25. "Stability." Peiro Gleijeses, Shattered Hope,
26-27.
1 Stimson. Kolko, Politics of War, 471.
2 Schoultz, Herman studies. Chomsky, Turning the Tide, 157f.
3 "Economic miracle." Chomsky, Turning the Tide, 1.8 and sources cited; Robert Williams, Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Central America, University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
1
2 Relations with the military. Chomsky, On Power and Ideology, Lecture 1 and Turning the Tide, 216.
31.
33.
34-50.
42. Oxfam's explanation. Dianna Melrose,
54. Bush's administration. Chomsky, "ŒWhat We Say Goes': The Middle East in the
56. Drugs. Chomsky, "Year 501: World Orders, Old and New, Part 1," Z magazine, March 1992, 24-36.
56-60.
58. Media reaction to the
68-69. Iran/contra cover-up. Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, 475f; Turning the Tide, 130 131; and Culture of Terrorism, Chapter 8.
70. Salvadoran Jesuit journal. Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, 354-55.
72 73. Eastern Europe and Latin America;
75. Chicago Tribune quote. William Neikirk, "We are the World's Guardian Angels," Chicago Tribune business section, September 9, 1990. Cited in Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, 5.
78-82. The Cold War. Chomsky, Turning the Tide, Chapter 4; and Deterring Democracy.
79. Dulles quote. John Foster Dulles telephone call to Allen Dulles, June 19, 1958, "Minutes of Telephone Conversations of John Foster Dulles and Christian Herter," Dwight D. Eisenhower Library,
82-86. War on drugs. Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, Chapter 4.
86-91. Political discourse. Edward S. Herman, Beyond Hypocrisy, South End Press, 1992.
87. Lipmann (and the evolution of these notions from 17th century
1 Stevenson; the concept "defense against aggression." Chomsky, For Reasons of State, Chapter 1, section 6.
2 "Peace process." Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, Chapter 9; Fateful Triangle, Chapter 3; Necessary Illusions, Appendix 5.4; and Deterring Democracy, Afterword (1991 edition).
90. John Jay. Frank Monaghan, John Jay.
91-92. Socialism. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent.
96-97. National Security Policy Review. Maureen Dowd, New York Times, February 23, 1992.
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