Introduction
from the book
The Washington Connection
and Third World Fascism
by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman
published by South End Press, 1979
Freedom, Aggression and Human Rights
The common view that internal freedom makes for humane and
moral international behavior is supported neither by historical
evidence nor by reason. The United States itself has a long history
of imposing oppressive and terrorist regimes in regions of the
world within the reach of its power, such as the Caribbean and
Central American sugar and banana republics (Trujillo in the Dominican
Republic and the Somozas in Nicaragua were long-lived progeny
of U.S. intervention and selection). Since World War II. with
the great extension of U.S. power, it has borne a heavy responsibility
for the spread of a plague of neofascism, state terrorism, torture
and repression throughout large parts of the underdeveloped world.
The United States has globalized the "banana republic."
This has occurred despite some modest ideological strain because
these developments serve the needs of powerful and dominant interests,
state and private, within the United States itself.
The Vietnam War experience is often cited to prove the importance
of freedom and dissent in constraining state violence. This assessment
seriously misreads the facts of the case. Peace movement activism,
growing from and contributing to the popular movements for equality,
freedom and social change within the United States, did succeed
in raising the domestic costs of the U.S. assault, thus helping
to limit in some degree its scope and severity and contributing
to the eventual decision that the game was not worth the candle.
It did so, of course, mainly by employing modalities that were
outside the framework of existing institutions: demonstrations,
nonviolent resistance, grass roots organizing, and wide-ranging
educational efforts needed to counter the deep commitment of existing
institutions to the protection and furthering of the interests
of state and private power. The established "free" institutions
supported the war, for the most part enthusiastically and uncritically,
occasionally with minor and qualifying reservations. The principled
opposition, based on grounds other than cost-ineffectiveness,
functioned outside the major institutional structures. It is,
of course, an important fact that a movement was allowed to organize
with relatively modest state harassment and violence, and that
this movement could make some impact on the course of events.
Such developments and the costs of overcoming these and other
forms of resistance that impede the actions of national elites
are also problems in totalitarian societies, though the toll imposed
on protectors in Iran, Argentina, and the Soviet Union is often
far more severe. The value of being allowed to protest relatively
unmolested is certainly real, but it should not lead to a disregard
of the fact that established institutions, with overwhelmingly
dominant power, tend to line up in goose-step fashion in support
of any state foreign venture, no matter how immoral (until the
cost becomes too high).
The peace movement frightened Western elites. The response
of the U.S. (indeed Free World) leadership to the politicization
of large parts of the population during the 1960s provides a revealing
indication of their concept of "democracy" and of the
role of the public in the "democratic process." In 1975,
the Trilateral Commission, representing the more liberal elements
of ruling groups in the industrial democracies, published a study
entitled The Crisis of Democracy which interprets public participation
in decision-making as a threat to democracy, one that must be
contained if elite domination is to persist unhindered by popular
demand. The population must be reduced to apathy and conformism
if "democracy" as interpreted by this liberal contingent,
is to be kept workable and allowed to survive.
The most crucial fact relating freedom to the Vietnam War
experience is that, despite its free institutions, for over two
decades (1949-1975) the United States attempted to subjugate Vietnam
by force and subversion, in the process violating the UN Charter,
the Geneva Accords of 1954 the Nuremberg Code the Hague Convention,
the Geneva Protocol of 1925, and finally the Paris agreements
of 19733. For almost a decade the peasants of Indochina served
as experimental animals for an evolving military technology-cluster
bombs, rockets designed to enter caves where people hid to escape
saturation bombing, a fiendish array of anti-personnal weapons;
new versions of the long-outlawed "dummy" bullet were
among the more modest weapons employed. The population was driven
into urban slums by bombing, artillery, and ground attacks that
often degenerated into mass murder, in an expanding effort to
destroy the social structures m which resistance was rooted. Defenseless
peasant societies in Laos and Cambodia were savagely bombed in
"secret"-the "secrecy" resulting from the
refusal of the mass media to make public facts For which they
had ample evidence. Freedom was consistent not only with this
expanding savagery, but also with interventions explicitly designed
to preserve non-freedom from the threat of freedom (e.g., the
invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965) and to displace democratic
with totalitarian regimes (e.g., the open subversion of Guatemala
in 1954: the slightly more sub rosa subversion of democracy in
Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973). Free institutions were able
to accept, indeed quietly approve of huge massacres in the name
of "freedom," as in Indonesia in 1965-1966 by U. S.
liberals as evidence for the farsightedness of U.S. intervention
in Vietnam. Massive atrocities committed by U.S. client regimes
against their own populations or against foreign populations they
hope to subdue (e.g., the Indonesian massacres in East Timor)
have also proven compatible with freedom and are regularly disguised
or ignored by the Free Press.
Whatever the attitudes of the U.S. leadership toward freedom
at home ... systematic policies towards Third World countries
... make it evident that the alleged commitment to democracy and
human rights is mere rhetoric, directly contrary to actual policy.
The operative principle has been and remains economic freedom-meaning
freedom for U.S. business to invest, sell, and repatriate profits-and
its two basic requisites, a favorable investment climate and a
specific form of stability. Since these primary values are disturbed
by unruly students, democratic processes, peasant organizations,
a free press, and free labor unions, "economic freedom"
has often required political servitude. Respect for the rights
of the individual, also alleged to be one of the cardinal values
of the West, has had little place in the operating procedures
applied to the Third World. Since a favorable investment climate
and stability quite often require repression, the United States
has supplied the tools and training for interrogation and torture
and is thoroughly implicated in the vast expansion of torture
during the Past decade. When Dan Mitrione came to Uruguay in a
police advisory function, the police were torturing with an obsolete
electric needle:
Mitrione arranged for the police to get newer electric needles
of varying thickness. Some needles were so thin they could be
slipped between the teeth. Benitez [a Uruguayan police official]
understood that this equipment came to Montevideo inside the U.S.
embassy's diplomatic pouch.
Within the United States itself, the intelligence services
were "running torture camps," as were their Brazilian
associates, who "set up a camp modeled after that of the
boinas verdes, the Green Berets." And there is evidence that
U.S. advisors took an active part in torture, not contenting themselves
with supplying training and material means. During the Vietnam
War, the United States. employed on a massive scale improved napalm,
phosphorus and fragmentation bombs, and a wide range of other
"anti-personnel" weapons that had a devastating effect
on civilians. The steady development of weaponry and methods of
"interrogation" that inflict enormous pain on the human
body and spirit, and the expansion of use of this technology in
U.S.-sponsored counterinsurgency warfare and "stabilization"
throughout the U.S. sphere of influence, is further evidence that
the "sacredness of the individual" is hardly a primary
value in the West, at least in its application beyond an elite
in-group.
The rationale given for the U.S.-buildup of Third World police
and military establishments and regular "tilt" toward
repressive regimes, is the demands of "security". This
is a wonderfully elastic concept with a virtuous ring that can
validate open-ended arms expenditures as well as support for neo-fascism.
When it is said that we must oppose Goulart in Brazil or the NLF
in South Vietnam for reasons of security, this obviously does
not mean that they threaten our survival; it means that their
success would be disadvantageous to U.S. interests, and not primarily
military interests. It is possible that "security" for
a great power and its client government corresponds to heightened
insecurity for large numbers within the dominated "secure"
state. This seems to be very much the case for the majorities
in Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay, for example.
As Jan Black points out:
"The delimitation of what must be secured expands to
accommodate what a nation, class, institution, or other social
entity has, or thinks it should have. It follows, then, that it
is often the nations, groups, or individuals whose wealth and
power would appear to make them the most secure who are, in fact,
most paranoid,..." a comment that applies with striking accuracy
to the United States after World War II. In the specific case
of the United States, she notes that the concept of security is
"all-encompassing, involving economic and political hegemony
as well as strictly military considerations...." This flows
from the fact of inordinate power and is the propaganda counterpart
of the imperial leader's assumption of the natural right to intervene
to keep its subordinates in line. It has the great public relations
advantage, also, of built-in self justification. Who could object
to the pitiful giant's efforts to protect its own security?
*****
The Shift in the Balance of Terror to the Free World
Over the past 25 years at least, not only has official terror
been responsible for torture and killing on a vastly greater scale
than its retail counterpart, but, furthermore, the balance of
terror appears to have shifted to the West and its clients, with
the United States setting the pace as sponsor and supplier. The
old colonial world was shattered during World War II, and the
resultant nationalist radical upsurge threatened traditional Western
hegemony and the economic interests of Western business. To contain
this threat the United States has aligned itself with elite and
military elements in the Third World whose function has been to
contain the tides of change. This role was played by Diem and
Thieu in South Vietnam and is currently served by allies such
as Mobutu in Zaire, Pinochet in Chile, and Suharto in Indonesia.
Under frequent U S sponsorship the neo-fascist National Security
State and other forms of authoritarian- rule have become the dominant
mode of government in the Third World. Heavily armed by the West
(mainly the United States) and selected for amenability to foreign
domination and zealous anti-Communism, counterrevolutionary regimes
have been highly torture- and bloodshed-prone.
In the Soviet sphere of influence, torture appears to have
been on the decline since the death of Stalin. In its 1974 Report
on Torture, Amnesty International (AI) notes:
"Though prison conditions and the rights of the prisoners
detained on political charges in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union may still be in many cases unsatisfactory, torture as a
government-sanctioned, Stalinist practice has ceased. With a few
exceptions no reports on the use of torture in Eastern Europe
have been reaching the outside world in the past decade."
In sharp contrast, torture, which "for the last two or
three hundred years has been no more than a historical curiosity
has suddenly developed a life of its own and become a social cancer."
Since it has declined in the Soviet sphere since the death of
Stalin, it would appear that this cancerous growth is largely
a Free World phenomenon: The frontispiece describes its distribution
within the sphere of influence. It has shown phenomenal growth
in where, as AI points out:
" There is a marked difference between traditional brutality,
stemming from historical conditions, and the systemic torture
which has spread to many Latin American countries within the past
decade."
Amnesty International also notes that in some of the Latin
American countries "the institutional violence and high incidence
of political assassinations has tended to overshadow the problem
of torture. The numbers involved in these official (wholesale)
murders have been large: for example, AI estimates 15,000 death
squad victims in the small country of Guatemala between 1970 and
`. a thousand in Argentina in 1975 before the military coup and
unleashing of a true reign of terror.
The AI Annual Report for 1975-1976 also notes that "more
80% of the urgent appeals and actions for victims of human torture
have been coming from Latin America. One reason for urgency of
these appeals is the nature of this expanding empire of violence.
which bears comparison with some of the worst excrescences of
European fascism. Hideous torture has become standard practice
in the U.S. client fascist states. In the new Chile, to savor
the results of the narrow escape of that country from Communist
tyranny:
Many people were tortured to death [after the military coup
of 1973] by means of endless whipping as well as beating with
fists, feet and rifle butts. Prisoners were beaten on all parts
of the body, including the head and sexual organs. The bodies
of prisoners were found in the Rio Mapocho, sometimes disfigured
beyond recognition. Two well-known cases in Santiago are those
of Litre Quiroga, the ax-director of prisons under the Allende
government, and Victor Jara, Chile's most popular folk singer.
Both were detained in the Estadio Chile and died as a result of
the torture received there. According to a recurrent report, the
body of Victor Jara was found outside the Estadio Chile, his hands
broken and his body badly mutilated. Litre Quiroga had been kicked
and beaten in front of other prisoners for approximately 40 hours
before he was removed to a special interrogation room where he
met his death under unknown circumstances.
Such horrendous details could be repeated for many thousands
of human beings in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay
Guatemala, Nicaragua, U.S.-occupied South Vietnam up to 1975,
Iran, and in quite a few other U.S. client states. They clearly
reflect state policy over a wide segment of the U. S. sphere of
influence. As already noted, much of the electronic and other
torture gear is U.S. supplied, and great numbers of client state
police and military interrogators are U.S.-trained.
Latin America has also become the locus of a major diaspora,
with hundreds of thousands of academics, journalists, scientists,
and other professionals, as well as liberals and radicals of all
social classes, driven into exile. This has been a deliberate
policy of the military juntas, which one distinguished Latin America
journalist calls a "lobotomization" of intellect and
the "cultural genocide of our time," with the purpose
of removing any source of social criticism or intellectual or
leadership base for the general population. Another aspect of
the same strategy is, of course, the widespread use of torture
and political assassinations to create "a climate of fear
and uncertainty to discourage any form of opposition to the ruling
elite." To find comparable flights into exile on a continental
scale, one would have to go back to the experience of fascist
Europe, 1933-1940 ... which provides numerous parallels.
*****
Individual Morality and Human Rights Policy
Several moral issues arise in protests concerning atroci and
violations of human rights. If the purpose of such protest self-aggrandizement,
service to one's state, establishing credent with one's compatriots
or deity, or other self-serving motives, tl it is clear how to
proceed; join the chorus of protests organized the government
or the media with regard to the iniquity of current enemies of
the state. Such protest may be directed towa genuine abuses of
human rights, but it is at the moral level protest for pay. We
understand this very well in the case of official enemies. Suppose
that some Russian intellectual condemns U behavior in Chile or
Vietnam. What he says may be quite true, I we do not admire his
courage or moral integrity. Similar remarks apply here, and for
the very same reasons.
Suppose that the purpose of protest is to relieve hum suffering
or defend human rights. Then more complex considerations arise.
One must consider the plausible consequences for the victims of
oppression. It is for this reason, for example, that organization
such as Amnesty International's polite letters the most miserable
tyrant. In some cases, public protest may positively harmful,
a fact familiar to people seriously concerned with human rights.
Recently Jiri Hajeok, formerly foreign minister in the Dubcek
government and now a leading Czech dissident "criticized
President Carter for an 'over-tough' approach which he said, will
hinder the struggle for greater political latitude in the East
bloc." If the purpose of the "human rights crusade"
is restore U.S. prestige after the battering it has taken in the
p. decades, then such considerations are irrelevant. In fact,
Washington had already made its position clear on the matter:
"The Carter Administration issued a pointed warning yesterday
that it will not be dissuaded from its public campaign for human
rights around the world [sic] by the harassment of individual
dissidents in foreign countries." But people with a genuine
concern for human rights would react quite differently, and give
serious consideration to the likely effects on the victims. Such
calculations are not always easy ones but the issue will not be
lightly dismissed by people who engage in protest for other than
self-serving or strategic motives.
Such persons will also consider how their finite energies
can be distributed most efficaciously. It is a cheap and cynical
evasion to plead that "we must raise our voices" whenever
human rights are violated. Even a saint could not meet this demand.
A serious person will try to concentrate protest efforts where
they are most likely to ameliorate conditions for the victims
of oppression. The emphasis should, in general, be close to home:
on violations of human rights that have their roots in the policies
of one's own state or its client regimes, or domestic economic
institutions (as e.g. in the case of U.S. investment in South
Africa), and in general, on policies that protest may be able
to influence. This consideration is particularly relevant in a
democracy, where public opinion can sometimes be aroused if circumstances
allow a sufficient breach in the conformism of the ideological
institutions (the media and academic scholarship), but it applies
as well in totalitarian states that rely in part on popular consent,
as most do. It is for this reason that we honor a Medvedev or
Grigorenko who denounce the crimes of the Russian state and its
satellites, at great personal risk. If, as in these cases, they
also condemn the criminal acts of the United States, that is well
and good, but far less significant. In the case of Solzhenitsyn,
who comes to the United States to call for a holy war against
Communism and criticizes us for not resorting to still greater
violence against our enemies, the most generous reaction must
be pity-and distress at the fact that the Soviet state has reduced
so many of its most courageous dissidents to such blindly destructive
hostility.
For privileged Western intellectuals, the proper focus for
their protest is at home. The primary responsibility of U.S. citizens
~ -concerned with human rights today is on the Continuing crimes
of the United States: the support for terror and oppression in
large parts of the world. the refusal to offer reparations or
aid to the recent victims of U.S. violence. Similar considerations
apply elsewhere. French intellectuals may, if they choose, devote
their energies to joining the chorus of protest against Cambodian
atrocities that has been conducted by the international press
(including the New York Times, the Soviet Press, indeed virtually
every articulate segment of opinion in the industrial societies).
As long as such protest is honest and accurate-often it is not,
as we shall see-it is legitimate, though further questions may
be raised about its impact. This small increment to the international
barrage on Cambodia had little if any effect in mitigating harsh
practices there, though it had a powerful effect on ideological
renewal in the West and helped prepare the ground for the Vietnamese
invasion of Cambodia in January 1979. These effects were predictable,
and predicted. French intellectuals interested in doing something
to alleviate suffering in Southeast Asia where their impact might
be positive would have been better advised to expend their efforts
in protesting the announcement by their government that it proposes
to join in the glorious massacre in East Timor by supplying arms,
setting up an arms industry and providing diplomatic cover for
Indonesia. If victims of oppression in Russia, Uganda, or Cambodia
can be helped by public protest. then it is justified; otherwise,
it is empty rhetoric, or worse, The ultimate vulgarity, perhaps,
is the spectacle to which we are now being treated in the U.S.
(indeed, Western) media, where many people who supported U.S.
savagery in Indochina or perhaps finally turned against the war
on pragmatic grounds"-the United States could not reach its
goals at reasonable cost-now feign outrage and indignation over
oppressive or murderous acts that are in large part a consequence
of the U.S. violence that they tolerated or supported. What they
say may in fact be true-although it often is not-but it reeks
of hypocrisy and opportunism. We would react no differently if
some German intellectual who tolerated or supported Hitler expressed
his indignation over the atrocities committed by the French resistance
after liberation.
Even those who took part in protest or resistance against
the U.S. war in Vietnam cannot escape these questions. Should
they, for example, protest-atrocities in Indochina in the pages
of the New York Times, in a context of continuing distortions
on atrocities (and on all facets of the war) and a very effective,
ongoing official and media propaganda campaign, which has direct
and very harmful consequences for the victims of U.S. barbarism
in Indochina? Again, individuals seriously concerned with human
rights and human dignity will carefully consider the potential
human consequences of their acts. Will particular forms of protest
help to alleviate the condition of those who suffer, including
victims of earlier violence? Or will they contribute to rebuilding
the ideological foundations for new violence and depredations?
The future victims of counterrevolutionary violence will not thank
even honest protectors who thoughtlessly contribute to these ends.
These questions are not easy to answer and honest people may reach
differing conclusions concerning them, but they deserve serious
thought, far more than has been publicly expressed during the
postwar period of ideological reconstruction.
Washington
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