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It is the responsibility of intellectuals
to speak truth and to expose lies.
Noam ChomskyThe first step towards political sanity
must be intensive self-examination,
exposure not only of what we do
and what we represent in the world today,
but also of the attitudes that color and distort
our perception of our international behavior.
Noam Chomsky, "The Logic of Withdrawal"Commitment to work on the problems
of racism, oppression, imperialism, and so on,
is in the United States an absolute necessity.
Noam Chomsky, Language and PoliticsThings happen in the world because of the efforts
of dedicated and courageous people
whose names no one has heard,
and who disappear from history.
Noam Chomsky, 1993War is inherently unjust,
and the great challenge of our time is
how to deal with evil, tyranny, and oppression
without killing huge numbers of people.
Howard Zinn, 2002We have enough examples-
in the history of our own country and that of others-
that show it is possible for organized citizens
to resist and overcome what seem like hopeless odds.
The power of determined people armed with a moral cause is,
I believe, "the ultimate power."
Howard Zinn, 2003Revenge knows few limits
when the privileged and powerful
are subjected to the kind of terror
they regularly mete out to their victims.
Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival. 182
Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928 and
began studying
language with his father, who was a Hebrew scholar.
He has been interested in politics since childhood and said he
was influenced
by the radical Jewish community in New York.
At
the University of Pennsylvania he studied linguistics, mathematics,
and philosophy,
and he was given a Ph.D. there after having done
research
as a Harvard Fellow from 1951 to 1955.
He and his wife
lived for a few months in 1953 on a kibbutz in Israel.
Chomsky
was influenced by George Orwell and the anarchists in Spain
that
were attacked by fascists in the Spanish Civil War.
He especially
admired Bertrand Russell
and compared his life and reputation
to another great pacifist,
Albert Einstein.
Both responded
to the "grave dangers facing humanity."
Einstein responded by living a very comfortable life in Princeton
and dedicating himself to research that he loved,
taking a few moments for an occasional oracular statement.
Russell responded by leading demonstrations
and getting himself dragged off by the cops,
writing extensively on the problems of the day,
organizing war crimes trials, etc.
The result? Russell was and is reviled and condemned.
Einstein is admired as a saint.
Should that surprise us? Not at all.1
Chomsky taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) from 1955
until he retired to do more speaking.
His writings
have been cited more times than those of any other living person.
He is one of the most influential thinkers in the field of linguistics
for his theory
of generative and transformational grammar with
deep structure.
His understanding of the uniqueness of human language
led him to criticize
the reductionist behaviorism of B. F. Skinner
that tried to explain
human behavior as a simple process of conditioning
by the environment.
Chomsky argued that language is more than
a set of
mechanical habits because it is creative and rational.
He considered it offensive to human dignity to treat people
as
if they were like laboratory rats or pigeons.
Chomsky became perhaps the most articulate critic of the American
war in Vietnam
and dedicated
his book of essays, American Power and the New Mandarins,
"to the brave young men who refuse to serve in a criminal
war."2
During an anti-draft protest at the Pentagon in October
1967 Chomsky himself
was arrested during a teach-in with Dave
Dellinger and Dagmar Wilson.
He also refused to pay half his federal
income tax.
He observed that anti-Communism was a useful device
to get the American people
to support an imperial intervention,
which was really to make sure
that American power dominated Southeast
Asia.
He suggested that it did not take great intelligence to
see the need for de-escalation
by the greatest power in the world
that had become the most aggressive.
This book included a long
essay on "The Revolutionary Pacifism of A.
J. Muste"
about the great pacifist's response to the
US going to war against Japan in 1941.
Chomsky agreed with Muste
that the tragedy might have been averted
by a serious attempt at peaceful reconciliation
with no attempt to fasten sole war-guilt on any nation,
assurance to all peoples of equitable access
to markets and essential materials,
armament reduction, massive economic rehabilitation,
and moves towards international federation.3
Chomsky admitted though, that such a proposal then
would have
seemed as senseless as during the time he wrote.
Yet he found
Muste's revolutionary pacifism realistic and ethical.
In his essay
on "The Logic of Withdrawal" Chomsky agreed with Howard
Zinn
that since 1954 the problems of Vietnam should have been
solved at the local level
by the Vietnamese instead of raising
them to an international conflict.
He argued that if enough people
spoke for withdrawal,
it would become politically feasible.
In
the essay "On Resistance" Chomsky described his arrest
at the Pentagon
and offered these reflections on the value of
nonviolent protest:
The argument that resistance to the war
should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.
As a tactic, violence is absurd.
No one can compete with the government in this arena,
and the resort to violence, which will surely fail,
will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached,
and will further encourage the ideologists
and administrators of forceful repression.
What is more, one hopes that participants in nonviolent resistance
will themselves become human beings of a more admirable sort.
No one can fail to be impressed by the personal qualities of those
who have grown to maturity in the civil rights movement.
Whatever else it may have accomplished,
the civil rights movement has made an inestimable contribution
to American society in transforming the lives and characters
of those who took part in it.
Perhaps a program of principled, nonviolent resistance
can do the same for many others,
in the particular circumstances that we face today.
It is not impossible that this may save the country
from a terrible future.4
Chomsky went on to say that resistance need not
replace dissent,
which is still needed.
Those who refuse to pay taxes and resist
the draft and the war
can also speak to church groups and town
meetings or
participate in electoral politics by supporting peace
candidates.
He concluded that the United States had become the
greatest threat
to peace, national self-determination, and international
cooperation,
while the American people still enjoyed internal
freedom.
In 1969 Chomsky became aware that the Pentagon and NASA
were
financing two laboratories at MIT.
He believed it was impossible
for the university to sever ties with the
military-industrial
complex at that time, and therefore he worked to
make people aware
of what was going on so that they would know how to act.
In 1970 Chomsky complained that Laos was
being bombed even
more than Vietnam.
He argued that Cambodia's "decade of genocide"
by the Khmer Rouge
was partly a reaction to and an effect of US
bombing.
The United States military killed nearly three million
people in the Vietnam War
and perhaps another million in Laos
and Cambodia.
Surprisingly, though it was hardly reported,
postwar
Vietnam had little retribution after so much violence.
Yet the
US not only refused to pay reparations for its massive devastation,
but it also tried to punish the Vietnamese even further.
When
India wanted to send a hundred buffalo to Vietnam in 1977,
the
US threatened to stop its Food for Peace program in India.
President
Carter said he would not help Vietnam
because the "destruction
was mutual."
Chomsky wrote to the New York Times, noting that the
term "bloodbath"
was never applied to the war but only
to the possibility of ending the war.
In 1973 the book Counterrevolutionary
Violence:
Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda,
which he wrote
with Edward S. Herman, was denied distribution by the
Warner Communications
corporation after 20,000 copies had been printed.
In 1976 Chomsky was interviewed in French by Mitsou Ronat
for
the book Language and Responsibility.
He said that anyone
can see through the deceptions of the system of shared ideology
and propaganda if one analyzes how they are designed to protect
special interests.
In 1972 Henry Kissinger appeared on television
to say that peace was at hand;
but he was rejecting the negotiating
principles on crucial points.
Thus Chomsky predicted more escalation,
which took place during the Christmas bombing.
He noted how revisionist
historians were changing the previously
prevalent view that Russia
and China were responsible for the Cold War.
Such revisionist
views were hardly noticed until there were enough students
aroused
by the civil rights movement and anti-war protests in the 1960s.
He noted that state censorship is unnecessary in the American
system
because the ideological controls are complex and decentralized.
He cited cases exposed by the Church Committee in which
the
FBI in its Counter-Intelligence Program (Cointelpro)
infiltrated
and murdered Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago.
The FBI did
little to stop the Rangers criminal gang
until the Black Panthers got them interested in politics;
then they tried to make the groups
fight each other.
The FBI hired the leader of the Secret Army
Organizatio
to shoot a student at San Diego State, wounding a
woman.
In Seattle the FBI infiltrated left-wing groups;
their
agent tried to instigate the bombing of a bridge,
and another
even initiated a robbery in which a man was killed.
In 1960 the
FBI tried to disrupt the Puerto Rican independence movement.
The
next year under Attorney General Robert Kennedy they targeted
the
Socialist Workers Party, because they ran candidates in elections
and supported racial integration and Castro.
Chomsky believed
that Cointelpro made Watergate look like a tea party.
Some people
were shocked that the CIA tried to assassinate foreign leaders,
but the Phoenix program in Vietnam exterminated forty thousand
people.
Chomsky asked why those people were considered less significant.
During the Carter presidency, which tried to bring
more human
rights into US foreign policy,
Chomsky and Herman published their
two-volume
Political Economy of Human Rights.
In the first
volume, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism,
they demonstrated that since World War II the United States has
been imposing
oppressive and terrorist regimes from the CIA-sponsored
coups in Iran in 1953
and in Guatemala in 1954 to Indonesia in
1965 and Chile in 1973.
In the 1960s eleven constitutionally elected
governments
in Latin America were displaced by military dictators.
The US was overthrowing democratic reformers and radicals in order
to
"stabilize" countries for business with right-wing
military regimes.
For a quarter of a century until 1975 in the
name of freedom the US tried
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 1973.5
Saturation bombing resulted in mass murder;
but the wars in
Laos and Cambodia were kept secret,
because the mass media refused
to report them.
Freedom in this case was for US business to make
profits;
but the rights of students, peasants, labor unions,
and
political critics were massively suppressed.
In 1965 the United States backed a coup in Indonesia that resulted
in a massacre of perhaps 700,000 people while 750,000 were arrested.
These figures are unknown to most Americans,
but the crimes of
the Khmer Rouge were repeatedly reported.
After centuries of colonialism
in Indonesia,
Portuguese fascism was overthrown in 1974.
People
in East Timor wanted to be independent and the following year
found
themselves in a civil war with Indonesia that in the next
four years slaughtered
about 200,000 people in East Timor from
a population of 700,000.
In 1976 US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
took credit
for blocking United Nations action on behalf of Timor.
The Carter administration increased the shipment of weapons to
Indonesia even though 100,000 people had already been massacred.
Some people think these are exceptions, but a pattern emerges.
Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov may be praised for their criticism of
Soviet oppression;
but what is their moral level when they complained
that the
US did not fight hard enough to win in Vietnam?
Chomsky
saw better ethics in the resisters and deserters who tried
to
defend the rights of others, namely the victims of American aggression.
The bias of the media is found in the emphasis on two or three
dissidents in the
Soviet Union while 20,000 cases of severe torture
in Latin America are completely ignored.
The military-industrial-intelligence
complex invested and made
huge profits by promoting weapons, fear,
and insecurity.
A murder network of death squads operated in Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay to hunt down dissidents.
Neither President Carter nor the mainstream press would refer
to the Shah of Iran as a dictator even though between 1974 and
1977
of at least 25,000 political prisoners some 300 were executed.
Because the right-wing military leaders of these third-world
countries do not usually
have a large following, as did Mussolini
and Hitler, Chomsky called them "subfascists."
He noted
that the Carter administration continued sending arms to the Philippines,
South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Morocco, and Iran
even though
they seriously violated human rights.
When as many as 250,000
people were systematically murdered by the minority
tribal government
of Burundi, the Carnegie Endowment's study could not find
a single
mention of it by the US Government nor a condemnation.
In Paraguay
the Aché Indians were treated atrociously by the government
and fundamentalist missionaries; yet US economic and military
aid
continued to go there despite Carter's human rights policy.
Chomsky noted that Paraguayan fascism was ignored by US media
even though it was widely reported in Europe.
Since the military
coup of 1964 Brazil gained much support from international
lending
organizations and multinational corporations despite
their bad
treatment of Indians, the poor, and the Amazon environment.
Chomsky and Herman discussed the horrendous problems of East
Timor at length.
In twenty years starting in 1949 the United States
gave Thailand more than
two billion dollars in aid and arms to
meet Communist threats even though
in the police state they established
there was little opposition.
During the Vietnam
War 50,000 US forces
used Thailand as a base for bombing raids,
causing the prostitution industry to boom.
Thailand managed to
elect a democratic government in 1973,
but aid was reduced despite
their economic difficulties.
Yet after the US assisted a military
coup in 1976, the aid was increased;
that year the US sold them
$89.6 million in military equipment,
more than Thailand had purchased
in the previous quarter century.
In 1977 the Marcos regime in
the Philippines arrested more than 60,000 people
under martial
law, but visiting Vice President Mondale was placated
by an announcement
that a few political prisoners would be released.
Lending drove
the Philippines debt from $2.2 billion in 1972,
when martial law
was declared, to $6 billion in 1977;
apparently capitalists approved
of this subfascism.
In the Dominican Republic the constitutional government of
Juan Bosch was overthrown by the military in 1963.
Two years later
23,000 US forces invaded the island to prevent Bosch
from replacing
the fascist regime of Donald Reid Cabral.
President Johnson claimed
Communism was a threat,
but Bosch was a democratic reformer.
Ten
years later Bosch complained,
"This country is not pro-American;
it is United States property."6
Chomsky and Herman explained
how Nazis had escaped to Latin America,
and helped by US military
and intelligence agencies, military elites were ruling
in Argentina,
Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay.
In their second volume on human rights, Chomsky and Herman
examined the results
of the Indochina War and the reconstruction
of the failed US foreign policy.
The United States was only partially
defeated by Vietnam,
which had suffered so much more.
The US refused
to pay reparations or give aid
to help rebuild the country they
destroyed,
unlike the policy toward Germany and Japan after World
War II,
and they even blocked trade.
The US was the only country
out of 141 to oppose a United Nations resolution
urging priority
economic assistance to Vietnam.
In Laos people died from malnutrition,
disease, and unexploded bombs.
The United States had dropped more
than 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia;
so it is not too surprising
that the country was militarized
and degenerated into a horrible
civil war.
The devastation that was caused by the US military
intervention
was explained as proof that Communism is evil.
Kissinger
directed the CIA to start subverting Angola from South Africa
and Zaire.
After Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Chomsky wrote The
Fateful Triangle
about the United States, Israel, and the
Palestinians.
He began by noting the hypocrisy of complaining
about Israel's establishing
settlements in the occupied territories
when the US is essentially
paying for them with huge amounts of
aid and discounted military sales.
Chomsky complained about Israel's
policy of rejecting
the Palestinians' rights that is condoned
by the US.
Since the mid-1970s the international consensus has
been that
there should be a Palestinian state in the West Bank
and Gaza strip;
but Israel has continually rejected this solution,
and over the protest of everyone,
including the US, Israel annexed
Arab East Jerusalem.
In January 1976 the United States vetoed
a UN Security Council resolution
calling for a peace settlement
according to the international consensus
for a Palestinian state
with 1967 borders.
In November 1977 Egypt's Anwar Sadat made his
daring trip to Jerusalem,
hoping to convene a Geneva conference
to settle the conflict;
but the US opposed this, because it would
include European powers.
The Camp David peace treaty of 1979 did
little to solve the Palestinian conflict
and even allowed more
settlements; but Egypt was separated from Arab allies
and became
a major recipient of US aid,
gaining $2 billion per year for more
than twenty years.
In April 1982 the US alone vetoed a UN Security Council resolution
calling on Israel
to reinstate the ousted mayors of Nablus, Ramallah,
and El Bireh.
Israel has not recognized rights of one-sixth of
their population that is not Jewish.
In June 1982 the US was alone
in vetoing a UN Security Council resolution
that called for a
simultaneous withdrawal from Beirut by Israeli and Palestinian
forces.
In the previous four years Israel had received 48% of
all US military aid.
The Israeli lobby consists not only of Jews
but also Christian fundamentalists,
some liberals and labor leaders,
and conservatives who support a strong military policy.
Public
opinion is swayed as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
accuses
any critics of being "anti-Semitic" or "self-hating"
Jews.
Since Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan
Heights in the 1967 war,
the US has considered Israel an important
strategic asset
in the Middle East, where oil is so important.
When Israeli forces invaded West Beirut on September 15, 1982,
the United States did not object, though the atrocious massacres
of Palestinians
at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps aroused
angry condemnation.
Israeli soldiers would not allow Newsweek
reporter James Pringle
into the Sabra camp during the massacre.
An ABC news investigation learned that at least 45 Israeli officers
knew of the slaughter while it was occurring; but the Begin government
refused to allow an independent inquiry.
US envoy Philip Habib
had assured the Lebanese and Palestinians that they
would be safe
after the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) fighters left.
The Habib cease-fire of 1981 had also guaranteed Israeli security,
which was their rationale for the invasion.
Chomsky considered
it a reflection of American racism that
Israel's security was
the issue instead of the Palestinians' security.
He predicted
that terrorism in the occupied territories and Israel
was the
likely forecast, and he hoped that more
of the peace movement
would start facing the issue.
Israel's attack on Lebanon was designed to disperse the refugees
and destroy Palestinians' nationalist organization.
Israel dissolved
the elected councils of Nablus and Dura on the West Bank
and dismissed
the mayors of Jenin and Gaza, where city employees were arrested.
Lebanese police estimated that the Israeli invasion killed 19,085
and wounded more than 30,000; 84% of those killed were civilians.
Chomsky considered these underestimates.
President Reagan proposed
a peace plan calling for a freeze on settlements;
but Israeli
prime minister Menachem Begin angrily rejected this
even though
it excluded the PLO by denying the right of inhabitants
to choose
their own political representative.
Begin announced new settlements
in Judea and Samaria.
Another consequence of the Lebanon invasion
was that Israel took over
complete control of the scarce water
resources of the West Bank
even though this violated the Camp
David accords.
In 1985 Chomsky published Turning the Tide
on the current
US intervention in Central
America.
He noted the bias in the US media.
Edward Herman
had done a study of the New York Times reporting
on the
elections in El Salvador
and Nicaragua.
The coercion
by armed forces was discussed in 37.5% of the Nicaragua
articles but only in 3.6% of the El
Salvador reports even though
such human rights abuses were much more
common in El Salvador
than in Nicaragua.
(The
wars in Central America
are discussed in a previous chapter of this book.)
Chomsky's book Deterring Democracy (1992) reflected
on
the end of the Cold War, which had caused an economic recession.
He predicted,
The United States remains the only power with the will
and the capacity to exercise force on a global scale—
even more freely than before,
with the fading of the Soviet deterrent.
But the US no longer enjoys
the preponderance of economic power
that had enabled it to maintain an aggressive
and interventionist military posture since World War II.
Military power not backed by a comparable economic base
has its limits as a means if coercion and domination.
It may well inspire adventurism,
a tendency to lead with one’s strength,
possibly with catastrophic consequences.7
Chomsky observed that in the past the United States and its
clients were
often politically weak (lacking popular support),
but it made up for this with
military and economic strength, instead
of following international law.
He feared that with less economic
power the temptation to use force was increased,
and as in the
Gulf War, the US police force would have
to be paid for by other
countries, making Americans mercenaries.
Chomsky accused the United States of using the Cold
War to justify international
subversion, aggression, and state
terrorism while the huge military-industrial complex,
which President
Eisenhower warned against, became a government welfare program
for high technology in the "private sector."
Sacrifice
and discipline for this imperial cause meant, especially under
Reagan,
reducing the social programs that meet human needs.
In
1990 Defense Secretary Dick Cheney announced that a large Navy would
continue to be necessary to further American interests in
Latin America and Asia.
In response to the initiatives of Gorbachev,
the United States did agree to a treaty
on intermediate-range
missiles in Europe (INF Treaty) in 1987;
but at the United
Nations the US stood alone against 154 nations
that voted
against weapons in outer space, alone against 135 nations voting
against
developing new weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and
only with France
against 143 nations voting for a comprehensive
test ban.
The United States was the only country to boycott
the
1987 UN disarmament conference.
Chomsky sharply criticized President Bush's
1989 invasion of Panama
which violated
the UN Charter, the OAS Charter, and the Panama
Canal treaty.
Wondering how the United States would learn, he
quoted A. J. Muste,
who said, "The problem after a war is
with the victor.
He thinks he has just proved that war and violence
pay.
Who will now teach him a lesson?"8
Chomsky exposed the
hypocrisy in the pretexts Bush gave for the invasion.
The wife
of an officer had been beaten, but numerous cases much worse
could
be found in Latin America.
Panama's 1989 election was fraudulent,
but the election of 1984 had been also.
Noriega was corrupt, but
he had been for years.
Noriega was involved in drug smuggling,
but he had been doing that with the CIA.
As for bank money-laundering,
Bush himself had cancelled the federal program
aimed at stopping
that in the early 1980s when he was the Drug Czar.
The press complained
that they could not cover the Panamanian casualties
because of
the US military; but Chomsky suggested
they could have checked
the hospitals.
One real reason for the US turning against Noriega is that
he was supporting the
Contadora peace process the US opposed,
and another was because
he allowed trading with Nicaragua and
Cuba.
Of course the main reason was to maintain control of the
Panama Canal
that was to be turned over mostly to Panamanian authority
in 1990.
The invasion put back in power the white Europeans, who
had been displaced
when the reforming General Torrijos took control
in 1968.
Chomsky learned that the "US military sent hundreds
of psy-war specialists
into Panama to 'spread pro-American propaganda
messages throughout the country.'"9
He reported that the
forgotten 1983 invasion of Grenada had left the island
much worse
off as the health care system was dismantled by Herbert Blaize,
who had died just before the Panama invasion.
F-117A stealth fighters
were used for the first time in Panama,
dropping 2,000-pound bombs
with time-delay mechanisms.
Chomsky found that casualty figures
reported in the US media were ludicrously low;
human rights groups
had found that at least 2,000 Panamanians had been killed.
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman published Manufacturing
Consent
on the political economy of the mass media in 1988.
The expression "manufacturing consent" was used by Walter
Lippman
to describe propaganda, the manipulation of public opinion
for political purposes.
They observed that the biased choices
made by the media in deciding what to report
and how were based
on selecting people with internalized preconceptions
that are
adapted to ownership, big organizations, markets, and political
power.
Overt censorship is not used as too crude; rather reporters
and commentators
censor themselves to suit the requirements of
the media.
Those individuals who do not conform are dismissed
or marginalized
so that their views have little influence.
Chomsky
and Herman studied the pattern of US propaganda and found that
evidence of US violence and aggression is systematically suppressed
while the faults of enemies are greatly emphasized by media coverage.
Uncomfortable facts can be found by a diligent researcher
in the
back pages of newspapers or in minor or alternative media.
In the commercial market mass media entertain
as much as inform
in order to maximize profits.
Chomsky and Herman analyzed the
pressures that shape the values, beliefs,
and behavior patterns
that are inculcated in American society by the mass media.
They
described five main factors that filter the news.
First, is the
immense size of the dominant media corporations,
the increasing
concentration of ownership, their great wealth,
and the ultimate
importance of making large profits (bottom-line motivation).
Since Manufacturing Consent was written, media ownership has
been
concentrated even more by mergers and acquisitions under
the relaxing of
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations.
Many in the past would publish well-written books, expecting about
three or four percent profit; but lately the big publishers usually
will not publish a book unless they expect it will make 15% profit;
this often means that it is either by or about an already marketable
celebrity.
The second major factor is how advertising affects
what makes
it into the mass media.
Advertisers have become the licensers
because they will not sustain content
in television, radio, and
magazines that does not boost their sales.
This means that the
media are designed primarily
for those with money who buy things.
Very few corporations will sponsor any programs or material
that
is critical of corporate activities or the military-industrial
complex.
Third, reporters increasingly are gathering their information
from government
sources, business entities, or from "experts"
funded by these agents of power.
The mass media assumes that these
are "objective" sources of news,
and they rarely challenge
those powerful interests;
but other sources of news are harder
to find and are scrutinized carefully
through the biased lens
of the establishment, if they are considered at all.
The government
and the corporate sector have immense financial, human, and
technical
resources to generate huge amounts of information for the media,
thus subsidizing and facilitating the work of the communications
media.
A comparison between the resources of the Pentagon and
those of the
largest peace organizations shows how overwhelming
is this imbalance.
Most scientists and researchers in the universities
and in business
have been bought by the government or the corporations.
An analysis of the experts presented on Public Broadcasting's
MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour in 1985 showed that
70% of the nonjournalists
presented were either government officials,
former government
officials, or from conservative think-tanks.
The fourth factor looked at the criticism of the media, referred
to as "flak."
Advertisers are especially concerned about
this and endeavor
to make sure that audiences are not made uncomfortable.
Those who criticize powerful constituencies
are seldom heard in
the mass media.
Such "unpopular" voices, no matter how
brilliant nor well informed
they may be, are rarely allowed on
talk shows.
Yet right-wing commentators, who are so well represented
in the major media,
often rail on about the "liberal bias"
of the media.
How often does a peace activist even get a chance
to speak?
In Manufacturing Consent, the fifth filter used
in the media
was described as "anti-Communism," which
during the Cold War
was a way of describing the dominant concern;
but in the 1996 book, The Common Good, Chomsky explained
that the fear
used to control people was broadened out during
and after the Reagan years
to include "international terrorism,"
"drug traffickers," "immigrants,
black criminals,
welfare mothers,"10 and others.
A clear dichotomy contrasts how the enemies of the United States
are reported in comparison to its allies.
Victims of an enemy
get extraordinary coverage in the media;
but those suffering from
the policies of the United States
are given as little attention
as possible.
For example, the murder of the Polish priest, Jerzy
Popieluszko, received
extensive media coverage; but murders by
client states in Latin America
are virtually ignored unless the
victim happens to be a US citizen.
Chomsky and Herman detailed
how biased was the coverage of
the Indochina wars and the retrospectives
such that the idea that
these were major war crimes is "inexpressible."
That American bombing killed more than a half million Cambodians
is not even mentioned; but the atrocities that followed these
attacks are emphasized.
When the US was convicted by the World
Court for mining Nicaraguan harbors,
this was a minor story; but
when the Reagan administration
went against the will of Congress,
this became the Iran-Contra scandal.
In 1999 Chomsky published Profit Over People
on neoliberalism
and the global order.
He described the "Washington consensus"
that
has promoted a free-market ideology to apply to other countries
in order to increase the profits of the wealthy,
while the United
States, Britain and other economic powers
have used government
controls to protect their own economies.
In 1945 the US proposed
an "Economic Charter of the Americas"
to keep Latin
American countries from adopting economic nationalism
that would
raise the living standards of the masses.
Thus the US has managed
to exploit the cheap labor
and natural resources of Latin America
for its own profit.
In 1948 the CIA intervened in the Italian
elections
to protect the world capitalist system.
Since the end
of the Cold War, economic
experiments with private capital
in Russia have driven a quarter
of the population below subsistence.
Chomsky noted how the British
empire exploited India
using the "Permanent Settlement"
two centuries ago, resulting in India's
financing 40% of Britain's
trade deficit as its textile industry
was destroyed by British
protectionism.
England exported opium from India to China while
banning its importation.
Especially since the Reagan presidency, the United States has
been enriching
the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle
class so that now
it has the highest child poverty rate of any
industrial country.
Thanks to the heartless policies of Margaret
Thatcher,
one-third of British babies were being born in poverty.
Chomsky found that neoliberal doctrines hurt education and health,
promote more inequality, and reduce the incomes of workers
while
helping the very rich get richer.
In Latin America the wealthy
are exempt from social obligations such as taxes.
Chomsky analyzed
that the United States and Japan have prospered
because they used
the British means of market interference.
During the Cold War
the US used its Food for Peace program as a way
to subsidize US
agribusiness and shipping while undercutting foreign agriculture.
The huge military spending subsidized the private aircraft industry
and spread into computers, electronics, automation,
biotechnology,
communications, and many other private sectors.
The Reagan administration
provided more protection to US industry
for import relief than
at any time since the 1930s.
These continuing policies amount
to "socialism for the rich," according to Chomsky.
He pointed out that Adam Smith, the founding capitalist theorist,
warned that
the division of labor should not turn workers into
objects
and that regulation to help workers is always just.
Chomsky
noted that public opinion in the United States is shifting as
now
more than 80% think the government is run to benefit special
interests,
not the people, and they believe that the economic
system is inherently unfair;
95% agree that corporations should
sacrifice some profits
to make things better for workers and communities.
The manipulation of people's buying habits and opinions results
from a trillion-dollar-a-year marketing industry, one-sixth of
the entire economy.
Chomsky noted that even the Wall Street
Journal recognized that
President Clinton was on the side
of corporate America on issue after issue.
Chomsky explained the United States has used the World Trade
Organization (WTO)
to pressure seventy countries to open up their
markets to US corporations and investors.
Against much popular
opposition, Brazil decided to privatize its successful
Vale Company
that controls uranium, iron, and other minerals;
its income in
1996 was over $5 billion.
The 1997 privatization reduced the Vale
labor force by 4,618, but profit growth
in the next five years
was 36% for its lucky new owners.
The UN Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) has warned developing countries
to reverse
the policies imposed on them by the "Washington consensus"
that are having disastrous effects on people while increasing
corporate profits.
Chomsky summarized the American values of the
WTO as a tool for US intervention
in the internal affairs of other
nations, taking over
crucial sectors of foreign economies by US
corporations,
benefiting business and the wealthy while shifting
costs to the general population,
and as a powerful new weapon
against democracy.
Clinton's re-election campaign was greatly
aided by the telecommunications sector,
which was rewarded by
the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
Most egregious is the Helms-Burton Act, which makes the US
impose sanctions
on any nation that trades with Cuba.
This economic
strangulation is a clear violation of ethics and the WTO.
Only
Israel and Uzbekistan voted with the US against a UN resolution
condemning this,
and the Organization of American States (OAS)
rejected the Helms-Burton Act unanimously.
By the late 1990s the
United States had used its veto
at the United Nations more than
seventy times since 1967.
The Clinton administration said that
the WTO
could not force the US to change its laws.
Lacking medicine
and food, Cuba has managed to train skilled doctors
and since
1963 has sent 51,820 doctors, dentists, and nurses
to help poor
nations, especially in Africa.
In 1985 Cuba had more than twice
as many specialists helping
third-world countries than the US
had in the Peace Corps and AID.
The so-called Cuban Democracy
Act of 1992 caused the number of companies
granted US licenses
to sell medicines to Cuba to be reduced by 96%.
Chomsky wrote
that the greatest human rights violator, Colombia,
receives more
US military aid than any other Latin American country
while it
terrorizes people in the name of the "drug war."
While speaking in South Africa in 1997, Chomsky noted that
during his talk
a thousand children would die of preventable diseases.
UNICEF has estimated that these tragedies could be alleviated
by about ten percent of US military spending.
In discussing the
Zapatista uprising in response to
the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA),
Chomsky noted that they were struggling "for
work, land, housing, food, health care,
education, independence,
freedom, democracy, justice, and peace."11
He reminded readers
that a few days after NAFTA was passed,
the US Congress financed
100,000 more police with more high security prisons
and militaristic
"boot camps" for youthful offenders,
extended the death
penalty, and made sentences more harsh.
Chomsky warned that secrecy
was trying to bypass public awareness
and criticism by giving
the President "Fast Track" authority and on the
Multilateral
Agreement on Investment (MAI) treaty, which would allow
a foreign corporation or investor to sue the United States
for damages if
it restrained their investment.
Chomsky complained that the full
text of the MAI is not even available to the public.
During the
stock market boom of the 1990s Chomsky noted that
in 1997 half
the stocks were owned by the top one percent
and 90% by the wealthiest
ten percent.
Howard Zinn was born into a poor family of immigrant Jews
in
New York City on August 24, 1922.
He loved to read and learned
about social injustice in the novels of Charles Dickens.
After
being a bombardier in World War II, Howard Zinn worked as a laborer.
The G.I. Bill helped him earn his B.A. at New York University,
and Zinn got his M.A. and Ph.D. at Columbia University.
He observed
the anti-Communist hysteria, wrote a thesis on the Colorado coal
strike
of 1913-14 and published his doctoral dissertation on
Fiorello LaGuardia in Congress.
In 1956 he was appointed chairman
of the history department at Spelman College,
where he taught
African Americans and participated
in the civil rights movement
for several years.
He advised the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) and wrote
SNCC: The New Abolitionists
about their efforts.
He found that by the end of 1961 more than
50,000 people had demonstrated
for civil
rights, and at least 3,600 had been to jail.
Zinn estimated
that about 150 dedicated SNCC workers in Georgia, Alabama,
and
Mississippi did much to bring about a civil rights revolution.
In 1965 Zinn began speaking out against the Vietnam
War.
He described atrocities and gave powerful reasons for
ending the Vietnam War
in his 1967 book Vietnam: The Logic
of Withdrawal.
At that time the US was spending twenty billion
dollars annually on the Vietnam War,
and he calculated that this
was enough to give every Vietnamese family $5,000,
which was nearly
ten times their annual income.
Each month the US was spending
more on the war than it spent annually
on the federal poverty
program for the Great Society.
He discovered that in 1966 the
Pentagon paid an average of $34 for condolence
to relatives for
each Vietnamese killed accidentally and
$87 for each rubber tree
accidentally destroyed.
They were killing four civilians for every
enemy soldier killed.
Zinn noted that the United States replaced
the French as the aggressors in Vietnam,
and he observed that
the main thrust of the war was bombing and shelling civilians.
The number of Vietcong revolutionaries they were fighting in South
Vietnam
far outnumbered the North Vietnamese soldiers opposing
them.
To those concerned about the loss of prestige if the United
States pulled out of Vietnam,
Zinn answered that compared to being
bogged down in a war that they were
afraid to lose, a clean and
swift withdrawal would be right
and would improve the declining
prestige.
He concluded his book on Vietnam by summarizing his
arguments
in an imaginary speech by President Johnson announcing
that
the United States was no longer at war in Vietnam.
During the Tet offensive on January 30, 1968 Zinn traveled with
Daniel Berrigan
to Hanoi because the North Vietnamese wanted to
release the
first captured American pilots to someone in the peace
movement.
Zinn learned that the leaders in Hanoi were willing
to negotiate;
but when he returned to the United States, no one
in the government
would even debrief him on what he had learned
during his week in Hanoi.
In 1968 Zinn published Disobedience and Democracy to refute
what he considered
nine fallacies on law and order put forth by
US Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas
in his booklet Concerning
Dissent and Civil Disobedience.
Zinn argued that human laws are
fallible.
When the laws and the government fail the moral test
of protecting human needs,
then conscientious citizens have the
right to take actions
to reform the social or political injustice.
He pointed out that during the two greatest crises in American
history -
the revolution against the British empire and the Civil
War that freed the slaves -
people had to go beyond the limits of
British law and the Constitution.
Zinn acknowledged that protesting
by civil disobedience is not enough by itself
because it does
not construct a new society.
Also not all forms of civil disobedience
are moral or effective.
Yet he concluded,
The only way to escape the twin evils
of stagnation and chaotic violence at home,
and to avoid devastating wars abroad,
is for citizens to accept, utilize,
control the disorder of civil disobedience,
enriching it with countless possibilities and tactics not yet imagined,
to make life more human for us and others on this earth.12
Despite his political protests Zinn got tenure at Boston University,
probably
because he had published more and had excellent student
evaluations.
In 1972 he criticized BU President John Silber for
inviting US Marines
to recruit on campus and for arresting protestors.
Zinn was denied raises and teaching assistants even though he
had 400 students.
He was arrested five times for protesting during
the Vietnam War,
and he was often called as an expert witness
in the trials of demonstrators.
When he found that several jurors
regretted voting guilty,
he wrote about the right of "jury
nullification" - that jurors have the right
to vote their conscience
regardless of the specific instructions of the judge.
Zinn became friends with Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky
when
they were in the same affinity group during
the demonstrations
against the war in 1971.
When Beacon Press published a four-volume
edition of the Pentagon Papers,
a political history of
the Vietnam War, they asked Zinn and Chomsky
to edit an accompanying
collection of critical essays.
In 1973 Zinn testified for several
hours on the history of the Vietnam War
during the trial of Ellsberg
and Tony Russo, who were accused of revealing
military secrets
for exposing the Pentagon Papers.
Zinn argued that this
information did not harm
the defense of the nation and the people
although it might have embarrassed special interests,
politicians,
and corporations going after tin, rubber, and oil.
Apparently
the jury would not have convicted them
even if the case
had not
been dismissed because of Nixon's sending men to burglarize
the
files of Ellsberg's psychiatrist and others to beat him up at
an anti-war rally.
Zinn wrote the volume Postwar America for the History of
American Society series.
He could not help emphasizing his own
views and dedicated the book
to Dave Dellinger for his revolutionary
courage.
The reviewer James T. Patterson reported that Zinn showed
the nasty side
of American life and concluded "by calling
for a humane new socialism,
the demise of the nation-state, the
abolition of prisons,
and the end of authoritarianism in personal
and familial relationships."13
In 1974 Zinn edited Justice in Everyday Life that gave
accounts
by various people on efforts to improve society.
The
next year he satirized the report on the CIA by a commission under
Nelson Rockefeller by calling it "Attica Massacre Chief Clears
Assassination Plotters."14
Zinn wrote a play about the anarchist
Emma Goldman,
and it was directed by his son in Greenwich Village.
In 1976 Zinn's biweekly column in the Boston Globe was
canceled after he wrote
about whom he thought should not
be honored on Memorial Day.
No politician who voted funds for war,
no business contractor for the military,
no general who ordered young men into battle,
no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities,
should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day.15
Zinn learned how the writing of history was being revised by
people with social concerns.
This provided him with the research
that enabled him to write his popular
People's History of the
United States in the late 1970s.
This book is an excellent
supplement to traditional American histories,
because it brings
out the history of those often neglected before,
such as native
Americans, African-Americans, women
immigrants, labor movements,
socialists, anarchists, etc.
Zinn signed the Pledge of Resistance, and in 1986 he was arrested
with 550 people at the federal building in Boston.
After being
charged with failing to quit the premises, the charges were dropped.
He retired from teaching in 1988 in order to do more speaking
and writing.
In 1990 Howard Zinn published his Declarations of Independence
as he cross-examined American ideology.
He criticized the very
rich class that dominates the media and public policy
and the
so-called "experts" that serve them.
He described how
modern politicians use Machiavellian
deception which they call
"plausible denial."
Dissenters like Leo Szilard, Albert
Einstein, and Daniel Ellsberg
have tried to change
the vicious policies that result from the
abuse of such power.
In discussing violence and human nature he
noted that zoologist Konrad Lorenz
wrote in his book On Aggression
that the animal instincts are not as dangerous
as our "emotional
allegiance to cultural values."16
Zinn observed that men
do not rush into battle with a ferocious desire to kill.
Rather,
they joined the armed forces for the security of a career,
or
they were conscripted by law with the threat of imprisonment if
they refused.
His own experience in war told him that people do
not delight in destruction.
He noted that at the My Lai massacre
several soldiers refused to follow orders to kill,
and Warrant
Officer Hugh Thompson actually saved some Vietnamese lives
by
ordering his helicopter crew to fire on American GIs if they shot
any more civilians.
Zinn recounted how Mark Twain wrote satires of war hysteria
and opposed the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Helen Keller in
1916 told American men not to fight but strike
and become heroes
in construction instead of obedient slaves in a destructive army.
Zinn was moved by the anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun
by Dalton Trumbo,
who had been blacklisted in Hollywood.
The lies
that Americans were told to get them into the First World War
were analyzed by Walter Millis in The Road to War.
Sinking
the Lusitania was publicized as an attack on a harmless
passenger ship,
but later it was learned that it was loaded with
munitions to be used against Germans.
Zinn discovered that two weeks before the Atlantic Charter
was proclaimed,
acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles assured
the French
they would be allowed to keep their colonies.
Zinn
pointed out that the United States imposed a total embargo
on
selling scrap iron and oil to Japan in the summer of 1941.
He
discovered that John J. McCloy deleted a footnote that questioned
whether
the internment of the Japanese on the West Coast was really
necessary.
Zinn lamented that a million Jews were murdered in
Europe in 1942
while the US State Department was checking to see
if the story was true.
He believed that the war against Hitler
probably
brought on the massive extermination of the Jews.
He
questioned a "war against racism" in which the US armed
forces were still segregated.
Black soldiers were given dangerous
jobs like loading munitions, and many were killed
at Port Chicago
on July 17, 1944 when two transport ships blew up.
Survivors who
refused to load munitions in unsafe conditions were put in jail.
Zinn challenged the saturation bombing of cities such as
Cologne,
Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo.
He himself had
been ordered to drop napalm on the French resort
at Royan in April
1945, because it was occupied by Germans.
Five allied planes were
lost in the mission, and he went back
years later to discover
the effects on the town.
He wrote a paper to show that the atomic
bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary.
Zinn noted
that 350,000 Americans had evaded the draft during that "good
war,"
and 6,000 conscientious objectors went to prison.
Zinn taught a political science course on "Law and Justice
in America"
in which they explored when disobedience is appropriate.
He noted that after Shays' Rebellion, Thomas Jefferson hoped that
the government
would pardon them because he believed the spirit
of
resistance to government was worth keeping alive.
Zinn described
the extreme economic injustices that had gotten worse
during the
Reagan years, and he felt that A Theory of Justice by John
Rawls
had a philosophical argument for a more just distribution
of wealth
but not a practical plan that would persuade the corporations.
Zinn reported how free speech was hampered by "national security,"
and he agreed with Chomsky that the media are strongly controlled
by wealthy interests.
Dissenters often have to commit civil
disobedience to get any attention in the media at all.
Zinn noted
that Daniel Schorr was fired from CBS
for publicizing a suppressed
report on the CIA in 1976.
The CIA in fact had employees working
for many major news outlets such as
Newsweek, Time,
the New York Times, UPI, and CBS News.
In 1982 Ray Bonner
was removed from covering Central
America
for the New York Times after he wrote an article
critical of US policy in El
Salvador.
In 1988 it was learned that the FBI was asking librarians
to report suspicious behavior.
In his final chapter on ultimate
power Zinn called for justice without violence.
In 1998 Howard Zinn wrote that the US bombing of Iraq to keep
Saddam Hussein
from getting weapons of mass destruction was unlikely
to fulfill that purpose.
In December the US bombed Iraq using
250 cruise missiles that cost $1 million each.
He questioned American
priorities that killed people
abroad while the homeless froze
in the US.
Zinn did find some cause for hope that demonstrators
in Seattle challenged
globalization, protectionism, export trade,
intellectual property,
and other difficult issues that hurt the
poor and the environment.
Zinn wrote that the atrocities of Milosevic did not justify
US-led NATO
committing more atrocities during the Yugoslavia War
in 1999.
He was horrified that cluster bombs were being used,
because he recalled
seeing wounded children in Hanoi hospitals
in 1968 with tiny pellets in their bodies.
He believed that "our"
terrorism was just as bad as "their" terrorism.
Milosevic
should be prosecuted for war crimes, but so should
Clinton, Albright,
Cohen, and Gen. Wesley Clark.
He suggested that they should stop
bombing and start talking.
After the US bombing of Yugoslavia for ten weeks in the spring
of 1999,
Chomsky wrote The New Military Humanism: Lessons from
Kosovo.
Since the Clinton administration claimed that this
was a humanitarian intervention,
Chomsky examined other cases
that were somewhat comparable.
The number of refugees created
by the bombing was nearly as many as the three-quarters
of a million
Palestinians, who were displaced in 1948 by Israel's founding
war.
The Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the United
Nations
on December 10, 1948, and UN Resolution 194 passed
the next day both required
respect for the right of refugees;
but President Clinton
renounced adherence to this UDHR Article
13 (2).
The Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic took away the
autonomy of Kosovo
in 1989 and also took control of the Hungarian
minority in Vojvodina.
The Kosovar intellectual Ibrahim Rugova
led a nonviolent movement for the rights
of the Albanian Kosovars,
and in 1990 they declared Kosovo an independent state.
In May
1992 Rugova was elected president with 99.5% of the vote
as the
Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) won three-quarters of the seats
in the Parliament; but the Serb government considered this Kosovo
government illegal.
In 1995 the Albanian Kosovars were excluded
from the Dayton negotiations
as the US partitioned Bosnia-Herzegovina
between Croatia and Serbia.
As a result the Albanians turned to
guerrilla warfare,
forming the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA),
and
in April 1996 they began killing Serb policemen and civilians.
The Clinton administration called the KLA terrorists.
The fighting
escalated in February 1998 as the KLA took on
the Serbian Army and started killing Serbian mail carriers.
After Serbian forces
massacred nearly a hundred people at the headquarters
of the Jashari
clan, Albanians rose up to fight the Serbs as the KLA distributed
arms.
By summer the KLA controlled 40% of Kosovo.
In seven months
nearly 2,000 Albanians had been killed
as about 350,000 fled their
homes.
In October a cease-fire led to the deployment of 2,000
monitors
from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE).
Although US intelligence reported that the Kosovo rebels were
trying to draw NATO
into its independence struggle by provoking
Serbian atrocities,
NATO took the bait after 45 civilians were
massacred at Racak on January 15, 1999.
UN refugee workers and
Catholic Relief Services warned that the threat of bombing
would
endanger tens of thousands of refugees hiding in the woods,
as
NATO bombing would cause these workers to leave.
On March 19 the
OSCE monitors of the Kosovo Verification Mission were withdrawn
to prepare for the bombing, and the Serbs began attacking KLA
strongholds.
The Serb National Assembly rejected NATO's Rambouillet
ultimatum on March 23
but objected to the withdrawal of the monitors
as part of
the "blackmail" threats made against their
country.
The next day the Serbs greatly escalated their attacks,
and NATO began bombing that night.
The US led the NATO forces
as the infrastructure of Yugoslavia was targeted.
President Bill
Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair explained that a
"new
internationalism" was aimed at stopping brutal repression
of ethnic groups,
but they acted without United Nations authorization.
The war actually increased the ethnic conflict and created
about 350,000 more refugees from Kosovo in the next two weeks.
NATO commander Wesley Clark stated that neither Clinton nor Blair
notified him there would be a flood of refugees.
In the first
three weeks casualties of Serb civilians were higher than the
previous
three months, which were supposed to have been a humanitarian
catastrophe.
By May the KLA was functioning as the ground forces
for NATO,
though NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea said
NATO had no
direct contact with the KLA.
By the middle of May more than 300
villages had been burned.
American B-52s dropped cluster bombs,
which Chomsky noted
had been banned except the US had refused
to sign the conventions.
The unexploded bombs would continue to
kill for years.
The infrastructure of Vojvodina was attacked because
it was an agriculture center,
turning the Hungarian democrats
there against NATO.
In Belgrade and other parts of Yugoslavia
the bombing targeted oil refineries,
storage areas, ammunition
depots, bridges, television and radio transmitters,
metal processing
plants, and even the president's villa.
In late May more than 5,000 KLA troops launched an offensive.
On June 3 Serbia agreed to a treaty; after they withdrew their
forces
from Kosovo a week later, the bombing stopped.
The UN High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported 671,500 refugees
left
Yugoslavia; but their relief services had been cut back since
1998
because the US was so far behind in paying its UN dues.
Yugoslavia
had denounced the NATO bombing as illegal aggression
against a
sovereign state; Russia had opposed it;
and China was deeply offended
because their embassy in Belgrade
was bombed, killing three and
wounding many.
China was concerned that the United States was
starting
a new Cold War against socialist countries.
Russia, China,
and India agreed with Serbia
that the bombing violated the UN
Charter.
After the treaty the peace-keeping mission was under
the United Nations
as KFOR with mostly NATO forces but also Russians.
Surprisingly, the Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn
said,
"The aggressors have kicked aside the UN, opening a
new era where might is right."17
He said that if NATO really
wanted to defend the Kosovars,
they would have defended the persecuted
Kurds too.
Chomsky noted that there had been many massacres worse
than the one at Racak in East Timor, where in 1999 a few thousand
were killed as Indonesians put thousands in concentration camps.
In Colombia recently there had been about 2,000 killed annually
with 300,000 new refugees, as many as in Kosovo;
but in Colombia
the atrocities were ongoing.
Turkey, a NATO member, had been repressing
the Kurds for many years.
In the mid-1990s more than a million
Kurds had to flee
the Turkish army as 3,200 were killed by death
squads.
Human Rights Watch in 1995 called this a scorched-earth
campaign that violated international law.
By 1999 Turkey had 300,000
forces in the southeastern region fighting the ethnic war.
After
Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds in northern Iraq in March 1988,
the United States increased its military aid to Iraq.
Thousands
of people, many of them children, were killed
by unexploded ordinance
in Laos; yet the US did nothing to help remove those bombs.
In
England a suit was brought against Tony Blair and others
for using
cluster bombs in Kosovo; but American officials could not be charged,
because the US had not signed the Ottawa Convention.
The United States has neglected much more severe crises in
Africa.
In October 1993 thirty-four US soldiers were killed in
Somalia;
according to Chomsky between 7,000 and 10,000 Somalis
were killed
before US forces withdrew in March 1994.
After that
embarrassment, Clinton issued Presidential Directive 25, announcing
that
future peace-keeping efforts would be limited by the following
conditions:
the national interest must be at stake; allies must
be engaged;
there must be a clear mandate and exit strategy;
the
force must be under US command, and there must be a peace to keep.
Because of the sanctions against Iraq half a million Iraqi
children had died,
mostly from lack of water purification by 1996
when Madeleine Albright,
soon to become US Secretary of State,
said on the
"60 Minutes" television program that the price was worth
it.
UN humanitarian coordinator Dennis Halliday called
this policy
genocidal and resigned in protest.
The US would not let Iran help
Muslims in Bosnia,
because Iran had been convicted of a crime
by the World Court.
The only other nation to have been convicted
by the World Court is the United States,
which alone vetoed a
UN Security Council resolution
calling upon all states to obey
international law.
Chomsky cited these recent examples but also
noted that US history has many more
instances going back to the
extermination of ten million native Americans
and the exploitation
of African slavery as Europeans conquered North America.
He concluded
that the new "humanitarian" intervention was just the
old intervention.
Chomsky also expressed concern that the NATO
bombing
undermined the already precarious international law.
Chomsky further commented on the implications of the Kosovo
war
in his 2000 book A New Generation Draws the Line.
Representatives
of 133 nations with 80% of the world population met in April 2000
in Havana at the South Summit of G-77, and they rejected the
"humanitarian
intervention" of NATO along with
other forms of coercion
as part of "globalization."
Nelson Mandela accused Britain
and the United States
of ignoring other nations while playing
the world's policemen;
he considered their intervention more serious
than what was happening in Africa.
Political scientist John Mearsheimer
observed that the Gulf War and Kosovo War
had made India more
determined than ever
to keep nuclear weapons to deter the United
States.
When Israel retreated from Lebanon in June 2000,
the United
Nations General Assembly voted 110-2 to provide nearly $150 million
for UNIFIL monitors; Israel and the US alone opposed.
Israel was
asked to pay $1.28 million to compensate for its attack on a
UN
compound that killed more than a hundred civilians during its
1996 invasion of Lebanon.
Chomsky discussed recent events in East Timor, where the
people
voted overwhelmingly for independence on August 30, 1999.
The
Indonesian military (TNI) reacted to this with numerous atrocities
that drove
about 800,000 people from their homes, a quarter of
a million to West Timor.
Amnesty International reported that at
the end of the year more than
a hundred thousand were still virtually
imprisoned
there in makeshift camps ruled by militia groups.
A
month later the UN International Commission of Inquiry on East
Timor called for
a human rights tribunal under the United Nations
for accountability.
The US had been supporting the Indonesian
military for a long time.
A massacre at Dili in 1991 could not
be denied, because Pacifica Radio reporters
Amy Goodman and Alan
Nairn witnessed it as they were severely beaten.
Chomsky calculated
that since 1975 the US had sold more than one billion dollars
worth of weapons to Indonesia, and in the year 1998
the sales
had increased five times over the previous year.
Britain's Hawk
jets were used to terrorize civilians.
On September 11, 2001 Americans were shocked by the terrorist
attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Despite the
many millions of people US bombing had killed in the previous
six decades,
most Americans had never felt the consequences of
mass slaughter
as something that could affect them.
On September
19, President George W. Bush gave a speech in which
he declared
war on terrorists, those who harbor terrorists,
and even on those
who refuse to cooperate with his war on terrorists.
Noam Chomsky gave several interviews in September and early
October in order
to give people some context to understand the
meaning of this traumatic event.
He particularly emphasized those
aspects of the story
that the mass media tended to leave out.
Although the analogy of Pearl Harbor had been used, that was actually
an attack on two military targets in a US colony.
For an attack
on the United States itself one has to go back to the War of 1812,
though New York's World Trade Center had already
been the target
of a terrorist bombing in 1993.
Chomsky pointed out that much
of the world
considers the US the leading terrorist state,
and
he noted that the US was convicted by the World Court in 1986
for the "unlawful use of force"18 against Nicaragua.
This is only one of many examples of international terrorism by
the United States.
When the Irish Republican Army (IRA) exploded
bombs in London,
the English did not bomb West Belfast, nor after
the Oklahoma City bombing
was there a call to bomb militia groups.
Chomsky lamented that there was little discussion of
solving this
crisis by adhering to the rule of law.
Instead, there was a drumbeat
to attack the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Yet killing innocent victims
there would likely help the
network of Osama bin Laden gain new
recruits.
Chomsky asked the fundamental question why this terrible deed
was committed.
Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed that in 1979 the US
supported Islamic terrorists
in order to draw the Russians into
an "Afghan trap."
After the Russians invaded Afghanistan,
the US by way of Pakistan supported
a mercenary army of about
100,000 Islamic radicals called Mujahidin.
The wealthy Osama bin
Laden joined these terrorist camps in the 1980s
and was then an
ally of the United States.
Chomsky suggested that Egypt's Anwar
Sadat was assassinated
by allied Islamist
radicals in 1981, and
a suicide bomber drove the US Marines out of Beirut in 1983.
Two
years later the Reagan administration instigated a terrorist bombing
that killed eighty and wounded 250 in Beirut.
Israel's 1993 and
1996 invasions of Lebanon killed about 20,000 civilians.
Chomsky
estimated that in the 1990s Turkey's counterinsurgency campaign
against the Kurds killed tens of thousands, drove over
two million from their homes, and destroyed 3,500 villages.
In retaliation
for the bombing of two US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
in August
1998, the US retaliated by destroying the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical
plant
in Sudan that provided half the medicines for that poor
country;
it is hard to measure how much misery resulted from that
atrocity.
Chomsky brought up the fact that millions in Afghanistan were
starving
and that a war against their country would be a humanitarian
disaster;
but few even wanted to discuss this.
In forming an alliance
against terrorists the United States was willing to let
Russia,
China, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Israel, Egypt,
Turkey, and
Algeria terrorize those rebelling against them.
The Taliban had
tried to eradicate the huge Afghan heroin production;
but the
US quickly made alliances with the Northern Alliance and Tajikistan,
who were very involved in this lucrative drug-trafficking.
Chomsky warned the US not to fall into Bin Laden's "diabolical
trap"
by massacring innocent civilians.
We must understand
the motivations behind the terrorist atrocities
and not escalate
the cycle of violence.
The Taliban offered to turn over Bin Laden
if the US
would give them evidence of his complicity in the crime.
Arundhati Roy in India suggested that the US could extradite Union
Carbide
chairman Warren Anderson to be prosecuted for the
Bhopal
gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984.
The Haitian government
has been asking the US to extradite Emmanuel Constant
for the
slaughter of 5,000 people in Haiti.
Chomsky reminded people that
the new US ambassador to the United Nations,
John Negroponte,
had overseen the terrorist war against Nicaragua
when he was ambassador
to Honduras in the 1980s.
Retired historian Howard Zinn reflected on Bush's policies
in his book Terrorism and War in early 2002.
He cited a
1997 Defense Science Board report that found increased terrorism
directed against the United States was correlated with US intervention
in other countries,
and he lamented that Bush's desire to increase
US domination
was likely to make the situation worse.
He observed
that the bombing of Afghanistan had increased the harm;
professor
Marc Herold calculated that already 3,700 people had been killed
by the bombing as more than 350,000 Afghans were driven from their
homes.
The Guardian reported that a hundred of these
were
dying of exposure and starvation each day.
Zinn doubted that terrorism
would be ended by perpetrating more terrorism.
He explained that
Osama bin Laden turned the al-Qaida network against the US
after
its foreign policy changed in 1990.
Bin Laden particularly resented
US military bases in his native land of Saudi Arabia
and US support
for Israel's crimes against the Palestinians.
Zinn traced the US interest in the oil back to Franklin Roosevelt's
agreement
with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia during World War
II.
Zinn recommended that the United States remove its troops
from Saudi Arabia,
stop the sanctions that cause such suffering
in Iraq,
and persuade Israel to improve its treatment of the Palestinians.
By reducing its military budget, the US could help solve many
health problems.
Even though he had enthusiastically volunteered
for World War II,
Zinn after much study came to the conclusion
that no war is just,
that better alternatives can always be found
to the killing of large numbers of people.
He observed that the
US bombing of Afghanistan did not destroy
the al-Qaida leadership
nor its network of terrorists.
He predicted that if the US extended
its war on terrorism from Afghanistan to Iraq
that relations with
the Muslim world would become much worse.
Zinn noted that many
of the relatives of the 9-11 victims
did not want the US retaliating
in revenge.
He complained that the Bush administration was giving
tax breaks of $70 billion
to corporations like IBM, GM, and Ford.
Economist Seymour Melman reminded people
that spending on war
causes economic injustice.
Zinn complained that the USA Patriot Act authorized arbitrary
arrests,
indefinite detention, and even military tribunals.
Constitutional
lawyer Nancy Chang warned that it criminalized legitimate political
dissent.
The patriotic hysteria in the media dismissed any criticism
of war as "anti-American."
The Afghanistan War was already
given $17.5 billion
and Bush's National Missile Defense (NMD)
could cost $200 billion.
During the panic even liberals were afraid
to criticize President Bush
after he made outrageously bellicose
speeches;
the attitude in the country was like a lynch mob.
Bush
claimed that the US is a peaceful nation, but historian Zinn has
shown that
since World War II the US has been the most warlike
nation.
He compared President Bush's order to keep the records
of the Reagan administration
secret from the American people analogous
to Stalin's effort to cover up his sordid past.
Zinn cried out against a foreign policy that uses massive bombing
to try to solve problems.
Journalists complained that the war
in Afghanistan restricted them more than ever before,
as they
were prevented from showing wounded US soldiers or Afghan civilians.
Zinn complained that capitalist corporations promote war
in order
to make profits on the weapons they make.
He reviewed the history
of anti-war activity in the United States and noted that
since
the Vietnam War was stopped,
politicians have tried to break out of the
"Vietnam syndrome"
so that there will be no restraint on their war-making.
Yet Zinn
remained an optimist, because he trusted in the people and
their
ability to change the policies of their government.
He believed
that those who oppose war will be vindicated eventually.
In 2003 Chomsky published Hegemony or Survival:
America's
Quest for Global Dominance.
He noted that only the United
States and Israel abstained from resolutions
by the United Nations
Committee on Disarmament and International Security
for measures
to prevent the militarization of space and to
confirm the 1925
Geneva Protocol against chemical and biological warfare.
The Bush
administration brought the comprehensive UN weapons inspections
in Iraq
to a sudden end by launching an invasion without approval
of the UN Security Council in March 2003.
Many intelligence specialists
warned that this would increase international terrorism
and the
spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
So many millions
protested this imminent invasion that the press began calling
world public opinion the second superpower.
The historian Arthur
Schlesinger called the invasion of Iraq "anticipatory self-defense"
but found it similar to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
International
law expert Richard Falk concluded that the invasion of Iraq was
a
Crime against Peace; Germany's Nazi leaders had been convicted
of this at Nuremberg.
Chomsky was concerned that the American
quest for hegemony
was making human survival precarious.
Chomsky reported that between November 2000 and April 2003 Israel's
security forces
in 175 attacks killed 235 people; of these they
suspected 156 had committed crimes.
In his war on terrorists George
W. Bush began using these liquidation tactics.
In late October
2002 the CIA used a Predator drone and its Hellfire missile
to
kill six suspected al-Qaida operatives while they were driving
a car in Yemen;
one of those murdered was a US citizen.
After
9-11 the Bush administration began declaring people, even US citizens,
enemy combatants or suspected terrorists so that they could be
imprisoned
without a charge or access to a lawyer.
The portion
of Cuba the US still occupied at Guantanamo Bay was used
in order
to attempt to escape the jurisdiction of US courts.
Chomsky warned
that the primacy of law over force that had been an important
part
of American foreign policy since World War II was being reversed
by Bush's new strategy.
The US had rejected UN Resolution 687 that called for an end to
sanctions against Iraq
after the Security Council determined they
had complied by eliminating weapons
of mass destruction (WMDs)
and their delivery systems.
President George H. W. Bush had refused
to lift the sanctions as long as
Saddam Hussein was in power,
and the US would not agree to eliminating WMDs
from the Middle
East because of Israel.
Chomsky noted that President Clinton also
followed this policy.
Iraq complained that UN inspectors (UNSCOM)
were spying for Washington.
UNSCOM was withdrawn in December 1998
so that Clinton and
British prime minister Tony Blair could bomb
Iraq in defiance of the UN.
To me it is ironic that at this time
Clinton was being impeached for an irrelevant issue
while the
US Congress was overwhelmingly supporting this bombing,
which
should be an impeachable offense.
Chomsky noted that George W. Bush was determined to invade Iraq
regardless
of whether Saddam Hussein had disarmed his country
or not, and at the Azores summit
in March 2003 Bush said that
he would invade even if Saddam Hussein left Iraq.
The US attack
on an already disarmed Iraq made North Korea and others
realize
that perhaps only possession of WMDs could deter American attacks.
The sympathy for the United States because of the 9-11 attack
had been radically reversed.
A Time magazine poll found
that more than 80% of Europeans believed
that the US had become
the greatest threat to world peace.
Turkey refused to allow its
territory to be used for the invasion of Iraq
because 95% of its
people opposed the US policy.
Chomsky reviewed the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when forty years
later it was
announced that only the Soviet submarine officer
Vasili Arkhipov had prevente
the launching of nuclear-armed torpedoes
that could have started a war,
which President Eisenhower had
warned could destroy the northern hemisphere.
Yet even after the
agreement that ended the crisis, President Kennedy approved
covert
sabotage against Cuban targets, and according to the Cuban government
a CIA team of six men killed 400 Cuban factory workers on November
8, 1962.
It is ironic that a plot to kill Castro was initiated
on the day Kennedy was assassinated.
Bush's anti-terrorism policies
have been challenged by his reluctance to extradite
Luis Posada
Carriles, who was responsible for the 1997 bombings in Cuba
and
is the prime suspect for the bombing of a
Cubana Airlines flight
in October 1976 that killed 73 people.
Posada had also supported
the Contras in the 1980s,
and he was convicted in Panama of conspiring
to assassinate Fidel Castro in 2000.
Yet in 1998 the FBI arrested
five Cubans who had infiltrated anti-Castro
terrorist groups in
the United States, and they were sentenced to long prison terms.
Once again Chomsky reviewed the imperial strategy of the United
States
and its disregard for international law.
The World Court
had ordered the US to pay indemnities for its mining
Nicaraguan
harbors in the 1980s, but this was contemptuously ignored.
Reparations
were estimated at $17 billion, the amount Iraq was obligated
to
pay Kuwait for its 1990 invasion that killed about the same number
of people as Bush I's invasion of Panama a few months earlier.
Chomsky noted that Latin Americans know that the United States
is
major sponsor of terrorism, and he asked why the Cubans and
Nicaraguans
would not feel justified in attacking the United States
by Bush's logic after 9-11.
Over the years the United States has supported such dictators
as the Shah of Iran,
George Papadopoulos in Greece, Saddam Hussein
in his war against Iran,
Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines,
Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti,
Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, Suharto
in Indonesia, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire,
South Korean leaders
prior to 1987, and Manuel Noriega in Panama.
George W. Bush has
closed his eyes to the human rights violations of many
dominant
leaders who have agreed to be allies in his war on terrorists,
including Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan, Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan,
and Teodoro Obiang in Equatorial Guinea.
The US has extended its
network of military bases to Bulgaria and Romania,
and the invasion
and occupation of Afghanistan has enabled the US
to build new
bases there and in Central Asia.
The US has more than seven hundred
military bases in at least forty countries,
plus others that are
kept secret.
The United States has insisted on maintaining its
base on Okinawa
ever since the San Francisco Peace Treaty (SFPT)
in 1951
despite protests from the Okinawans.
Neither China, Korea,
nor the Philippines ever received any reparations
from imperial
Japan's conquests,
but the US made Japan pay for the costs of
its post-war occupation.
Chomsky cited US intelligence and other sources for the estimate
that Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons and
that it is
developing chemical and biological weapons.
The air and armored
forces of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are considered
more
advanced than any NATO nation's except the US.
In the Middle East
the US-Israel-Turkey alliance has been called an "axis of
evil."
Twelve percent of Israel's offensive aircraft are
based in Turkey.
Early in 2002 the Arab League accepted a Saudi
Plan that offered Israel full recognition
and integration into
the region if they would withdraw to the 1967 borders.
Chomsky
noted that American public opinion supports such a proposal and
also
equalizing the aid the US gives to Israel with comparable
aid
to the Palestinians under a negotiated settlement.
The US
has continued its support of Israel even while they have been
illegally building new settlements in the West Bank in the 1990s
and recently.
Part of Bush II's "road map" requires
Israel to cut public sector jobs and wages
while lowering taxes;
this proposal caused 700,000 workers to go on strike.
George W.
Bush has called the war criminal Ariel Sharon "a man of peace,"
and the wall Israel is building in the West Bank will leave nearly
100,000 Palestinians and much rich agricultural land on the Israeli
side.
Another quarter million Palestinians will be isolated.
Chomsky commented that useful truisms are no longer followed.
The first is that actions should be evaluated as to their likely
consequences.
The second is that the standards we apply to others
should also apply to ourselves.
He recalled that the first war
on terrorism was
declared in 1981 by the Reagan administration.
Unwanted facts were ignored, and terrorist attacks
carried out
by the US and its allies were even praised.
After the attacks
of September 11, according to a Gallup poll most people
preferred that the US government extradite the terrorists to stand trial
rather than attack militarily the country where they were based.
In Europe support for military action ranged from 8% in Greece
to 29% in France.
In Latin America the range was from only 2%
in Mexico to a high of 16% in Panama.
Support was much lower if
civilian targets were to be included.
This is assuming that those
who were responsible for the attack were known;
but they were
not known as the US government admitted eight months later.
Even
the thousand Afghan leaders who opposed the Taliban
asked the
US to stop the air raids in October 2002.
The US bombing was also
opposed by the Afghan
women's organization RAWA and the relief
agencies.
The Taliban had offered to hand over suspected criminals,
but the US refused to provide any evidence of who the criminals
were.
Yet when Haiti renewed its request that the US extradite
Emmanuel Constant,
whose paramilitary forces had murdered thousands
in the early 1990s
with support from Bush I and Clinton, the US
Government did not even respond
because of concerns that Constant
might reveal
contacts between his state terrorists and Washington.
Many have pointed out that destroying al-Qaida will have little
effect
if the political
repression and economic injustices that
provoke terrorists continue to persist.
The US approach of firing
missiles and dropping bombs
tends to spread violence like a virus.
A United Nations report found that during the period of threats
to invade Iraq
recruitment for al-Qaida increased in more than
thirty countries,
and since the US occupation Iraq has become
a magnet
for terrorists who want to attack Americans.
Ami Ayalon,
who ran Israel's General Security Service (Shabak) in the late
1990s
learned that those who fight terror without facing its
underlying grievances
desire an unending war, which Bush II apparently
has accepted.
Chomsky observed that the reasons why the terrorists
seem to hate Americans
are easily found in the policies of the
United States.
Anger is increasing in Pakistan because Musharraf's
military regime
has delayed democracy as it cooperates with the
US war on terrorists.
The US support for the repressive regimes
in Saudi Arabia
and Egypt also fuels Arab anti-Americanism.
Chomsky warned that an even greater threat to human survival
than
the war on terrorism is found in the weapons of mass destruction
and the US attempt to achieve world domination
by gaining a monopoly
on the militarization of space.
The developing program of missile
defense is provoking a new arms race.
China is greatly expanding
its arsenal of nuclear-armed missiles
and will probably add multiple
warheads (MIRV).
This causes India to react, and that provokes
Pakistan.
American intelligence predicts that Russia and China
are likely to sell
countermeasures to North Korea, Iran, Syria,
and other countries.
China has been urgently pleading since 1998
to keep space
for only peaceful uses, and since then the US militarization
of space programs
has blocked the UN Conference on Disarmament
from making progress.
Chomsky noted that even Sam Nunn dismissed
the 2002 Bush-Putin SORT treaty as meaningless.
Missile defense
is getting more funds than the US State Department and
four times
as much as what is spent on safeguarding
dangerous weapons in
the former Soviet Union.
In May 2003 the US Congress approved
Bush's program
for a new generation of nuclear weapons.
Analysts
have found that "missile defense" is not really for
defense but combines
with offensive forces to achieve the goal
of military supremacy and global domination.
To monopolize the
militarization of space, the US would have
to be able to protect
satellites that are easy targets.
This means that they would have
to achieve "full spectrum dominance."
According to the
Strategic Master Plan of the Air Force Space Command,
the military
ownership of space would
provide war-fighting commanders the ability to rapidly
deny, delay, deceive, disrupt, destroy,
exploit and neutralize targets
in hours/minutes rather than weeks/days
even when US and allied forces have a limited forward presence.19
Hypersonic drones (airplanes directed by remote control)
are
already being used to monitor and destroy targets.
In the Clinton
era the Space Command put out publicity indicating their goal
of
"dominating the space dimension of military operations
to protect US interests and investments."20
The economic
globalization process that is widening the gap between
the rich
and the poor is expected to require this full-spectrum dominance
to prevent rogue elements from gaining WMDs
and to fight terrorism
that resists the US hegemony.
Noam Chomsky raised the existential question whether hegemony
will continue
to be considered more important than survival, as
it has for the past half century.
The United States recently refused
to reaffirm or strengthen the
1967 Outer Space Treaty that reserved
space for peaceful purposes,
and it is the only nation out of
66 member states
that is opposing formal negotiations on outer
space.
Since 2001 the United States has declined to fund and refused
to cooperate
with international verification of the ban on chemical
weapons.
The Bush II administration has also withdrawn from negotiations
for verification
of the 1972 Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention,
claiming the pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies must protect
their trade secrets.
The US apparently has three clandestine defense
projects related to bioweapons,
and it is suspected that Russia
and the US are working on
genetically engineering vaccine-resistant
anthrax.
Thus a bioweapons arms race is also likely, and the 2002
Hart-Rudman report
warned that the chances are increasing that
terrorists could use chemical or bioweapons.
The Bush administration has ignored and announced that it no longer
supports
the essential Article 6 of the important Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT)
that calls for complete nuclear disarmament.
Bush
has revoked the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty
and opposed
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Chomsky noted that Bush undermined
the first UN conference to try to control
the black market in
small arms and that he designated John Bolton to back
US opposition
to international advocacy by non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Chomsky garnered to show
how precarious
human survival is, he concluded his book with the
hope that recent developments
in human rights culture and solidarity
movements in Central America and elsewhere
could join with the
global justice movements that are becoming a superpower.
These
he believed could evolve into a global movement that could yet
save our civilization.
1. Quoted in Noam Chomsky by Robert F. Barsky, p. 33.
2. Chomsky, Noam, American Power and the New Mandarins.
3. Ibid., p. 165.
4. Ibid., p. 374-375.
5. Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection
and
Third World Fascism, p. 3.
6. Alan Riding, "Balaguer and His Firm Ally, the U.S."
New York Times (6 June 1975)
quoted in The Washington
Connection and Third World Fascism, p. 243.
7. Chomsky, Noam, Deterring Democracy, p. 2-3.
8. Ibid., p. 148.
9. Ibid., p. 161.
10. Chomsky, Noam, The Common Good, p. 42.
11. Chomsky, Noam, "The Zapatists Uprising" in Profit
Over People, p. 122.
12. Disobedience and Democracy by Howard Zinn, p. 123.
13. Quoted in Howard Zinn: A Radical American Vision by
Davis D. Joyce, p. 144.
14. "The CIA, Rockefeller, and the Boys in the Club"
in The Zinn Reader, p. 326.
15. "Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?" in The Zinn
Reader, p. 329.
16. Quoted in Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn,
p. 39.
17. Chomsky, Noam, The New Military Humanism, p. 9.
18. Chomsky, Noam, 9-11, p. 23.
19. Quoted in Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky, p.
228.
20. Ibid., p. 229.
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