Noam Chomsky's talk in Caracas, Venezuela, August 29

Analyzing the May 2009 Obama-Netanyahu-Abbas meetings

A routine use of torture by the U.S., from its founding until today

The new Administration continues efforts to undermine a peaceful settlement

What we might expect from the new Administration

David Barsamian interviews Noam Chomsky.

Having brought up Iran [in Part I], we might as well turn briefly to the third member of the famous Axis of Evil, North Korea. The official story right now is that after having been forced to accept an agreement on dismantling its nuclear weapons facilities, North Korea is again trying to evade its commitments in its usual devious way—“good news” for superhawks like John Bolton, who have held all along that the North Koreans understand only the mailed fist and will exploit negotiations only to trick us.

Iraq remains a significant concern for the population, but that is a matter of little moment in a modern democracy.

The actions of the U.S. make sense only on one assumption, namely, that “we own the world.” If we own the world, then the only question that can arise is, is someone else is interfering in a country we have invaded and occupied.

SINCE ITS LIBERATION from Spanish rule, Latin America has faced many problems. One of the most grave was foreseen by the Liberator, Simon Bolivar, in 1822: “There is at the head of this great continent a very powerful country, very rich, very warlike, and capable of anything.” Citing this comment, Latin America scholar Piero Gleijeses observes that, “In England, Bolivar saw a protector; in the United States, a menace.” Naturally so, given the geopolitical realities.

These are exciting days in Washington, as the government directs its energies to the demanding task of “containing Iran” in what Washington Post correspondent Robin Wright, joining others, calls “Cold War II.”  During Cold War I, the task was to contain two awesome forces. The lesser and more moderate force was “an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost.” Hence “if the United States is to survive,” it will have to adopt a “repugnant philosophy” and reject “acceptable norms of human conduct” and the “long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’” that had been exhibited with such searing clarity in the conquest of the national territory, the Philippines, Haiti, and other beneficiaries of “the idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity,” as the newspaper of record describes our noble mission. The judgments about the nature of the super-Hitler and the necessary response are those of General Jimmy Doolittle, in a critical assessment of the CIA commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1954. They are quite consistent with those of Truman administration liberals, the “wise men” who were “present at the creation,” notoriously in NSC 68 but in fact quite consistently.  In the face of the Kremlin’s unbridled aggression in every corner of the world, it is perhaps understandable that the U.S. resisted in defense of human values with a savage display of torture, terror, subversion, and violence while doing “everything in its power to alter or abolish any regime not openly allied with America,” as Tim Weiner summarizes the doctrine of the Eisenhower administration in his recent history of the CIA. And just as the Truman liberals easily matched their successors in fevered rhetoric about the implacable enemy and its campaign to rule the world, so did John F. Kennedy, who bitterly condemned the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy,” and dismissed the proposal of its leader (Khrushchev) for sharp mutual cuts in offensive weaponry, then reacted to his unilateral implementation of these proposals with a huge military build-up. The Kennedy brothers also quickly surpassed Eisenhower in violence and terror, as they “unleashed covert action with an unprecedented intensity” (Wiener), doubling Eisenhower’s annual record of major CIA covert operations, with horrendous consequences worldwide, even a close brush with terminal nuclear war.  But at least it was possible to deal with Russia, unlike the fiercer enemy, China. The more thoughtful scholars recognized that Russia was poised uneasily between civilization and barbarism. As Henry Kissinger later explained in his academic essays, only the West has undergone the Newtonian revolution and is therefore “deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer,” while the rest still believe “that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer,” the “basic division” that is “the deepest problem of the contemporary international order.” But Russia, unlike third word peasants who think that rain and sun are inside their heads, was perhaps coming to the realization that the world is not just a dream, Kissinger felt.  Not so the still more savage and bloodthirsty enemy, China, which for liberal Democrat intellectuals at various times rampaged as a “a Slavic Manchukuo,” a blind puppet of its Kremlin master, or a monster utterly unconstrained as it pursued its crazed campaign to crush the world in its tentacles, or whatever else circumstances demanded. The remarkable tale of doctrinal fanaticism from the 1940s to the 1970s, which makes contemporary rhetoric seem rather moderate, is reviewed by James Peck in his highly revealing study of the national security culture, Washington’s China.  In later years, there were attempts to mimic the valiant deeds of the defenders of virtue from the two villainous global conquerors and their loyal slaves—for example, when the Gipper strapped on his cowboy boots and declared a National Emergency because Nicaraguan hordes were only two days from Harlingen Texas, though, as he courageously informed the press, despite the tremendous odds, “I refuse to give up. I remember a man named Winston Churchill who said, ‘Never give in. Never, never, never.’ So we won’t.” With consequences that need not be reviewed.  Even with the best of efforts, however, the attempts never were able to recapture the glorious days of Cold War I. But now, at last, those heights might be within reach, as another implacable enemy bent on world conquest has arisen, which we must contain before it destroys us all: Iran.  Perhaps it’s a lift to the spirits to be able to recover those heady Cold War days when at least there was a legitimate force to contain, however dubious the pretexts and disgraceful the means. But it is instructive to take a closer look at the contours of Cold War II as they are being designed by “the former Kremlinologists now running U.S. foreign policy, such as Rice and Gates” (Wright).  The task of containment is to establish “a bulwark against Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East,” Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper explain in the New York Times (July 31). To contain Iran’s influence we must surround Iran with U.S. and NATO ground forces, along with massive naval deployments in the Persian Gulf and of course incomparable air power and weapons of mass destruction. And we must provide a huge flow of arms to what Condoleezza Rice calls “the forces of moderation and reform” in the region, the brutal tyrannies of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and, with particular munificence, Israel, by now virtually an adjunct of the militarized high-tech U.S. economy. All to contain Iran’s influence. A daunting challenge indeed.  And daunting it is. In Iraq, Iranian support is welcomed by much of the majority Shi’ite population. In an August visit to Teheran, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met with the supreme leader Ali Khamenei, President Ahmadinejad, and other senior officials, and thanked Tehran for its “positive and constructive” role in improving security in Iraq, eliciting a sharp reprimand from President Bush, who “declares Teheran a regional peril and asserts the Iraqi leader must understand,” to quote the headline of the Los Angeles Times report on al-Maliki’s intellectual deficiencies. A few days before, also greatly to Bush’s discomfiture, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Washington’s favorite, described Iran as “a helper and a solution” in his country. Similar problems abound beyond Iran’s immediate neighbors. In Lebanon, according to polls, most Lebanese see Iranian-backed Hezbollah “as a legitimate force defending their country from Israel,” Wright reports. And in Palestine, Iranian-backed Hamas won a free election, eliciting savage punishment of the Palestinian population by the U.S. and Israel for the crime of voting “the wrong way,” another episode in “democracy promotion.”  But no matter. The aim of U.S. militancy and the arms flow to the moderates is to counter “what everyone in the region believes is a flexing of muscles by a more aggressive Iran,” according to an unnamed senior U.S. government official—“everyone” being the technical term used to refer to Washington and its more loyal clients. Iran’s aggression consists in its being welcomed by many within the region, and allegedly supporting resistance to the U.S. occupation of neighboring Iraq.  It’s likely, though little discussed, that a prime concern about Iran’s influence is to the East, where in mid-August, “Russia and China today host Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a summit of a Central Asian security club designed to counter U.S. influence in the region,” the business press reports. The “security club” is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which has been slowly taking shape in recent years. Its membership includes not only the two giants Russia and China, but also the energy-rich Central Asian states Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan. Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was a guest of honor at the August meeting. “In another unwelcome development for the Americans, Turkmenistan’s President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov also accepted an invitation to attend the summit,” another step in its improvement of relations with Russia, particularly in energy, reversing a long-standing policy of isolation from Russia. “Russia in May secured a deal to build a new pipeline to import more gas from Turkmenistan, bolstering its dominant hold on supplies to Europe and heading off a competing U.S.-backed plan that would bypass Russian territory.”  Along with Iran, there are three other official observer states: India, Pakistan, and Mongolia. Washington’s request for similar status was denied. In 2005 the SCO called for a timetable for termination of any U.S. military presence in Central Asia. The participants at the August meeting flew to the Urals to attend the first joint Russia-China military exercises on Russian soil.  Association of Iran with the SCO extends its inroads into the Middle East, where China has been increasing trade and other relations with the jewel in the crown, Saudi Arabia. There is an oppressed Shi’ite population in Saudi Arabia that is also susceptible to Iran’s influence—and happens to sit on most of Saudi oil. About 40 percent of Middle East oil is reported to be heading East, not West. As the flow Eastward increases, U.S. control declines over this lever of world domination, a “stupendous source of strategic power,” as the State Department described Saudi oil 60 years ago.  In Cold War I, the Kremlin had imposed an iron curtain and built the Berlin Wall to contain Western influence. In Cold War II, Wright reports, the former Kremlinologists framing policy are imposing a “green curtain” to bar Iranian influence. In short, government-media doctrine is that the Iranian threat is rather similar to the Western threat that the Kremlin sought to contain, and the U.S. is eagerly taking on the Kremlin’s role in the thrilling new Cold War.  All of this is presented without noticeable concern. Nevertheless, the recognition that the U.S. government is modeling itself on Stalin and his successors in the new Cold War must be arousing at least some flickers of embarrassment. Perhaps that is how we can explain the ferocious Washington Post editorial announcing that Iran has escalated its aggressiveness to a Hot War: “the Revolutionary Guard, a radical state within Iran’s Islamic state, is waging war against the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible.” The U.S. must therefore “fight back,” the editors thunder, finding quite “puzzling...the murmurs of disapproval from European diplomats and others who say they favor using diplomacy and economic pressure, rather than military action, to rein in Iran,” even in the face of its outright aggression. The evidence that Iran is waging war against the U.S. is now conclusive. After all, it comes from an Administration that has never deceived the American people, even improving on the famous stellar honesty of its predecessors.  Suppose that for once Washington’s charges happen to be true, and Iran really is providing Shi’ite militias with roadside bombs that kill U.S. forces, perhaps even making use of some of the advanced weaponry lavishly provided to the Revolutionary Guard by Ronald Reagan in order to fund the illegal war against Nicaragua, under the pretext of arms for hostages (the number of hostages tripled during these endeavors). If the charges are true, then Iran could properly be charged with a minuscule fraction of the iniquity of the Reagan administration, which provided Stinger missiles and other high-tech military aid to the “insurgents” seeking to disrupt Soviet efforts to bring stability and justice to Afghanistan, as they saw it. Perhaps Iran is even guilty of some of the crimes of the Roosevelt administration, which assisted terrorist partisans attacking peaceful and sovereign Vichy France in 1940-41, and had thus declared war on Germany even before Pearl Harbor.  One can pursue these questions further. The CIA station chief in Pakistan in 1981, Howard Hart, reports that “I was the first chief of station ever sent abroad with this wonderful order: ‘Go kill Soviet soldiers.’ Imagine! I loved it.” Of course “the mission was not to liberate Afghanistan,” Tim Wiener writes in his history of the CIA, repeating the obvious. But “it was a noble goal,” he writes. Killing Russians with no concern for the fate of Afghans is a “noble goal,” but support for resistance to a U.S. invasion and occupation would be a vile act and declaration of war.  Without irony, the Bush administration and the media charge that Iran is “meddling” in Iraq, otherwise presumably free from foreign interference. The evidence is partly technical. Do the serial numbers on the Improvised Explosive Devices really trace back to Iran? If so, does the leadership of Iran know about the IEDs, or only the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Settling the debate, the White House plans to brand the Revolutionary Guard as a “specially designated global terrorist” force, an unprecedented action against a national military branch, authorizing Washington to undertake a wide range of punitive actions. Watching in disbelief, much of the world asks whether the U.S. military, invading and occupying Iran’s neighbors, might better merit this charge—or its Israeli client, now about to receive a huge increase in military aid to commemorate 40 years of harsh occupation and illegal settlement, and its fifth invasion of Lebanon a year ago.  It is instructive that Washington’s propaganda framework is reflexively accepted, apparently without notice, in U.S. and other Western commentary and reporting, apart from the marginal fringe of what is called “the loony left.” What is considered “criticism” is skepticism as to whether all of Washington’s charges about Iranian aggression in Iraq are true. It might be an interesting research project to see how closely the propaganda of Russia, Nazi Germany, and other aggressors and occupiers matched the standards of today’s liberal press and commentators.  The comparisons are of course unfair. Unlike German and Russian occupiers, American forces are in Iraq by right, on the principle, too obvious even to enunciate, that the U.S. owns the world. Therefore, as a matter of elementary logic, the U.S. cannot invade and occupy another country. The U.S. can only defend and liberate others. No other category exists. Predecessors, including the most monstrous, have commonly sworn by the same principle, but again there is an obvious difference: they were wrong and we are right. QED.  Another comparison comes to mind, which is studiously ignored when we are sternly admonished of the ominous consequences that might follow withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. The preferred analogy is Indochina, highlighted in a shameful speech by the president on August 22. That analogy can perhaps pass muster among those who have succeeded in effacing from their minds the record of U.S. actions in Indochina, including the destruction of much of Vietnam and the murderous bombing of Laos and Cambodia as the U.S. began its withdrawal from the wreckage of South Vietnam. In Cambodia, the bombing was in accord with Kissinger’s genocidal orders: “anything that flies on anything that moves”—actions that drove “an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency [the Khmer Rouge] that had enjoyed relatively little support before the Kissinger- Nixon bombing was inaugurated,” as Cambodia specialists Owen Taylor and Ben Kiernan observe in a highly important study that passed virtually without notice, in which they reveal that the bombing was five times the incredible level reported earlier, greater than all allied bombing in World War II. Completely suppressing all relevant facts, it is then possible for the president and many commentators to present Khmer Rouge crimes as a justification for continuing to devastate Iraq.  But although the grotesque Indochina analogy receives much attention, the obvious analogy is ignored: the Russian withdrawal from Afganistan, which, as Soviet analysts predicted, led to shocking violence and destruction as the country was taken over by Reagan’s favorites, who amused themselves by such acts as throwing acid in the faces of women in Kabul they regarded as too liberated, and who then virtually destroyed the city and much else, creating such havoc and terror that the population actually welcomed the Taliban. That analogy could indeed be invoked without utter absurdity by advocates of “staying the course,” but evidently it is best forgotten.  Under the heading “Secretary Rice’s Mideast mission: contain Iran,” the press reports Rice’s warning that Iran is “the single most important single-country challenge to...U.S. interests in the Middle East.” That is a reasonable judgment. Given the long-standing principle that Washington must do “everything in its power to alter or abolish any regime not openly allied with America,” Iran does pose a unique challenge, and it is natural that the task of containing Iranian influence should be a high priority.  As elsewhere, Bush administration rhetoric is relatively mild in this case. For the Kennedy administration, “Latin America was the most dangerous area in the world” when there was a threat that the progressive Cheddi Jagan might win a free election in British Guiana, overturned by CIA shenanigans that handed the country over to the thuggish racist Forbes Burnham. A few years earlier, Iraq was “the most dangerous place in the world” (CIA director Allen Dulles) after General Abdel Karim Qassim broke the Anglo-American condominium over Middle East oil, overthrowing the pro-U.S. monarchy, which had been heavily infiltrated by the CIA. A primary concern was that Qassim might join Nasser, then the supreme Middle East devil, in using the incomparable energy resources of the Middle East for the domestic population. The issue for Washington was not so much access as control. At the time and for many years after, Washington was purposely exhausting domestic oil resources in the interests of “national security,” meaning security for the profits of Texas oil men, like the failed entrepreneur who now sits in the Oval Office. But as high-level planner George Kennan had explained well before, we cannot relax our guard when there is any interfence with “protection of our resources” (which accidentally happen to be somewhere else).  Unquestionably, Iran’s government merits harsh condemnation, though it has not engaged in worldwide terror, subversion, and aggression, following the U.S. model—which extends to today’s Iran as well, if ABC news is correct in reporting that the U.S. is supporting Pakistan-based Jundullah, which is carrying out terrorist acts inside Iran. The sole act of aggression attributed to Iran is the conquest of two small islands in the Gulf—under Washington’s close ally the Shah. In addition to internal repression—heightened, as Iranian dissidents regularly protest, by U.S. militancy—the prospect that Iran might develop nuclear weapons also is deeply troubling. Though Iran has every right to develop nuclear energy, no one—including the majority of Iranians—wants it to have nuclear weapons. That would add to the threat to survival posed much more seriously by its near neighbors Pakistan, India, and Israel, all nuclear armed with the blessing of the U.S., which most of the world regards as the leading threat to world peace, for evident reasons.  Iran rejects U.S. control of the Middle East, challenging fundamental policy doctrine, but it hardly poses a military threat. On the contrary, it has been the victim of outside powers for years: in recent memory, when the U.S. and Britain overthrew its parliamentary government and installed a brutal tyrant in 1953, and when the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein’s murderous invasion, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iranians, many with chemical weapons, without the “international community” lifting a finger—something that Iranians do not forget as easily as the perpetrators. And then under severe sanctions as a punishment for disobedience.  Israel regards Iran as a threat. Israel seeks to dominate the region with no interference, and Iran might be some slight counterbalance, while also supporting domestic forces that do not bend to Israel’s will. It may, however, be useful to bear in mind that Hamas has accepted the international consensus on a two-state settlement on the international border, and Hezbollah, along with Iran, has made clear that it would accept any outcome approved by Palestinians, leaving the U.S. and Israel isolated in their traditional rejectionism.  But Iran is hardly a military threat to Israel. And whatever threat there might be could be overcome if the U.S. would accept the view of the great majority of its own citizens and of Iranians and permit the Middle East to become a nuclear-weapons free zone, including Iran and Israel, and U.S. forces deployed there. One may also recall that UN Security Council Resolution 687 of April 3, 1991, to which Washington appeals when convenient, calls for “establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery.”  It is widely recognized that use of military force in Iran would risk blowing up the entire region, with untold consequences beyond. We know from polls that in the surrounding countries, where the Iranian government is hardly popular—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan—nevertheless large majorities prefer even a nuclear-armed Iran to any form of military action against it.  The rhetoric about Iran has escalated to the point where both political parties and practically the whole U.S. press accept it as legitimate and, in fact, honorable, that “all options are on the table,” to quote Hillary Clinton and everybody else, possibly even nuclear weapons. “All options on the table” means that Washington threatens war.  The UN Charter outlaws “the threat or use of force.” The United States, which has chosen to become an outlaw state, disregards international laws and norms. We’re allowed to threaten anybody we want—and to attack anyone we choose.  Washington’s feverish new Cold War “containment” policy has spread to Europe. Washington intends to install a “missile defense system” in the Czech Republic and Poland, marketed to Europe as a shield against Iranian missiles. Even if Iran had nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, the chances of its using them to attack Europe are perhaps on a par with the chances of Europe’s being hit by an asteroid, so perhaps Europe would do as well to invest in an asteroid defense system. Furthermore, if Iran were to indicate the slightest intention of aiming a missile at Europe or Israel, the country would be vaporized.  Of course, Russian planners are gravely upset by the shield proposal. We can imagine how the U.S. would respond if a Russian anti-missile system were erected in Canada. The Russians have good reason to regard an anti-missile system as part of a first-strike weapon against them. It is generally understood that such a system could never block a first strike, but it could conceivably impede a retaliatory strike. On all sides, “missile defense” is therefore understood to be a first-strike weapon, eliminating a deterrent to attack. A small initial installation in Eastern Europe could easily be a base for later expansion. More obviously, the only military function of such a system with regard to Iran, the declared aim, would be to bar an Iranian deterrent to U.S. or Israel aggression.  Not surprisingly, in reaction to the “missile defense” plans, Russia has resorted to its own dangerous gestures, including the recent decision to renew long-range patrols by nuclear-capable bombers after a 15-year hiatus, in one recent case near the U.S. military base on Guam. These actions reflect Russia’s anger “over what it has called American and NATO aggressiveness, including plans for a missile-defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland, analysts said” (Andrew Kramer, NYT).  The shield ratchets the threat of war a few notches higher, in the Middle East and elsewhere, with incalculable consequences, and the potential for a terminal nuclear war. The immediate fear is that by accident or design, Washington’s war planners or their Israeli surrogate might decide to escalate their Cold War II into a hot one—in this case a real hot war.  Z  Noam Chomsky is a linguist, lecturer, social critic, and author of numerous articles and books. 

To help commemorate 20 years of publication, we are running a series featuring memorable articles from the past, leading up to our official birthday in January 2008. We are reprinting them in the original magazine format. In this issue, we are featuring a portion of Noam Chomsky’s series on Year 501 from the March 1992 issue.   —Eds.  HE YEAR 1992 poses a critical moral and cultural challenge for the more privileged sectors of the world-dominant societies. The challenge is heightened by the fact that within these societies, notably our own, popular struggle over many centuries has won a measure of freedom with opportunities for independent thought and committed action. How this challenge is addressed, in fact whether it is perceived at all on a broad scale, may have fateful consequences.  As everyone knows, we are entering the 500th year of the Old World Order, sometimes called the Colombian era of world history, or the Vasco da Gama era, depending on which blood thirsty adventurer got there first. Or “the 500-year Reich,” to borrow the title of a recent book that compares the methods and ideology of the Nazis with those of the European invaders who subjugated most of the world. The major theme of the Old World Order has been a confrontation between the conquerors and the conquered on a global scale. It has taken various forms and been given different names: imperialism, the North-South conflict, core versus periphery, G-7 (the 7 leading state capitalist industrial societies) and their satellites versus the rest. Or, more simply, Europe’s conquest of the world.  By the term “Europe,” we include the European-settled colonies that now lead the crusade; adopting South African conventions, the Japanese are admitted as “honorary Whites,” rich enough to qualify. Japan was the one part of the South that escaped conquest and, perhaps not coincidentally, the one part that was able to join the core, with some of its former colonies in its wake. The idea that there is more than coincidence in the correlation of independence and development is reinforced by a look at Western Europe, where parts that were colonized followed the Third World path of underdevelopment. One notable example is Ireland, violently conquered, then barred from development by the standard “free trade” doctrines selectively applied to ensure subordination of the South—today called “structural adjustment,” “neo- liberalism,” or “our noble ideals,” from which we, to be sure, are exempt.  A Bit of History  THE EARLY SPANISH-Portuguese conquests had their domestic counterpart. In 1492, the Jewish community of Spain was expelled or forced to convert. Millions of Moors suffered the same fate. The fall of Granada in 1492, ending eight centuries of Moorish sovereignty, made it possible for the Spanish Inquisition to extend its barbaric sway. The conquerors destroyed priceless books and manuscripts with their rich record of classical learning, and demolished the civilization that had flourished under the far more tolerant and cultured Moorish rule. The stage was set for the decline of Spain and also for the racism and savagery of the world conquest—“the curse of Columbus,” in the words of Africa historian Basil Davidson.  Spain and Portugal were soon displaced from their leading role as English pirates, marauders, and slave traders swept the seas, perhaps the most notorious, Sir Francis Drake. Later, the newly consolidated English state took over the task of “wars for markets” from “the plunder raids of Elizabethan sea-dogs.” State power also enabled England to subdue the Celtic periphery, then to apply the newly-honed techniques with even greater destruction to new victims across the seas. By 1651, England was powerful enough to impose the Navigation Act, which established a closed trading area throughout much of the world, monopolized by English merchants. They were thus able to enrich themselves through the slave trade and their “plunder-trade with America, Africa and Asia,” assisted by “state-sponsored colonial wars” and the various devices of economic management by which state power has forged the way to development (Hill, A Nation of Change & Novelty, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1990).  It should be stressed that the economic doctrines preached by the powerful are intended for others, so that they can be more efficiently robbed and exploited. No wealthy developed society accepts these conditions for itself, unless they happen to confer temporary advantage; and their history reveals that sharp departure from these doctrines was a prerequisite for development. At least since the work of Alexander Gerschenkronin the 1950s, it has been widely recognized by economic historians that “late development” has been critically dependent on state intervention; Japan and the Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) on its periphery are standard contemporary examples. The same is true of the “early development” of England and the United States. High tariffs and other forms of state intervention may have raised costs to American consumers, but they allowed domestic industry to develop, from textiles to steel to computers, barring cheaper British products in earlier years, providing a state-guaranteed market and public subsidy for research and development in advanced sectors, creating and maintaining capital-intensive agribusiness, and so on. “Import substitution [through state intervention] is about the only way anybody’s ever figured out to industrialize,” development economist Lance Taylor observes, adding that “In the long run, there are no laissez-faire transitions to modern economic growth. The state has always intervened to create a capitalist class, and then it has to regulate the capitalist class, and then the state has to worry about being taken over by the capitalist class, but the state has always been there.” Furthermore, state power has regularly been invoked by the capitalist class to protect it from the destructive effects of an unregulated market, to secure resources, markets, and opportunities for investment, and in general to safeguard and extend their profits and power; the Pentagon system of public subsidy for high tech industry is the most glaring example, close to home (Taylor, Dollars & Sense, Nov. 1991; see also my Deterring Democracy, Verso, 1991).  It is hardly surprising that the government is seeking new ways to maintain the Pentagon-based industries now that the conventional pretext has disappeared. One method is increased foreign arms sales, which also help alleviate the balance of payments crisis. The Bush administration has created a Center for Defense Trade to stimulate arms sales, and has directed U.S. embassies to participate actively while proposing U.S. government guarantees for up to $1 billion in loans for purchase of U.S. arms. The Defense Security Assistance Agency is reported to have sent more than 900 officers to some 50 countries to promote U.S. weapons sales. The Gulf war was prominently featured as a sales promotion device. Larry Korb of the Brookings Institution, formerly Assistant Secretary of Defense in charge of logistics, observes that the promise of arms sales has kept stocks of military producers high despite the end of the Cold War, with arms sales skyrocketing from $12 billion in 1989 to almost $40 billion in 1991. Moderate declines in purchases by the U.S. military have been more than offset by other arms sales by U.S. companies. Since “President Bush called last May [1991] for restraint in weapons sales to the Middle East,” AP correspondent Barry Schweid reports, “the United States has transferred roughly $6 billion in arms to the region,” part of the $19 billion in U.S. weapons sent to the Middle East since Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. Since 1989, U.S. arms exports to the Third World have increased by 138 percent, making the U.S. far and away the leading arms exporter. The sales since May are described as “fully consistent with the president’s initiative and the guidelines” in his call for restraint, State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher explained—quite accurately, given the actual intent.  Such considerations, however, should not obscure the more fundamental role of the Pentagon system (including NASA and DOE) in maintaining high tech industry generally, just as state intervention plays a crucial role in supporting biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, and most competitive segments of the economy.  By IMF standards, the United States, after a decade of what George Bush accurately called “voodoo economics” before he joined the team, is a prime candidate for severe austerity measures. But it is far too powerful to submit to the rules, intended for the weak. No one espoused liberal doctrine more fervently than the British, after they had employed state power to rob and destroy, establishing the basis for the first industrial revolution and their domination of world manufacture and trade. But the passionate rhetoric subsided when it no longer served the needs of the rulers. Unable to compete with Japan in the 1920s, Britain effectively barred Japan from trade with the Commonwealth, including India; the Americans followed suit in their lesser empire, as did the Dutch. These were significant factors leading to the Pacific war as Japan set forth to emulate its powerful predecessors, having naively adopted their liberal dictates only to discover that they were a fraud, imposed on the weak, accepted by the strong only when they are useful. So it has always been. Today, the World Bank estimates that the protectionist measures of the industrial countries—keeping pace with free market bombast—reduce the national income of the “developing societies” by about twice the amount provided by official “development assistance”; the term “developing societies” is the standard euphemism for those that are not developing, with a little help from their friends. (On the backgrounds for the Pacific war, see my American Power and the New Mandarins, Pantheon, 1969.)  The “development assistance” may help or harm the recipients, but that is incidental. Typically, it is a form of export promotion. One familiar example is the Food for Peace program, designed to subsidize U.S. agribusiness and induce others to “become dependent on us for food” (Senator Hubert Humphrey), and to promote the global security network that keeps order in the Third World by requiring that local governments use counterpart funds for armaments (thus also subsidizing U.S. military producers). Another familiar example of export promotion was the Marshall Plan and other devices of the period, motivated in large part by the “dollar gap” that deprived U.S. industry of an export market, threatening a return to the depression of the 1930s. More generally, its goal was “to avert ‘economic, social and political’ chaos in Europe, contain Communism (meaning not Soviet intervention but the success of the indigenous Communist parties), prevent the collapse of America’s export trade, and achieve the goal of multilateralism,” and provide a crucial economic stimulus for “individual initiative and private enterprise both on the Continent and in the United States,” undercutting the fear of “experiments with socialist enterprise and government controls,” which would “jeopardize private enterprise” in the United States as well (Michael Hogan, in the major scholarly study). The Marshall Plan also “set the stage for large amounts of private U.S. direct investment in Europe. “Reagan’s Commerce Department observed in 1984, establishing the basis for the modern multinational corporations, which “prospered and expanded on overseas orders...fueled initially by the dollars of the Marshall Plan” and protected from “negative developments” by “the umbrella of American power,” Business Week observed in 1975, lamenting that this golden age of state intervention might be fading away. Aid to Israel, Egypt, and Turkey, the leading recipients in recent years, is motivated by their role in maintaining U.S. dominance of the Middle East, with its enormous oil energy reserves. (On Food for Peace, see my Necessary Illusions, South End, 1989.)  So it goes case by case. “Our idealism” and “American moral leadership” (Henry Kissinger) are the tools of trade of the commissar class in state and ideological institutions. The real world proceeds along a different path.  THE UTILITY OF FREE TRADE as a weapon against the poor is well-illustrated by a World Bank study on global warming, designed to “forge a consensus among economists” (meaning, the expert advisers of the rulers) in advance of the Rio conference on global warming in June, New York Times business correspondent Silvia Nasar reports under the headline “Can Capitalism Save the Ozone?” (the implication being: “Yes”). Harvard economist Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank, explains that the world’s environmental problems are largely “the consequence of policies that are misguided on narrow economic grounds,” particularly the policies of the poor countries that “have been practically giving away oil, coal and natural gas to domestic buyers in hopes of fostering industry and keeping living costs low for urban workers” (Nasar). If the poor countries would only have the courage to resist the “extreme pressure to improve the performance of their economies” by fostering development while protecting their population from starvation, then environmental problems would abate. “Creating free markets in Russia and other poor countries may do more to slow global warming than any measures that rich countries are likely to adopt in the 1990s,” the World Bank concludes—correctly, since the rich are hardly likely to pursue policies detrimental to their interests, and they do have many weapons to wield against the poor, including selective use of “free trade” (in the small print, the consensus economists also recognize that “more effective government regulation” reduces pollution, but crushing the poor has obvious advantages).  The same page of the New York Times business section carries an item referring a confidential memo of the World Bank, published by the London Economist. The author of the memo is the same Lawrence Summers. He writes: “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the [Third World]?” This is reasonable on economic grounds, Summers explains. For example, a cancer-producing agent will have larger effects “in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-5 mortality is 200 per thousand.” Poor countries are “under-polluted,” and it is only reasonable, on grounds of economic rationality, to encourage “dirty industries” to move to them: “The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” Summers recognizes that there are “arguments against all of these proposals” for exporting pollution to the Third World: “intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.” But the problem is that these arguments “could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.” “Mr. Summers is asking questions that the World Bank would rather ignore,” the Economist observes, but “on the economics, his points are hard to answer.” Quite true. We have the choice of accepting the conclusions or regarding them as a eductio ad absurdum argument against the “free market” ideology.  The doctrines, then, are very clear. On grounds of economic rationality, the Third World should cut back on its “misguided” efforts to promote economic development while protecting the population from disaster, while the rich countries, observing the same principles of economic rationality, should export pollution to the Third World. That way, capitalism can overcome the environmental crisis. Free market capitalism is, indeed, a wondrous implement. Surely there should be two Nobel prizes awarded annually, not just one.  Confronted with the memo, Summers said that it was only “intended to provoke debate”—elsewhere, that it was a “sarcastic response” to another World Bank draft, in the style of Jonathan Swift. Perhaps the same is true of the World Bank “consensus” study reported on the same page of the Times business section. In fact, it is often hard to determine when the intellectual productions of the World Bank and other experts are intended seriously, or are a perverse form of sarcasm. Unfortunately, huge numbers of people, subjected to these doctrines, do not have the luxury of pondering this intriguing question.  Though not intended for us, “free trade does, however, have its uses,” Arthur MacEwan observes in a review of the uniform record of industrial and agricultural development through protectionism and other measures of state interference, notably in the United States: “Highly developed nations can use free trade to extend their power and their control of the world’s wealth, and businesses can use it as a weapon against labor. Most important, free trade can limit efforts to redistribute income more equally, undermine progressive social programs, and keep people from democratically controlling their economic lives.” Small wonder, then, that neoliberal doctrine has won such a grand victory within the ideological system. The evidence about successful development and the actual consequences of neoliberal doctrine is dismissed with the contempt that irrelevant nuisance so richly deserves.  All of this is a crucial part of the doctrinal and policy framework of the New World Order, as of the old.  THE ENGLISH COLONISTS in North America pursued the course laid out by their forerunners in the home country. From the earliest days of colonization, Virginia was a center of piracy and pillage, raiding Spanish commerce and plundering French settlements as far as the coast of Maine. By the beginning of the 17th century, “New York had become a thieve’s market where pirates disposed of loot taken on the high seas,” historian Nathan Miller observes, while as in England, “corruption...was the lubricant that greased the wheels of the nation’s administrative machinery”; “graft and corruption played a vital role in the development of modern American society and in the creation of the complex, interlocking machinery of government and business that presently determines the course of our affairs,” Miller writes, ridiculing the ideologists who expressed great shock at Watergate.  As state power consolidated, piracy became less acceptable than graft and corruption, though the U.S. would not permit American citizens apprehended for slave trading or other crimes to be judged by international tribunals. The U.S. would not accept the reasonable standards proposed by Libya’s Qaddafi, who has urged that charges concerning its alleged terrorism be brought to the World Court. That proposal is naturally dismissed with disdain by the U.S., which has little use for such instruments—perhaps, the noted specialist on international law Alfred Rubin suggests, because “the U.S. and its two European friends are seeking a legal basis for some military strike at Libya that might help an incumbent president or prime minister nearing election time.” The U.S. refusal to permit punishment of American criminals was no small matter; the U.S. refused to allow the British navy to search any American slaver, “and American naval vessels were almost never there to search her, with the result that most of the slave ships, in the 1850s, not only flew the American flag but were owned by American citizens” (Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republics, Verso, 1990).  With American independence, state power was used to protect domestic industry, foster agricultural production, manipulate trade, monopolize raw materials, and take the land from its inhabitants. Americans “concentrated on the task of felling trees and Indians and of rounding out their natural boundaries,” as diplomatic historian Thomas Bailey describes the project.  These tasks were eminently reasonable by the approved standards of political correctness; the challenge to them in the past few years has, predictably, elicited much hysteria among those who regard anything less than total control over the ideological system as an unspeakable catastrophe. Hugo Grotius, a leading 17th century humanist and the founder of modern international law, determined that the “most just war is against savage beasts, the next against men who are like beasts.” George Washington wrote in 1783 that “the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape”; what is called in PC language “a pragmatist,” Washington regarded purchase of Indian lands (typically, by fraud and threat) as a more cost-effective tactic than violence. Consciences were eased further by the legal doctrine developed by Chief Justice John Marshall: “discovery gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian right of occupancy, either by purchase or by conquest”; “that law, which regulates, and ought to regulate in general, the relations between the conqueror and conquered was incapable of application to...the tribes of Indians...fierce savages whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest.”  The colonists, to be sure, knew better. Their survival depended on the agricultural sophistication of the “fierce savages. “Observing the Narragansett-Pequot wars, Roger Williams could see that their fighting was “farre less bloudy and devouring than the cruell Warres of Europe.” John Underhill sneered at the “feeble Manner” of the Indian warriors, which “did hardly deserve the Name of fighting,” and their laughable protests against the “furious” style of the English that “slays too many men”—not to speak of women and children in undefended villages, a European tactic that had to be taught to the backward natives. The useful doctrines of John Marshall and others remained in place through modern scholarship; thus the highly regarded anthropological authority A. L. Kroeber attributed to the East Coast Indians a kind of “warfare that was insane, unending,” inexplicable “from our point of view” and so “dominantly emphasized within [their culture] that escape was well-nigh impossible,” for any group that would depart from these hideous norms “was almost certainly doomed to early extinction”—a “harsh indictment [that] would carry more weight,” Francis Jennings observes, “if its rhetoric were supported by either example or reference,” in an influential scholarly study. The Indians were hardly pacifists, but they had to learn the techniques of “total war” and true savagery from the European conquerors, with their ample experience in Ireland and elsewhere.  Respected statespeople have upheld the same values. To Theodore Roosevelt, the hero of George Bush and of the liberal commentators who gushed over his sense of “righteous mission” during the Gulf slaughter, “the most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages,” establishing the rule of “the dominant world races.” This “noble minded missionary,” as contemporary ideologues term him, did not limit his vision to the “beasts of prey” who were being swept from their lairs within the “natural boundaries” of the American nation. The ranks of savages included as well the “dagos” to the south, and the “Malay bandits” and “Chinese half breeds” who were resisting the American conquest of the Philippines, all “savages, barbarians, a wild and ignorant people, Apaches, Sioux, Chinese boxers,” as their stubborn recalcitrance amply demonstrated. Winston Churchill felt that poison gas was just right for use against “uncivilized tribes” (Kurds and Afghans, particularly). Noting approvingly that British diplomacy had prevented the 1932 disarmament convention from banning bombardment of civilians, the equally respected statesperson Lloyd George observed that “we insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers,” capturing the basic point succinctly. The metaphors of “Indian fighting” were carried right through the Indochina wars. The conventions have not lapsed into the 1990s, as we saw in early 1991 and quite possibly will again, before too long.  THE TASK OF FELLING TREES and Indians and of rounding out their natural boundaries” also required that some way be found to rid the continent of European interlopers. The main enemy was England, a powerful deterrent, and the target of frenzied hatred in broad circles. It was, incidentally, reciprocated, interlaced with considerable contempt. Thus in 1865, a progressive English gentleman offered to endow a lectureship at Cambridge University for American studies, a subject then considered too insignificant to merit attention. Cambridge dons protested with outrage against what one called, with admirable literary flair, “a biennial flash of Transatlantic darkness.” They feared that the lectures would spread “discontent and dangerous ideas” among uneducated undergraduates, “over whom they would naturally exercise some considerable influence.” Some thought “that the Harvard credentials of the lecturers would guarantee that the lectures be inoffensive,” historian Joyce Appleby notes, quoting one don who recognized that the lecturers would be drawn from the class that felt itself “increasingly in danger of being swamped by the lower elements of a vast democracy.” Most feared the subversive influence of these lower elements. The threat was beaten back in an impressive show of the kind of political correctness that continues to reign in most of the academic world, as fearful as ever of the lower elements and their strange ideas.  Recognizing that England’s military force was too powerful to confront, Jacksonian Democrats called for annexation of Texas to ensure a U.S. world monopoly of cotton. The U.S. would then be able to paralyze England and intimidate Europe. “By securing the virtual monopoly of the cotton plant” the U.S. had acquired “a greater influence over the affairs of the world than would be found in armies however strong, or navies however numerous, “President Tyler observed after the annexation and the conquest of a third of Mexico. “That monopoly, now secured, places all other nations at our feet,” he wrote. “An embargo of a single year would produce in Europe a greater amount of suffering than a fifty years’ war. I doubt whether Great Britain could avoid convulsions.” The same monopoly power neutralized British opposition to the conquest of the Oregon territory.  The editor of New York’s leading newspaper exulted that Britain was “completely bound and manacled with the cotton cords” of the United States, “a lever with which we can successfully control” this dangerous rival. Thanks to the conquests that ensured monopoly of the most important commodity in world trade, the Polk Administration boasted, the U.S. could now “control the commerce of the world and secure thereby to the American Union inappreciable political and commercial advantages.” “Fifty years will note lapse ere the destinies of the human race will be in our hands,” a Louisiana congressperson proclaimed, as he and others looked to ”mastery of the Pacific” and control over the resources on which European rivals were dependent. Polk’s Secretary of Treasury reported to Congress that the conquests of the Democrats would guarantee “the command of the trade of the world.”  The national poet, Walt Whitman, wrote that our conquests “takeoff the shackles that prevent men the even chance of being happy and good.” Mexico’s lands were taken over for the good of mankind: “What has miserable, inefficient Mexico...to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?” Others recognized the difficulty of taking Mexico’s resources without burdening ourselves with its “imbecile” population, “degraded” by “the amalgamation of races,” though the New York press was hopeful that their fate would be “similar to that of the Indians of this country—the race, before a century rolls over us, will become extinct.”  The concerns of the expansionists went beyond their fear that an independent Texas would break the U.S. resource monopoly and expand to become a rival empire; it might also abolish slavery, igniting dangerous sparks of egalitarianism. Andrew Jackson thought that an independent Texas, with a mixture of Indians and fleeing slaves, might be manipulated by Britain to “throw the whole west into flames.” His earlier conquest of Florida had been justified by John Quincy Adams, with Thomas Jefferson’s enthusiastic approbation, by the need to thwart British efforts to launch “mingled hordes of lawless Indians and negroes” in a “savage war” against the “peaceful inhabitants” of the United States.  It is evident without further comment that the logic of the Jacksonian Democrats was essentially that attributed to Saddam Hussein by U.S. propaganda after his conquest of Kuwait. But the comparisons should not be pressed too far. Unlike his Jacksonian precursors, Saddam Hussein is not known to have feared that slavery in Iraq would be threatened by independent states nearby, or to have publicly called for their “imbecile” inhabitants to “become extinct” so that the “great mission of peopling the Middle East with a noble race” of Iraqis can be carried forward, placing “the destinies of the human race in the hands” of the conquerors. And even the wildest fantasies did not accord Saddam potential control over the major resource of the day of the kind enjoyed by the American expansionists of the 1840s. Like Qaddafi, Saddam still has a few things to learn from our history, so extolled by enraptured intellectuals.  After the successful mid-19th century conquests, New York editors proudly observed that the U.S. was “the only power which has never sought and never seeks to acquire a foot of territory by force of arms”; “Of all the vast domains of our great confederacy over which the star spangled banner waves, not one foot of it is the acquirement of force or bloodshed.” The remnants of the native population, among others, were not asked to confirm this judgment. The U.S. is unique among nations in that “By its own merits it extends itself.” That is only natural, since “all other races...must bow and fade” before “the great work of subjugation and conquest to be achieved by the Anglo-Saxon race,” conquest without force. Leading contemporary historians accept this flattering self-image. Samuel Flagg Bemis wrote in 1965 that “American expansion across a practically empty continent despoiled no nation unjustly.” Arthur M. Schlesinger had earlier described Polk as “undeservedly one of the forgotten men of American history”: “By carrying the flag to the Pacific he gave America her continental breadth and ensured her future significance in the world,” a realistic assessment, if not exactly in the intended sense.  Such doctrinal fantasies could not easily survive the Vietnam war, at least outside the intellectual class, where we are regularly regaled by orations on how “for 200 years the United States has preserved almost unsullied the original ideals of the Enlightenment...and, above all, the universality of these values” (Yale professor Michael Howard). Writing today on “the self-image of Americans,” New York Times correspondent Richard Bernstein observes that “many who came of age during the 1960’s protest years have never regained the confidence in the essential goodness of America and the American government that prevailed in earlier periods,” a matter of much concern to ideologists and a factor in the appeal of dreams of Camelot, an interesting topic that merits separate discussion.  THE CONQUEST OF THE NEW WORLD set off two vast demographic catastrophes, unparalleled in history: the virtual destruction of the indigenous population of the Western hemisphere, and the devastation of Africa as the slave trade rapidly expanded to serve the needs of the conquerors. The basic patterns persist to the current era. As the slaughter of the indigenous population by the Guatemalan military approached virtual genocide, Ronald Reagan and his officials, while lauding the democracy-loving assassins, informed Congress that the U.S. would provide arms “to reinforce the improvement in the human rights situation following the 1982 coup” that installed Ros Montt, perhaps the greatest murderer of them all; although “the primary means” by which Guatemala obtained U.S. military equipment, the General Accounting Office of Congress observed, was commercial sales licensed by the Department of Commerce (putting aside the network of allies and clients that are always ready to contribute to genocide if there are profits to be made). The U.S. was also instrumental in maintaining a high level of slaughter and terror from Mozambique to Angola, while “quiet diplomacy” helped the Administration’s South African friends to cause over $60 billion in damage and 1.5 million deaths from 1980 to 1988 in the neighboring states. The most devastating effects of the general catastrophe of capitalism through the 1980s were in the same two continents: Africa and Latin America.  One of the grandest of the Guatemalan killers, General Hector Gramajo, was rewarded for his contributions to genocide in the highlands with a Mason Fellowship to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government—not unreasonably, given Kennedy’s decisive contributions to the vocation of counterinsurgency (the technical term for international terrorism conducted by the powerful). Cambridge dons will be relieved to learn that Harvard is no longer a dangerous center of subversion.  While earning his degree at Harvard, Gramajo gave an interview to the Harvard International Review in which he offered a more nuanced view of his own role. He said that he was personally in charge of the commission that drafted the “70 percent-30 percent civil affairs program, used by the Guatemalan government during the 1980s to control people or organizations who disagreed with the government.” He outlined with some pride the doctrinal innovations he had introduced: “We have created a more humanitarian, less costly strategy, to be more compatible with the democratic system. We instituted civil affairs [in 1982] which provides development for 70 percent of the population, while we kill 30 percent. Before, the strategy was to kill 100 percent.” This is a “more sophisticated means” than the previous crude assumption that you must “kill everyone to complete the job” of controlling dissent.  It is unfair, then, for journalist Alan Nairn, who exposed the U.S. origins of the Central American death squads, to describe Gramajo as “one of the most significant mass-murderers in the Western Hemisphere,” as Gramajo was sued by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York for damages for murders, disappearances, torture, and forced exile of Guatemalan citizens. We can also understand now why former CIA director William Colby sent Gramajo a copy of his memoirs with the inscription: “To a colleague in the effort to find a strategy of counterinsurgency with decency and democracy,” Kennedy-style. We can be assured that Gramajo, like Colby, correctly understands what is “compatible with the democratic system,” as envisioned by the masters.  Given his understanding of humanitarianism, decency, and democracy, it is not surprising that Gramajo appears to be the State Department’s choice for the 1995 elections, according to Central America Report, citing Americas Watch on the Harvard fellowship as “the State Department’s way of grooming Gramajo” for the job, and quoting a U.S. Senate staffer who says: “He’s definitely their boy down there.” Gramajo’s image is also being prettified. He offered the Post a sanitized version of his interview on the 70 percent to 30 percent program: “The effort of the government was to be 70 percent in development and 30 percent in the war effort. I was not referring to the people, just the effort.” Too bad he expressed himself so badly—or better, so honestly—before the Harvard grooming had taken effect.  It is not at all unlikely that the rulers of the world, meeting in G-7 conferences, have written off large parts of Africa and much of the population of Latin America, superfluous people who have no place in the New World Order, to be joined by many others, in the home societies as well.  Diplomacy has perceived Latin America and Africa in a similar light. Planning documents stress that the role of Latin America is to provide resources, markets, investment opportunities with ample repatriation of capital, and, in general, a favorable climate for business. If that can be achieved with formal elections under conditions that safeguard business interests, well and good. If it requires death squads “to destroy permanently a perceived threat to the existing structure of socioeconomic privilege by eliminating the political participation of the numerical majority...” that’s too bad, but preferable to the alternative of independence (the words are those of Lars Schoultz, the leading U.S. academic specialist on human rights in Latin America, describing the National Security States that had their roots in Kennedy Administration policies).  As for Africa, State Department Policy Planning chief George Kennan, assigning to each part of the South its special function in the New World Order of the post-World War II era, recommended that it be “exploited” for the reconstruction of Europe, adding that the opportunity to exploit Africa should afford the Europeans “that tangible objective for which everyone has been rather unsuccessfully groping...” a badly needed psychological lift, in their difficult postwar straits. Such recommendations are too uncontroversial to elicit comment, or even notice.  The genocidal episodes of the Colombian-Vasco da Gama era are by no means limited to the conquered countries of the South, as is sufficiently attested by the achievements of the leading center of Western civilization 50 years ago. Throughout the era, there have also been regular savage conflicts among the core societies of the North, sometimes spreading far beyond, particularly in this terrible century. From the point of view of most of the world’s population, these have been much like shoot-outs between rival drug gangs or mafia dons. The only question is who will gain the right to rob and kill. In the post-World War II era, the U.S. has been the global enforcer, guaranteeing the interests of the club of rich men. It has, therefore, compiled an impressive record of aggression, international terrorism, slaughter, torture, chemical and bacteriological warfare, and human rights abuses of every imaginable variety. This is not surprising; it goes with the turf. Nor is it surprising that the occasional documentation of these facts, far from the mainstream, elicits tantrums among the commissars, as it regularly does.  This horrifying record, if noticed at all, is considered insignificant, even a proof of our nobility. Again, that goes with the turf. The most powerful mafia don is also likely to dominate the doctrinal system. One of the great advantages of being rich and powerful is that you never have to say “I’m sorry.” It is precisely here that the moral and cultural challenge arises, as we approach the end of the first 500 years.         

If you look at the state sector in the United States, your taxes have been funding growth for years. Now the funding is shifting. Pentagon funding is declining and funding for the National Institute of Health and other health-related parts of the government is going up.  Take a look MIT, take a look at the funding that is going on. There is a pretty of good reason for it.  In the early post-war period, the first 25 years, the cutting edge of the economy was electronics-based and the way to fool the public into paying for that was to scream, “The Russians are coming” or “Grenada is coming” or somebody. Then we have to have a big defense system and fund the computers and Internet and microelectronics and so on, and later hand it over to private corporations for profit.  But now the cutting edge of the economy is biology-based, so therefore government funding has to shift—you have to have some other excuse for government funding: we will cure cancer, whatever it is. Meanwhile you have engineering and biotechnology being paid for by the same people, namely, you, with the profits going to whatever private corporations will be able to milk them when something is developed.  There are a lot of different devices. Like one critical part of the trade agreements is what is called Intellectual Property Rights and that is a fancy term that means “state guaranteed monopoly pricing rights.” So pharmaceutical corporations can charge very high prices because they have a monopoly and that monopoly is given to them by state power under the pretext of free trade.  They claim that they need it for research and development, but that is a fraud. It has been well investigated by Dean Baker, an excellent economist.  You can get some information on this from a book he just wrote, which is actually free if you go online.  It is called The Conservative Nanny State, which is about the real economy. One part of that has to do with the production of drugs. Baker calculated that if you increase the state subsidy to 100 percent and force the companies on the market, drug savings would be a huge benefit for consumers. But that is not the way existing capitalism works.  Let’s turn to NAFTA in 1994. Something happened in 1994 along with NAFTA.  It was called “Operation Gatekeeper,” instituted by the Clinton administration. It militarized the U.S./Mexican border. Previously it was a fairly open border. Like most borders it was established by conquest. But pretty much the same people lived on both sides and moved across the borders in both directions, but that was not going to work anymore after NAFTA. They had to militarize it.  Why? Well, it was understood what the effect of NAFTA was going to be for Mexico. Mexican farmers were not going to be able to compete with state-subsidized U.S. agribusiness. So people were going to flee and a lot of them were going to flee to the United States. They were going to be joined by people fleeing from the wreckage of Washington’s terrorist wars in Central America in the 1980s. So what is the solution? The solution is to build a wall. First, destroy their economy and then keep them out.  There is a real solution, promote or at least permit development. But that is counter to the interest of those who pretty much rule the world, or, at least, own it, or hope to.  Well, control of Latin America has been the earliest and major goal of U.S. foreign policy—and it remains very central. That is partly for resource and  market investment, as well as for ideological reasons. These are discussed in internal records where planners point out that we cannot expect to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world unless we control Latin America. So it’s important to keep it under control. There are traditional methods of control—violence and economic strangulation. But they are losing their effectiveness.  U.S. military coups used to be routine. The most recent attempt was 2002 in Venezuela, and Washington, of course, supported the coup and probably instigated it. The coup installed a rich businessperson and his first act was to disband Parliament, eliminate the Supreme Court, and get rid of every other vestige of democracy—that’s what the U.S. calls “democracy promotion.”  The coup was quickly reversed in a popular uprising, restoring the elected government. Washington had to turn to subversion, a propaganda war, and very substantial aid to the supporters of the coup, under the guise of democracy promotion. For example, the opposition candidate in the election supported the coup. Can you imagine what would happen in the United States if there was a military coup and one of its supporters then ran for president?   Well, Central America was pretty much subdued, at least temporarily, by Reaganite terror throughout the 1980s, but the region from Venezuela to Argentina is now falling out of control. Venezuela is forging closer relations with China. It’s planning to sell increasing amounts of oil to China. That is part of its effort to diversify exports and reduce its dependence on the openly hostile U.S. government. In fact Latin America as a whole is increasing trade and other relations with China and also Europe. But China is more worrisome to the United States, with very likely expansion for the raw material exporters like Brazil and Chile. China is investing in Latin America and challenging U.S. dominance.  If you look at U.S. public documents, China is regarded as the main potential threat, but not a military threat. Of the major powers it’s been the most restrained in military expenditures. But it is a threat. The threat is it can’t be intimidated. When the U.S. shakes its fist at Europe and tells them to stop investing in Iran, Europeans immediately pull out. China just moves in.  They have been there for 3,000 years. They cannot be intimidated, which is very frightening to the U.S. Put yourself in the situation of a Mafia Don, and suppose there is somebody that can’t be intimidated. And international affairs are pretty much like the Mafia. In Latin America, China is just moving along.  Elsewhere too. You might recall last spring the Bush administration decided to insult the president of China. He came to visit Washington and they insulted him by not inviting  him to a state dinner, only to a state lunch. He took it pretty calmly and he then flew to Saudi Arabia where he entered into new trade investment relations with Saudi Arabia, which is the oldest and most valued U.S. ally in the Middle East.  Getting back to Venezuela, it joined a South American economic bloc and was welcomed as opening a new chapter in integration. Venezuela supplied Argentina with fuel oil to help stave off an energy crisis and bought about a third of the Argentine debt. That is one element of a region-wide effort to free the countries from the controls of the International Monetary Fund.  This is after two decades of disastrous effects of conformity to its rules. The way Argentine President Kirchner put it, “The IMF has acted towards our country as a promoter and vehicle of policies that cause poverty and pain among the Argentine people.” That is approximately what he said when he announced his decision to pay almost a trillion dollars, in his words, “to rid Argentina of the IMF forever.” And by radically violating IMF rules Argentina did enjoy a substantial economic recovery from the disaster that was left by IMF policies. Other countries are going in the same direction.  Steps towards Latin American independence advanced further with the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia last December—a real democratic election, the kind that does not take place in the West. The election of Rafael Correa in Ecuador was another step. Morales moved very quickly to reach a series of energy agreements with Venezuela and he committed himself to reversing the neo-liberal policies that Bolivia had pursued rigorously for 25 years, leaving the country with lower per capita income than at the outset.  In Brazil, now considered by the U.S. as one of the good guys, it was necessary to ignore the fact that the first thing President Lula did after his re-election was fly to Venezuela to offer his support to Chavez in the upcoming election there and also to promote regional integration by inaugurating a joing Venezuelan-Brazilian-built bridge across the Orinoco river and overseeing work by Brazil’s state oil companies.  In addition, the indigenous populations are becoming much more active and influential, and many of them want oil and gas—and other resources—to be domestically controlled. In some cases they oppose production altogether.  Some are even calling for an Indian nation in South America, which challenges the race/class divide that goes back to the Spanish conquests. The elite that run the place are mostly white, European. The population are mostly Indians, black, mised race.  That is a fairly sharp distinction.  Internal economic integration is also taking place for the first time since the Spanish conquest. Elites in the past, the white elites, have been linked to the imperial powers, but not to one another, and that is beginning to change.  Latin America is now, I think, the most exciting part of the world and there are opportunities for cooperative development and interchange that are quite real. One step towards that is the solidarity movements that developed in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. That was something new. During hundreds of years of Western imperialism, no one in France ever thought to live in an Algerian village and no one ever thought of going to a Vietnamese village to live with the people to help them and support them and protect them with a white face.  But that started in the 1980s on a substantial scale. Thousands of people, many of them from churches, organized what is now a mass popular movement all over the world.  The internal developments in much of Latin America, as you know, are strongly influenced by mass popular movements, which are coming together in the global justice movement. Where this will lead, nobody can say. But there are definitely opportunities now for real progress towards more freedom and justice in cooperation across the hemisphere—and beyond.  Z  Noam Chomsky is a linguist, social critic, and author of numerous articles and books, including Failed States. This talk was given at City Life/Vida Urbana in January 2007. It was transcribed for Z by Mary Peacock. 

M y days are often full of interviews on all sorts of topics, ranging from literal threats to human survival, which are quite real, to catastrophes all over the world, some known, like Iraq; some not known, like Western Sahara, the last literal colony in Africa. Many of these are tainted by the realization that the U.S. shares a lot of responsibility for misery, suffering, and possible disaster, often by action, sometimes by inaction. With that in front of us, it feels to me, and may seem to you, a little bit cold and bloodless to do what I’m now going to do and that is ignore the torment, misery, and threats to survival, and so on, and talk about problems of democracy and development. I think the implications for day-to-day life are actually quite direct.  Just to illustrate with one example—I’m sure you have read the many commentaries on the death of Milton Friedman. A typical one was the front-page story in the Wall Street Journal full of accolades, among them that the intellectual foundations of the Reagan administration were provided by Friedman’s work— reliance on market forces and fiscal conservatism, all of which led to the grand economy that we have been enjoying for the last 30 years. Well, there is only one problem with it: it is the exact opposite of the truth in every crucial respect. As for the grand economy, the last 30 years have been probably the major economic failure in U.S. history, the so called “neo-liberal period.” There have been no serious depressions, no other major disasters, but the majority of the population has actually seen real wages and incomes stagnate, or even decline. One stunning figure is that the bottom 40 percent of the population has seen a decline in their net worth. There has been economic growth through this period. There has been increased productivity, but the benefits are for the few.  You may have seen a couple of front-page articles in the New York Times on the suffering of the ultra rich because they’re so envious of the super ultra rich, which is surely the great problem of the day—for some, at least. If you go back 30 years, the beginning of the so-called “neo-liberal period” in the United States, wages were the highest in the industrial world, the working hours were the least—exactly what you would expect in the richest county in the world. But now it is reversed. Real wages are about the lowest in the industrial world, working hours are the highest, or close to it. Benefits, which were never very strong, have declined, debt has soared, and security has declined severely. Much of that, incidentally, was planned. Fed chair Alan Greenspan, when he testified to Congress about the wonders of the economy that he was organizing and running, pointed out very frankly that one of the major reasons for the health of the economy was what he called “growing worker insecurity.” What happened is not some kind of accident, it was organized.  For example, during the Reagan years it seems that about $700 million was spent on trying to encourage corporations to shift from the United States to the Caribbean. One phase of it was discovered in a great sting operation by Charlie Kernaghan and the National Labor Committee that he runs—it even hit national television. They pretended to set up a fake company and were able to catch USAID officials explaining to them how beneficial it would be for this fake company to shift their operations to the Caribbean—very cheap labor, very exploited, no benefits, mostly women so you can control them easily, kick them out if they make a fuss or get pregnant, no environmental constraints, things you all know about.  Also the Reagan administration openly pioneered illegal labor practices. This was well recorded in Business Week , which pointed out that the Reagan administration effectively instructed the business world that they were not going to enforce the laws, which led to a sharp increase in illegal company actions to prevent union organizing. That was continued by Clinton who had another way of doing it called NAFTA . One of the predicted effects of NAFTA was that it would undermine union organizers by giving employers a way to threaten workers who were trying to organize: if you keep trying we’ll move to Mexico. That worked too. It’s is illegal, but when you have a criminal state, and the business world knows that it enjoys the benefits of a criminal state, it can carry these activities out. But unions not only improve the lives of working people, they’re a powerful democratizing force. So threatening them harms working people and also harms democracy.  What about the miracle of the market under Reagan? Well, that’s a standard line too—overlooking the fact that Reagan was the most protectionist president in post-war U.S. history. In fact he practically doubled protective barriers, more than all post-war presidents combined. There is a reason for that. If you go back to, say, the late 1970s there was a great deal of concern in the business world that U.S. companies could not compete with superior Japanese manufacturers. U.S. managers hadn’t understood the new techniques of production-on-time and other measures that had developed in Japan. U.S. industry was falling apart and there were calls in the business press to “reindustrialize America.” Well, how do you do that? You do it by keeping out superior Japanese and South Korean products and by calling on the usual savior, namely, the Pentagon. Which has happened before.  A century earlier the biggest business operation in the United States was railroads. It was beyond the competence of private industries and the Pentagon took it over. Of course I say the Pentagon, but the U.S. Army took it over. It has often happened before and it happened again with Reagan who called on the Pentagon to design what they called “the factory of the future,” a modern factory. This would teach backward U.S. corporate managers how to use computers, on time production, and all of the techniques that the Japanese had invented.  This has many advantages, calling on the Pentagon. For one, they could design the factory of the future so that it empowers managers and de-skills workers. That has been pretty well studied. David Noble, who was on the faculty of MIT, did major work on this, particularly with regard to automation. He showed that under military auspices, automation was designed to insure that decisions were taken away from skilled mechanics and put in the hands of supervisors and managers to de-skill the workforce and empower management. There was no reason—efficiency or even profit, as it sometimes harmed profit. It did not matter. It was very important for class war to ensure that the working class was de-skilled and passive and that power was in the hands of the managers and supervisors.  There is nothing new about that either. It goes right through history. I’m sure you heard of “Taylorism,” a concept that was introduced about a century ago essentially to turn working people into robots, in effect control every motion to make sure everything is maximally “efficient.” It was designed in U.S. military production, armories, and so on. That gives you plenty of funding to do whatever you like—no controls, no constraints—and you can implement class war very efficiently. The Reagan administration broke new records in this.  Let’s turn to a broader look at democracy and development. The two concepts are closely related in many respects. One respect is that they have a common enemy—loss of sovereignty. In a world of nation-states it is true by definition that decline of sovereignty leads to the decline of democracy and the decline in the ability to conduct economic and social policy. That in turn harms development, a conclusion that is very well confirmed by several centuries of economic history. That same economic history shows quite consistently that loss of sovereignty leads to imposed liberalization—imposed, of course, in the interest of the designers, not the subjects.  In recent years the imposed regime is commonly called “neo-liberalism.” It is the reigning economic orthodoxy of the past decades. It’s not a very good term, incidentally, as it is by no means new and it is not liberal, at least not in the sense of “liberal” as understood by classical liberals—Adam Smith and others.  The very design of neo-liberal principles is a direct attack on democracy. One component is privatization. You take something out of the public domain, put it into the hands of totalitarian systems, which is what corporations are, and obviously that reduces democracy. Let’s move on to the current primary theme, what is called “trade in services.” It has nothing to do with trade in the usual sense. It’s privatization of services. It’s called “trade” so they can fit it into the trade agreement. It just means selling off services.  What are services? Well, services are anything that a human being could be interested in—education, health, water, air, energy, and so on. “Trade in services” now means putting all of these into the hands of unaccountable totalitarian institutions. If that is achieved, you can have formal democracy quite openly—clean elections, etc.—but it doesn’t matter much because there is nothing for people to have any decisions about, nothing that matters, at least. It’s somewhere else in the hands of unaccountable institutions under the name of “General Agreement on Trade in Services.” That is the leading theme of the current trade negotiations.  Financial Liberalization  A nother component of the neo-liberal package is financial liberalization. It means governments, for example, can’t control capital flight, currencies aren’t regulated, and so on. It’s very well understood by economists what that leads to. Financial liberalization creates what some international economists have called a “virtual senate” of investors and lenders who carry out a “moment-by-moment referendum” on social and economic policies. If they don’t like those policies, they destroy the economy by capital flight, by attacks on currencies, by selling bonds, and so on. The policies that the virtual senate doesn’t like are anything that is “irrational.” “Irrational” means it’s helpful to people, not to profits, and the virtual senate keeps an eye on this second by second. If the government makes the mistake of being irrational, you get huge capital flight, attacks on currency, and so on. It happens all the time and it keeps the countries in line. It means that governments have what is sometimes called a “dual constituency,” one of them is the voters and the other is the virtual senate. You can guess who wins.  All of this is coming to a head right now in what are called “free trade negotiations,” which have practically nothing to do with free trade. There is what is called the Doha Round. Poor countries, the so-called “developing countries”—a euphemism for the former colonial countries—are trying to escape the grip of imperial violence and destruction. They are called “developing countries” whether they are developing or not. They have blocked the Doha Round. But in the West, among the rich, it’s considered a kind of no-brainer; of course we have to implement the Doha Round, we have to bring it to a successful conclusion. Popular opinion is generally opposed, often strongly opposed, in the rich countries too and that is no surprise. If you look at the proposals, which are usually kind of secret—people are not supposed to look at them—they provide great benefits for investors, lenders, and management who are free to set working people against one another all over the world. It’s called “globalization.” The main theme is to set working people against one another so it will naturally follow that wages are lowered, benefits decline, working conditions are harmed, environment is destroyed. It’s a problem for our grandchildren, but planners don’t worry about it. There are also tremendous privileges for management. One component of these agreements is what is called “national treatment.” It means that if, say, General Motors invests in Mexico, they have to be treated like a Mexican company. Better than a Mexican company, because the treatment of General Motors has to meet international trade conditions.  In contrast, if a Mexican comes to the United States, a Mexican of flesh and blood, he or she cannot demand national treatment, obviously. Try that and you might end up in Guantanamo, if you’re lucky. But corporations are different; they have the rights of persons, granted by state power, but rights far beyond those as persons. The so-called “free trade agreements” extend those rights in numerous ways. What all of this means for the so-called “developing countries,” often, is to lock them in to their current state of underdevelopment, at least if they follow the rules.  Climbing the Ladder  T here is a name for this in economic theory. It’s called kicking away the ladder. First climb up the ladder of development yourself and then kick it away. You make sure no one else uses the measures you used to climb to the top—protection of domestic industries, targeted investment, reliance on the state sector for research and development, production and procurement, and a whole bunch of other devices. It’s called free trade.  What the developing countries are supposed to do is pursue comparative advantage. It is supposed to be a wonderful thing. The problem is that “development” means changing comparative advantage, not pursuing it. Development is changing your comparative advantage to a different comparative advantage. Take the history of the United States right after it won independence. Suppose it had followed the advice and pursued its comparative advantage in exporting fur and fish and so on. The scattered population that would live here today would be doing that. But they did not pursue their comparative advantage, they did not follow the rules. What they did was create very high tariffs to prevent superior British textiles from coming in, later superior British steel, and superior industrial machinery. That way the United States was able to change their comparative advantage and become the world’s leading industrial society.  In the 19th century, right up to the mid-20th century, the United States was far in the lead in protectionism, violating all the rules, far more than other industrial countries. That is consistent throughout history. So consistent that a leading economic historian has actually concluded that protectionism enhances trade. It sounds kind of like a paradox, but it seems to work and has a rationale. Protectionism increases growth and growth increases trade. So protectionism seems to enhance trade. A similar conclusion, incidentally, holds into the post-WWII period when other forms of market interference became more prominent. The United States, by pursuing not only protectionist policies, but reliance on the state sector for research and development, became by far the world’s leading economic power.  By 1950 the United States was the richest and most powerful state in history. U.S.-based corporations, and the state that caters to their interest, at that point were willing to sponsor limited free trade, knowing the playing field was not level and they were going to win—so maybe free trade would be okay. But that commitment was hedged with crucial restrictions to insure that the powerful would prevail. The most extreme restriction, which is rarely discussed by economists, is reliance on a dynamic state sector as the engine of growth. It covers practically the whole high-tech economy—computers, Internet, lasers, commercial aircraft. You can go across the board and find that the state sector is critical in development. In the case of computers and the Internet, they were basically in the state sector for about 30 years before being handed over to private power.  It may not be what you learn in economics courses, but this is how the world works. And it makes a lot of sense. When research and development and production and procurement are in the state sector, it means that the public is paying for it and taking the risk. If something works out, maybe 30 years later, like in the case of computers and the Internet, you hand it over to private power to make profits. It’s known as market society, free markets, capitalism, it’s the way things really work.  Britain’s Narco-Trafficking  T he United States did not invent it. If you look at the global dominance of England, that is the way they handled it. In 1846 England shifted to free trade after 150 years of protectionism, state intervention, and imperial violence, which had placed England far in the lead in industrialization, twice as high per capita as any other country. It seemed that competition would be relatively safe, like for the U.S. a century later. But like the U.S. the British hedged their bets. One way was to keep some protected markets, like India, to insure profits. One of the main reasons for conquering India was another form of market interference, trying to monopolize opium production. They did not quite make it—Yankee merchants got a piece of it—but the British came pretty close to monopolizing opium production.  That was extremely important because England was unable to break into the Chinese market. China did not want British goods because they felt their own were superior, and British agents were complaining about that. But England hit on a brilliant way to do it, by developing by far the largest narco-trafficking industry in history. Colombia doesn’t even come close. They tried to monopolize opium production and then forced it on China with gunboats. The enterprise succeeded brilliantly. The China market was opened by what was called “the poison trade” and “the pig trade.” The poison trade meant opium brought in at gunpoint, which turned the country into a nation of opium addicts, creating a market for British exports. The pig trade brought kidnapped Chinese workers to the United States to build the railroads—making a big contribution to U.S. economic development in the 19th century (as well as providing us with the term “Shanghaied”).  The profits from the narco-trafficking racket were enormous. They paid the cost of the Royal Navy, which was the mainstay of imperialism. They paid for administering India, a colony. They paid for the purchase of U.S. cotton—which fueled the industrial revolution, like oil today. That also was not exactly a free market miracle. It was created by extermination of the indigenous population and slavery, rather radical forms of market interference.  But by the 1920s England was facing a situation like the United States did 50 years later—superior Japanese products were driving British products out of the market. Britain handled it the way Reagan did; they closed the empire to Japanese imports. Notice it’s similar to the Reaganite intervention to reindustrialize America in the face of Japanese competition in the 1970s. The general point is that free trade and democracy are just fine when you can make sure that the results come out the right way, otherwise you get rid of them. History is full of that.  After World War II the picture pretty much conforms to the historical pattern. There have been two phases, roughly 1950 to 1975 and 1975 to the present, not exact, but approximately. The first phase was designed under great popular pressure for social democracy, for much more radical measures of democracy and social welfare. The system was designed to leave these options open. The system was designed with capital controls, regulated currencies, and government programs in the third world to stimulate production. It was called “import substitution” and continued roughly into the 1970s. That is a period that economists call “the golden age of capitalism,” state capitalism is a more accurate term. Economic results were better than ever before in history—and ever since. Take the United States. From roughly 1950 to 1975 this was the highest growth period ever in U.S. history and it was egalitarian; growth was about the same for the lowest and highest quintile. An interesting and important fact is that the social indicators that measure the health of the society—infant mortality, child abuse, and a whole collection of measures—rose along with growth. That continued until 1975. Since then social indicators have declined, though growth has gone up, not as fast, but it has gone up. Social indicators declined by the year 2000 to the level of 1960—that is after the very brief and shallow Clinton boom. But since then the record has become much worse in all respects. One startling fact that was just revealed in the business press is that during the current Bush years, the private sector has added no jobs outside of the health sector. One reason there are added jobs there is because it is a total catastrophe, it is the most inefficient public health system in the industrial world. But outside of that no new jobs.  It’s the same in much of the world. In the mid- 1970s we switch to the neo-liberal period. There has been a sharp decline in almost every economic dimension—growth of the economy, growth of productivity, and others. The so-called Asian tigers, like Taiwan and South Korea, ignored the rules and grew very fast. The decline is correlated very closely with following the rules, following the programs. The countries that followed the rules most rigorously have the worst records, like Latin America. Probably worst in their history.  India is a poster child. According to Thomas Friedman, the greatest place in the world, etc., and since 1990 it has partially followed the rules and there has been improvement for a substantial minority of the population. Also in the number of billionaires; it’s now eighth in the world. It is quite a rise. There is also something called the UN ranking for Human Development. Prior to this period in 1990, India was 124th. Now it has sunk to 127th. So much for the “grand economy.”  Z   Part 2 covers democratic challenges to neo-liberalism, mainly coming from Latin America . A DVD of the complete talk is available from www.zmag.org.  

I t goes without saying that what happens in the U.S. has an enormous impact on the rest of the world—and conversely: what happens in the rest of the world cannot fail to have an impact on the U.S., in several ways. First, it sets constraints on what even the most powerful state can do. Second, it influences the domestic U.S. component of “the second superpower,” as the New York Times ruefully described world public opinion after the huge protests before the Iraq invasion. Those protests were a critically important historical event, not only because of their unprecedented scale, but also because it was the first time in hundreds of years of the history of Europe and its North American offshoots that a war was massively protested even before it was officially launched.  We may recall, by comparison, the war against South Vietnam launched by JFK in 1962, brutal and barbaric from the outset: bombing, chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to starve out the civilian support for the indigenous resistance, programs to drive millions of people to virtual concentration camps or urban slums to eliminate its popular base. By the time protests reached a substantial scale, the highly respected and quite hawkish Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall wondered whether “Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity” would escape “extinction” as “the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size”—particularly South Vietnam, always the main target of the U.S. assault. When protest did finally develop, many years too late, it was mostly directed against the peripheral crimes: the extension of the war against the South to the rest of Indochina—hideous crimes, but lesser ones.  It’s quite important to remember how much the world has changed since then. As almost always, not as a result of gifts from benevolent leaders, but through deeply committed popular struggle, far too late in developing, but ultimately effective. One consequence was that the U.S. government could not declare a national emergency, which should have been healthy for the economy, as during World War II when public support was very high. Johnson had to fight a “guns-and-butter” war, buying off an unwilling population, harming the economy, ultimately leading the business classes to turn against the war as too costly, after the Tet Offensive of January 1968 showed that it would go on a long time. There were also concerns among U.S. elites about rising social and political consciousness stimulated by the activism of the 1960s, much of it reaction to the miserable crimes in Indochina, then at last arousing popular indignation. We learn from the last sections of the Pentagon Papers that after the Tet offensive, the military command was reluctant to agree to the president’s call for further troop deployments, wanting to be sure that “sufficient forces would still be available for civil disorder control” in the U.S., and fearing that escalation might run the risk of “provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions.”  The Reagan administration assumed that the problem of an independent, aroused population had been overcome and apparently planned to follow the Kennedy model of the early 1960s in Central America. But they backed off in the face of unanticipated public protest, turning instead to “clandestine war” employing murderous security forces and a huge international terror network. The consequences were terrible, but not as bad as B-52s and mass murder operations of the kind that were peaking when John Kerry was deep in the Mekong Delta in the South, by then largely devastated. The popular reaction to even the “clandestine war,” so called, broke entirely new ground. The solidarity movements for Central America, now in many parts of the world, are again something new in Western history. State managers cannot fail to pay attention to such matters. Routinely, a newly elected president requests an intelligence evaluation of the world situation. In 1989, when Bush I took office, a part was leaked. It warned that when attacking “much weaker enemies”—the only sensible target—the U.S. must win “decisively and rapidly.” Delay might “undercut political support,” recognized to be thin, a great change since the Kennedy-Johnson years when the attack on Indochina, while never popular, aroused little reaction for many years.  The world is pretty awful today, but it is far better than yesterday, not only with regard to unwillingness to tolerate aggression, but also in many other ways, which we now tend to take for granted. There are very important lessons here, which should always be uppermost in our minds—for the same reason they are suppressed in the elite culture.  W ithout forgetting the very significant progress towards more civilized societies in past years, and the reasons for it, let’s focus nevertheless on the notions of imperial sovereignty now being crafted. It is not surprising that as the population becomes more civilized, power systems become more extreme in their efforts to control the “great beast” (as the Founding Fathers called the people). And the great beast is indeed frightening.   The conception of presidential sovereignty crafted by the statist reactionaries of the Bush administration is so extreme that it has drawn unprecedented criticism in the most sober and respected establishment circles. These ideas were transmitted to the president by the newly appointed attorney-general, Alberto Gonzales—who is depicted as a moderate in the press. They are discussed by the respected constitutional law professor Sanford Levinson in the summer 2004 issue of Daedalus , the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  Levinson writes that the conception is based on the principle, “There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos.” The quote, Levinson comments, is from Carl Schmitt, the leading German philosopher of law during the Nazi period, who Levinson describes as “the true éminence grise of the Bush administration.” The Administration, advised by Gonzales, has articulated “a view of presidential authority that is all too close to the power that Schmitt was willing to accord his own Führer,” Levinson writes.  One rarely hears such words from the heart of the establishment.  The same issue of the journal carries an article by two prominent strategic analysts on the “transformation of the military,” a central component of the new doctrines of imperial sovereignty: the rapid expansion of offensive weaponry, including militari- zation of space, and other measures designed to place the entire world at risk of instant annihilation. These have already elicited the anticipated reactions by Russia and recently China. The analysts conclude that these U.S. programs may lead to “ultimate doom.” They express their hope that a coalition of peace-loving states will coalesce as a counter to U.S. militarism and aggressiveness, led by China. We’ve come to a pretty pass when such sentiments are voiced in sober respectable circles not given to hyperbole.  Going back to Gonzales, he transmitted to the president the conclusions of the Justice Department that the president has the authority to rescind the Geneva Conventions—the supreme law of the land, the foundation of modern international humanitarian law. Gonzales, who was then Bush’s legal counsel, advised him that this would be a good idea because rescinding the Conventions “substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution [of administration officials] under the War Crimes Act” of 1996, which carries the death penalty for “grave breaches” of Geneva Conventions.  We can see on today’s front pages why the Justice Department was right to be concerned that the president and his advisers might be subject to the death penalty under the laws passed by the Republican Congress in 1996—and under the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, if anyone took them seriously.  In early November, the NY Times featured a front-page story reporting the conquest of the Falluja General Hospital. It reported, “Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs.” An accompanying photograph depicted the scene. That was presented as an important achievement. “The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Falluja General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.” These “inflated” figures—inflated because our Leader so declares—were “inflaming opinion throughout the country” and the region, driving up “the political costs of the conflict.” The word “conflict” is a common euphemism for U.S. aggression, as when we read on the same pages that the U.S. must now rebuild “what the conflict just destroyed”: just “the conflict,” with no agent, like a hurricane. L et’s go back to the NYT picture and story about the closing of the “propaganda weapon.” There are some relevant documents, including the Geneva Conventions, which state: “Fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the Medical Service may in no circumstances be attacked, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.” So page one of the world’s leading newspaper is cheerfully depicting war crimes for which the political leadership could be sentenced to death under U.S. law.  The world’s greatest newspaper also tells us that the U.S. military “achieved nearly all their objectives well ahead of schedule,” leaving “much of the city in smoking ruins.” But it was not a complete success. There is little evidence of dead “packrats” in their “warrens” or the streets, which remains “an enduring mystery.” The embedded reporters did find a body of a dead woman, though it is “not known whether she was an Iraqi or a foreigner,” apparently the only question that comes to mind.  The front-page account quotes a Marine commander who says, “It ought to go down in the history books.” Perhaps it should. If so, we know on just what page of history it will go down and who will be right beside it, along with those who praise or, for that matter, even tolerate it. At least, we know that if we are capable of honesty.  One might mention at least some of the recent counterparts that immediately come to mind, like the Russian destruction of Grozny ten years ago, a city of about the same size; or Srebrenica, almost universally described as “genocide” in the West. In that case, as we know in detail from a Dutch government report and other sources, the Muslim enclave in Serb territory, inadequately protected, was used as a base for attacks against Serb villages and, when the anticipated reaction took place, it was horrendous. The Serbs drove out all but military age men and then moved in to kill them. There are differences with Falluja. Women and children were not bombed out of Srebrenica, but trucked out and there will be no extensive efforts to exhume the last corpse of the packrats in their warrens in Falluja. There are other differences, arguably unfair to the Serbs.  It could be argued that all this is irrelevant. The Nuremberg Tribunal, spelling out the UN Charter, declared that initiation of a war of aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Hence the war crimes in Falluja and Abu Ghraib, the doubling of acute malnutrition among children since the invasion (now at the level of Burundi, far higher than Haiti or Uganda), and all the rest of the atrocities. Those judged to have played any role in the supreme crime—for example, the German Foreign Minister—were sentenced to death by hanging. The Tokyo Tribunal was far more severe.  There is a very important book on the topic by Canadian international lawyer Michael Mandel, who reviews in convincing detail how the powerful are self-immunized from international law.  In fact, the Nuremberg Tribunal established this principle. To bring the Nazi criminals to justice, it was necessary to devise definitions of “war crime” and “crime against humanity.” How this was done is explained by Telford Taylor, chief counsel for the prosecution and a distinguished international lawyer and historian: “Since both sides [in World War II] had played the terrible game of urban destruction—the Allies far more successfully—there was no basis for criminal charges against Germans or Japanese, and in fact no such charges were brought.... Aerial bombardment had been used so extensively and ruthlessly on the Allied side as well as the Axis side that neither at Nuremberg nor Tokyo was the issue made a part of the trials.”  The operative definition of “crime” is: “Crime that you carried out, but we did not.” To underscore the fact, Nazi war criminals were absolved if the defense could show that their U.S. counterparts carried out the same crimes.  Taylor concludes that “to punish the foe—especially the vanquished foe—for conduct in which the enforcer nation has engaged, would be so grossly inequitable as to discredit the laws themselves.” That is correct, but the operative definition also discredits the laws themselves, along with all subsequent tribunals. Taylor provides this background as part of his explanation of why U.S. bombing in Vietnam was not a war crime. His argument is plausible, further discrediting the laws themselves.  Some of the subsequent judicial inquiries are discredited in perhaps even more extreme ways, such as the Yugoslavia vs. NATO case adjudicated by the International Court of Justice.   The U.S. was excused, correctly, on the basis of its argument that it is not subject to the jurisdiction of the Court in this case. The reason is that when the U.S. finally signed the Genocide Convention (which is at issue here) after 40 years, it did so with a reservation stating that it is not applicable to the United States.  In an outraged comment on the efforts of Justice Department lawyers to demonstrate that the president has the right to authorize torture, Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh said, “The notion that the president has the constitutional power to permit torture is like saying he has the constitutional power to commit genocide.” The president’s legal advisers, and the new attorney-general, should have little difficulty arguing that the president does indeed have that right—if the second superpower permits him to exercise it.  The sacred doctrine of self-immunization is sure to hold for the trial of Saddam Hussein, if it is ever held. We see that every time Bush, Blair, and other worthies in government and commentary lament over the terrible crimes of Saddam Hussein, always bravely omitting the words: “with our help, because we did not care.” Surely no tribunal will be permitted to address the fact that U.S. presidents from Kennedy until today, along with French presidents and British prime ministers, and Western businesses, have been complicit in Saddam’s crimes, sometimes in horrendous ways, including current incumbents and their mentors. In setting up the Saddam tribunal, the State Department consulted U.S. legal expert professor Charif Bassiouni, recently quoted as saying: “All efforts are being made to have a tribunal whose judiciary is not independent but controlled, and by controlled I mean that the political manipulators of the tribunal have to make sure the U.S. and other western powers are not brought in cause. This makes it look like victor’s vengeance: it makes it seem targeted, selected, unfair. It’s a subterfuge.” We hardly need to be told.  The pretext for U.S.-UK aggression in Iraq is what is called the right of “anticipatory self-defense,” now sometimes called “preemptive war” in a perversion of that concept. The right of anticipatory self-defense was affirmed officially in the Bush administration National Security Strategy of September 2002, declaring Washington’s right to resort to force to eliminate any potential challenge to its global dominance. The NSS was widely criticized among the foreign policy elite, beginning with an article in the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs , warning that “the new imperial grand strategy” could be very dangerous. Criticism continued, again at an unprecedented level, but on narrow grounds—not that the doctrine itself was wrong, but rather its style and manner of presentation. Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright summed the criticism up accurately, also in FA . She pointed out that every president has such a doctrine in his back pocket, but it is foolish to smash people in the face with it and to implement it in a manner that will infuriate even allies. That is threatening to U.S. interests and therefore wrong.  Albright knew, of course, that Clinton had a similar doctrine. The Clinton doctrine advocated “unilateral use of military power” to defend vital interests, such as “ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources,” without even the pretexts that Bush and Blair devised. Taken literally, the Clinton doctrine is more expansive than Bush’s NSS. But the more expansive Clinton doctrine was barely even reported. It was presented with the right style and implemented less brazenly.  Henry Kissinger described the Bush doctrine as “revolutionary,” pointing out that it undermines the 17th century Westphalian system of international order and of course the UN Charter and international law. He approved of the doctrine, but with reservations about style and tactics and with a crucial qualification: it cannot be “a universal principle available to every nation.” Rather, the right of aggression must be reserved to the U.S., perhaps delegated to chosen clients. We must forcefully reject the principle of universality—that we apply to ourselves the same standards we do to others, more stringent ones if we are serious. Kissinger is to be praised for his honesty in forthrightly articulating prevailing doctrine, usually concealed in professions of virtuous intent and tortured legalisms. He understands his educated audience. As he doubtless expected, there was no reaction. His understanding of his audience was illustrated again, rather dramatically, last May, when Kissinger-Nixon tapes were released, over Kissinger’s strong objections. There was a report in the world’s leading newspaper. It mentioned, in passing, the orders to bomb Cambodia that Kissinger transmitted from Nixon to the military commanders. In Kissinger’s words, “A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” It is rare for a call for horrendous war crimes—what we would not hesitate to call “genocide” if others were responsible—to be so stark and explicit. It would be interesting to see if there is anything like it in archival records. The publication elicited no reaction, refuting Dean Koh. Apparently, it is taken for granted in the elite culture that the president and his National Security adviser do have the right to order genocide.  Imagine the reaction if the prosecutors at the Milosevic Tribunal could find anything remotely similar. They would be overjoyed, the trial would be over, Milosevic would receive several life sentences, the death penalty if the Tribunal adhered to U.S. law.  But that is them, not us.  T he principle of universality is the most elementary of moral truisms. It is the foundation of “just war theory” and of every system of morality deserving of anything but contempt. Rejection of such moral truisms is so deeply rooted in the intellectual culture as to be invisible. To illustrate again how deeply entrenched it is, let’s return to the principle of “anticipatory self-defense,” adopted as legitimate by both political organizations in the U.S. and across virtually the entire spectrum of articulate opinion, apart from the usual margins. The principle has some immediate corollaries. If the U.S. is granted the right of “anticipatory self-defense” against terror, then, certainly, Cuba, Nicaragua, and a host of others have long been entitled to carry out terrorist acts within the U.S. because there is no doubt of its involvement in very serious terrorist attacks against them, extensively documented in impeccable sources and, in the case of Nicaragua, even condemned by the World Court and the Security Council (in two resolutions that the U.S. vetoed, with Britain loyally abstaining). The conclusion that Cuba and Nicaragua, among many others, have long had the right to carry out terrorist atrocities in the U.S. is of course utterly outrageous and advocated by no one. Thanks to our self-determined immunity from moral truisms, there is no fear that anyone will draw the outrageous conclusions.  There are still more outrageous ones. No one, for example, celebrates Pearl Harbor day by applauding the fascist leaders of Imperial Japan. But by our standards, the bombing of military bases in the U.S. colonies of Hawaii and the Philippines seems rather innocuous. The Japanese leaders knew that B-17 Flying Fortresses were coming off the Boeing production lines and were surely familiar with the public discussions in the U.S. explaining how they could be used to incinerate Japan’s wooden cities in a war of extermination, flying from Hawaiian and Philippine bases—“to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bombing attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps,” as retired Air Force General Chennault recommended in 1940, a proposal that “simply delighted” President Roosevelt. That’s a far more powerful justification for anticipatory self-defense than anything conjured up by Bush-Blair and their associates—and accepted, with tactical reservations, throughout the mainstream of articulate opinion.  Examples can be enumerated virtually at random. To add one last one, consider the most recent act of NATO aggression prior to the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq: the bombing of Serbia in 1999. The justification is supposed to be that there were no diplomatic options and that it was necessary to stop ongoing genocide. It is not hard to evaluate these claims.  As for diplomatic options, when the bombing began, there were two proposals on the table, a NATO and a Serbian proposal. After 78 days of bombing a compromise was reached between them—formally at least. It was immediately undermined by NATO. All of this quickly vanished into the mists of unacceptable history, to the limited extent that it was ever reported.  What about ongoing genocide—to use the term that appeared hundreds of times in the press as NATO geared up for war?  That is unusually easy to investigate. There are two major documentary studies by the State Department, offered to justify the bombing, along with extensive documentary records from the OSCE, NATO, and other Western sources, and a detailed British Parliamentary Inquiry. All agree on the basic facts: the atrocities followed the bombing, they were not its cause. Furthermore, that was predicted by the NATO command, as General Wesley Clark informed the press right away and confirmed in more detail in his memoirs. The Milosevic indictment, issued during the bombing—surely as a propaganda weapon, despite implausible denials—and relying on U.S.-UK intelligence as announced at once, yields the same conclusion: virtually all the charges are post-bombing.  Such annoyances are handled quite easily. The Western documentation is commonly expunged in the media and even scholarship. The chronology is regularly reversed, so that the anticipated consequences of the bombing are transmuted into its cause. There were indeed pre-bombing atrocities: about 2,000 were killed in the year before the March 1999 bombing, according to Western sources. The British, the most hawkish element of the coalition, made the astonishing claim—hard to believe just on the basis of the balance of forces—that until January 1999 most of the killings were by the Albanian KLA guerrillas attacking civilians and soldiers in cross-border raids in the hope of eliciting a harsh Serbian response that could be used for propaganda purposes in the West, as they candidly reported, apparently with CIA support in the last months. Western sources indicate no substantial change until the bombing was announced and the monitors withdrawn a few days before the March bombing.  In one of the few works of scholarship that even mentions the unusually rich documentary record, Nicholas Wheeler concludes that 500 of the 2,000 were killed by Serbs. He supports the bombing on the grounds that there would have been worse Serbian atrocities had NATO not bombed, eliciting the anticipated crimes. That’s the most serious scholarly work. The press, and much of scholarship, chose the easier path of ignoring Western documentation and reversing the chronology.  I t is all too easy to continue. But the—unpleasantly consistent—record leaves open a crucial question: how does the “great beast” react, the domestic U.S. component of the second superpower? The conventional answer is that the population approves of all of this, as just shown by the election of George Bush. But as is often the case, a closer look is helpful.  Each candidate received about 30 percent of the electoral vote, Bush a bit more, Kerry a bit less. General voting patterns were close to the 2000 elections; almost the same “red” and “blue” states, in the conventional metaphor. A few percent shift in vote would have meant that Kerry would be in the White House. Neither outcome could tell us much of any significance about the mood of the country, even of voters. Issues of substance were as usual kept out of the campaign or presented so obscurely that few could understand.  It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars. Their professional concern in their regular vocation is not to provide information. Their goal, rather, is deceit. But deceit is quite expensive: complex graphics showing the car with a sexy actor or a sports hero or climbing a sheer cliff or some other device to project an image that might deceive the consumer into buying this car instead of the virtually identical one produced by a competitor. The same is true of elections, run by the same public relations industry.  The goal is to project images, and deceive the public into accepting them, while sidelining issues—for good reasons.  The population seems to grasp the nature of the performance. Right before the 2000 elections, about 75 percent regarded it as virtually meaningless, some game involving rich contributors, party managers, and candidates who are trained to project images that conceal issues, but might pick up some votes. This is probably why the “stolen election” was an elite concern that did not seem to arouse much public interest; if elections have about as much significance as flipping a coin to pick the King, who cares if the coin was biased?  Right before the 2004 election, about 10 percent of voters said their choice would based on the candidate’s “agendas/ideas/platforms/goals”; 6 percent for Bush voters, 13 percent for Kerry voters. For the rest, the choice would be based on what the industry calls “qualities” and “values.” Does the candidate project the image of a strong leader, the kind of guy you’d like to meet in a bar, someone who really cares about you and is just like you? It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that Bush is carefully trained to say “nucular” and “misunderestimate” and the other silliness that intellectuals like to ridicule. That’s probably about as real as the ranch constructed for him and the rest of the folksy manner. After all, it wouldn’t do to present him as a spoiled frat boy from Yale who became rich and powerful thanks to his rich and powerful connections. Rather, the imagery has to be an ordinary guy just like us, who’ll protect us, and who shares our “moral values,” more so than the windsurfing goose-hunter who can be accused of faking his medals.  Bush received a large majority among voters who said they were concerned primarily with “moral values” and “terrorism.” We learn all we have to know about the moral values of the Administration by reading the pages of the business press the day after the election, describing the “euphoria” in board rooms—not because CEOs are opposed to gay marriage. Or by observing the principle, hardly concealed, that the very serious costs incurred by the Bush planners, in their dedicated service to power and wealth, are to be transferred to our children and grandchildren, including fiscal costs, environmental destruction, and perhaps “ultimate doom.” These are the moral values, loud and clear.  The commitment of Bush planners to “defense against terrorism” is illustrated most dramatically, perhaps, by their decision to escalate the threat of terror, as had been predicted even by their own intelligence agencies, not because they enjoy terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens, but because it is, plainly, a low priority for them—surely as compared with such goals as establishing secure military bases in a dependent client state at the heart of the world’s energy resources, recognized since World War II as the “most strategically important area of the world,” “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” It is critically important to ensure that “profits beyond the dreams of avarice”—to quote a leading history of the oil industry—flow in the right directions, i.e., to U.S. energy corporations, the Treasury Department, U.S. high tech (militarized) industry, huge construction firms, and so on. Even more important is the stupendous strategic power. Having a firm hand on the spigot guarantees “veto power” over rivals, as George Kennan pointed out over 50 years ago. In the same vein, Zbigniew Brzezinski recently wrote that control over Iraq gives the U.S. “critical leverage” over European and Asian economies, a major concern of planners since World War II. Rivals are to keep to their “regional responsibilities” within the “overall framework of order” managed by the U.S., as Kissinger instructed them in his “Year of Europe” address 30 years ago. That is even more urgent today, as the major rivals threaten to move in an independent course, maybe even united. The EU and China became each other’s leading trading partners in 2004 and those ties are becoming tighter, including the world’s second largest economy, Japan. Critical leverage is more important than ever for world control in the tripolar world that has been evolving for over 30 years. In comparison, the threat of terror is a minor consideration—though the threat is known to be awesome. Long before 9/11 it was understood that, sooner or later, the Jihadist terror organized by the U.S. and its allies in the 1980s was likely to combine with WMDs, with horrifying consequences.  Notice that the crucial issue with regard to Middle East oil—about two-thirds of estimated world resources, and unusually easy to extract—is control, not access. U.S. policies towards the Middle East were the same when it was a net exporter of oil and remain the same today when U.S. intelligence projects that the U.S. will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources.   Policies would be likely to be about the same if the U.S. were to switch to renewable energy. The need to control the “stupendous source of strategic power” and to gain “profits beyond the dreams of avarice” would remain. Jockeying over Central Asia and pipeline routes reflects similar concerns.  There are plenty of other illustrations of the same ranking of priorities. To mention one, the Treasury Department has a bureau (OFAC, Office of Foreign Assets Control) that is assigned the task of investigating suspicious financial transfers, a crucial component of the “war on terror.” OFAC has 120 employees. Last April, the White House informed Congress that four are assigned to tracking the finances of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, while almost two dozen are dedicated to enforcing the embargo against Cuba—incidentally, declared illegal by every relevant international organization, even the usually compliant Organization of American States. From 1990 to 2003, OFAC informed Congress, there were 93 terrorism-related investigations with $9,000 in fines; and 11,000 Cuba-related investigations with $8 million in fines.  Why should the Treasury Department devote vastly more energy to strangling Cuba than to the war on terror? The basic reasons were explained in secret documents 40 years ago, when the Kennedy administration sought to bring “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba, as historian (and Kennedy confidante) Arthur Schlesinger recounted in his biography of Robert Kennedy, who ran the terror operations as his highest priority. State Department planners warned that the “very existence” of the Castro regime is “successful defiance” of U.S. policies going back 150 years, to the Monroe Doctrine; no Russians, but intolerable defiance of the master of the hemisphere. Furthermore, this successful defiance encourages others, who might be infected by the “Castro idea of taking matters into their own hands,” Schlesinger had warned incoming President Kennedy, summarizing the report of the President’s Latin American mission. These dangers are particularly grave, Schlesinger elaborated, when “the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes…and the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living.” Let’s return to the great beast. U.S. public opinion is studied with great care and depth. Studies released right before the election showed that those planning to vote for Bush assumed that the Republican Party shared their views, even though the Party explicitly rejected them. Pretty much the same was true of Kerry supporters. The major concerns of Kerry supporters were economy and health care and they assumed that he shared their views on these matters, just as Bush voters assumed, with comparable justification, that Republicans shared their views.  In brief, those who bothered to vote mostly accepted the imagery concocted by the PR industry, which had only the vaguest resemblance to reality. That’s apart from the more wealthy who tend to vote their class interests.   What about actual public attitudes? Again, right before the election, major studies were released reporting them—and we see right away why it is a good idea to base elections on deceit, very much as in the fake markets of the doctrinal system. Here are a few examples: A considerable majority believe that the U.S. should accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court; sign the Kyoto protocols; allow the UN to take the lead in international crises (including security, reconstruction, and political transition in Iraq); rely on diplomatic and economic measures more than military ones in the “war on terror,” and use force only if there is “strong evidence that the country is in imminent danger of being attacked,” thus rejecting the bipartisan consensus on “pre-emptive war” and adopting a rather conventional interpretation of the UN Charter. A majority even favor giving up the Security Council veto.  Overwhelming majorities favor expansion of purely domestic programs: primarily health care (80 percent), but also aid to education and Social Security. Similar results have long been found in these studies, carried out by the most reputable organizations that monitor public opinion. In other mainstream polls, about 80 percent favor guaranteed health care even if it would raise taxes—a national health care system is likely to reduce expenses considerably, avoiding the heavy costs of bureaucracy, supervision, paperwork, etc., some of the factors that render the U.S. privatized system the most inefficient in the industrial world. Public opinion has been similar for a long time, with numbers varying depending on how questions are asked. The facts are sometimes discussed in the press, with public preferences noted, but dismissed as “politically impossible.” That happened again on the eve of the 2004 elections. A few days before (October 31), the NY Times reported, “There is so little political support for government intervention in the health care market in the United States that Senator John Kerry took pains in a recent presidential debate to say that his plan for expanding access to health insurance would not create a new government program”—what the majority want, so it appears. But it is politically impossible and there is too little political support, meaning that the insurance companies, HMOs, pharmaceutical industries, Wall Street, etc., are opposed.  It is notable that these views are held by people in virtual isolation. Their preferences do not enter into the political campaigns and only marginally into articulate opinion in media and journals. The same extends to other domains and raises important questions about a “democratic deficit” in the world’s most important state, to adopt the phrase we use for others.  What would the results of the election have been if the parties, either of them, had been willing to articulate people’s concerns on the issues they regard as vitally important? Or if these issues could enter into public discussion within the mainstream? We can only speculate about that, but we do know that it does not happen and that the facts are scarcely even reported. It seems reasonable to suppose that fear of the great beast is rather deep.  The operative concept of democracy is revealed very clearly in other ways as well. Perhaps the most extraordinary was the distinction between Old and New Europe in the run-up to the Iraq war. The criterion for membership was so clear that it took real discipline to miss it. Old Europe—the bad guys—were the governments that took the same stand as the large majority of the population. New Europe—the exciting hope for a democratic future—were the Churchillian leaders like Berlusconi and Aznar who disregarded even larger majorities of the population and submissively took their orders from Crawford, Texas. The most dramatic case was Turkey, where, to everyone’s surprise, the government actually followed the will of 95 percent of the population. The official administration moderate, Colin Powell, immediately announced harsh punishment for this crime. Turkey was bitterly condemned in the national press for lacking “democratic credentials.” The most extreme example was Paul Wolfowitz, who berated the Turkish military for not compelling the government to follow Washington’s orders and demanded that they apologize and publicly recognize that the goal of a properly functioning democracy is to help the U.S. In other ways, too, the operative concept of democracy is scarcely concealed. The lead think-piece in the NY Times on the death of Yasser Arafat opened by saying, “The post-Arafat era will be the latest test of a quintessentially American article of faith: that elections provide legitimacy even to the frailest institutions.” In the final paragraph, on the continuation page, we read that Washington “resisted new national elections among the Palestinians” because Arafat would win and gain “a fresher mandate” and elections “might help give credibility and authority to Hamas” as well. In other words, democracy is fine if the results come out the right way; otherwise, to the flames.  To take just one crucial current example, a year ago, after other pretexts for invading Iraq had collapsed, Bush’s speech writers had to come up with something to replace them. They settled on what the liberal press calls “the president’s messianic vision to bring democracy” to Iraq, the Middle East, the whole world. The reactions were intriguing. They ranged from rapturous acclaim for the vision, which proved that this was the most noble war in history (David Ignatius, veteran Washington Post correspondent) to critics who agreed that the vision was noble and inspiring, but might be beyond our reach because Iraqi culture is just not ready for such progress towards our civilized values. We have to temper the messianic idealism of Bush and Blair with some sober realism, the London Financial Times advised.  The interesting fact is that it was presupposed uncritically across the spectrum that the messianic vision must be the goal of the invasion, not this silly business about WMDs and al-Qaeda, no longer credible to elite opinion. What is the evidence that the U.S. and Britain are guided by the messianic vision? There is indeed a single piece of evidence: our leaders proclaimed it. What more could be needed?  There is one sector of opinion that had a different view: the Iraqis. Just as the messianic vision was unveiled in Washington to reverent applause, a U.S.-run poll of Baghdadis was released. Some agreed with the near-unanimous stand of Western elite opinion that the goal of the invasion was to bring democracy to Iraq. One percent. Five percent thought the goal was to help Iraqis. The majority assumed the obvious: the U.S. wants to control Iraq’s resources and use its base there to reorganize the region in its interest. Baghdadis agree that there is a problem of cultural backwardness: in the West, not in Iraq. Actually, their views were more nuanced. Though 1 percent believed that the goal of the invasion was to bring democracy, about half felt that the U.S. wanted democracy, but would not allow Iraqis to run their democracy “without U.S. pressure and influence.” They understand the quintessentially American faith very well, perhaps because it was the quintessentially British faith while Britain’s boot was on their necks. They don’t have to know the history of Wilsonian idealism or Britain’s noble counterpart or France’s civilizing mission or the even more exalted vision of Japanese fascists and many others—probably also close to a historical universal. Their own experience is enough.  At the outset, I mentioned the notable successes of popular struggles in the past decades, very clear if we think about it a little, but rarely discussed, for reasons that are not hard to discern. Both recent history and public attitudes suggest some straightforward strategies for short-term activism on the part of those who don’t want to wait for China to save us from “ultimate doom.” We enjoy great privilege and freedom, remarkable by comparative and historical standards. That legacy was not granted from above, it was won by dedicated struggle, which does not reduce to pushing a lever every few years. We can abandon that legacy and take the easy way of pessimism—everything is hopeless, so I’ll quit. Or we can make use of that legacy to work to create—in part re-create—the basis for a functioning democratic culture in which the public plays some role in determining policies, not only in the political arena from which it is largely excluded, but also in the crucial economic arena, from which it is excluded in principle.  These are hardly radical ideas. They were articulated clearly, for example, by the leading 20th century social philosopher in the U.S., John Dewey, who pointed out that until “industrial feudalism” is replaced by “industrial democracy,” politics will remain “the shadow cast by big business over society.” Dewey was as “American as apple pie,” in the familiar phrase. He was in fact drawing from a long tradition of thought and action that had developed independently in working class culture from the origins of the industrial revolution. Such ideas remain just below the surface and can become a living part of our societies, cultures, and institutions. But like other victories for justice and freedom over the centuries, that will not happen by itself. One of the clearest lessons of history, including recent history, is that rights are not granted; they are won. The rest is up to us.   Noam Chomsky is a social critic, and author of numerous articles and books, including Hegemony or Survival? (Owl/Metropolitan Books, 2003) and Pirates and Emperors, Old and New (South End Press, 2002). This article is based on a talk in Toronto, November 21, 2004, sponsored by Canadian Dimensions magazine

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