Year 501 Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky. Published by South End Press.
Chapter 3: North-South/East-West Segment 5/14
Previous segment | Next segment | Contents | Overview | Archive | ZNet


The Cuban missile crisis of 1962, revealing extreme Soviet vulnerability, led to a huge increase in military spending, levelling off by the late 1970s. The economy was then visibly stagnating and the autocracy unable to control rising dissidence. The command economy had carried out basic industrial development but was unable to proceed to more advanced stages, and also suffered from the global recession that devastated much of the South. By the 1980s, the system collapsed, and the core countries, always far richer and more powerful, "won the Cold War." Much of the Soviet empire will probably return to its traditional Third World status, with the old CP privileged class (the Nomenklatura) taking on the role of the Third World elites linked to international business and financial interests.14

A 1990 World Bank report describes the outcome in these terms: "The Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China have until recently been among the most prominent examples of relatively successful countries that deliberately turned from the global economy," relying on their "vast size" to make "inward-looking development more feasible than it would be for most countries," but "they eventually decided to shift policies and take a more active part in the global economy." A more accurate rendition would be that their "vast size" made it possible for them to withstand the refusal of the West to allow them to take part in the global economy on terms other than traditional subordination, the "active part in the global economy" dictated to the South by the world rulers.15

Throughout the period, great efforts have been undertaken to present the Soviet Union as larger than life, about to overwhelm us. The most important Cold War document, NSC 68 of April 1950, sought to conceal the Soviet weakness that was unmistakably revealed by analysis, so as to convey the required image of the "slave state" pursuing its "implacable purpose" of gaining "absolute authority" over the world, its way barred only by the United States, with its almost unimaginable nobility and perfection. So awesome was the threat that Americans must come to accept "the necessity for just suppression" as a crucial feature of "the democratic way." They must accept "a large measure of sacrifice and discipline," including thought control and a shift of government spending from social programs to "defense and foreign assistance" (in translation: subsidy for advanced industry and export promotion). In a 1948 book, liberal activist Cord Meyer, an influential figure in the CIA, wrote that the right to strike must be "denied" if it is not voluntarily restricted, given "the urgency of [the] defense plans" required. And "citizens of the United States will have to accustom themselves to the ubiquitous presence of the powerful secret police needed for protection against sabotage and espionage." As under Wilson, fascist methods are needed to guard against the threat to "stability."

By 1980, no one with eyes open could fail to perceive the "loss of hegemony and relative economic decline" of both superpowers "as the bipolar system of the postwar years has gradually evolved to something more complex," and the corresponding decline of "the Cold War system that proved so useful for both superpowers as a device for controlling their allies and mobilizing domestic support for the ugly and often costly measures required to impose the desired form of order and stability on their respective domains." Nor was there any doubt as to their relative strength and influence, as the CDI and other sane analysts were aware. Nevertheless, the period was marked by rising hysteria about the gargantuan Soviet system, leaping from strength to strength, straddling the globe, challenging the US and even threatening its survival, establishing positions of strength in Cambodia, Nicaragua, Mozambique, and other such crucial centers of strategic power.16

These delusionary efforts were accompanied by much fantasy about Soviet military spending. Again, no little ingenuity was required, if only because the Pentagon's own figures in 1982 showed that NATO (including the US, facing no foreign threat) outspent the Warsaw Pact (including the USSR, deploying much of its force on the border with its Chinese enemy) by $250 billion from 1971 to 1980. But these figures, as economist Franklyn Holzman has been demonstrating for some years, are inaccurate, much overstating Soviet strength. When corrected, they reveal a total gap in NATO's favor of about $700 billion for the decade of the 1970s. The Carter military build-up, extended under Reagan, and pressures on the NATO powers to do the same, were "justified in part by the false claims of a steady increase in the Soviet rate of military spending," Raymond Garthoff observes: "The `relentless Soviet buildup' to an important extent reflected an American error in estimating Soviet outlays, rather than being a `disquieting index of Soviet intentions'," as claimed during the late Carter years, and "the American lead in absolute numbers of strategic bombs and warheads actually widened between 1970 and 1980." Holzman makes a strong case that the errors involved "deliberate [CIA] distortion" from the late 1970s, under intense political pressure.17

Exaggeration of the enemy's power is a characteristic feature of the North-South conflict; at the outer limits, one hears that Sandinistas were about to march on Texas, even that Grenada was a menace, "strategically located" to threaten US oil supplies, as "the Cubans surely appreciate" (Robert Leiken). The procedure was not invented with the Cold War. "A review of alarmist scenarios from the past might well begin with the threat from Chile posited in the 1880s by advocates of a new navy," John Thompson observes, reviewing the "tradition" of "exaggeration of American vulnerability." Recall as well the "mingled hordes of lawless Indians and negroes" who compelled us to conquer Florida in self-defense, and on back to colonial days.18

The purpose is transparent. The cultural managers must have at hand the tools to do their work. And apart from the most cynical, planners must convince themselves of the justice of the actions, often monstrous, that they plan and implement. There are only two pretexts: self-defense and benevolence. It need not be assumed that use of the tools is mere deception or careerism, though sometimes it is. Nothing is easier than to convince oneself of the merits of actions and policies that serve self-interest. Expressions of benevolent intent, in particular, must be regarded with much caution: they can be taken seriously when the policies advocated happen to be harmful to self-interest, a historical category that is vanishingly small.

In the Cold War case, there is another factor that may have helped extend the delusional system beyond its normal practitioners: the Russians had their own reasons for depicting themselves as an awesome superpower marching on towards a still grander future. When the world's two major propaganda systems agree on some doctrine, however fanciful, it is not easy to escape its grip.

A striking example is the delusion that the Cold War was a struggle between socialism and capitalism. The Soviet Union, from 1917, has been even more remote from socialism than the US and its allies have been from capitalism, but again, both major propaganda systems have had a longstanding interest in claiming otherwise: the West, so as to defame socialism by associating it with Leninist tyranny, and the USSR, so as to gain what prestige it could by associating itself with socialist ideals -- ideals whose force was powerful and wide-ranging. "I believe that socialism is the grandest theory ever presented, and I am sure some day it will rule the world," Andrew Carnegie told the New York Times, and when it does, "we will have attained the millennium." To this day, almost half the population find the phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" to be such an obvious truth that they attribute it to the US Constitution, a text largely unknown but taken to be akin to Holy Writ. The absurd association of Bolshevik tyranny with socialist freedom was doubtless reinforced by the accord between the two major doctrinal systems, though for intellectuals, the appeal of Lenin's authoritarian deviation from the socialist tradition has deeper roots.19

By the early 1980s it was becoming impossible to sustain the illusion of Soviet power, and a few years later, it was laid to rest.


Go to the next segment.

14 See Charles S. Maier, Why Did Communism Collapse in 1989?, Program on Central and Eastern Europe, Working Paper Series #7, Jan. 1991.

15 World Bank statement published in Trócaire Development Review, op. cit. (ch. 2, n. 46).

16 Quotes from TNCW, 3, 204. On NSC 68, see DD, ch. 1.1. Meyer, cited by Pisani, CIA, from his Peace or Anarchy.

17 Holzman, Challenge, May/June 1992. Garthoff, Détente, 793-800. In an addendum of June 11, 1992, Holzman notes that a Review Committee of 5 distinguished economists set up by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence found the same technical problems and was unable to get satisfactory explanations in face-to-face meetings with the responsible CIA analysts, who were described as lacking in "candor."

18 Leiken, Foreign Policy, Spring 1981; cited by Schoultz, National Security, a useful review of the delusional systems of planners, whether real or contrived, one can only speculate. See DD, ch. 3.6, for further discussion. Thompson, Diplomatic History, Winter 1992.

19 Carnegie, cited in Krause, Homestead, 235. 1987 poll cited by Lobel, Less than Perfect, 3. See APNM, ch. 1; "Intellectuals and the State," reprinted in TNCW.