Editor’s Introduction
The remaining Republican candidates, led by Donald Trump are pushing the slogan, “Let’s make America Great Again.” You may be wondering when America was great, and by great do they mean Empire Great or Democracy Great. Well, it turns out that to the remaining GOP candidates, America was great when Reagan was president. Seriously? Let’s go to Noam Chomsky’s article in the December 2015 issue of Z magazine for a report on Reagan’s presidency, in case you need a reminder, followed by more evidence on this so-called greatness in excerpts from The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism.
Ronald Reagan, One Of The Great Criminals Of The Modern Era
The stunning illustration of the success of propaganda—which had an impact on the future—is the cult of the great killer and torturer, Ronald Reagan, one of the grand criminals of the modern era who had an unerring instinct for favoring the most brutal murderers and terrorists around the world—from the most dedicated killers in Latin America to the South African racists who killed an estimated 1.5 million people during the Reagan years and had to be supported by the U.S. as they were under attack from Mandela’s African National Congress, one of the notorious “terrorists” groups in the world, as the Reaganites determined in 1988 and on and on with remarkable consistency.
“Naturally, Reagan’s brutal record was quickly expunged in favor of mythic constructions that would have impressed Kim Il Sung. Among other feats, he was anointed as the apostle of free markets while raising protectionist barriers more than probably all other post-war presidents combined—and while implementing massive interventions in the economy. He was a great exponent of law and order while he informed the business world that labor laws would not be enforced so illegal firing of union organizers tripled under his supervision. His hatred for working people was exceeded only by his contempt for the “rich black women driving their limousines to collect their welfare checks.”
“The outcome taught us quite a lot about the intellectual and moral culture which we live in. For President Obama, this monstrous creature was a transformative figure.”
The Washington Connection Facts vs. Belief
This study, consisting of two related volumes, deals with relations between the United States and the Third World. It has a dual focus: on facts and on beliefs. The basic fact is that the United States has organized under its sponsorship and protection a neocolonial system of client states ruled mainly by terror and serving the interests of a small local and foreign business and military elite. The fundamental belief, or ideological pretense, is that United States is dedicated to furthering the cause of democracy and human rights throughout the world, though it may occasionally err in the pursuit of this objective.
Since 1960, over 18 Latin American regimes have been subjected to military takeovers—a “domino effect” neglected in the West. U.S. influence has been crucial in this process, in some cases by means of deliberate subversion or even direct aggression, but invariably important given the substantial economic and military penetration and presence of the superpower. The phenomenon itself is neither new nor confined to Latin America. The fate of Guatemalan democracy, subverted by the CIA in 1954 in favor of a regime of torture and oppression, can be matched with that of Iran a year earlier; and the Philippines, brutally subjugated at the turn of the century and has now been stripped of its short-lived democratic facade without a word of protest by the United States. This, and the subsequent sharp increases in economic and military aid to the martial law government of Marcos, not only reflect a familiar and traditional pattern, they are also compelling evidence of approval and support.
The ugly proclivities of the U.S. clients, including the systemic use of torture, are functionally related to the needs of U.S. business interests, helping to stifle unions and certain reformist threats that might interfere with business freedom of action. The proof of the pudding is that U.S. bankers and industrialists have consistently welcomed the “stability” of the new client fascist order, whose governments, while savage in their treatment of dissidents, priests, labor leaders, peasant organizers, or others who threaten “order,” and at best are indifferent to the mass of the population, have been most accommodating to large external interests. In an important sense, therefore, the torturers in the client states are functionaries of IBM, Citibank, Allis Chalmers, and the U.S. government, playing their assigned roles in a system that has worked according to choice, and plan.
With the spread and huge dimensions of the empire of Third World Fascism, complete with death squads, torture, and repression, the gap between fact and belief has become a yawning chasm. The ideological institutions—the press, schools, and universities—thus face a growing challenge. It is, one might have thought, a formidable task to transmute increasing numbers of fascist thugs into respectable “leaders” worthy of our subsidies and active support. Equally serious is the problem of depicting the United States as fit to judge and assess the human rights record of other states, in this context of sponsorship of an international mafia, and immediately after its own prolonged and brutal assault on the peasant societies of Indochina. Nevertheless, these formidable tasks have been accomplished without notable difficulty, and the credibility gap has been successfully bridged by a very effective system of rewriting history; of selecting, processing, and creating current “information.”
The picture that emerges from our inquiry seems to us a very grim one, both at the level of fact and with regard to the capacity of Western ideological institutions to falsify, obscure, and reinterpret the facts in the interest of those who dominate the economic and political system. But this system is not all-powerful, as millions of people learned from their own experience during the U.S. war in Indochina. Until 1965, it was virtually impossible to gain a hearing for any principled opposition to the U.S. military intervention in Indochina, already well-advanced by that time. By “principled opposition” we mean opposition to the U.S. military intervention based not on an estimate of national costs and benefits, but on the view that the United States has no unique right to exercise force and violence to gain its objectives.
Later, a hearing of sorts did become possible, partly through organizations and publications associated with the peace movement and partly as a result of the news value of peace activism as it assumed mass proportions. The “Free Press” remained largely closed to direct access by the movement throughout the war. The peace movement also had to overcome the obstacle of active state hostility to its efforts. It is now well known that the U.S. government deployed its national political police in a major effort to undermine and destroy the mass movement of the 1960s. Nevertheless, it continued to grow and undoubtedly had an impact on the decisions ultimately taken at the center, without however, modifying the structure of domestic power in a meaningful way.
The common view that internal freedom makes for humane and moral international behavior is supported neither by historical evidence nor by reason. The United States has a long history of imposing oppressive and terrorists regimes in regions of the world within the reach of its power, such as the Caribbean and Central American sugar and “banana republic.” This has occurred despite some modest ideological strain because these developments serve the needs of powerful and dominant interests, state and private, within the United States itself.
Freedom, Aggression And Human Rights
The Vietnam War experience is often cited to prove the importance of freedom and dissent in constraining state violence. This assessment seriously misreads the facts of the case. Peace movement activism growing from contributing to the popular movements for equality, freedom, and social change within the United States, did succeed in raising the domestic costs of the U.S. assault, thus helping to limit in some degree its scope and severity and contributing to the eventual decision that the game was not worth the candle. It did so, of course, mainly by employing modalities that are outside the framework of existing organizing, and wide-ranging educational efforts were needed to counter the deep commitment of existing institutions to the protection and furthering of the interests of state and private power.
The established “free” institutions supported the war, for the most part enthusiastically and uncritically, occasionally with minor and qualified reservations. The principled opposition, based on grounds other than cost effectiveness, functioned outside the major institutional structures. The peace movement frightened Western elites. The response of the U.S. (indeed the Free World) leadership to the politicization of large parts of the population during the 1960s provides a revealing indication of their concept of “democracy” and of the role of the public in the “democratic process.” In 1975, the Trilateral Commission, representing the more liberal elements of ruling groups in the industrial democracies, published a study entitled “The Crisis of Democracy” which interprets public participation in decision-making as a threat to democracy, one that must be contained if elite domination is to persist unhindered by popular demands. The population must be reduced to apathy and conformism if “democracy,” as interpreted by this liberal contingent, is to be kept workable and allowed to survive. The most crucial fact relating freedom to the Vietnam War experience is that, despite its free institutions, for over two decades, the United States attempted to subjugate Vietnam by force and subversion, in the process violating the UN Charter, the Geneva Accords of 1954, the Nuremberg Code, the Hague Convention, the Geneva Protocol of 1925, and finally the Paris Agreements of 1973. For almost a decade, the peasants of Indochina served as experimental animals for an evolving military technology—cluster bombs, rockets designed to enter caves where people hid to escape saturation bombing, a fiendish array of anti-personnel weapons; new versions of the long-outlawed “dumdum” bullets were among the more modest weapons employed.
The population was driven into urban slums by the bombing, artillery, and ground attacks that often degenerated into mass murder, in an expanding effort to destroy the social structures in which resistance was rooted. Defenseless peasant societies in Laos and Cambodia were savagely bombed in “secret”—the “secrecy resulting from the refusal of the mass media to make public the facts for which they had ample evidence. Freedom was consistent not only with this expanding savagery, but also with intervention explicitly designed to preserve non-freedom from the threat of freedom (eg. the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965) and to displace democratic with totalitarian regimes (e.g., the open subversion of Guatemala in 1954; the slightly more sub rosa subversion of democracy in Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973). Free institutions were able to accept, indeed quietly approve of huge massacres in the name of “freedom,” as in Indonesia in 1965-1966—interpreted by U.S. liberals as evidence for the farsightedness of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Massive atrocities committed by U.S. client regimes against their own populations they hoped to subdue (e.g., the Indonesian massacres in East Timor) have also proven compatible with freedom and are regularly disguised or ignored by the free press.
Whatever the attitudes of the U.S. leadership toward freedom at home—and as noted, this is highly ambiguous—systemic policies toward Third World countries, described in detail elsewhere, make it evident that the alleged commitment to democracy and human rights is mere rhetoric, directly contrary to actual policy. The operative principle has been and remains economic freedom—meaning freedom for U.S. business to invest, sell, and repatriate profits—and its two basic requisites, a favorable investment climate and a specific form of stability. Since these primary values are disturbed by unruly students, democratic processes, peasant organizations, a free press, and free labor unions, “economic freedom” has often required political servitude.
Respect for the rights of the individual, also alleged to be one of the cardinal values of the West has had little place in the operating procedures applied to the Third World. Since a favorable investment climate and stability quite often require repression, the United States has applied the tools and training for interrogation and torture and is thoroughly implicated in the vast expansion of torture during the past decade.
Within the United States itself, the intelligence services were “running torture camps,” as were their Brazilian associates who “set up a camp modeled after that of the boinas verses, the Green Berets.” And there is evidence that U.S. advisors took an active part in torture, not contenting themselves with supplying training and material means. During the Vietnam War, the United States employed on a massive scale improved napalm, phosphorous, and fragmentation bombs, and a wide range of other “anti-personnel” weapons that had a devastating effect on civilians. The steady development of weaponry and methods of “interrogation” that inflict enormous pain on the human body and spirit, and the expansion of the use of this technology in U.S. sponsored counterinsurgency warfare and “stabilization” throughout the U.S. sphere of influence is further evidence that the “sacredness of the individual” is hardly a primary value in the West, at least in its application beyond an elite in-group.
Demands of Security
The rationale given for the U.S. build-up of Third World police and military establishments and regular “tilt” toward repressive regimes is the demands of “security.” This is a wonderfully elastic concept with a virtuous ring that can validate open-ended arms expenditures as well as support for neo-fascism. When it is said that we must oppose the NLF in South Vietnam for reasons of security, this obviously means that their success would be disadvantageous to U.S. interests and not primarily military interests. It is possible that “security” for a great power and its client governments corresponds with heightened insecurity for large numbers within the dominated secure state. In the United States the concept of security is “all-encompassing, involving economic and political hegemony as well as strictly military considerations, This flows from the fact of inordinate power and the propaganda counterpart of the imperial leader’s assumption of the natural right to intervene to keep its subordinates in line. It has the great public relations advantage also of built-in self-justification. Who could object to the pitiful giant’s efforts to protect its own security?
The Semantics Of Terror
Among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of the democratic states, few have been more important than “terror” and “terrorism.” These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups. Official violence, which is far more extensive in both scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether. This usage has nothing to do with justice, causal sequence, or numbers abused. Whatever the actual sequence of cause and effect, official violence is described as responsive or provoked (“retaliation,” protective reaction,” etc.), not as the active initiating source of abuse. Similarly, the massive long-term violence inherent in the oppressive social structures that U.S. power has supported or imposed is typically disregarded. The numbers tormented and killed by official violence—wholesale as opposed to retail terror—during recent decades have exceeded those of unofficial terrorists by a factor running into the thousands. But this is not “terror.”
These terminological devices serve important functions. They help to justify the far more extensive violence of (unfriendly) state authorities by interpreting them as “reactive,” and they implicitly sanction the suppression of information on the methods and scale of official violence by removing it from the category of “terrorism.” Thus the language is well-designed for apologetics for wholesale terror.
This language is also useful in its connotation of irrational evil, which can be exterminated with no questions asked. On the current scene, for example, the New York Times refers to “the cold-blooded and mysterious” Carlos; the South Africa government, on the other hand, whose single raid on the Namibian refugee camp of Kassinga on May 4 19978 wiped out a far larger total (more than 600) than the combined victims of Carlos, the Baader-Meinhof gang, and the Italian Red Brigades, is not referred to in such invidious terms. Retail terror is “the Crime of our times” in the current picture of reality conveyed by the media; and friendly governments are portrayed as the reassuring protectors of the public, striving courageously to cope with “terror.”
The limited concept of terror also serves as a lightning rod to distract attention from substantive issues, and helps to create a sensibility and frame of mind that allows greater freedom of action by the state. During the Vietnam War, students were the terrorists and the government and mass media devoted great attention (and much outrage ) to their frightful depredations (one person killed, many windows broken). The device was used effectively to discredit the anti-war movement as violence-prone and destructive—the motive, of course, for the infiltration of the movement by government provocateurs—and it helped divert attention from the official violence that was far more extensive even on the home front, not to speak of Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere. The ploy was amazingly successful in light of the facts, now documented beyond serious question, even though it did not succeed in destroying the anti-war movement. The terrorism of the Vietnamese enemy was also used effectively in mobilizing public opinion, again a tremendous testimonial to the power of brain- washing under freedom, given the real facts of the matter.
The Vietnam War has been digested by the U.S. political system with hardly a trace. Essentially, the same people manage national affairs, and possess virtually exclusive access to the mass media; the critics of the war have lapsed or been forced into silence, and the media have not allowed the vast accumulation of sordid details about out Vietnam involvement to disturb the myth of U.S. benevolence and concerned pursuit of democracy abroad. This myth has remained unruffled even in the face of the accelerating “Brazilianization” of the Third World over the past several decades, very often under active U.S. sponsorship, with frequent displacement of democratic government and extensive and growing resort to repression, including physical torture, imprisonment, death squads, and mysterious “disappearances,” all within the U.S. sphere of influence.
The Scope And Variety Of CIA Subversive Activities
CIA destabilization operations have assumed many forms, of which only a few will be mentioned here. First is the outright murder of political leaders, like Lumumba (to be replaced by the amenable Mobutu), or General Scheiner in Chile, and the numerous attempts on the life of Castro. Second, and also familiar, are the direct conspiracies with terrorists, mercenaries or (usually) military factions within a country to disrupt or overthrow a government in disfavor. Among the more conspicuous and acknowledged successes with heavy CIA involvement, have been the Belgian Congo, Chile, Greece, Guatemala, Indonesia, and the Bay of Pigs fiasco of 1961. In the case of Laos, the CIA actually organized and directed a mercenary army of hill tribesman in an effort to destroy the indigenous social revolution, cynically abandoning its proteges when they were largely decimated and no longer needed. In this general category, we may also note such activities as terrorist attacks, crop poisoning, etc as practiced by the CIA under Kennedy and subsequent administrations in an effort to undermine the Cuban regime and disrupt Cuban economic development. The total number of cases of CIA involve- ment in active subversion of established governments (and attempts at political murder) runs into the hundreds or even thousands. Third is political bribery and the funding of foreign politicians.
In the case of Brazil, the inflow of CIA money in the pre-1964 period was so huge, involving so many hundreds of politicians, that it provoked a scandal and a government investigation, which was conveniently terminated by the 1964 coup.
Fourth is propaganda, which can take a wide variety of forms, but it is invariably undercover (and thus dishonest as to its source) and is often carried out by subsidies to researchers, research institutes, publishers, and journalists. It can be massive in scale and scope, as in pre-coup Brazil where, in 1962, the CIA mounted a “saturation campaign” with 80 weekly radio programs, 300 additional hours of radio-TV advertising, a flooding of the press with canned editorials and “information,” large quantities of billboard ads and pamphlets, etc. It kept “dozens” of journalists on its payroll and edited a monthly magazine, using top quality paper and free distribution. It even rented the editorial page of Rio’s evening paper, A Noite. And it subsidized the publication of numerous conservative books, distributed free and without attribution.
In its propaganda campaigns, the CIA has long engaged in forgeries designed to discredit its enemies. In Brazil, for example, in order to undercut the position of a peasant leader threatening reform, the CIA printed leaflets announcing his presence at nonexistent meetings, and printed Marxist literature to be distributed after the coup to prove the existence of a Communist threat. In Chile, the CIA forged and disseminated documents in 1973 to prove that the Communists intended a bloody coup, featuring the beheading of the top echelons of the military, in part to frighten and provoke the military into pushing ahead with their own takeover and massacre.
A fifth type of CIA de-stabalization operation is the organization and funding of demonstrations, important in the subversion process in both Brazil and Chile. Philip Agee noted in his Diary that “the Rio station and its larger bases were financing the mass urban demonstrations against the Goulart government, proving the old themes of God, Country, family, and liberty, to be as effective as ever.” The same tactic was employed in Chile as part of the CIA subversion program. A sixth CIA tactic is the infiltration of unfavored organizations and political parties. This has informational value as it allows confusion to be sown and agent provocateurs to function. In Brazil, the most important effort of this sort was implemented in collaboration with the AFL-CIO through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which carried out an anti-communist propaganda campaign, worked diligently to split and discredit any independent Brazilian unions, and in the end proudly supported the coup that definitively ended free unionism in Brazil.
Finally, the CIA collects information, which is used in various ways. Most interesting is the extent to which it regularly provides information to rightist thugs and conspirators against constitutional government. The Chilean military were given lists of “enemies” and the Brazilian right was constantly fed information prior to the coup. The political orientation and role of the CIA is such that no clandestine agents were stationed in South Africa before 1974, while both before and after 1974 the CIA has had a close and “cordial” relationship with the South African secret police. CIA destabilization of inconvenient democracies has been commonplace, but it takes a vivid imagination to conceive of them subverting South Africa in the interests of ending apartheid.
The Economic Role Of Terror
We have seen that there is a positive relationship between U.S. aid, investment climate, and terror. A grim further fact is that the terror is not a fortuitous spinoff but has a functional relationship to investment climate. Special tax privileges to foreign business and dependence on foreign investment for economic growth are not easy to achieve under a democratic order in this era of Third World nationalism. Neither are wage controls and other actions conducive to a favorable investment climate. These actions have involved the deliberate “marginalization” of over 80 percent of the population by their total exclusion from political processes, from legal and boarder human rights and from the policy calculations of the elite leadership. In short, the “new order” in the U.S. colonial sphere is blatant and violent class warfare, with the combined interests of the denationalized military leadership, some local business, and multinational enterprise (with its foreign state adjuncts) literally seizing the state to accomplish their objectives, shattering the organizational defenses of the majority of the population, and striving to reduce it to passivity, clearing the decks for subfacist economic policy and “development.”
The economics of subfascism involves a rapid shift to a wide open door to foreign trade and investment, tight money, and social welfare budget cuts—that is, the economic policies called for by the interests of the dominant power and its institutional affiliates, the IMF and World Bank. Priority is given to servicing the foreign debt via increased exports and increased imports, with the burden failing largely on the underlying population in the form of reduced wages and serious unemployment. There is a return to the “free market, ” in theory, but it is selectively applied, with no serious control over monopoly power, employer organizations, and collective action, but with control over wages, both directly and by means of banning of strikes and the destruction of state control of unions.
Brainwashing Under Freedom
Despite the clear link between U.S. sponsorship and support, on the one hand, and the use of terror and serious human rights violations, on the other, the nature and importance of the “Washington Connection” are generally ignored in the West and the United States is regarded as in the vanguard of the defense of human rights. To some extent this faith rests on the facile—and still widely prevalent— assumption that external misbehavior is closely related to internal repression and the limitations on freedom of dissent. As should be obvious from the cursory examination of history, however, internal freedom is quite compatible with exploitative and inhumane external conduct extending over many decades. Even in the fountainhead of Western democracy, ancient Athens, the development of a military establishment (a naval fleet) made Athens securely democratic and incurably aggressive. Against this background, Athens’s ruthless and incessant naval enterprise, which kept the entire Greek world in turmoil from 480 to 404 BC, becomes intelligible. The cruel plundering of India, China, the East Indies, and Africa by the relatively liberal and open societies of Western Europe from the 17th well into the 20th centuries also shows that internal freedom and long-term external viciousness are entirely compatible.
More important, however, the neglect of the scope and significance of the Washington Connection is a testimonial to the greatly underrated capacities of what we may call “brainwashing under freedom.” The ability of the system—that is to say, the important power factions in the system and their intellectual and media spokespersons—to reconstruct and shape the perspectives of history and the interpretation of current events in accordance with its own interest is truly impressive. Just as slavery and institutional racism could be rationalized and reconciled with the idea of the United States as the land of liberty and equality of opportunity (mainly by not looking), so the Washington Connection with spreading Third World terror can be reconciled with a United States keen on human rights by a suitable combination of diversion, prevarication, and refusal to contemplate. To achieve this result without explicit government censorship is the genius of the Western way.
The background against which human rights issues have arisen in the period since 1945 includes an unparalleled, world-wide economic expansion by the United States, its establishment of a global military presence with a peak of over 3,000 foreign military bases “virtually surrounding both the Soviet Union and Communist China, and interventions in the affairs of other states that are unmatched in number, scale, violence, and global reach. In the face of these developments, the myth has been successfully established in the public mind, and in liberal circles in Western Europe, that the United States is just “containing” other expansionist powers. During the early phases of the Vietnam War, by a general propaganda barrage, the Chinese were established by the mass media as “expansionist,” while the United States, engaged in the wholesale destruction of a distant small country on the border of China, with bases around China and supporting Chiang and Taiwan, was responding to China’s aggressiveness, preventing dominoes from falling, protecting freedom, etc. Rarely was the United States portrayed in the media or mainstream academic scholarship as engaged in the positive pursuit of its own economic-imperial interests at the expense of any people standing in its way; nor are its exploits described as subversion or outright aggression.
The hypocrisy and sheer silliness of much political commentary in this regard is truly remarkable. At the outer limits of absurdity, we find the Wall Street Journal deriding the “simple-minded myths” that the “problems in Indochina stem from things like American imperialism and its military-industrial complex” (editorial, August 31, 1978). Such phrases as “American imperialism,” ordinarily under strict taboo, are occasionally permitted in such contexts as these. Readers are carefully protected from exposure to any serious discussion of the concept that arouses such horror. We were in Indochina not because of any U.S. material interests motivating a “forward” foreign policy, but as a matter of higher principle, exactly as when we aid and support Stroessner in Paraguay or the Shah in Iran. And it goes without saying that the U.S. military exploits or “social engineering” programs in Indochina could hardly be responsible for any current problems.
As these examples illustrate, self-deception can reach quite extraordinary heights. Suppose Fidel Castro had organized and participated in at least eight assassination attempts against the various presidents of the United States since 1959. It is safe to conclude that the New York Times, CBS News, and the mass media in general would have portrayed him as an international gangster and assassin who must be excluded from the community of civilized nations. But when it is revealed that the United States has made or participated in that many attempts on Castro’s life, it’s just “one of those things that governments do.” The press will hardly suggest on the basis of such information that the world’s nations have to evaluate the U.S. potentiality as a responsible world citizen, ” to paraphrase a Christian Science Monitor editorial that had the gall to assert the United States, after the record of the past 30 years, is entitled to stand in judgment over Vietnam for its alleged violations of human rights!
Z
Noam Chomsky (in 1979 when the first edition of these books was published by South End Press) is a professor of linguistics at MIT, amd author of numerous books. He is an activist critic of U.S. foreign and economic policies. Edward S. Herman (in 1979) is professor of finance at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and has written extensively, and critically, on public policy, international affairs, and mainstream media. Used, well-documented. volumes of the Washington Connection and After the Cataclysm are available on Amazon.