-Caveat Lector-
Deterring Democracy
Copyright (c) 1991, 1992 by Noam Chomsky.
Published by South End Press
Chapter 12: Force and Opinion
2. The Bewildered Herd and its Shepherds <cont'd>
Western readers would be hard put to learn of the Legion of
Merit award to the commander of the Vincennes, but it did not go
unnoticed in the Third World, where commentators also readily
draw the conclusions barred within Western intellectual culture.
Commenting on "U.S. imperial policy," "Third World
Resurgence" (Malaysia) lists the shooting down of the Iranian
airbus among acts of U.S. terrorism in the Middle East, quoting
the words of the award and adding that "the Western public, fed
on the media, sees the situation in black-and-white
one-dimensional terms," unable to perceive what is obvious to
those who escape the grip of the Western propaganda system.
Huge massacres are treated by much the same criteria: THEIR
terror and violence are crimes, OURS are statecraft or
understandable error.
In a study of U.S. power and ideology a decade ago, Edward
Herman and I reviewed numerous examples of two kinds of
atrocities, "benign and constructive bloodbaths" that are
acceptable or even advantageous to dominant interests, and
"nefarious bloodbaths" perpetrated by official enemies.
The reaction follows the same pattern as the treatment of
terrorism. The former are ignored, denied, or sometimes even
welcomed; the latter elicit great outrage and often large-scale
deceit and fabrication, if the available evidence is felt to be
inadequate for doctrinal requirements.
One comparison that we presented in great detail was
particularly illuminating, the "benign bloodbath" conducted by
Indonesia after its invasion of East Timor in 1975, and the
"nefarious bloodbath" of the Khmer Rouge when they took over
Cambodia in the same year. Reviewing virtually all available
material (at that time, covering primarily 1975-77), we showed
that the evidence concerning these two horrendous bloodbaths --
in the same part of the world, in the same years -- was
comparable, and indicated that the two slaughters were comparable
in scale and character. There were also differences. One was that
the Indonesian aggression and bloodbath received critical
material and diplomatic support from the United States and its
allies, and could have readily been terminated by exposure and
withdrawal of this support, while no one offered a serious
proposal as to how to mitigate the Pol Pot atrocities; for that
reason, the Timor bloodbath was far more significant for the
West, at least if elementary moral standards are applicable. A
second difference lay in the reaction to the two bloodbaths.
Following the pattern illustrated throughout the record that we
surveyed, the Timor atrocities, and the crucial contribution of
the U.S. and its allies, were suppressed or denied; the media
even avoided refugee testimony, exactly as in the case of the
U.S. terror bombing of Cambodia a few years earlier.
In the parallel case of the Khmer Rouge, in contrast, we
documented a record of deceit that would have impressed Stalin,
including massive fabrication of evidence, suppression of useless
evidence (e.g., the conclusions of State Department Cambodia
watchers, the most knowledgeable source, but considered too
restrained to serve the purposes at hand), etc.
The reaction to the exposure is also instructive: on the
Timor half of the comparison, further silence, denial, and
apologetics; on the Cambodia half, a great chorus of protest
claiming that we were denying or downplaying Pol Pot atrocities.
This was a transparent falsehood, though admittedly the
distinction between advocating that one try to keep to the truth
and downplaying the atrocities of the official enemy is a
difficult one for the mind of the commissar, who, furthermore, is
naturally infuriated by any challenge to the right to lie in the
service of the state, particularly when it is accompanied by a
demonstration of the services rendered to ongoing atrocities.
Quite generally, wholesale slaughter is regarded benignly,
and the revelation of direct U.S. government participation in it
arouses no particular interest, when the means are well-suited to
our ends. And it is reasonable enough to regard the dilemmas of
counterinsurgency as merely "practical" and "ethically neutral."
It is simply a matter of finding the proper mix among the
various techniques of population control, ranging in practice
from B-52 bombing and napalm, to torture and mutilation and
disappearance, and to kinder, gentler means such as starvation
and totalitarian control in concentration camps called "strategic
hamlets" or "model villages."
Leading theorists of this form of international terrorism
calmly explain that while it is a "desirable goal" to win
"popular allegiance" to the government we back or impose, that is
a distinctly secondary consideration, and does not provide an
appropriate "conceptual framework for counterinsurgency
programs." The "unifying theme" should be "influencing BEHAVIOR,
rather than attitudes" (Charles Wolf, senior economist of the
RAND Corporation). Hume's problem then does not arise; there need
be no concern that force is on the side of the governed. For
influencing behavior, such techniques as "confiscation of
chickens, razing of houses, or destruction of villages" are quite
proper as long as "harshness meted out by government forces [is]
unambiguously recognizable as deliberately imposed because of
behavior by the population that contributes to the insurgent
movement." If it is not, terror will be a meaningless exercise.
"The crucial point," this respected scholar continues, is to
connect all programs "with the kind of population behavior the
government wants to promote." Wolf notes a further advantage of
this more scientific approach, emphasizing control of behavior
rather than attitudes: it should improve the image of
counterinsurgency in the United States; we are, after all, an
enlightened society that respects science and technology and has
little use for mystical rumination on minds and attitudes. Note
that when we turn to the United States, where coercive force is
not readily available, we must concern ourselves with control of
attitudes and opinions.
Even imposing mass starvation is entirely legitimate if it
meets the pragmatic criterion, as explained by Professor David
Rowe, director of graduate studies in international relations at
Yale University.
Testifying in Congress before China became a valued ally,
Rowe advised that the U.S. should purchase all surplus Canadian
and Australian wheat so as to impose "general starvation" on a
billion people in China, a cost-effective method, he observed, to
undermine the "internal stability of that country."
As an expert on the Asian mind, he assured Congress that
this policy would be particularly welcomed by the Japanese,
because they have had a demonstration "of the tremendous power in
action of the United States...[and]...have felt our power
directly" in the firebombing of Tokyo and at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki; it would therefore "alarm the Japanese people very
intensely and shake the degree of their friendly relations with
us" if we seemed "unwilling to use the power they know we have"
in Vietnam and China.
Apart from the scale of his vision, Rowe was following a
well-trodden path. As director of the humanitarian program
providing food to starving Europeans after World War II, Herbert
Hoover advised President Wilson that he was "maintaining a thin
line of food" to guarantee the rule of anti-Bolshevik elements.
In response to rumors of "a serious outbreak on May Day" in
Austria, Hoover issued a public warning that any such action
would jeopardize the city's sparse food supply. Food was withheld
from Hungary under the Communist Bela Kun government, with a
promise that it would be supplied if he were removed in favor of
a government acceptable to the U.S. The economic blockade, along
with Rumanian military pressure, forced Kun to relinquish power
and flee to Moscow. Backed by French and British forces, the
Rumanian military joined with Hungarian counterrevolutionaries to
administer a dose of White terror and install a right-wing
dictatorship under Admiral Horthy, who collaborated with Hitler
in the next stage of slaying the Bolshevik beast. The threat of
starvation was also used to buy the critical Italian elections of
1948 and to help impose the rule of U.S. clients in Nicaragua in
1990, among other noteworthy examples. Dikes were bombed in South
Vietnam to eliminate the supply of food for South Vietnamese
peasants resisting U.S. aggression and crop destruction was
carried out throughout Indochina, as in Central America in recent
years. The practice can be traced to the earliest Indian wars,
and, of course, was no innovation of the British colonists.
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