'Those who are seriously interested in understanding the world will adopt the same standards whether they are evaluating their own political and intellectual elites or those of official enemies. One might fairly ask how much would survive this elementary exercise of rationality and honesty.'
On East Timor :
'On Septmeber 8th, the Clinton administration reacted by reiterating its position that East Timor is "the resposnsibility of the Government of Indonesia, and we don't want to take that responsibility away from them." A few days later, under strong international and domestic pressure, Clinton reversed the 25-year policy of support for Indonesia's crimes in East Timor, and informed the Indonesian military that Washington would no longer directly support their crimes. They immediatly withdrew from the territory, allowing an Australian-led UN peacekeeping force to enter unopposed.
The lesson was crystal clear: as a handful of activists and critics had been saying for almost twenty-five years, there had never been any need for threats or forceful measures. It would have sufficed to withdraw from participation for some of the worst crimes of the late twentieth century to have come to a halt.'
Turkey:
In the case of Turkey, "conscience-shocking situations" went virtually unheeded in the United States until the moment in early 2003 when the Turkish government defied Washington's demands and followed the wishes of 95 percent of its population by refusing to allow an attack on Iraq from it's borders. At that point, one began to read about "Turkey's ghastly record of torturing, killing, and 'disappearing' Turkish Kurds and destroying more than 3000 of their villages," with citations from human rights organizations reiterating what they had reported in far more detail years before while the crimes were in progress, thanks to U.S aid, and could easily have been stopped. To this day, the decisive U.S role remains under wraps'
General:
We understand the truism very well when considering the actions of official enemies but find it hard to apply ourselves. There are many illustrations, including recent US military exercises. Aid agencies, scholars, and others who properly warned of the risks in Afghanistan and Iraq were ridiculed when the worst, fortunatly, did not come to pass. At the same level of moral imbecility, one would rush into the streets every October to sing praises to the Kremlin, while ridiculing those who warned of the dangers of placing missiles in Cuba and persist in condemning the criminal lunacy of the act'
Cuba:
'The intelligence assessment eliminated a danger that had been identified by the Mexican ambassador in 1961, when he rejected JFK's attempt to organize collective action against Cuba on the grounds that "if we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing." '
Successful Defiance
'The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of our whole hemisphere policy of almost a century and a half......to put it simply, Thomas Paterson writes, "Cuba as a symbol and reality, challenged US hegemony in Latin America'
This is called 'successful defiance' by Chomsky - a successful 'escape' from the US and its system.
Successful defiance has regularly been overcome by one or another form of violence without any risk to the perpetrators. One strategy from the early 1960's was the installation of neo-Nazi National Security States, which had as their goal "to destroy permanently a percieved threat to the exisiting structure of socioeconomic privilege by eliminating the political participation of the numerical majority", that is, the "popular classes". The move set off a plague of repression and terror throughout the continent, reaching Central America during the Reganite phase of the current political leadership. The plauge began with a military coup in Brazil set in motion before Kennedy's assassination and carried out shortly after. Washington cooperated with the military forces that overthrew parlimentry democracy in recognition of their "basically democratic and pro - United States orientation," Kennedy's ambassador Lincoln Gordon explained. While the torturers and assassins were carrying out their work, Gordon hailed "the most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century." The "democratic rebellion," Gordon cabled Washington, would help in "restraining left wing excesses" of the former moderate populist elected government, and the "democratic forces" now in charge should "create a greatly improved climate for private investment."
Gordon's view was endorsed by other leading figures of the Kennedy-Johnson administrations, though by the 1980's, as in Chile at the same time, the Brazilian generals were happy to transfer the wreckage to civilian hands. Despite the enourmous advantages of the "colossus of the South," the generals had left Brazil in "the same catagory as the less developed African or Asian countries when it came to social welfare indices" (malnutrition, infant mortality,etc.), with conditions of inequality and suffering rarely matched elsewhere, but a grand success for foriegn investors and domestic privilege.
This is all taken from the book 'Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance' by Noam Chomsky.
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