Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky
Page 23
Supporting Terror
So the fact that Russia had pulled itself out of the West’s traditional Third World service-area and was developing on an independent course was really one of the major motivations behind the Cold War. I mean, the standard line you always hear about it is that we were opposing Stalin’s terror—but that’s total bullshit. First of all, we shouldn’t even be able to repeat that line without a sense of self-mockery, given our record. Do we oppose anybody else’s terror? Do we oppose Indonesia’s terror in East Timor? Do we oppose terror in Guatemala and El Salvador? Do we oppose what we did to South Vietnam? No, we support terror all the time—in fact, we put it in power.
Just take a look at U.S. aid, for instance. There have been a lot of studies of it, including studies by people who write in the mainstream, and what they show is that there is in fact a very high correlation between U.S. foreign aid and human rights abuses. For example, Lars Schoultz at the University of North Carolina—who’s the major academic specialist on human rights in Latin America and a highly respected mainstream scholar—published a study on U.S. aid to Latin America almost fifteen years ago, in which he identified an extremely close correlation between U.S. aid and torture: as he put it, the more a country tortures its citizens and the more egregious are the violations of human rights, the higher is U.S. aid. 12
In fact, it’s true at this very moment. The leading human rights violator in the Western Hemisphere by a good margin is Colombia, which has just an atrocious record—they have “social cleansing” programs, before every election members of the opposition parties get murdered, labor union leaders are murdered, students, dissidents are murdered, there are death squads all around. Okay, more than half of U.S. aid to the entire Hemisphere goes to Colombia, and the figure’s increasing under Clinton. 13 Well, that’s just normal, and like I say, similar results have been shown world-wide. 14 So claims about our concern for human rights are extremely difficult to support: in precisely the regions of the world where we’ve had the most control, the most hideous things you can imagine happen systematically—people have to sell their organs for money in order to survive, police death squads leave flayed bodies hanging by the roadsides with their genitals stuffed in their mouths, children are enslaved, and worse, those aren’t the worst stories. 15
As for Stalin, leaders in the West admired him, they didn’t give a damn about his terror. President Truman, for example, described Stalin as “smart as hell,” “honest,” “we can get along with him,” “it’ll be a real catastrophe if he dies.” He said, what goes on in Russia I don’t really care about, it’s not my business, so long as “we get our way 85 percent of the time.” 16 We get our way 85 percent of the time with this nice, smart, decent, honest guy, we can do business with him fine; he wants to murder 40 million people, what do we care? Winston Churchill was the same: the British documents are now being declassified, and after the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Churchill was praising Stalin in internal cabinet meetings as a man of honor we can trust, who can help lead us forward to a new world, a “champion of peace,” “illustrious,” and so on. 17 He was particularly impressed with the fact that Stalin didn’t lift a finger while British troops occupied Greece [beginning in November 1944] and under Churchill’s order treated Athens like “a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress,” carrying out a big massacre to destroy the Greek anti-Nazi resistance and restore the Nazi collaborators to power. Stalin just stood there quietly and let the British do it, so Churchill said he’s a really nice guy. 18
None of these guys had anything against Stalin’s crimes. What’s more, they had nothing against Hitler’s crimes—all this talk about Western leaders’ principled opposition to atrocities is just a complete fabrication, totally undermined by a look at the documentary record. 19 It’s just that if you’ve been properly educated, you can’t understand facts like these: even if the information is right in front of your eyes, you can’t comprehend it.
“People’s Democratic Socialist Republics”
Well, let me just end with one last point to do with your question. One of the issues which has devastated a substantial portion of the left in recent years, and caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere, is the alleged fact that there’s been this great battle between socialism and capitalism in the twentieth century, and in the end capitalism won and socialism lost—and the reason we know that socialism lost is because the Soviet Union disintegrated. So you have big cover stories in The Nation about “The End of Socialism,” and you have socialists who all their lives considered themselves anti-Stalinist saying, “Yes, it’s true, socialism has lost because Russia failed.” 20 I mean, even to raise questions about this is something you’re not supposed to do in our culture, but let’s try it. Suppose you ask a simple question: namely, why do people like the editors at The Nation say that “socialism” failed, why don’t they say that “democracy” failed?—and the proof that “democracy” failed is, look what happened to Eastern Europe. After all, those countries also called themselves “democratic”—in fact, they called themselves “People’s Democracies,” real advanced forms of democracy. So why don’t we conclude that “democracy” failed, not just that “socialism” failed? Well, I haven’t seen any articles anywhere saying, “Look, democracy failed, let’s forget about democracy.” And it’s obvious why: the fact that they called themselves democratic doesn’t mean that they were democratic. Pretty obvious, right?
Okay, then in what sense did socialism fail? I mean, it’s true that the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe called themselves “socialist”—but they also called themselves “democratic.” Were they socialist? Well, you can argue about what socialism is, but there are some ideas that are sort of at the core of it, like workers’ control over production, elimination of wage labor, things like that. Did those countries have any of those things? They weren’t even a thought there. Again, in the pre-Bolshevik part of the Russian Revolution, there were socialist initiatives—but they were crushed instantly after the Bolsheviks took power, like within months, In fact, just as the moves towards democracy in Russia were instantly destroyed, the moves towards socialism were equally instantly destroyed. The Bolshevik takeover was a coup—and that was perfectly well understood at the time, in fact. So if you look in the mainstream of the Marxist movement, Lenin’s takeover was regarded as counter-revolutionary; if you look at independent leftists like Bertrand Russell, it was instantly obvious to them; to the libertarian left, it was a truism. 21
But that truism has been driven out of people’s heads over the years, as part of a whole prolonged effort to discredit the very idea of socialism by associating it with Soviet totalitarianism. And obviously that effort has been extremely successful—that’s why people can tell themselves that socialism failed when they look at what happened to the Soviet Union, and not even see the slightest thing odd about it. And that’s been a very valuable propaganda triumph for elites in the West—because it’s made it very easy to undercut moves towards real changes in the social system here by saying, “Well, that’s socialism—and look what it leads to.”
Okay, hopefully with the fall of the Soviet Union we can at least begin to get past that barrier, and start recovering an understanding of what socialism could really stand for.
The Organ Trade
WOMAN: You mentioned “social cleansing” and people in the Third World selling their body parts for money. I don’t know if you saw the recent Barbara Walters program …
The answer is, “No by definition,”
WOMAN: Well, I have to admit I watched it. She had a segment on some American women who were attacked by villagers in Guatemala and put in jail for allegedly stealing babies for the organ trade. The gist of the story was that the Guatemalan people are totally out of their minds for supposing that babies are being taken out of the country and used for black market sale of organs. 22 What I’d like to know is, do you know of any evidence that this black market trade in children�
�s organs does in fact exist, and do you think the U.S. might be playing a role in it?
Well, look: suppose you started a rumor in Boston that children from the Boston suburbs are being kidnapped by Guatemalans and taken to Guatemala so their bodies could be used for organ transplants. How far off the ground do you think that rumor would get?
WOMAN: Not far.
Okay, but in Guatemalan peasant societies it does get off the ground. Do they have different genes than we do?
WOMAN: No.
Alright, so there’s got to be some reason why the story spreads there and it wouldn’t spread here. And the reason is very clear. Though the specific stories are doubtless false in this case, there’s a background which is true—that’s why nobody would believe it here, and they do believe it there: because they know about other things that go on.
For one thing, in Latin America there is plenty of kidnapping of children. Now, what the children are used for, you can argue. Some of them are kidnapped for adoption, some of them are used for prostitution—and that goes on throughout the U.S. domains. I mean, you take a look at the U.S. domains—Thailand, Brazil, practically everywhere you go—there are young children being kidnapped for sex-slavery, or just plain slavery. 23 So kidnapping of children unquestionably takes place. And there is strong evidence—I don’t think anybody doubts it very much—that people in these regions are killed for organ transplants. 24 Now, whether it’s children or not, I don’t know. But if you take a look at the recent Amnesty International report on Colombia, for example, they say almost casually—just because it’s so routine—that in Colombia they carry out what’s called “social cleansing”: the army and the paramilitary forces go through the cities and pick up “undesirables,” like homeless people, or homosexuals, or prostitutes, or drug addicts, anybody they don’t like, and they just take them and murder them, then chop them up and mutilate their bodies for organ transplants. That’s called “social cleansing,” and everybody thinks it’s a great idea. 25 And again, this goes on throughout the U.S. domains.
In fact, it’s even beginning now in Eastern Europe as they’re being turned back into another sector of the Third World—people are starting to sell organs to survive, like you sell a cornea or a kidney or something. 26
WOMAN: Your own?
Yeah, your own. You just sell it because you’re totally desperate—so you sell your eyes, or your kidney, something that can be taken out without killing you. That goes on, and it’s been going on for a long time.
Well, you know, that’s a background, and against that background these stories, which have been rampant, are believable—and they are in fact believed. And it’s not just by peasants in the highlands: the chief official in the Salvadoran government in charge of children [Victoria de Aviles], the “Procurator for the Defense of Children,” she’s called, recently stated that children in El Salvador are being kidnapped for adoption, crime, and organ transplants. Well, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s not an authority you just dismiss. In Brazil too there’s been a lot of testimony about these things from very respectable sources: church sources, medical investigators, legal sources, and others. 27
Now, it’s interesting: I didn’t see the Barbara Walters program you mentioned, but I’ve read the State Department reports on which she probably based her stuff—and they’re very selective in their coverage. They say, “Oh, it’s all nonsense and lies, and it was all started by the Communists,” and they trace it back to sort of Communist sources—which doubtless picked it up, but they are not the sources. The State Department carefully excluded all the other sources, like the church sources, the government sources, the mainstream legal investigators, the human rights groups—they didn’t mention them, they just said, “Yeah, the stories were picked up by the Russian propaganda apparatus back in the bad old days.” But that’s not where it comes from. Like I say, the Russians couldn’t start these stories in the Boston suburbs—and there’s a reason why they couldn’t start them in the Boston suburbs and somebody could start them in Guatemala. And the reason is, there’s a background in Guatemala against which these things are not implausible—which is not to say these women are being correctly charged; undoubtedly they’re not, these women are just women who happened to be in Guatemala. But the point is, that background makes it easy for people there to be frightened, and in that sort of context it’s quite understandable how these attacks can have happened.
The Real Crime of Cuba
WOMAN: Mr. Chomsky, I’m wondering, how do you explain our embargo on Cuba—why is it still going on, and can you talk a bit about the policies that have been behind it over the years?
Well, Cuba is a country the United States has considered that it owns ever since the 1820s. In fact, one of the earliest parts of U.S. foreign relations history was the decision by Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and others to try to annex Cuba. At the time the British navy was in the way, and they were a real deterrent, so the plan, in Adams’s words, was to wait until Cuba falls into our hands like a ripe fruit, by the laws of political gravitation. 28 Well, finally it did, and the U.S. ran it—with the usual effects—all the way up until 1959.
In January 1959, Cuba had a popular nationalist revolution. We now know from declassified U.S. government documents that the formal decision to overthrow Castro was made by the American government in March 1960—that’s very important, because at that point there were no Russians around, and Castro was in fact considered anti-Communist by the U.S. [Castro did not align with the Soviet Union until May 1961, after the U.S. had severed diplomatic relations with Cuba in January and had sponsored an invasion attempt in April.] 29 So the reason for deciding to overthrow the Castro government can’t have had anything to do with Cuba being a Russian outpost in the Cold War—Cuba was just taking an independent path, which has always been unacceptable to powerful interests in the United States.
Strafing and sabotage operations began as early as October 1959. Then, soon after his inauguration in 1961, John F. Kennedy launched a terrorist campaign against them which is without even remote comparison in the history of international terrorism [Operation MONGOOSE]. 30 And in February 1962, we instituted the embargo—which has had absolutely devastating effects on the Cuban population.
Remember, Cuba’s a tiny country right in the U.S. sphere of influence—it’s not going to be able to survive on its own for very long against a monster. But over the years, it was able to survive—barely—thanks to Soviet support: the Soviet Union was the one place Cuba could turn to to try to resist the United States, and the Soviets did provide them with sort of a margin for survival. And we should be realistic about what happened there: many important and impressive things have been achieved, but it’s also been pretty tyrannical, so there’s been an upside and a downside. However, the country certainly was succeeding in terms that are meaningful to other populations in the region—I mean, just compare Cuba with Haiti or the Dominican Republic right next door, or with any other place in Latin America which the United States has controlled: the difference is obvious, and that’s exactly what the United States has always been concerned about.
Look, the real crime of Cuba was never the repression, which, whatever you think about it, doesn’t even come close to the kind of repression we have traditionally supported, and in fact implemented, in nearby countries: not even close. The real crime of Cuba was the successes, in terms of things like health care and feeding people, and the general threat of a “demonstration effect” that follows from that—that is, the threat that people in other countries might try to do the same things. That’s what they call a rotten apple that might spoil the barrel, or a virus that might infect the region—and then our whole imperial system begins to fall apart. I mean, for thirty years, Cuba has been doing things which are simply intolerable—such as sending tens of thousands of doctors to support suffering people around the Third World, or developing biotechnology in a poor country with no options, or having health services roughly at
the level of the advanced countries and way out of line with the rest of Latin America. 31 These things are not tolerable to American power—they’d be intolerable anywhere in the Third World, and they’re multiply intolerable in a country which is expected to be a U.S. colony. That’s Cuba’s real crime. 32
In fact, when the Soviet Empire was disintegrating and the supposed Soviet threat in Cuba had evaporated beyond the point that anyone could possibly take it seriously, an interesting event took place, though nobody in the U.S. media seemed to notice it. For the last thirty years the story had always been, “We have to defend ourselves against Cuba because it’s an outpost of the Russians.” Okay, all of a sudden the Russians weren’t there anymore—so what happens? All of a sudden it turned out that we really had Cuba under an embargo because of our love for democracy and human rights, not because they’re an outpost of Communism about to destroy us—now it turns out that’s why we have to keep torturing them—and nobody in the American press even questions this development. The propaganda system didn’t skip a beat: check back and try to find anybody who even noticed this little curiosity.
Then in 1992, a liberal Democrat, Robert Torricelli, pushed a bill through Congress called the Cuban Democracy Act, which made the embargo still tighter—it forbids foreign-based U.S. subsidiaries from trading with Cuba, it allows seizure of cargo from foreign ships that trade with Cuba if they enter U.S. waters, and so on, In fact, this proposal by the liberal Democrat Torricelli was so obviously in conflict with international law that George Bush himself even vetoed it—until he was out-flanked from the right during the Presidential campaign by Bill Clinton, and finally agreed to accept it. Well, the so-called “Cuban Democracy Act” was immediately denounced by I think every major U.S. ally. At the U.N., the entire world condemned it, with the exception of two countries—the United States and Israel; the New York Times apparently never discovered that fact. The preceding year, there had been a U.N. vote on the embargo in which the United States managed to get three votes for its side—itself, Israel, and Romania. But Romania apparently dropped off this year.