Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  Well, as this was all going on, the Haitian generals in effect were being told: “Look, murder the leaders of the popular organizations, intimidate the whole population, destroy anyone who looks like they might get in the way after you’re gone. We’ll give you a certain amount of time to do it, then when your job is done, we’ll let you know and you can go off to the south of France and be very nicely treated; and don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of money when you retire, you’ll be rich and comfortable for the rest of your lives.” And that’s exactly what Cédras [the coup leader] and those guys did, that’s precisely what happened—and of course they were given total amnesty when they finally did agree to step down [after a diplomatic mission by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in October 1994]. 55

  Alright, the day before the U.S. troops were sent into Haiti, a big story to do with this came across the Associated Press news-wires—meaning every newsroom in the country knew about it. What it said was that a Justice Department investigation had just revealed that American oil companies were supplying oil directly to the Haitian coup leaders in violation of the embargo, which everybody knew, but also with the official authorization of the U.S. government at the highest level, which not everybody knew. I mean, you could have guessed as much, but you didn’t know for certain that the administration in Washington was openly permitting American corporations to support the Haitian junta until this story broke. And what this Justice Department investigation had found was that the Secretary of the Treasury under Bush essentially had just told the big American oil companies, yeah it’s illegal, but don’t worry about it, we won’t pursue it—and the same exact thing was going on under Clinton too.

  Okay, the following day I did a Nexis [news media database] search on this, just out of curiosity, and it turns out that that story did in fact appear in the American press—in something called Platt’s Oilgram, a journal for the oil industry. Somehow they discovered it. It was also in a bunch of local papers, like the Dayton Ohio Whatever and so on—just because local editors aren’t always sophisticated enough to know the things you’re not supposed to publish. But it never bit the national press, save for a couple lines buried in the Wall Street Journal somewhere, which didn’t give the full picture. 56

  And remember, this was at precisely the time when everybody in the country was focusing on Haiti: there were American troops being sent there, supposedly to throw out the coup leaders, there were thousands of stories about Haiti and the embargo, but the media completely silenced this report of the Justice Department investigation. And keep in mind, that was the biggest story of the week—what it said was, there never were any sanctions, never: not under Bush, not under Clinton. Well, that would have given the whole thing away, of course, so therefore it simply did not appear in the major American media.

  So the American troops moved in, and the generals who led the coup basically were told, “You did your job, now you can go away and be rich and happy.” Aristide was finally allowed to return to office for a few months to finish out his term—with the popular organizations that had elected him now massacred. And do you remember Bill Clinton’s big speech about this on T.V. [in September 1994], when he said that President Aristide has shown what a true democrat he is because he’s agreed to step down in early 1996, when the Haitian constitution says he has to step down? You remember that? Well, the Haitian constitution didn’t say he had to step down in early 1996—Bill Clinton said that. The Haitian constitution says that the president is supposed to be in office for a term of five years, it doesn’t deal with the question of what happens if three of those five years are spent in forced exile, while U.S.-trained terrorists have stolen his office and are murdering the population as he sits in Washington. That’s Bill Clinton’s interpretation, it’s the United States’s interpretation. 57 I mean, people who hate democracy as much as we do will say, “Okay, that counts.” But if you actually believe in democracy, that means that the people who voted for Aristide—which was the overwhelming majority of the Haitian population—have a right to five years with him as president. But just try to find anyone in the United States who even notices the possibility of this. Actually, it has been mentioned in Canada—but I haven’t been able to find a word suggesting it in the United States, again reflecting just how profound is the contempt for democracy here. 58

  So Aristide was allowed in for a few months with his hands tied, and with a national economic plan being rammed down his throat by the World Bank, a standard structural adjustment package. 59 I mean, it was referred to in the press as “the program that Aristide is offering the donor nations”—offering it with a gun to his head—and it has lots of nice rhetoric around in it for the benefit of Western journalists. But when you get right down to the core part of it, what it says is the following.

  It says: “The renovated government,” meaning Aristide, “must focus its energies and efforts on civil society,” particularly export industries and foreign investors. 60 Okay, that’s Haitian civil society—foreign investors in New York City are Haitian civil society, not grassroots organizations in Haiti, they’re not Haitian civil society. And what that means is, under these World Bank economic conditions, whatever foreign resources do come into Haiti will have to be used to turn the country back into what we’ve always wanted it to be in the first place: an export platform with super-cheap manufacturing labor and agricultural exports to the United States that keep the peasants there from subsistence farming as the population starves.

  So the upshot is, things in Haiti have been returned to 1990 again—but with one important difference: the popular movements have been decimated. I mean, people in Haiti were extremely happy when the coup leaders were finally kicked out—and boy, if I’d been living there, I’d have been happy too: at least there weren’t murderers in control torturing and killing them anymore. But that’s basically the choice between water-torture and electric-torture, really. I guess water-torture’s better, or so people say. But the hope for Haitian democracy is finished, at least for the moment—it’ll just go back to being a U.S. export platform again. Meanwhile, there’ll be more rousing speeches here about our love for democracy and free elections, and just how far we’ll go to uphold our democratic ideals around the world. Maybe in fifty years they’ll even discover the business about the oil.

  Texaco and the Spanish Revolution

  Incidentally, there’s a little historical footnote here, if you’re interested. The oil company that was authorized by the Treasury Department under Bush and Clinton to ship oil to the Haitian coup leaders happened to be Texaco. And people of about my age who were attuned to these sorts of things might remember back to the 1930s, when the Roosevelt administration was trying to undermine the Spanish Republic at the time of the Spanish Revolution in 1936 and ’37—you’ll remember that Texaco also played a role.

  See, the Western powers were strongly opposed to the Spanish Republican forces at that point during the Spanish Civil War—because the Republican side was aligned with a popular revolution, the anarcho-syndicalist revolution that was breaking out in Spain, and there was a danger that that revolution might take root and spread to other countries. After the anarcho-syndicalist organizations were put down by force, the Western powers didn’t care so much anymore [anarcho-syndicalism is a sort of non-Leninist or libertarian socialism]. But while the revolution was still going on in Spain and the Republican forces were at war with General Franco and his Fascist army—who were being actively supported by Hitler and Mussolini, remember—the Western countries and Stalinist Russia all wanted to see the Republican forces just gotten rid of. And one of the ways in which the Roosevelt administration helped to see that they were gotten rid of was through what was called the “Neutrality Act”—you know, we’re going to be neutral, we’re not going to send any support to either the Republican side or the Fascist side, we’re just going to let them fight their own war. 61 Except the “Neutrality Act” was only 50 percent applied in this case.

  You see, the
Fascists were getting all the guns they needed from Germany, but they didn’t have enough oil. So therefore the Texaco Oil Company—which happened to be run by an outright Nazi at the time [Captain Thorkild Rieber], something that wasn’t so unusual in those days, actually—simply terminated its existing oil contracts with the Spanish Republic and redirected its tankers in mid-ocean to start sending the Fascists the oil they needed, in July 1936. 62 It was all totally illegal, of course, but the Roosevelt administration never pushed the issue.

  And again, the entire American press at the time was never able to discover it—except the small left-wing press: somehow they were able to find out about it. So if you read the small left-wing press in the United States back in 1937, they were reporting this all the time, but the big American newspapers just have never had the resources to find out about things like this, so they never said a word. 63 I mean, years later people writing diplomatic history sort of mention these facts in the margins—but at the time there was nothing in the mainstream. 64 And that’s exactly what we just saw in Haiti: the American press would not tell people that the U.S. was actively undermining the sanctions, that there never were any sanctions, and that the U.S. was simply trying to get back the old pre-Aristide business climate once again—which was pretty much achieved.

  Averting Democracy in Italy

  MAN: Noam, since you mentioned the U.S. opposing popular democracy and supporting fascist-type structures in Spain and Haiti—I just want to point out that that also happened in Italy, France, Greece, and other allied Western countries after World War II. I mean, there’s a big history of the U.S. undermining democracy and supporting fascist elements in the past half century or so, even in the rich European societies.

  That’s right—in fact, that was the first major post-war operation by the United States: to destroy the anti-fascist resistance all over the world and restore more or less fascist structures to power, and also many Fascist collaborators. That happened everywhere, actually: from European countries like Italy and France and Greece, to places like Korea and Thailand. It’s the first chapter of post-war history, really—how we broke up the Italian unions, and the French unions, and the Japanese unions, and avoided the very real threat of popular democracy that had arisen around the world by the end of World War II. 65

  The first big American intervention was in Italy in 1948, and the point was to disrupt the Italian election—and it was a huge operation. See, U.S. planners were afraid there was going to be a democratic election in Italy which would result in a victory for the Italian anti-fascist movement. That prospect had to be avoided for the same reason it always has to be avoided: powerful interests in the United States do not want people with the wrong sort of priorities in charge of any government. And in the case of Italy, there was a major effort to prevent the popular-democratic forces that had comprised the anti-fascist resistance from winning the election after the war. 66 In fact, U.S. opposition to Italian democracy reached the point of almost sponsoring a military coup around the late 1960s, just to keep the Communists (meaning the working-class parties) out of the government. 67 And it’s probable that when the rest of the internal U.S. records are declassified, we’ll find that Italy was actually the major target of C.I.A. operations in the world for years after that—that seems to be the case up until around 1975, when the declassified record sort of runs dry. 68

  It was the same story in France—and the same throughout Europe. In fact, if you look back, the main reason for the partition of Germany into Eastern and Western countries—which was Western-initiated, remember—was put rather nicely by George Kennan [of the U.S. State Department], who was one of the main architects of the post-war world. Back in 1946, he said: we have to “wall off” Western Germany (nice phrase) from the Eastern Zone, because of the danger that a German Communist movement might develop—which would just be too powerful; Germany’s an important, powerful country, you know, and since the world was kind of social-democratic at that time, a unified socialist movement in a place like Germany or Japan would have been totally intolerable. So therefore we had to wall off Western Germany from the Eastern Zone in order to prevent that possibility from taking place. 69

  In Italy, it was an especially serious problem—because the anti-fascist resistance there was huge, and it was extremely popular and prestigious. See, France has a much better propaganda system than Italy, so we know a lot more about the French resistance than the Italian resistance. But the fact of the matter is the Italian resistance was way more significant than the French resistance—I mean, the people who were involved in the French resistance were very courageous and honorable, but it was a very small sector of the society: France as a whole was mostly collaborationist during the Nazi occupation. 70 But Italy was quite different: the Italian resistance was so significant that it basically liberated Northern Italy, and it was holding down maybe six or seven German divisions, and the Italian working-class part of it was very organized, and had widespread support in the population. In fact, when the American and British armies made it up to Northern Italy, they had to throw out a government that had already been established by the Italian resistance in the region, and they had to dismantle various steps towards workers’ control over industry that were being set up. And what they did was to restore the old industrial owners, on the grounds that removal of these Fascist collaborators had been “arbitrary dismissal” of legitimate owners—that’s the term that was used. 71 And then we also undermined the democratic processes, because it was obvious that the resistance and not the discredited conservative order was going to win the upcoming elections. So there was a threat of real democracy breaking out in Italy—what’s technically referred to by the U.S. government as “Communism”—and as usual, that had to be stopped.

  Well, as you say, the same thing also happened elsewhere at the time—and in other countries it was much more violent, actually. So to destroy the anti-Nazi resistance in Greece and restore the Nazi collaborators to power there, it took a war in which maybe 160,000 people were killed and 800,000 became refugees—the country still hasn’t recovered from it. 72 In Korea, it meant killing 100,000 people in the late 1940s, before what we call the “Korean War” even started. 73 But in Italy it was enough just to carry out subversion—and the United States took that very seriously. So we funded ultra-right Masonic Lodges and terrorist paramilitary groups in Italy, the Fascist police and strikebreakers were brought back, we withheld food, we made sure their economy couldn’t function. 74 In fact, the first National Security Council Memorandum, N.S.C. 1, is about Italy and the Italian elections. And what it says is that if the Communists come to power in the election through legitimate democratic means, the United States must declare a national emergency: the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean should be put on alert, the United States should start subversive activities in Italy to overthrow the Italian government, and we should begin contingency planning for direct military intervention—that’s if the resistance wins a legitimate democratic election. 75

  And this was not taken as a joke, not at all—in fact, there were people at the top levels of the U.S. government who took even more extreme positions than that. For instance, George Kennan again, who’s considered a great humanist, thought that we ought to invade Italy even before the election and not allow anything like that to happen in the first place—but he was kind of held down by other people who said, look, we can probably buy off the election by the threat of starvation and extensive terrorism and subversion, which in the end turned out to be correct. 76

  And these sorts of policies were still being followed by the United States right into the 1970s, when the declassified records dry up. The end of the documentation that we have at this point is around 1975—that’s when the House Pike Committee Report released a lot of information about U.S. subversive activities—and who knows whether it went on after that. 77 Most of the literature about this is in Italian, but there’s some in English—for example, Ed Herman and Frank Brodhead have a good
book on the so-called “plot to kill the Pope” disinformation story, which includes an interesting discussion of some of the more recent material on Italy—and there are others. 78 And as I say, the same sorts of policies also were carried out in France, Germany, Japan, and so on.

  Actually, the U.S. also reconstructed the Mafia as part of this whole effort to split the European labor movement after the war. I mean, the Mafia had mostly been wiped out by the Fascists—Fascists tend to run a pretty tight ship, they don’t like competition. So Hitler and Mussolini had essentially wiped out the Mafia, and as the American liberating armies moved into Sicily and then through Southern Italy and into France, they reconstituted it as a tool to break strikes. See, the U.S. needed goons to break strikers’ knees on the waterfront and that kind of thing, and where are you going to find guys like that? Well, the answer was, in the Mafia. So in France, the C.I.A.—working together with the leadership of the American labor movement, incidentally—resurrected the Corsican Mafia. And the Mafia don’t just do it for fun, you know—I mean, maybe they also enjoy it, but they want a payoff. And as kind of a quid pro quo for smashing up the French labor movement, they were allowed to reconstitute the heroin trade, which had been reduced to virtually zero under the Fascists—that’s the origin of the famous “French Connection,” the main source of the post-war heroin racket. 79