Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

In fact, if we’re talking about activism, this is a very revealing case—because if you can organize successfully on an issue like East Timor, you can do it on almost anything. It’s a pretty hard topic to get people interested in, you’d think, yet popular pressure here has forced things to the point of at least symbolic gestures by the U.S. government—and symbolic gestures on the part of the United States are very important. Remember, everyone in the world is scared shitless of us: we’re a brutal terrorist power of enormous strength, and if you get in our way, you’re in trouble. Nobody steps on Uncle Sam’s toes. So when the United States Congress makes a symbolic gesture like banning military-training aid or banning small-arms sales, the Indonesian generals hear it, even if they can get whatever they want from some other country, or even from Bill Clinton in the end.