On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures

by Noam Chomsky

The major enemy, however, is always the indigenous population, which has an unfortunate tendency to succumb to strange and unacceptable ideas about using their resources for their own purposes. They must therefore be taught regular lessons in obedience to thwart any such evil designs. Thus in Southeast Asia in the post-World War II period, national movements arose that did not comprehend the conceptions developed by State Department planners, who explained in internal documents that the region was “to fulfill its major function as a source of raw materials and a market for Japan and Western Europe.” The more general plan was that East Asia and Western Europe were to be reconstructed as regional groupings dominated by Japan and Germany, their “natural leaders,” within the overarching U.S.-dominated system of world order. The effort to tame the enemies of “stability” and “order” in Indochina, who rejected their assigned “function,” was to become a major theme of postwar history.

Others too fail to understand their function in the global system, and must be properly disciplined. In the terminology of U.S. political theology, they are “Communists,” a broad-ranging concept that has little relation to social, political or economic doctrines but a great deal to do with a proper understanding of one’s duties and function in the global system. A prestigious study group of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the National Planning Association in 1955 explained the meaning of the term “Communist” candidly and accurately: the primary threat of “Communism,” the study observed, is the economic transformation of the Communist powers “in ways which reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial economies of the West”—where “West” includes Japanese capitalism, and it is understood that these industrial capitalist economies are to remain firmly within the U.S.-managed “overall framework of order,” in Kissinger’s phrase. This is a good definition of the term “Communism” as it is actually used in U.S. political discourse. In brief, the “Communists” are those who attempt to use their resources for their own purposes, thus interfering with the right to rob and to exploit, the central doctrine of foreign policy. Naturally, the U.S. is consistently “anti-Communist,” while only selectively anti-fascist.

The first principle of U.S. foreign policy, then, is to ensure a favorable global environment for U.S.-based industry, commerce, agribusiness and finance. In the Third World, its primary concern is the defense of the Fifth Freedom from various enemies, primarily indigenous. What is called “national security policy” is oriented to the same ends. In the fourth lecture, I will turn to the question of just what national security policy is. For the moment, let me just say what it is not: its primary concern is not the security of the United Stares or its allies, except in the sense of securing the Fifth Freedom. A second and related central principle is that an ideological system must be constructed to ensure that the population remains passive, ignorant and apathetic, and that none of these matters are understood among the educated, articulate and politically active classes in the United States or, indeed, in the world in general. Recall that in the operative sense of the term “democracy,” these minority elements are to dominate the “democratic process”—the political syste...

From its earliest days, the United States had wide-ranging imperial aspirations. In 1754, Benjamin Franklin, a leading spokesman for Enlightenment values, defined “the father of his nation” as the man who “removes the Natives to give his own people Room.” And indeed, from the origins of the colonial settlement through the 19th century, the native population was removed or destroyed through massacre, crop destruction, robbery and cheating, or expulsion, always with the highest motives, always in self-defense. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville observed “the triumphal march of civilization across the desert” as “in the middle of the winter,” when the “cold was unusually severe,” “three or four thousand soldiers drive before them the wandering races of the aborigines,” who “brought in their train the wounded and the sick, with children newly born and old men on the verge of death,” a “solemn spectacle” that would never fade from his memory. He was particularly impressed by the way the pioneers could deprive Indians of their rights and exterminate them “with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world.” It was impossible to destroy people with “more respect for the laws of humanity,” he observed.

Half a century earlier, the Founding Fathers, in their bill of indictment in the Declaration of Independence, had accused the King of England of inciting against the suffering colonies “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” They were referring to the response of the native population to the genocidal assaults launched against them by the saintly Puritans and other merciless European savages who had taught the Indians that warfare, European-style, is a program of mass extermination of women and children; George Washington was soon to teach the same lesson to the Iroquois as he sent his forces to destroy their society and civilization, quite advanced by the standards of the era, in 1779. Rarely have hypocrisy and moral cowardice been so explicit, and admired with such reverence for centuries. It was, in fact, not until the 1960s, when the popular movements in the United Stares substantially raised the moral and intellectual level of the country—the major reason why they are so reviled and despised by the educated classes—that it became possible to face this history with a degree of honesty.

Fortunately, God has always been on the side of commercial advantage, a great good fortune for a nation so deeply imbued with religious values as the United States.

George Kennan’s lucid presentation of U.S. foreign policy goals did not emerge from a vacuum. It reflected a broader geopolitical analysis that had been developed by elite groups during the war. Study groups of the Council on Foreign Relations (a major channel for business influence on foreign policy) and the State Department formulated the concept of what they called the “Grand Area,” a region that should be subordinated to the needs of the American economy and that was to include at a minimum the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British empire. It was to be expanded to a global system to the extent possible, surely including Western Europe and the incomparable energy reserves of the Middle East, then passing into American hands. This documentary record of high-level planning is also excluded from sanitized history. These guiding geopolitical conceptions explain a good deal of what has been happening in the world; if they are not understood, what takes place will appear to be a series of random errors, confusions and inconsistencies, traceable to the failings of a political leadership that is, in fact, succeeding brilliantly in its assigned tasks, despite the occasional failures that are inevitable in a complex world.

I would like to turn now to the question of what all this has meant for the world since World War II. Let us consider several elements of the world system that has emerged. Let us begin with the Third World, which was to be incorporated within the Grand Area so that its various regions could “fulfill their functions.” I will return to some of the many problems that arose in carrying out this task. A rough measure of these problems is given by a 1983 review by Ruth Sivard of major military conflicts since World War II, conducted under the auspices of the Institute of World Order, the Rockefeller Foundation, and other similarly respectable institutions. She estimates that there were about 125 major conflicts, 95% of them in the Third World, in most cases involving foreign forces, with “western powers accounting for 79% of the interventions, communist for 6%.” The toll has been enormous. In Indochina alone, there may have been close to 4 million killed in the course of the French and American wars of aggression, while 3 countries were left in ruins.* In Afghanistan, estimates of the death toll caused by the Soviet aggression range from one-half million to a million, and there has been vast destruction. In Indonesia, one-half to a million people were slaughtered in four months, mostly landless peasants, after a military coup backed (and possibly inspired) by the United States in 1965, an operation much lauded by Western (including liberal) opinion and offered as a justificatio...

These estimates understate the lethal consequences of U.S. intervention in the Third World. When we try to assess the crimes of the Pol Pot regime, we rightly consider not only actual killing, but also the effect of harsh and brutal policies that led to death from malnutrition, the conditions of life and labor, lack of health facilities, and so on. No similar estimate has been attempted of the impact of U.S. policies in the Third World, and I will not try to speculate here on the scale of these much larger atrocities. Quite often in areas of predominant U.S. influence such as Latin America, there has been statistical growth in the course of “economic miracles” while much of the population starves as croplands are devoted to exports for the benefit of U.S. agribusiness and local elites. The U.S. is the world’s largest food importer, primarily from the Third World, while its massive food exports go primarily to advanced industrial societies, or for such projects as producing beef for export to U.S. markets, replacing local subsistence agriculture. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress gave a major impetus to these destructive—indeed, if we were honest, murderous—developments, a topic to which I will return in the third lecture, along with the relation between these models of development and the terror-and-torture states that are their natural concomitant.

The primary concern had been formulated by South African Prime Minister Jan Christiaan Smuts, one of Winston Churchill’s most trusted advisers, who warned Churchill in 1943, with regard to southern Europe, that “with politics let loose among those peoples, we may have a wave of disorder and wholesale Communism set going all over those parts of Europe.” Neither so-called “Communism,” nor socialism, nor radical democracy, nor national capitalism that might strike an independent course was tolerable. These were the threats that had to be confronted, not Soviet aggression.

The main enemy is the indigenous population who attempt to steal our resources that happen to be in their countries, who are concerned with vague and idealistic objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization, and who, in their backwardness and folly, find it difficult to understand that their “function” is to “complement the industrial economies of the West” (including Japan) and to serve the needs of the privileged groups that dominate these societies. The major danger posed by these indigenous enemies is that unless they are stopped in time, they may spread the virus of independence, freedom, and concern for human welfare, infecting regions beyond; they must be prevented from turning their societies into rotten apples, which may infect the barrel, threatening the stability of the Grand Area. As other planners put it, the United States must “prevent the rot from spreading.” It must prevent what is sometimes—on different assumptions as to what is right and just—called “the threat of a good example.” The threat of rot and infection is a serious one, which requires serious measures, violence if necessary, always presented as the defense of the highest values, in the classic manner.

To overcome these threats, the U.S. undertook the Marshall Plan and similar programs, which, as noted earlier, also served as critically important subsidies to U.S. exporters of raw materials and manufactured goods. Meanwhile, the threat of democratic politics was met in the natural way, by undertaking a program, worldwide in scope, to destroy the anti-fascist resistance and the popular organizations associated with it, often in favor of fascists or fascist collaborators. This is, in fact, one of the major themes of early postwar history.

The successful counterinsurgency operation in Greece served as the model for the escalation of the U.S. war against South Vietnam in the early 1960s, as Adlai Stevenson proclaimed at the United Nations in 1964 while explaining that in South Vietnam, the United States was engaged in defense against “internal aggression.” That is, the U.S. was undertaking the defense of South Vietnam against the “internal aggression” of its own population; essentially the rhetoric of the Truman Doctrine. The Greek model was also invoked by Reagan’s Central America advisor Roger Fontaine as the Reagan Administration prepared to escalate Carter’s “defense” of El Salvador against “internal aggression” there. It might be noted that Stevenson’s reputation as an outstanding spokesman for enlightened values and a leading figure of modern liberalism is unsullied by such rhetoric as this. The doctrine that the U.S. has been engaged in defense of one or another country against “internal aggression” is quite blandly accepted by the educated classes in the United States, as in Europe quite generally, a fact that provides a certain insight into the moral and intellectual level of what passes as civilized discourse.

Turning to Latin America, a fascist coup in Colombia inspired by Franco’s Spain aroused no more concern than a military coup in Venezuela or the restoration of an admirer of fascism in Panama. But the first democratic government in the history of Guatemala, modeling itself on Roosevelt’s New Deal, elicited bitter U.S. antagonism and a CIA coup that turned Guatemala into a literal hell-on-earth, kept that way since with regular U.S. intervention and support, particularly under Kennedy and Johnson.

The postwar pattern of marginalizing or if necessary destroying the antifascist resistance, often in favor of fascist sympathizers and collaborators, was quite a general and pervasive one. But predictably, sanitized history does not include a chapter devoted to this worldwide campaign, though one can discover the details in specialized studies dealing with one or another country. Where the facts are noted in connection with some particular country, the policy is generally described as a mistake, resulting from the ignorance or naivete of the well-meaning U.S. leadership or the confusions of the postwar era.

Acheson’s success in this deception taught an important lesson for propagandists, applied many times since: when the U.S. political leadership wants to drum up support for intervention and aggression, it need only shout that the Russians are coming. Whatever the facts, this is bound to achieve the desired results. The tactic worked unfailingly until the popular movements in the 1960s somewhat improved the intellectual and moral level of U.S. society, and despite this setback, this tactic remains highly effective.

Acheson’s success had further implications for policy-makers: if it is deemed necessary to arrack another country, it will be highly useful to be able to portray it as a Soviet client to reinforce the cry that the Russians are again on the march. Therefore it is useful to drive the target of aggression into the hands of the Soviet Union by embargo, threat, subversion and other measures, including pressure on allies and international agencies to withdraw assistance, so as to provide the required doctrinal basis for the planned aggression. If this goal can be achieved, it will also provide a retrospective justification for the hostile actions that were undertaken to achieve it, assuming, of course, that the media and articulate intelligentsia can be relied upon to play their assigned part in the charade—a well-founded assumption. If the goal cannot be achieved, the desired consequence can be proclaimed as fact nevertheless, with media complicity. This lesson has also been applied frequently: during the successful overthrow of capitalist democracy in Guatemala in 1954, in the case of Cuba, and with regard to Nicaragua today, among many other cases.

And when in May 1985, Ronald Reagan declared a “national emergency” to deal with the “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” posed by “the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua,” the reaction in Congress and the media—and in much of Europe—was not ridicule, but rather praise for these principled and statesmanlike steps. All of this provides yet another indication of the level of Western intellectual culture.

Lyndon Johnson, probably the most liberal President in American history and in many ways “a man of the people,” who was undoubtedly speaking honestly when he warned in 1948 that unless the U.S. maintained overwhelming military superiority, it would be “a bound and throttled giant; impotent and easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife”; or when he said in a speech in Alaska in 1966, at the height of U.S. aggression in Vietnam, that “If we are going to have visits from any aggressors or any enemies, I would rather have that aggression take place out 10,000 miles from here than take place here in Anchorage,” referring to the “internal aggression” of the Vietnamese against U.S. military forces in Vietnam: There are 3 billion people in the world [Johnson continued] and we have only 200 million of them. We are outnumbered 15 to one. If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and take what we have. We have what they want. Difficult as it may be to believe, such sentiments are widely shared among the richest and most privileged people in the world. We need not tarry on the psychological mechanisms; what is important is that this is a fact, and one that allows much of the population to be easily aroused by jingoist rhetoric appealing to deep-seated fears.

The rot that concerns planners is the threat of successful social and economic development outside the framework of U.S. control, development of a sort that may be meaningful to poor and oppressed people elsewhere. The “virus” that may spread contagion is the “demonstration effect,” which may indeed cause “the rot to spread” as others seek to emulate successes that they observe. It is “the threat of a good example.”

In the 1950s, U.S. planners were deeply concerned over the possibility of successful social and economic development in North Vietnam and China, and in South Vietnam under the NLF if the “internal aggression” should succeed. This might lead to efforts to emulate their achievements elsewhere, so that Southeast Asia would no longer “fulfill its function” as a dependency of Japan and the West, serving their needs rather than its own.

In the 1950s, U.S. planners recommended that measures should be taken to impede economic development in China and North Vietnam, a proposal that is remarkable in its cruelty.

In cultivated Western circles, it is considered the prerogative of the United States to use violence to prevent reform measures that might benefit poor and deprived people, so that the statement of such an intent arouses no special interest or concern. The U.S. will permit no constructive programs in its own domains, so it must ensure that they are destroyed elsewhere, to undermine “the threat of a good example.”

Or consider Grenada, a tiny speck in the Caribbean of no interest to the United States, where the Maurice Bishop government at once elicited U.S. hostility and rage, including economic measures and threatening military maneuvers and finally, after the regime cracked, outright invasion. Why should such tiny and marginal countries evoke such concern, indeed near hysteria, among U.S. planners? Surely their resources are of no significance. And while indeed leading U.S. military and political figures solemnly discussed the military threat posed by Grenada, one must assume that these ravings—for that is what they are—were simply a cover for something else. An explanation for this superficially quite irrational behavior is provided by the rotten apple theory, in its internal rather than public form; in these terms, the hysteria makes perfect sense. If a tiny and impoverished country with minuscule resources can begin to do something for its own population, others may ask: “Why not us?” The weaker and more insignificant a country, the more limited its means and resources, the greater is the threat of a good example. The rot may spread, threatening regions of real concern to the rulers of much of the world.

The real meaning of the Cold War is elucidated by a look at its typical events: Soviet tanks in East Berlin in 1953, in Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968, the invasion of Afghanistan; U.S. intervention in Greece, Iran, Guatemala, Indochina, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Chile, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and a host of other examples, including U.S.-backed aggression by client states, as in East Timor and Lebanon, among other instances. In each case, when one of the superpowers resorts to subversion or aggression, the act is presented to the domestic population and the allies as “self-defense,” defense against the superpower enemy or its agents. In fact, the actions are taken to ensure control over a certain sphere of influence; for the U.S., much of the world.

The actual events of the Cold War illustrate the fact that the Cold War is in effect a system of joint global management, a system with a certain functional utility for the superpowers, one reason why it persists. Intervention and subversion are conducted in the interest of elite groups, what is called in political theology “the national interest,” meaning the special interest of groups with sufficient domestic power to shape affairs of state.

To mobilize the population and recalcitrant allies in support of costly domestic programs and foreign adventures, it is necessary to appeal to the fear of some Great Satan, to adopt the Ayatollah Khomeini’s useful contribution to political rhetoric. The Cold War confrontation provides a useful means. Of course, it is necessary to avoid direct confrontation with the Great Satan himself, this being far too dangerous. It is preferable to confront weak and defenseless powers designated as proxies of the Great Satan. The Reagan Administration has regularly used Libya for this purpose, arranging regular confrontations timed to domestic needs, for example, the need to gain support for the Rapid Deployment Force or for contra aid. The system is a hazardous one, and may sooner or later break down, leading to a terminal global war, something that has come close to happening more than once and will again. But this is the kind of long-term consideration that does not enter into planning.

In this record we see dramatically revealed one of the central features of U.S. foreign policy. A popular movement or a state does not become an enemy because it is controlled by Moscow; rather, given that it is an enemy (for other reasons) and therefore must be undermined and destroyed, it must be that it is controlled by Moscow, whatever the facts, so that the U.S. attack against it is just and necessary. The “other reasons” are those already discussed. The U.S. may indeed succeed in driving the enemy into the hands of the Russians by its hostile actions, a most welcome result, or if it fails, it will pretend that this is the case, trusting the media to go along, as in the case of Guatemala in 1954, for example. Naturally, none of this can be expressed within the doctrinal system, and indeed it is not.

There is no “threat of a good example” in Indochina, and surrounding regions, the ones that were really important, are firmly incorporated within the Grand Area. The current problems have more to do with rivalries within the First World of industrial capitalism than with the threat of “infection” that might lead to independent development geared to domestic needs. All of this counts as a substantial success for the U.S. crusade in Indochina, a fact of which business circles, at least, have long been well aware.

In the last century in particular, a period in which the intelligentsia have developed as a more or less identifiable category in modern societies, they have tended to see themselves as managers, either managers of industry, managers of the state or ideological managers. That has been the general tendency among the intelligentsia, that is the interest that they hope to satisfy. And that, incidentally, is true in Western capitalist societies, in the so-called “socialist” societies (which are not socialist, in my opinion), and in the Third World. We have to ask what kind of an image of the world these intellectuals have created and why. Well, they have created an image of a stupid mass who must be led by clever intellectuals. In fact, what we often find is that the intellectuals, the educated classes, are the most indoctrinated, most ignorant, most stupid part of the population, and there are very good reasons for that. Basically two reasons. First of all, as the literate part of the population, they are subjected to the mass of propaganda. There is a second, more important and more subtle reason. Namely, they are the ideological managers. Therefore, they must internalize the propaganda and believe it. And part of the propaganda they have developed is that they are the natural leaders of the masses.

The U.S. is a society which is very heavily polled. The reason is that business wants to better understand what the popular mood is, so we have a great deal of information about popular attitudes divided by sectors of the population and so on. Every year the Gallup Poll, a major poll, asks people: Do you think the Vietnam war was a “mistake” or do you think it was “fundamentally wrong and immoral”? Among the general population, over 70 percent say that it was “fundamentally wrong and immoral.” Among the groups that they call “opinion leaders,” which include people like clergymen, it is about 40 percent who think that the war was “fundamentally wrong and immoral.” Among the intellectual elite, other studies show that the overwhelming majority regarded it as a mistake only, always, even at the height of the war. That is not unusual.