On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures

by Noam Chomsky

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.