On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures

by Noam Chomsky

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.