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.