On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures

by Noam Chomsky

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.