On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures

by Noam Chomsky

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.