On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures

by Noam Chomsky

From its earliest days, the United States had wide-ranging imperial aspirations. In 1754, Benjamin Franklin, a leading spokesman for Enlightenment values, defined “the father of his nation” as the man who “removes the Natives to give his own people Room.” And indeed, from the origins of the colonial settlement through the 19th century, the native population was removed or destroyed through massacre, crop destruction, robbery and cheating, or expulsion, always with the highest motives, always in self-defense. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville observed “the triumphal march of civilization across the desert” as “in the middle of the winter,” when the “cold was unusually severe,” “three or four thousand soldiers drive before them the wandering races of the aborigines,” who “brought in their train the wounded and the sick, with children newly born and old men on the verge of death,” a “solemn spectacle” that would never fade from his memory. He was particularly impressed by the way the pioneers could deprive Indians of their rights and exterminate them “with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world.” It was impossible to destroy people with “more respect for the laws of humanity,” he observed.