On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures

by Noam Chomsky

I would like to turn now to the question of what all this has meant for the world since World War II. Let us consider several elements of the world system that has emerged. Let us begin with the Third World, which was to be incorporated within the Grand Area so that its various regions could “fulfill their functions.” I will return to some of the many problems that arose in carrying out this task. A rough measure of these problems is given by a 1983 review by Ruth Sivard of major military conflicts since World War II, conducted under the auspices of the Institute of World Order, the Rockefeller Foundation, and other similarly respectable institutions. She estimates that there were about 125 major conflicts, 95% of them in the Third World, in most cases involving foreign forces, with “western powers accounting for 79% of the interventions, communist for 6%.” The toll has been enormous. In Indochina alone, there may have been close to 4 million killed in the course of the French and American wars of aggression, while 3 countries were left in ruins.* In Afghanistan, estimates of the death toll caused by the Soviet aggression range from one-half million to a million, and there has been vast destruction. In Indonesia, one-half to a million people were slaughtered in four months, mostly landless peasants, after a military coup backed (and possibly inspired) by the United States in 1965, an operation much lauded by Western (including liberal) opinion and offered as a justificatio...