The Culture of Terrorism Noam Chomsky Pluto Press London 4 Copyright © Noam Chomsky, 1988, 1989 Book printed in the United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Chomsky, Noam. The culture of terrorism 1. United States Foreign relations 1981- — — I. Title 7.73 E876 ISBN 0-7453-0269-6 ISBN 0-7453-0270-X Pbk Digital processing by The Electric Book Company 20 Cambridge Drive, London SE12 8AJ, UK www.elecbook.com Classics in Politics: The Culture of Terrorism Noam Chomsky 5 Contents Preface........................................................................................ 7 Notes Preface............................................................................. 11 INTRODUCTION The Public and State Violence.............................. 12 Notes Introduction...................................................................... 16 PART ONE The Scandals of 1986................................................ 17 1 The Challenge......................................................................... 18 Notes Chapter One...................................................................... 34 2 The Cultural-Historical Context.................................................. 37 Notes Chapter Two..................................................................... 49 3 The Problems of Clandestine Terrorism....................................... 52 Notes Chapter Three................................................................... 77 4 The Limits of Scandal............................................................... 83 Notes Chapter Four..................................................................... 93 5 The Culture of Terrorism........................................................... 96 Notes Chapter Five....................................................................136 6 Damage Control......................................................................146 Notes Chapter Six......................................................................166 7 The Perils of Diplomacy...........................................................170 Classics in Politics: The Culture of Terrorism Noam Chomsky 6 Notes Chapter Seven..................................................................214 8 The Reality That Must Be Effaced: Iran and Nicaragua.................................................................................221 Notes Chapter Eight...................................................................246 PART TWO Further Successes of the Reagan Administration...........................................................................252 9 Accelerating the Race Towards Destruction...............................253 Notes Chapter Nine....................................................................257 10 Controlling “Enemy Territory” .................................................258 Notes Chapter Ten.....................................................................261 11 Freedom of Expression in the Free World.................................262 Notes Chapter Eleven.................................................................274 PART THREE The Current Agenda..............................................277 12 The Threat of a Good Example................................................278 Notes Chapter Twelve................................................................285 13 The Fledgling Democracies.....................................................287 Notes Chapter Thirteen...............................................................314 14 Restoring Regional Standards.................................................320 Notes Chapter Fourteen..............................................................324 15 Standards for Ourselves.........................................................325 Notes Chapter Fifteen.................................................................331 16 Prospects.............................................................................332 Notes Chapter Sixteen................................................................334 Classics in Politics: The Culture of Terrorism Noam Chomsky Preface 7 Preface T his essay on the culture of terrorism is based on a December 1986 “postscript” for several foreign editions of my book Turning the Tide.1 I had originally intended to update the same material for a new U.S. edition, carrying it through the Iran-contra hearings, but it took on a rather different character in the course of rewriting, so I have prepared it for separate publication. I will, however, generally assume the discussion in Turning the Tide and the further elaboration in On Power and Ideology as background, without specific reference. This earlier material dealt with several topics: the travail of Central America; the principles that underlie U.S. policy planning as revealed by the documentary record; the application of these principles in Third World intervention, primarily with regard to Central America and the Caribbean; the application of the same principles to national security affairs and interactions among the industrial powers; and some relevant features of domestic U.S. society. The central—and not very surprising— conclusion that emerges from the documentary and historical record is that U.S. international and security policy, rooted in the structure of power in the domestic society, has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call “the Fifth Freedom,” understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced. This guiding principle was overlooked when Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced the Four Freedoms that the U.S. and its allies would uphold in the conflict with Classics in Politics: The Culture of Terrorism Noam Chomsky Preface 8 fascism: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The internal documentary record of U.S. planning and, more importantly, the unfolding historical events themselves yield ample evidence to evaluate the significance attached to the Four Freedoms in doctrine and in practice, and to demonstrate their subordination to the Fifth Freedom, the operative principle that accounts for a substantial part of what the U.S. government does in the world. When the Four Freedoms are perceived to be incompatible with the Fifth, a regular occurrence, they are set aside with little notice or concern. To pursue programs that are conceived and applied in these terms, the state must spin an elaborate web of illusion and deceit, with the cooperation of the ideological institutions that generally serve its interests—not at all surprisingly, given the distribution of domestic wealth and power and the natural workings of the “free market of ideas” functioning within these constraints. They must present the facts of current history in a proper light, conducting exercises of “historical engineering,” to use the term devised by American historians who offered their services to President Wilson during World War I: “explaining the issues of the war that we might the better win it,” whatever the facts may actually be. It has commonly been understood that the responsibility of the serious academic historian and political scientist, as of political leaders, is to deceive the public, for their own good. Thus the respected historian Thomas Bailey explained in 1948 that “Because the masses are notoriously short-sighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests,” a view recently endorsed by the director of Harvard University’s Center of International Affairs, Samuel Huntington, who wrote in 1981 that “you Classics in Politics: The Culture of Terrorism Noam Chomsky Preface 9 may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has done ever since the Truman Doctrine.” An accurate assessment, which applies very aptly to Central America today. The academic world too must be rallied to the cause. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1949, Conyers Read explained that we must clearly assume a militant attitude if we are to survive ... Discipline is the essential prerequisite of every effective army whether it march under the Stars and Stripes or under the Hammer and Sickle ... Total war, whether it be hot or cold, enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his part. The historian is no freer from this obligation than the physicist ... This sounds like the advocacy of one form of social control as against another. In short, it is.2 In general, it is necessary to ensure that the domestic population remains largely inert, limited in the capacity to develop independent modes of thought and perception and to formulate and press effectively for alternative policies—even alternative institutional arrangements—that might well be seen as preferable if the framework of ideology were to be challenged. Subsequent events illustrate very well the theses developed in the earlier material to which I referred above. I will review a number of examples, including the “scandals” that erupted in late 1986 and their consequences, and the new demands that these developments posed for the ideological system. The scandals elicited a good deal of commentary and reflection on our political institutions and the way they function. Much of it, I think, is misguided, for reasons that I will try to explain as Classics in Politics: The Culture of Terrorism Noam Chomsky Preface 10 we proceed. My main concern will be to assess what we can learn about ourselves, particularly about the dominant intellectual culture and the values that guide it,3 from an inquiry into recent events and the reaction to them at a critical moment of American life. Dedication to the Fifth Freedom is hardly a new form of social pathology. Nor, of course, was it an invention of the “white hordes” who, “fortified in aggressive spirit by an arrogant, messianic Christianity” and “motivated by the lure of enriching plunder, ... sallied forth from their western European homelands to explore, assault, loot, occupy, rule and exploit the rest of the world” during the nearly six centuries when “western Europe and its diaspora have been disturbing the peace of the world”—as the advance of European civilization is perceived, not without reason, by a perceptive African commentator.4 But this vocation of the powerful constantly assumes new forms—and new disguises, as the supportive culture passes through varying stages of moral cowardice and intellectual corruption. As the latest inheritors of a grim tradition, we should at least have the integrity to look into the mirror without evasion. And when we do not like what we see, as we most definitely will not if we have the honesty to face reality, we have a far more serious moral responsibility, which should be obvious enough. Cambridge, Massachusetts October 1987 Classics in Politics: The Culture of Terrorism Noam Chomsky Preface 11 Notes Preface 1. Turning the Tide (South End, 1985), henceforth TTT. The “postscript” has appeared in the Canadian and Italian editions (Black Rose (Montreal), 1987; Eleuthera (Milan), 1987). See also my On Power and Ideology (South End, 1987; henceforth, PI), a series of lectures delivered in Managua in 1986, dealing with similar themes. 2. For sources and more general discussion, see my Towards a New Cold War (Pantheon, 1982), chapter 1, drawing particularly on Jesse Lemisch, On Active Service in War and Peace: Politics and Ideology in the American Historical Profession (New Hogtown Press (Toronto), 1975), an important study, unread for the usual reasons: wrong message. Lemisch was one of the many young scholars eliminated from the universities during the little-known but extensive academic repression of the left during the 1960s, on the grounds that his “political concerns interfered with his scholarship”—meaning, he failed to adopt the proper “political concerns.” Many illusions have been fostered about what happened in the universities in those years of conflict, when the rigid ideological barriers were breached to a limited extent, but at a serious cost to many of the young people who achieved this important result. Huntington, in International Security, Summer, 1981. 3. A related and very significant question, which I do not attempt to address, is the shaping of the popular culture for the general public in television, cinema, mass circulation journals, educational practice, and so on. 4. Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite (Vintage, 1975), 3. Classics in Politics: The Culture of Terrorism Noam Chomsky