[News] Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia - Noam Chomsky

[Anti-Imperialist News]

posted 2009-05-19 09:36:46
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175073/noam_chomsky_unexceptional_americans

Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, Unexceptional Americans

Murder, torture, abuse
 and photos of the same. 
We've 
<http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=8560>seen 
some of them, of course. Now, 
<http://news.antiwar.com/2009/05/13/generals-pressed-obama-to-block-photo-%20release/>evidently 
under pressure from his top generals, President 
Obama has decided to 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/13/AR2009051301751_pf.html>fight 
the release of other grim photos from the dark 
side of the Bush years of offshore injustice -- 
on the grounds that their publication might 
inflame opinion in the Middle East and our 
various war zones (as if fighting to suppress 
their publication won't). In this way, just as 
the president is in the process of making Bush's 
wars his own, so he seems to be making much of 
the nightmare legacy of those years of crime, torture, and cover-up his, too.

The photos his Justice Department will fight to 
suppress (for how long or how successfully we 
don't yet know) are now officially "his"; next, 
assumedly, come those military commissions, 
suspended as Obama took office, which are 
evidently about to be 
<http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gxy556BRGHjpxwA2iLBQ8y6abh9g>reborn 
as Obama era tools of injustice. (This brings to 
mind, in grimmer form, the old saw about how 
military justice is to justice as military music 
is to music.) And with those commissions comes 
that wonderfully un-Constitutional idea of 
<http://news.antiwar.com/2009/05/14/obama-mulls-indefinite-detention-without-trial-for-detainees/>detaining 
chosen prisoners indefinitely either entirely 
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124223286506515765.html>without 
trial or with trials that will be mockeries. And 
with that, evidently, goes the idea of possibly 
setting up some sort of new 
<http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/04/09/what-to-do-with-gitmo-detainees-profs-propose-national-security-court/>"national 
security court" to try some detainees. (Keep in 
mind that the Obama administration is already 
<http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/05/13/cheney/>hanging 
on tightly to Dick Cheney's "state secrets" 
privilege to block various lawsuits by those 
wronged in all sorts of ways in the Bush years.)

In other words, if you can't go to court and get 
the punishments you want, the solution is simply 
to create courts jiggered in such a way (and 
surrounded by enough secrecy) that you'll get the 
decisions you desire. If that isn't a striking 
definition of American justice, I don't know what is.

Obama's national security world is now coming 
into view -- and it's not a pretty picture, but 
then, as Noam Chomsky points out, in a tour de 
force piece below, it hasn't been a pretty picture for a long, long time. Tom



Why We Can't See the Trees or the Forest

The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia
By Noam Chomsky

The torture memos released by the White House 
elicited shock, indignation, and surprise. The 
shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so.

For one thing, even without inquiry, it was 
reasonable to suppose that Guantanamo was a 
torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where 
they would be beyond the reach of the law -- a 
place, incidentally, that Washington is using in 
violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point 
of a gun? Security reasons were, of course, 
alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. 
The same expectations held for the Bush 
administration's 
<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mayer>"black 
sites," or secret prisons, and for 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/7789/the_cia_s_la_dolce_vita_war_on_terror>extraordinary 
rendition, and they were fulfilled.

More importantly, torture has been routinely 
practiced from the early days of the conquest of 
the national territory, and continued to be used 
as the imperial ventures of the "infant empire" 
-- as George Washington called the new republic 
-- extended to the Philippines, Haiti, and 
elsewhere. Keep in mind as well that torture was 
the least of the many crimes of aggression, 
terror, subversion, and economic strangulation 
that have darkened U.S. history, much as in the case of other great powers.

Accordingly, what's surprising is to see the 
reactions to the release of those Justice 
Department memos, even by some of the most 
eloquent and forthright critics of Bush 
malfeasance: Paul Krugman, for example, writing 
that we used to be "a nation of moral ideals" and 
never before Bush "have our leaders so utterly 
betrayed everything our nation stands for." To 
say the least, that common view reflects a rather 
slanted version of American history.

Occasionally the conflict between "what we stand 
for" and "what we do" has been forthrightly 
addressed. One distinguished scholar who 
undertook the task at hand was Hans Morgenthau, a 
founder of realist international relations 
theory. In a classic study published in 1964 in 
the glow of Camelot, Morgenthau developed the 
standard view that the U.S. has a "transcendent 
purpose": establishing peace and freedom at home 
and indeed everywhere, since "the arena within 
which the United States must defend and promote 
its purpose has become world-wide." But as a 
scrupulous scholar, he also recognized that the 
historical record was radically inconsistent with that "transcendent purpose."

We should not be misled by that discrepancy, 
advised Morgenthau; we should not "confound the 
abuse of reality with reality itself." Reality is 
the unachieved "national purpose" revealed by 
"the evidence of history as our minds reflect 
it." What actually happened was merely the "abuse of reality."

The release of the torture memos led others to 
recognize the problem. In the New York Times, 
columnist Roger Cohen 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/books/review/Cohen-t.html>reviewed 
a new book, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, 
by British journalist Geoffrey Hodgson, who 
concludes that the U.S. is "just one great, but 
imperfect, country among others." Cohen agrees 
that the evidence supports Hodgson's judgment, 
but nonetheless regards as fundamentally mistaken 
Hodgson's failure to understand that "America was 
born as an idea, and so it has to carry that idea 
forward." The American idea is revealed in the 
country's birth as a "city on a hill," an 
"inspirational notion" that resides "deep in the 
American psyche," and by "the distinctive spirit 
of American individualism and enterprise" 
demonstrated in the Western expansion. Hodgson's 
error, it seems, is that he is keeping to "the 
distortions of the American idea," "the abuse of reality."

Let us then turn to "reality itself": the "idea" 
of America from its earliest days.

"Come Over and Help Us"

The inspirational phrase "city on a hill" was 
coined by John Winthrop in 1630, borrowing from 
the Gospels, and outlining the glorious future of 
a new nation "ordained by God." One year earlier 
his Massachusetts Bay Colony created its 
<http://www.sec.state.ma.us/pre/presea/sealhis.htm>Great 
Seal. It depicted an Indian with a scroll coming 
out of his mouth. On that scroll are the words 
"Come over and help us." The British colonists 
were thus pictured as benevolent humanists, 
responding to the pleas of the miserable natives 
to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.

The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic 
representation of "the idea of America," from its 
birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of 
the psyche and displayed on the walls of every 
classroom. It should certainly appear in the 
background of all of the Kim Il-Sung-style 
worship of that savage murderer and torturer 
Ronald Reagan, who blissfully described himself 
as the leader of a "shining city on the hill," 
while orchestrating some of the more ghastly 
crimes of his years in office, notoriously in 
Central America but elsewhere as well.

The Great Seal was an early proclamation of 
"humanitarian intervention," to use the currently 
fashionable phrase. As has commonly been the case 
since, the "humanitarian intervention" led to a 
catastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries. The 
first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, 
described "the utter extirpation of all the 
Indians in most populous parts of the Union" by 
means "more destructive to the Indian natives 
than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru."

Long after his own significant contributions to 
the process were past, John Quincy Adams deplored 
the fate of "that hapless race of native 
Americans, which we are exterminating with such 
merciless and perfidious cruelty
 among the 
heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe 
God will one day bring [it] to judgement." The 
"merciless and perfidious cruelty" continued 
until "the West was won." Instead of God's 
judgment, the heinous sins today bring only 
praise for the fulfillment of the American "idea."

The conquest and settling of the West indeed 
showed that "individualism and enterprise," so 
praised by Roger Cohen. Settler-colonialist 
enterprises, the cruelest form of imperialism, 
commonly do. The results were hailed by the 
respected and influential Senator Henry Cabot 
Lodge in 1898. Calling for intervention in Cuba, 
Lodge lauded our record "of conquest, 
colonization, and territorial expansion 
unequalled by any people in the 19th century," 
and urged that it is "not to be curbed now," as 
the Cubans too were pleading, in the Great Seal's 
words, "come over and help us."

Their plea was answered. The U.S. sent troops, 
thereby preventing Cuba's liberation from Spain 
and turning it into a virtual colony, as it remained until 1959.

<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082840/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>
[]
The "American idea" was illustrated further by 
the 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1027/noam_chomsky_on_terrorizing_cuba>remarkable 
campaign, initiated by the Eisenhower 
administration virtually at once to restore Cuba 
to its proper place, after Fidel Castro entered 
Havana in January 1959, finally liberating the 
island from foreign domination, with enormous 
popular support, as Washington ruefully conceded. 
What followed was economic warfare with the 
clearly articulated aim of punishing the Cuban 
population so that they would overthrow the 
disobedient Castro government, invasion, the 
dedication of the Kennedy brothers to bringing 
"the terrors of the earth" to Cuba (the phrase of 
historian Arthur Schlesinger in his biography of 
Robert Kennedy, who considered that task one of 
his highest priorities), and other crimes 
continuing to the present, in defiance of virtually unanimous world opinion.

American imperialism is often traced to the 
takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 
1898. But that is to succumb to what historian of 
imperialism Bernard Porter calls "the saltwater 
fallacy," the idea that conquest only becomes 
imperialism when it crosses saltwater. Thus, if 
the Mississippi had resembled the Irish Sea, 
Western expansion would have been imperialism. 
 From George Washington to Henry Cabot Lodge, 
those engaged in the enterprise had a clearer 
grasp of just what they were doing.

After the success of humanitarian intervention in 
Cuba in 1898, the next step in the mission 
assigned by Providence was to confer "the 
blessings of liberty and civilization upon all 
the rescued peoples" of the Philippines (in the 
words of the platform of Lodge's Republican 
party) -- at least those who survived the 
murderous onslaught and widespread use of torture 
and other atrocities that accompanied it. These 
fortunate souls were left to the mercies of the 
U.S.-established Philippine constabulary within a 
newly devised model of colonial domination, 
relying on security forces trained and equipped 
for sophisticated modes of surveillance, 
intimidation, and violence. Similar models would 
be adopted in many other areas where the U.S. 
imposed brutal National Guards and other client forces.

The Torture Paradigm

Over the past 60 years, victims worldwide have 
endured the CIA's "torture paradigm," developed 
at a cost that reached $1 billion annually, 
according to historian Alfred McCoy in his book A 
Question of Torture. He 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1795/alfred_mccoy_on_the_cia_s_road_to_abu_ghraib>shows 
how torture methods the CIA developed from the 
1950s surfaced with little change in the infamous 
photos at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. There is no 
hyperbole in the title of Jennifer Harbury's 
penetrating study of the U.S. torture record: 
Truth, Torture, and the American Way. So it is 
highly misleading, to say the least, when 
investigators of the Bush gang's descent into the 
global sewers 
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21716>lament 
that "in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way."

None of this is to say that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld 
et al. did not introduce important innovations. 
In ordinary American practice, torture was 
largely farmed out to subsidiaries, not carried 
out by Americans directly in their own 
government-established torture chambers. As 
<http://www.allannairn.com/>Allan Nairn, who has 
carried out some of the most revealing and 
courageous investigations of torture, points out: 
"What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly 
knocks off is that small percentage of torture 
now done by Americans while retaining the 
overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which 
is done by foreigners under U.S. patronage. Obama 
could stop backing foreign forces that torture, 
but he has chosen not to do so."

Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, 
Nairn observes, but "merely repositioned it," 
restoring it to the American norm, a matter of 
indifference to the victims. "[H]is is a return 
to the status quo ante," writes Nairn, "the 
torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, 
year by year, often produced more U.S.-backed 
strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years."

Sometimes the American engagement in torture was 
even more indirect. In a 1980 study, Latin 
Americanist Lars Schoultz found that U.S. aid 
"has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin 
American governments which torture their 
citizens,... to the hemisphere's relatively 
egregious violators of fundamental human rights." 
Broader studies by Edward Herman found the same 
correlation, and also suggested an explanation. 
Not surprisingly, U.S. aid tends to correlate 
with a favorable climate for business operations, 
commonly improved by the murder of labor and 
peasant organizers and human rights activists and 
other such actions, yielding a secondary 
correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights.

These studies took place before the Reagan years, 
when the topic was not worth studying because the correlations were so clear.

Small wonder that President Obama advises us to 
look forward, not backward -- a convenient 
doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who 
are beaten by them tend to see the world differently, much to our annoyance.

Adopting Bush's Positions

An argument can be made that implementation of 
the CIA's "torture paradigm" never violated the 
1984 Torture Convention, at least as Washington 
interpreted it. McCoy points out that the highly 
sophisticated CIA paradigm developed at enormous 
cost in the 1950s and 1960s, based on the "KGB's 
most devastating torture technique," kept 
primarily to mental torture, not crude physical 
torture, which was considered less effective in 
turning people into pliant vegetables.

McCoy writes that the Reagan administration then 
carefully revised the International Torture 
Convention "with four detailed diplomatic 
'reservations' focused on just one word in the 
convention's 26-printed pages," the word 
"mental." He continues: "These 
intricately-constructed diplomatic reservations 
re-defined torture, as interpreted by the United 
States, to exclude sensory deprivation and 
self-inflicted pain -- the very techniques the 
CIA had refined at such great cost."

When Clinton sent the UN Convention to Congress 
for ratification in 1994, he included the Reagan 
reservations. The president and Congress 
therefore exempted the core of the CIA torture 
paradigm from the U.S. interpretation of the 
Torture Convention; and those reservations, McCoy 
observes, were "reproduced verbatim in domestic 
legislation enacted to give legal force to the UN 
Convention." That is the "political land mine" 
that "detonated with such phenomenal force" in 
the Abu Ghraib scandal and in the shameful 
Military Commissions Act that was passed with bipartisan support in 2006.

Bush, of course, went beyond his predecessors in 
authorizing prima facie violations of 
international law, and several of his extremist 
innovations were struck down by the Courts. While 
Obama, like Bush, eloquently affirms our 
unwavering commitment to international law, he 
seems intent on substantially reinstating the 
extremist Bush measures. In the important case of 
Boumediene v. Bush in June 2008, the Supreme 
Court rejected as unconstitutional the Bush 
administration claim that prisoners in Guantanamo 
are not entitled to the right of habeas corpus.

Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald 
<http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/11/bagram/index.html?source=newsletter>reviews 
the aftermath. Seeking to "preserve the power to 
abduct people from around the world" and imprison 
them without due process, the Bush administration 
decided to ship them to the U.S. prison at Bagram 
Air Base in Afghanistan, treating "the Boumediene 
ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional 
guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly 
game -- fly your abducted prisoners to Guantanamo 
and they have constitutional rights, but fly them 
instead to Bagram and you can disappear them 
forever with no judicial process."

Obama adopted the Bush position, "filing a brief 
in federal court that, in two sentences, declared 
that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory 
on this issue," arguing that prisoners flown to 
Bagram from anywhere in the world (in the case in 
question, Yemenis and Tunisians captured in 
Thailand and the United Arab Emirates) "can be 
imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any 
kind -- as long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantanamo."

In March, however, a Bush-appointed federal judge 
"rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that 
the rationale of Boumediene applies every bit as 
much to Bagram as it does to Guantanamo." The 
Obama administration announced that it would 
appeal the ruling, thus placing Obama's 
Department of Justice, Greenwald concludes, 
"squarely to the Right of an extremely 
conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 
43-appointed judge on issues of executive power 
and due-process-less detentions," in radical 
violation of Obama's campaign promises and earlier stands.

The case of Rasul v. Rumsfeld appears to be 
following a similar trajectory. The plaintiffs 
charged that Rumsfeld and other high officials 
were responsible for their torture in Guantanamo, 
where they were sent after being captured by 
Uzbeki warlord Rashid Dostum. The plaintiffs 
claimed that they had traveled to Afghanistan to 
offer humanitarian relief. Dostum, a notorious 
thug, was then a leader of the Northern Alliance, 
the Afghan faction supported by Russia, Iran, 
India, Turkey, and the Central Asian states, and 
the U.S. as it attacked Afghanistan in October 2001.

Dostum turned them over to U.S. custody, 
allegedly for bounty money. The Bush 
administration sought to have the case dismissed. 
Recently, Obama's Department of Justice 
<http://washingtonindependent.com/33679/obama-justice-department-urges-dismissal-of-another-torture-case>filed 
a brief supporting the Bush position that 
government officials are not liable for torture 
and other violations of due process, on the 
grounds that the Courts had not yet clearly 
established the rights that prisoners enjoy.

It is also reported that the Obama administration 
intends to 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/08/AR2009050804228.html>revive 
military commissions, one of the more severe 
violations of the rule of law during the Bush 
years. There is a reason, 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/us/politics/02gitmo.html>according 
to William Glaberson of the New York Times: 
"Officials who work on the Guantanamo issue say 
administration lawyers have become concerned that 
they would face significant obstacles to trying 
some terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges 
might make it difficult to prosecute detainees 
who were subjected to brutal treatment or for 
prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by 
intelligence agencies." A serious flaw in the 
criminal justice system, it appears.

Creating Terrorists

There is still much debate about whether torture 
has been effective in eliciting information -- 
the assumption being, apparently, that if it is 
effective, then it may be justified. By the same 
argument, when Nicaragua captured U.S. pilot 
Eugene Hasenfuss in 1986, after shooting down his 
plane delivering aid to U.S.-supported Contra 
forces, they should not have tried him, found him 
guilty, and then sent him back to the U.S., as 
they did. Instead, they should have applied the 
CIA torture paradigm to try to extract 
information about other terrorist atrocities 
being planned and implemented in Washington, no 
small matter for a tiny, impoverished country 
under terrorist attack by the global superpower.

By the same standards, if the Nicaraguans had 
been able to capture the chief terrorism 
coordinator, John Negroponte, then U.S. 
ambassador in Honduras (later appointed as the 
first Director of National Intelligence, 
essentially counterterrorism czar, without 
eliciting a murmur), they should have done the 
same. Cuba would have been justified in acting 
similarly, had the Castro government been able to 
lay hands on the Kennedy brothers. There is no 
need to bring up what their victims should have 
done to Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and other 
leading terrorist commanders, whose exploits 
leave al-Qaeda in the dust, and who doubtless had 
ample information that could have prevented further "ticking bomb" attacks.

Such considerations never seem to arise in public discussion.

There is, to be sure, a response: our terrorism, 
even if surely terrorism, is benign, deriving as 
it does from the city on the hill.

Perhaps culpability would be greater, by 
prevailing moral standards, if it were discovered 
that Bush administration torture had cost 
American lives. That is, in fact, the conclusion 
drawn by Major Matthew Alexander [a pseudonym], 
one of the most seasoned U.S. interrogators in 
Iraq, who elicited "the information that led to 
the US military being able to locate Abu Musab 
al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq," 
correspondent Patrick Cockburn 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick04272009.html>reports.

Alexander expresses only contempt for the Bush 
administration's harsh interrogation methods: 
"The use of torture by the U.S.," he believes, 
not only elicits no useful information but "has 
proved so counter-productive that it may have led 
to the death of as many U.S. soldiers as 
civilians killed in 9/11." From hundreds of 
interrogations, Alexander discovered that foreign 
fighters came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses 
at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and that they and 
their domestic allies turned to suicide bombing 
and other terrorist acts for the same reasons.

There is also mounting evidence that the torture 
methods Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld 
encouraged created terrorists. One carefully 
studied case is that of 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/21/AR2009022101234.html>Abdallah 
al-Ajmi, who was locked up in Guantanamo on the 
charge of "engaging in two or three fire fights 
with the Northern Alliance." He ended up in 
Afghanistan after having failed to reach Chechnya 
to fight against the Russians.

After four years of brutal treatment in 
Guantanamo, he was returned to Kuwait. He later 
found his way to Iraq and, in March 2008, drove a 
bomb-laden truck into an Iraqi military compound, 
killing himself and 13 soldiers -- "the single 
most heinous act of violence committed by a 
former Guantanamo detainee," according to the 
Washington Post, and according to his lawyer, the 
direct result of his abusive imprisonment.

All much as a reasonable person would expect.

Unexceptional Americans

Another standard pretext for torture is the 
context: the "war on terror" that Bush declared 
after 9/11. A crime that rendered traditional 
international law "quaint" and "obsolete" -- so 
George W. Bush was advised by his legal counsel 
Alberto Gonzales, later appointed Attorney 
General. The doctrine has been widely reiterated 
in one form or another in commentary and analysis.

The 9/11 attack was doubtless unique in many 
respects. One is where the guns were pointing: 
typically it is in the opposite direction. In 
fact, it was the first attack of any consequence 
on the national territory of the United States 
since the British burned down Washington in 1814.

Another unique feature was the scale of terror 
perpetrated by a non-state actor.

Horrifying as it was, however, it could have been 
worse. Suppose that the perpetrators had bombed 
the White House, killed the president, and 
established a vicious military dictatorship that 
killed 50,000 to 100,000 people and tortured 
700,000, set up a huge international terror 
center that carried out assassinations and helped 
impose comparable military dictatorships 
elsewhere, and implemented economic doctrines 
that so radically dismantled the economy that the 
state had to virtually take it over a few years later.

That would indeed have been far worse than 
September 11, 2001. And it happened in Salvador 
Allende's Chile in what Latin Americans often 
call "the first 9/11" in 1973. (The numbers above 
were changed to per-capita U.S. equivalents, a 
realistic way of measuring crimes.) 
Responsibility for the military coup against 
Allende can be traced straight back to 
Washington. Accordingly, the otherwise quite 
appropriate analogy is out of consciousness here 
in the U.S., while the facts are consigned to the 
"abuse of reality" that the naïve call "history."

It should also be recalled that Bush did not 
declare the "war on terror," he re-declared it. 
Twenty years earlier, President Reagan's 
administration came into office declaring that a 
centerpiece of its foreign policy would be a war 
on terror, "the plague of the modern age" and "a 
return to barbarism in our time" -- to sample the fevered rhetoric of the day.

That first U.S. war on terror has also been 
deleted from historical consciousness, because 
the outcome cannot readily be incorporated into 
the canon: hundreds of thousands slaughtered in 
the ruined countries of Central America and many 
more elsewhere, among them an estimated 1.5 
million dead in the terrorist wars sponsored in 
neighboring countries by Reagan's favored ally, 
apartheid South Africa, which had to defend 
itself from Nelson Mandela's African National 
Congress (ANC), one of the world's "more 
notorious terrorist groups," as Washington 
determined in 1988. In fairness, it should be 
added that, 20 years later, Congress voted to 
remove the ANC from the list of terrorist 
organizations, so that Mandela is now, at last, 
able to enter the U.S. without obtaining a waiver from the government.

The reigning doctrine of the country is sometimes 
called "American exceptionalism." It is nothing 
of the sort. It is probably close to a universal 
habit among imperial powers. France was hailing 
its "civilizing mission" in its colonies, while 
the French Minister of War called for 
"exterminating the indigenous population" of 
Algeria. Britain's nobility was a "novelty in the 
world," John Stuart Mill declared, while urging 
that this angelic power delay no longer in completing its liberation of India.

Similarly, there is no reason to doubt the 
sincerity of Japanese militarists in the 1930s, 
who were bringing an "earthly paradise" to China 
under benign Japanese tutelage, as they carried 
out the rape of Nanking and their "burn all, loot 
all, kill all" campaigns in rural North China. 
History is replete with similar glorious episodes.

As long as such "exceptionalist" theses remain 
firmly implanted, however, the occasional 
revelations of the "abuse of history" often 
backfire, serving only to efface terrible crimes. 
The My Lai massacre was a mere footnote to the 
vastly greater atrocities of the post-Tet 
pacification programs, ignored while indignation 
in this country was largely focused on this single crime.

Watergate was doubtless criminal, but the furor 
over it displaced incomparably worse crimes at 
home and abroad, including the FBI-organized 
assassination of black organizer Fred Hampton as 
part of the infamous COINTELPRO repression, or 
the bombing of Cambodia, to mention just two 
egregious examples. Torture is hideous enough; 
the invasion of Iraq was a far worse crime. Quite 
commonly, selective atrocities have this function.

Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not 
only because it undermines moral and intellectual 
integrity, but also because it lays the 
groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (retired) at 
MIT. He is the author of many books and articles 
on international affairs and social-political 
issues, and a long-time participant in activist movements.

[Note: A slightly longer version of this piece, 
fully footnoted, will be posted at 
<http://www.chomsky.info/>Chomsky.info within 48 hours.]

Copyright 2009 Noam Chomsky




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20090519/f44679d1/attachment.htm>