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<font size=3>posted 2009-05-19 09:36:46<br>
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175073/noam_chomsky_unexceptional_americans" eudora="autourl">
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175073/noam_chomsky_unexceptional_americans<br>
</a></font><h1><b>Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, Unexceptional
Americans</b></h1><font size=3>Murder, torture, abuse… and photos of the
same. We've
<a href="http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=8560">seen</a> some of
them, of course. Now,
<a href="http://news.antiwar.com/2009/05/13/generals-pressed-obama-to-block-photo-%20release/">
evidently under pressure</a> from his top generals, President Obama has
decided to
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/13/AR2009051301751_pf.html">
fight the release</a> 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. <br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gxy556BRGHjpxwA2iLBQ8y6abh9g">
reborn</a> 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
<a href="http://news.antiwar.com/2009/05/14/obama-mulls-indefinite-detention-without-trial-for-detainees/">
detaining</a> chosen prisoners indefinitely either entirely
<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124223286506515765.html">without
trial</a> or with trials that will be mockeries. And with that,
evidently, goes the idea of possibly setting up some sort of new
<a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/04/09/what-to-do-with-gitmo-detainees-profs-propose-national-security-court/">
"national security court"</a> to try some detainees. (Keep in
mind that the Obama administration is already
<a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/05/13/cheney/">hanging
on tightly</a> to Dick Cheney's "state secrets" privilege to
block various lawsuits by those wronged in all sorts of ways in the Bush
years.) <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.
<i>Tom</i> <br><br>
<br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd><h2><b>Why We Can't See the Trees or</i> the Forest</b></h2>
<dd><font size=3>The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia<br>
</b>
<dd>By Noam Chomsky <br><br>
<dd>The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock,
indignation, and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable.
The surprise, less so. <br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mayer">
"black sites,"</a> or secret prisons, and for
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/7789/the_cia_s_la_dolce_vita_war_on_terror">
extraordinary rendition</a>, and they were fulfilled. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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." <br><br>
<dd>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." <br><br>
<dd>The release of the torture memos led others to recognize the problem.
In the New York Times</i>, columnist Roger Cohen
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/books/review/Cohen-t.html">
reviewed</a> a new book, The Myth of American Exceptionalism</i>, 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." <br><br>
<dd>Let us then turn to "reality itself": the "idea"
of America from its earliest days. <br><br>
<dd>"Come Over and Help Us"</b> <br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.sec.state.ma.us/pre/presea/sealhis.htm">Great
Seal</a>. 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. <br><br>
<dd>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.
<br><br>
<dd>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." <br><br>
<dd>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."
<br><br>
<dd>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."
<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082840/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
<img src="http://www.nationinstitute.org/pdf/chomsky.gif" alt="[]"></a>
The "American idea" was illustrated further by the
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1027/noam_chomsky_on_terrorizing_cuba">
remarkable campaign</a>, 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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>The Torture Paradigm</b> <br><br>
<dd>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</i>. He
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1795/alfred_mccoy_on_the_cia_s_road_to_abu_ghraib">
shows</a> 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</i>. So it is highly misleading, to say the least, when investigators
of the Bush gang's descent into the global sewers
<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21716">lament</a> that "in
waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way."
<br><br>
<dd>None of this is to say that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al.</i> 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
<a href="http://www.allannairn.com/">Allan Nairn</a>, 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." <br><br>
<dd>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."
<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>These studies took place before the Reagan years, when the topic was
not worth studying because the correlations were so clear. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>Adopting Bush's Positions</b> <br><br>
<dd>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.
<br><br>
<dd>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." <br><br>
<dd>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.
<br><br>
<dd>Bush, of course, went beyond his predecessors in authorizing prima
facie</i> 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</i> 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</i>. <br><br>
<dd>Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald
<a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/11/bagram/index.html?source=newsletter">
reviews the aftermath</a>. 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." <br><br>
<dd>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." <br><br>
<dd>In March, however, a Bush-appointed federal judge "rejected the
Bush/Obama position and held that the rationale of Boumediene</i> 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. <br><br>
<dd>The case of Rasul v. Rumsfeld</i> 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. <br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://washingtonindependent.com/33679/obama-justice-department-urges-dismissal-of-another-torture-case">
filed a brief</a> 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. <br><br>
<dd>It is also reported that the Obama administration intends to
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/08/AR2009050804228.html">
revive military commissions</a>, one of the more severe violations of the
rule of law during the Bush years. There is a reason,
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/us/politics/02gitmo.html">
according to William Glaberson</a> of the New York Times</i>:
"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. <br><br>
<dd>Creating Terrorists</b> <br><br>
<dd>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.
<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>Such considerations never seem to arise in public discussion.
<br><br>
<dd>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.
<br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick04272009.html">reports</a>.
<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>There is also mounting evidence that the torture methods Dick Cheney
and Donald Rumsfeld encouraged created terrorists. One carefully studied
case is that of
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/21/AR2009022101234.html">
Abdallah al-Ajmi</a>, 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. <br><br>
<dd>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</i>,
and according to his lawyer, the direct result of his abusive
imprisonment. <br><br>
<dd>All much as a reasonable person would expect. <br><br>
<dd>Unexceptional Americans</b> <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>Another unique feature was the scale of terror perpetrated by a
non-state actor. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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." <br><br>
<dd>It should also be recalled that Bush did not declare</i> the
"war on terror," he re</i>-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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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.
<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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.
<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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.</i> <br><br>
<dd>[Note:</b> A slightly longer version of this piece, fully footnoted,
will be posted at <a href="http://www.chomsky.info/">Chomsky.info</a>
within 48 hours.]<br><br>
</dl>Copyright 2009 Noam Chomsky <br><br>
<br><br>
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