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<h1><b>The Torture Memos<br><br>
</b></h1><h2><font size=4><b>Torture has been routine practice from the
early days of the Republic</b></font></h2><font size=3>By <b>Noam
Chomsky</b> <br><br>
<b>T</b>he torture memos released by the White House in April
elicited shock, indignation, and surprise. The shock and indignation are
understandableparticularly the testimony in the Senate Armed Services
Committee report on the Cheney-Rumsfeld desperation to find links between
Iraq and al-Qaeda, links that were later concocted as justification for
the invasion, facts irrelevant. Former Army psychiatrist Major Charles
Burney testified that "a large part of the time we were focused on
trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated
people got in not being able to establish this link...there was more and
more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate
results"that is, torture. The McClatchy press reported that a
former senior intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue
added that "The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on
interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence
of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein's regime.... [Cheney and Rumsfeld] demanded that the
interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.... 'There was
constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to
do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees,
especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up
empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push
harder'." These were the most significant revelations, barely
reported.<br><br>
While such testimony about the viciousness and deceit of the
Administration should indeed be shocking, the surprise at the general
picture revealed is nonetheless surprising. A narrow reason is that 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 lawincidentally, a place that Washington is using in
violation of a treaty that was forced on Cuba at the point of a gun?
Security reasons are alleged, but they are hard to take seriously. The
same expectations held for secret prisons and rendition, and were
fulfilled.<br><br>
A broader reason is that torture has been routine practice from the early
days of the conquest of the national territory, and then beyond, as the
imperial ventures of the "infant empire"as George Washington
called the new Republicextended to the Philippines, Haiti, and
elsewhere. Furthermore, torture is 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, it is surprising to see the reactions even by some of the
most eloquent and forthright critics of Bush malfeasance: for example,
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" (Paul Krugman). To say the least, that common view
reflects a rather slanted version of history.<br><br>
Occasionally the conflict between "what we stand for" and
"what we do" has been forthrightly addressed. One distinguished
scholar who undertook the task is Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist
international relations theory. In a classic study written 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 recognized that the historical record is
radically inconsistent with the "transcendent purpose" of
America.<br><br>
We should not, however, be misled by that discrepancy, Morgenthau
advises: in his words, 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 is merely the "abuse of
reality." To confound abuse of reality with reality is akin to
"the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on
similar grounds." An apt comparison.<br><br>
The release of the torture memos led others to recognize the problem. In
the <i>New York Times</i>, columnist Roger Cohen reviewed a book 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 regards it as
fundamentally mistaken. The reason is 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 by America'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 is that he is
keeping to "the distortions of the American idea in recent
decades," the "abuse of reality" in recent years.<br><br>
<b><i>A Legacy of Ghastly Crimes<br><br>
</i>L</b>et us then turn to "reality itself": the
"idea" of America from its earliest days. 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 established its Great Seal. It depicts an Indian with a scroll
coming out of his mouth. On it are the words "Come over and help
us." The British colonists were thus benevolent humanists,
responding to the pleas of the "miserable" natives to be
rescued from their bitter pagan fate.<br><br>
The Great Seal is 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 the savage murderer and torturer Ronald Reagan, who blissfully
described himself as the leader of a "shining city on the hill"
while orchestrating ghastly crimes and leaving a hideous legacy.<br><br>
This early proclamation of "humanitarian intervention," to use
the currently fashionable phrase, turned out to be very much like its
successors, facts that were not obscure to the agents. 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 judgment." The merciless and perfidious cruelty continued
until "the West was won." Instead of God's judgment, the
heinous sins bring only praise for the fulfillment of the American
"idea" (Reginald Horsman, <i>Expansion and American Indian
Policy,</i> Michigan State, 1967; William Earl Weeks, <i>John Quincy
Adams and American Global Empire,</i> Kentucky, 1992).<br><br>
There was, to be sure, a more convenient and conventional version,
expressed for example by Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who mused
that "the wisdom of Providence" caused the natives to disappear
like "the withered leaves of autumn" even though the colonists
had "constantly respected" them (see Nicholas Guyatt,
<i>Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-1876,
</i>Cambridge 2007).<br><br>
The conquest and settling of the West indeed showed individualism and
enterprise. Settler-colonialist enterprises, the cruelest form of
imperialism, commonly do. The outcome was 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
are pleading with us to come over and help them (cited by Lars Schoultz,
<i>That Infernal Little Cuban Republic). </i>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>
The "American idea" is illustrated further by a remarkable
campaign, initiated virtually at once, to restore Cuba to its proper
place: economic warfare with the clearly articulated aim of punishing the
population so that they would overthrow the disobedient government;
invasion; the dedication of the Kennedy brothers to bring "the
terrors of the earth" to Cuba (the phrase of historian Arthur
Schlesinger, in his biography of Robert Kennedy, who took the task as one
of his highest priorities); and other crimes continuing to the present,
in defiance of virtually unanimous world opinion.<br><br>
There are to be sure critics, who hold that our efforts to bring
democracy to Cuba have failed, so we should turn to other ways to
"come over and help them." How do these critics know that the
goal was to bring democracy? There is evidence: our leaders proclaim it.
There is also counter-evidence: the declassified internal record, but
that can be dismissed as just "the abuse of history."<br><br>
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 salt water fallacy," the
idea that conquest only becomes imperialism when it crosses salt water.
Thus, if the Mississippi had resembled the Irish Sea, Western expansion
would have been imperialism. From Washington to Lodge, those engaged in
the enterprise had a clearer grasp.<br><br>
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
the large-scale 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 (Alfred
McCoy, <i>Policing America's Empire,</i> 2009). Similar models were
adopted in many other areas where the U.S. imposed brutal National Guards
and other client forces, with consequences that should be
well-known.<br><br>
In the past 60 years, victims worldwide have also endured the CIA's
"torture paradigm," developed at a cost reaching $1 billion
annually, according to historian Alfred McCoy, who shows that the methods
surfaced with little change in Abu Ghraib. There is no hyperbole when
Jennifer Harbury entitles her penetrating study of the U.S. torture
record <i>Truth, Torture, and the American Way</i>. It is highly
misleading, to say the least, when investigators of the Bush gang's
descent into the sewer lament that "in waging the war against
terrorism, America had lost its way" (McCoy, <i>A Question of
Torture, </i>Metropolitan, 2006; also McCoy, "The U.S. Has a History
of Using Torture," http://hnn.us/articles/32497.html; Jane Mayer,
"The Battle for a Country's Soul,"<i> New York Review of
Books</i>, August 14, 2008).<br><br>
<br>
<b><i>Torture Innovations & Paradigms<br><br>
</i>B</b>ush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al. did introduce important innovations.
Ordinarily, torture is farmed out to subsidiaries, not carried out by
Americans directly in their government-established torture chambers.
Alain Nairn, who has conducted some of the most revealing and courageous
investigations of torture, points out that "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
norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. Since Vietnam, "the
U.S. has mainly seen its torture done for it by proxypaying, arming,
training, and guiding foreigners doing it, but usually being careful to
keep Americans at least one discreet step removed." Obama's ban
"doesn't even prohibit direct torture by Americans outside
environments of 'armed conflict,' which is where much torture happens
anyway .... [H]is is a return to the status quo ante, 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" (<i>News and Comment</i>, January 24, 2009,
www.allannairn.com).<br><br>
Sometimes engagement in torture is 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." That includes military aid, is
independent of need, and runs through the Carter years. 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 and this is commonly improved
by 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 (Schoultz, <i>Comparative
Politics</i>, Jan. 1981; Herman, in Chomsky and Herman, <i>Political
Economy of Human Rights I, </i>South End, 1979; Herman, <i>Real Terror
Network</i>, 1982).<br><br>
These studies precede the Reagan years, when the topic was not worth
studying because the correlations were so clear. And the tendencies
continue to the present. Small wonder that the president advises us to
look forward, not backwarda 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>
An argument can be made that implementation of the CIA's "torture
paradigm" does not violate the 1984 Torture Convention, at least as
Washington interprets it. Alfred McCoy points out that the highly
sophisticated CIA paradigm, based on the "KGB's most devastating
torture technique," keeps primarily to mental torture, not crude
physical torture, which is considered less effective in turning people
into pliant vegetables. McCoy writes that the Reagan administration
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."
"[T]hese intricately-constructed diplomatic reservations re-defined
torture, as interpreted by the United States, to exclude sensory
deprivation and self-inflicted painthe 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.
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 passed with
bipartisan support in 2006. Accordingly, after the first exposure of
Washington's latest resort to torture, constitutional law professor
Sanford Levinson observed that it could perhaps be justified in terms of
the "interrogator-friendly" definition of torture adopted by
Reagan and Clinton in their revision of international human rights law
(McCoy, "US has a history"; Levinson, "Torture in Iraq
& the Rule of Law in America," <i>Daedalus</i>, Summer
2004).<br><br>
<b><i>Bush/Obama & the Courts<br><br>
</i>B</b>ush 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, affirms our
unwavering commitment to international law, he seems intent on
substantially reinstating the extremist Bush measures. In the important
case of <i>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. Glenn
Greenwald 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 Bagram, treating
"the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional
guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly gamefly 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 worldin the case in question, Yemenis and
Tunisians captured in Thailand and the UAE"can be imprisoned
indefinitely with no rights of any kindas long as they are kept in
Bagram rather than Guantanamo."<br><br>
In March a Bush-appointed federal judge "rejected the Bush/Obama
position and held that the rationale of <i>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 "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>
The case of <i>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 they were captured by Uzbeki warlord Rashid Dostum. Dostum is a
notorious thug who was then a leader of the Northern Alliance, the Afghan
faction supported by Russia, Iran, India, Turkey, and the Central Asian
states, joined by the U.S. as it attacked Afghanistan in October 2001.
Dostum then turned them over to U.S. custody, allegedly for bounty money.
The plaintiffs claimed that they had traveled to Afghanistan to offer
humanitarian relief. The Bush administration sought to have the case
dismissed. Obama's Department of Justice filed a brief supporting the
Bush position that government officials are not liable for torture and
other violations of due process, because the Courts had not yet clearly
established the rights that prisoners enjoy (Daphne Eviatar, "Obama
Justice Department Urges Dismissal of Another Torture Case,"
<i>Washington Independent</i>, March 12, 2009).<br><br>
It is also reported that Obama intends to revive military commissions,
one of the more severe violations of the rule of law during the Bush
years. There is a reason. "Officials who work on the Guantánamo
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" (William Glaberson, "U.S.
May Revive Guantanamo Military Courts," <i>New York Times</i>, May
1, 2009). A serious flaw in the criminal justice system, it
appears.<br><br>
There is much debate about whether torture has been effective in
eliciting informationthe assumption being, apparently, that if it is
effective then it may be justified. By the same argument, when Nicaragua
captured U.S. pilot Eugene Hasenfus in 1986 after shooting down his plane
delivering aid to Reagan's contra forces, they should not have tried him,
found him guilty, and then sent him back to the U.S., as they did.
Rather, 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 and poor country
under terrorist attack by the global superpower. And Nicaragua should
certainly have done the same if they had been able to capture the chief
terrorism coordinator, John Negroponte, then ambassador in Honduras,
later appointed counter-terrorism Czar, without eliciting a murmur. Cuba
should have done the same if they had been able to lay hands on the
Kennedy brothers. There is no need to bring up what victims should have
done to Kissinger, Reagan, and other leading terrorist commanders, whose
exploits leave al-Qaeda far in the distance, and who doubtless had ample
information that could have prevented further "ticking
bombs."<br><br>
Such considerations, which abound, never seem to arise in public
discussion. Accordingly, we know at once how to evaluate the pleas about
valuable information.<br><br>
<br>
<b><i>Torturer's Cost-Benefit Analysis<br><br>
</i>T</b>here 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 the most eloquent exposition of this thesis was presented by
<i>New Republic </i>editor Michael Kinsley, a respected spokesperson of
"the left." America's Watch (Human Rights Watch) had protested
State Department confirmation of official orders to Washington's
terrorist forces to attack "soft targets"undefended civilian
targetsand to avoid the Nicaraguan army, as they could do thanks to CIA
control of Nicaraguan airspace and the sophisticated communications
systems provided to the contras. In response, Kinsley explained that U.S.
terrorist attacks on civilian targets are justified if they satisfy
pragmatic criteria: a "sensible policy [should] meet the test of
cost-benefit analysis," an analysis of "the amount of blood and
misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will
emerge at the other end""democracy" as U.S. elites
determine<i> (Wall Street Journal</i>, March 26, 1987). His thoughts
elicited no comment, to my knowledge, apparently deemed acceptable. It
would seem to follow, then, that U.S. leaders and their agents are not
culpable for conducting such sensible policies in good faith, even if
their judgment might sometimes be flawed.<br><br>
Perhaps culpability would be greater, by prevailing moral standards, if
it were discovered that Bush administration torture cost American lives.
That is, in fact, the conclusion drawn by U.S. Major Matthew Alexander
[pseudonym], one of the most seasoned interrogators in Iraq, who elicited
"the information that led to the U.S. military being able to locate
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq," correspondent
Patrick Cockburn reports. Alexander expresses only contempt for the harsh
interrogation methods: "The use of torture by the US," 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
domestic allies turned to suicide bombing and other terrorist acts for
the same reason (Cockburn, "Torture? It probably killed more
Americans than 9/11," <i>Independent</i>, April 6, 2009).<br><br>
There is also mounting evidence that Cheney-Rumsfeld torture created
terrorists. One carefully studied case is that of 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
Russian invasion. 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," the <i>Washington
Post</i> reports, the direct result of his abusive imprisonment, his
Washington lawyer concludes<i> (Anonymous,</i> Rajiv Chandrasekaran,
"From Captive to Suicide Bomber," <i>Washington Post</i>,
February 22, 2009).<br><br>
Another standard pretext for torture is the context: the "war on
terror" that Bush declared after 9/11, a "crime against
humanity" carried out with "wickedness and awesome
cruelty," as Robert Fisk reported. That crime rendered traditional
international law "quaint" and "obsolete," Bush was
advised by his legal counsel Alberto Gonzales, later appointed attorney
general. The doctrine has been widely reiterated in one or another form
in commentary and analysis.<br><br>
The 9/11 attack was doubtless unique, in many respects. One was where the
guns were pointing: typically it is in the opposite direction. In fact
that was the first attack of any consequence on the national territory
since the British burned down Washington in 1814. Another unique feature
was the scale of terror by a non-state actor. But horrifying as it was,
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 50,000-100,000 people and tortured 700,000, set
up a huge international terror center that carried out assassinations,
helped impose comparable military dictatorships elsewhere, and
implemented economic doctrines that destroyed the economy so radically
that the state had to virtually take it over a few years later. That
would have been a lot worse than 9/11. And it happened, in what Latin
Americans often call "the first 9/11," in 1973. The numbers
have been changed to per capita equivalents, a realistic way of measuring
crimes. Responsibility traces straight back to Washington. Accordingly,
thequite appropriateanalogy is out of consciousness, while the facts
are consigned to the "abuse of reality" that the naďve call
history.<br><br>
It should also be recalled that Bush did not declarethe "war on
terror"; he re-declared it. Twenty years earlier, the Reagan
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 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 elsewhereamong them an
estimated 1.5 million 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, one of the
more world's "more notorious terrorist groups," 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 (Joseba Zulaika and
William Douglass, <i>Terror and Taboo,</i> 1996; Jesse Holland, AP, May
9, 2009, <i>NYT).<br><br>
<br>
<b>Exceptionalism & Amnesia<br><br>
</i>T</b>he reigning doctrine is sometimes called "American
exceptionalism." It is nothing of the sort. It is probably close to
universal among imperial powers. France was hailing its "civilizing
mission" 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. This classic essay on humanitarian
intervention was written shortly after the public revelation of Britain's
horrifying atrocities in suppressing the 1857 Indian rebellion. The
conquest of the rest of India was in large part an effort to gain a
monopoly of opium for Britain's huge narco-trafficking enterprise, by far
the largest in world history, designed primarily to compel China to
accept Britain's manufactured goods.<br><br>
Similarly, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Japanese
militarists who were bringing an "earthly paradise" to China
under benign Japanese tutelage, as they carried out the rape of Nanking.
History is replete with similar "glorious" episodes.<br><br>
As long as such "exceptionalist" theses remain firmly
implanted, the occasional revelations of the "abuse of history"
can backfire, serving 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 focused on this single
crime. Watergate was doubtless criminal, but the furor over it displaced
incomparably worse crimes at home and abroadthe FBI-organized
assassination of black organizer Fred Hampton as part of the infamous
COINTELPRO repression or the bombing of Cambodia, to mention two
egregious examples. Torture is hideous enough; the invasion of Iraq is a
far worse crime. Quite commonly, selective atrocities have this
function.<br><br>
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 lie ahead.<br>
<b><u>Z<br>
<hr>
</u><i>Noam Chomsky is a linguist and social critic. He is the author of
numerous articles and books including </i>Hegemony or Survival: America's
Quest for Global Dominance<i> (2003) and </i>Failed States: The Abuse of
Power and the Assault on Democracy<i> (2006).<br>
<hr>
</i></b>From: Z Magazine - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives <br>
URL:
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/zmag/viewArticle/21609">
http://www.zcommunications.org/zmag/viewArticle/21609</a> <br><br>
<br>
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