Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Fifth Freedom
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
114
A further useful consequence of the attack against South Vietnam,
Laos and Cambodia was to ensure North Vietnamese dominance. It was
clear enough by 1970, if not before, that “by employing the vast
resources of violence and terror at its command” the US might be able
to destroy the NLF in South Vietnam and independent forces in Laos
and Cambodia, thus “creat[ing] a situation in which, indeed, North
Vietnam will necessarily dominate Indochina, for no other viable society
will remain.” 65 This predictable consequence of US savagery is regularly
invoked in retrospective justification for it, another ideological victory
that would have impressed Orwell. Note that this achievement is a
special case of the device discussed earlier: when conquest fails, efforts
are made to encourage assimilation to the Soviet bloc, to justify further
hostile acts and to limit the danger that independence and success will
“infect” others.
Still another notable achievement of US violence was to ensure
control by the harshest elements, those capable of surviving an attack of
extraordinary barbarism and destructiveness; people whose homes and
families are destroyed by a cruel invader have a way of becoming angry,
even brutal, a fact that Westerners profess not to comprehend, having
effectively suppressed the memory of their own behavior under far less
onerous circumstances. 66 Then their terrible acts can be invoked to
justify the attack that helped to create this outcome. With a docile
intelligentsia and well-behaved ideological institutions, Western Agitprop
can achieve quite notable results.
The US is intent on winning its war against Nicaragua in the same
way. Nicaragua must first be driven to dependence on the USSR, to
justify the attack that must be launched against it to punish it for its
violation of the Fifth Freedom. If this attack does not succeed in
restoring the country to the happy state of Haiti or the Dominican
Republic, or of the Somoza years, then at least it must ensure that no