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

The Fifth Freedom
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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unity because it wanted a group it could control” under Adolfo Calero of
the FDN, who the US sees “as the future leader of Nicaragua,” and
states that the US-controlled Honduran military kept him and other
prominent Miskitos from entering Honduras to attend a Miskito
conference, as part of this strategy. 79
Again, it is pointless to compare the abuse of the Miskitos with the
wholesale slaughter conducted by US clients in Central America in the
same years. So we might recall some moments of early US history, for
example, the Sullivan Expedition against the Iroquois in 1779, pursuant
to General Washington’s orders that the towns and territories of the
Iroquois were “not to be merely overrun but destroyed.” The orders were
“fulfilled to the hilt,” Fairfax Downey records in his upbeat account of
“an outstanding feat in military annals,” leading to “total destruction and
devastation” of “cultivated fields and well-built towns,” of “the North
American Indian’s finest civilization north of Mexico” with richly
cultivated fields and orchards, stone houses and log cabins beyond the
level of most of the colonial farmers. Nothing was left but “smoking
ruins and desolation”; “all this industry and plenty was doomed to be
scorched earth.” One column destroyed forty towns and 160,000
bushels of corn along with orchards and other crops, while a smaller one
destroyed hundreds of houses and 500 acres of corn. “The towns and
field of the hostile Iroquois had been ruthlessly ravished,” though one
officer “sadly” observed that “The nests have been destroyed, but the
birds are still on the wing.” They survived in “miserable destitution” after
“the wastage of their lands.” 80
Or we might consider one of the early exploits of our most favored
client state, the massacre on Oct. 28, 1948 at Doueimah, an
undefended town north of Hebron in an area where there had been no
fighting. The massacre was conducted by a unit with tanks, leaving 580
civilians killed according to the accounting by its Mukhtar—100 to 350,