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

The Fifth Freedom
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
131
policies are natural concomitants of the geopolitical conceptions that
have motivated planning and that are deeply rooted in American
institutions. It is not surprising, for example, that the US should react
with extraordinary hostility to democracy in Laos or should overthrow the
only democratic government in the history of Guatemala, keeping in
power a series of mass murderers ever since. It is familiar to students of
US policy that “while paying lip-service to the encouragement of
representative democracy in Latin America, the United States has a
strong interest in just the reverse,” apart from “procedural democracy,
especially the holding of elections—which only too often have proved
farcical.” The reason is that democracies may tend to be responsive to
popular needs, while “the United States has been concerned with
fostering the most favourable conditions for her private overseas
investment”: 95
. . . United States concern for representative democracy in Latin
America is a facet of her anti-communist policy. There has been
no serious question of her intervening in the case of the many
right-wing military coups, from which, of course, this policy
generally has benefited. It is only when her own concept of
democracy, closely identified with private, capitalistic enterprise,
is threatened by communism [or to be more accurate, by
independent development, whether capitalist, socialist, or
whatever] that she has felt impelled to demand collective action to
defend it.
It is only when some form of democracy contributes to maintaining
the Fifth Freedom that the US will tolerate it; otherwise, terror-andtorture
states will have to do.