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

Patterns of Intervention
New World . . . Thus Latin America and Mexico are conceived as
a base for activity against the United States.
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
137
“Mexico was on trial before the world,” President Coolidge declared
as he sent the Marines to Nicaragua, once again. 2 Now Nicaragua is the
base for the Bolshevik threat to Mexico, and ultimately the United
States.
It requires no great originality, then, when Reagan, speaking on
national television, warns of Soviet intentions to surround and ultimately
destroy America by taking over Latin American states, as proven by a
statement by Lenin, which, he said, “I have often quoted,” but which
happens not to exist 3 or when his speech writers have him say that “Like
a roving wolf, Castro’s Cuba looks to peace-loving neighbors with hungry
eyes and sharp teeth” and that the troubles in Central America are “a
power play by Cuba and the Soviet Union, pure and simple”; or when
the White House condemns Nicaragua for its “increased aggressive
behavior” against Honduras and Costa Rica as the US proxy army
attacks Nicaragua from Honduras and Costa Rica and Secretary of State
George Shultz thunders that “we have to help our friends to resist the
aggression that comes from these arms” that Nicaragua is acquiring to
defend itself from the American onslaught, one act of a drama involving
fabricated arms shipments to Nicaragua in a successful exercise in
media management to deflect attention from unwanted elections there. 4
The media have yet to comment on the similarity to earlier episodes, for
example, Hitler’s anger at the “increased aggressive behavior” of Poland
as his forces attacked in self-defense.
What of earlier years? Woodrow Wilson, the revered apostle of selfdetermination,
invaded Mexico and sent his warriors to Haiti and the
Dominican Republic, where they blocked constitutional government,
reinstituted virtual slavery, tortured, murdered and destroyed, leaving a