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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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noticed at all, falls under the category of irony, plainly, since US
intentions are so elevated. And the fact that planners secretly explain
that they understand exactly what they are doing—for example, when
Wilson’s Secretary of State explained that the people of Latin America
are “an incident, not an end” while the US pursues its own higher
interests—is simply further irony, not relevant to the concerns of the
serious political thinker or historian.
The proper way to interpret these matters was elucidated by Hans
Morgenthau, one of the founders of the “realist” school which eschews
sentimentality and moralistic posturing in favor of hard-headed analysis.
The US was founded to achieve a “transcendent purpose,” Morgenthau
explained: “the establishment of equality in freedom in America” and
throughout the world. True, the historical record appears to show that
the US, very much like every other power, pursues the interests of its
own dominant elites with little regard for others. But those who express
skepticism about the transcendent purpose on these trivial grounds are
guilty of an error of logic: “To reason thus is to confound the abuse of
reality with reality itself.” It is the unachieved “national purpose,”
revealed by “the evidence of history as our minds reflect it” (and as our
commissars interpret it), that is the reality; the actual historical record is
merely the abuse of reality. The critics, who foolishly mistake the real
world for reality, have fallen into “the error of atheism, which denies the
validity of religion on similar grounds.” 167
These remarks were written during the Kennedy era, a period of
relative ascendancy for the educated elite and correspondingly one of the
low points of US intellectual culture. But the ideas, in one or another
form, run through much mainstream commentary and analysis.
After torturing the Dominican Republic for 30 years, “President
Trujillo and a handful of United States companies owned the Dominican
Republic,” but “Trujillo’s share, an estimated 65-85% of the country’s