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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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than the monthly minimum wage of $58. The Bishops’ conference
report states: “the situation of underdevelopment and poverty is not the
result of coincidence; rather, it is the consequence of concrete economic
social and political structures that overlook or fail to recognize the
dignity and inherent rights of the human person. Joining with the
Bishops’ conference of Haiti, they urge further that something be done
for the 400,000 Haitians who fled to the Dominican Republic for work
under conditions of virtual slavery. Under IMF pressure, the government
attempted to reduce living standards further, imposing a crackdown on
opposition elements to ensure order as security forces backed up by
helicopter gunships arrested thousands of citizens, also killing many. 176
To translate this dismal story into the approved lingo of American
political science: “The interventions by United States Marines in Haiti,
Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere in those years often
bore striking resemblances to the interventions by federal marshals in
the conduct of elections in the American South in the 1960s: registering
voters, protecting against electoral violence, ensuring a free vote and an
honest count,” nothing more. So Harvard political scientist Samuel
Huntington informs us in the lead article in the Political Science
Quarterly. A human rights program was “superfluous” in those days of
overwhelming US power, he continues, because “the message was there
for all to see in the troop deployments, carrier task forces, foreign aid
missions, and intelligence operatives.” Even the Pinochet coup in Chile
proves the magnificence of American virtue: if “the United States had
been as active in the popular election of 1970 as it had been in that of
1964, the destruction of Chilean democracy in 1973 might have been
avoided.” To translate into real world terms: the US would not have had
to commit itself to the overthrow of Chilean democracy and support for
the subsequent slaughter and oppression if only it had intervened with
sufficient vigor to prevent a democratic election in 1970. “The overall