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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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effect of American power on other societies was to further liberty,
pluralism, and democracy.” The Dominican Republic offers a remarkable
illustration of US virtue, Huntington continues: “No Dominican could
doubt but that his country was a far, far better place to live in 1922
than it was in 1916,” including those tortured by the benefactors and
those whose families they murdered or whose villages they burned for
the benefit of US sugar companies. No less outstanding is “the extent to
which the United States has over the years nurtured the development of
democratic institutions in the Dominican Republic”; “to the extent that
they are [established], the United States deserve a lion’s share of the
credit.” 177
We can learn a good deal about our own society and its intellectual
culture by considering such examples as this, noting that they are
respected as reputable scholarship, in contrast to “extremist” work
demonstrating that the exercise of US power conforms to the historical
pattern of violent hegemonic states. We might ask, for example, how we
would react to an account of Soviet behavior at a similar level of
veracity, and audacity, in a Communist Party journal. It is a useful
exercise.
7.2 Torturing Guatemala
Returning to Central America, consider the case of Guatemala, where
Juan José Arévalo was elected president in 1944, inaugurating a tenyear
departure from military rule. His government, “favorably disposed
initially toward the United States, was modeled in many ways after the
Roosevelt New Deal.” It quickly elicited US hostility because of its
commitment to democratic values (Communists were not repressed), a
labor code that “sought to right the balance in a society where