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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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elsewhere, as dependent development leads to economic growth with
impoverishment for much of the population, a long-term tendency to
which US policy makes regular and significant contributions.
Turning finally to democratization, the record shows clearly that the
US has strenuously and often violently opposed formal parliamentary
democracy when its outcome cannot be guaranteed by the domestic
concentration of power and external US force, and has evinced a positive
hatred for democracy, if we understand democracy to be a system that
provides the population at large with ways to participate meaningfully in
determining public policy and controlling state actions. In Latin America,
the US has repeatedly intervened to overthrow democratic systems or
prevent steps towards achieving democracy, as in the case of Chile,
Brazil, the Dominican Republic in 1963 and 1965, El Salvador in 1961
and dramatically since 1979, and so on; and it has done the same
elsewhere as well, as in the case of Laos and the Philippines, noted
earlier. In Vietnam, US policy-makers always recognized that their
problem was that the client regime they had established “lacks sufficient
popular support and cohesion to enter . . . a political test of strength
with the front [the NLF, the political front of the Vietcong].” The generals
placed in power by the US recognized that “we are very weak politically
and without the strong popular support of the population which the NLF
have.” Thus the US had to prevent any political settlement and
physically destroy the political opposition and the society in which it was
based, while running elections it knew to be fraudulent to appease the
home front. 196
It is no surprise at all that the US should overthrow the only
democratic government in the history of Guatemala in 1954, support a
military coup to avert the threat of democracy in 1963, and maintain in
power a series of torturers and mass murderers, while the press in its
occasional commentary deplores the violence that erupted from some