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

Patterns of Intervention
9. The Awesome Nobility of our Intentions
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
253
hatever we do, so our historians and commentators tell us, is
guided by utterly benign intent. We are hardly alone in
adopting such a stance, though it might be argued that we
passed long ago beyond the norm. In 1831, de Tocqueville observed the
arrival in Memphis of native Americans driven from their homes by
several thousand soldiers “in the middle of winter,” with snow “frozen
hard on the ground.” “The Indians had their families with them, and
they brought in their train the wounded and the sick, with children
newly born and old men upon the verge of death,” a “solemn spectacle”
that would never fade from his memory, “the triumphal march of
civilization across the desert.” He was particularly struck that the
pioneers could deprive Indians of their rights and exterminate them
“with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without
shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality
in the eyes of the world.” It was impossible to destroy people with “more
respect for the laws of humanity,” he wrote. 199
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So it has always been. As the US was massacring hundreds of
thousands of natives during the conquest of the Philippines (what we
call “the Spanish-American war”) at the turn of the century, the press
commented:
Whether we like it or not, we must go on slaughtering the natives
in English fashion, and taking what muddy glory lies in the
wholesale killing til they have learned to respect our arms. The
more difficult task of getting them to respect our intentions will
follow.