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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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to be not enough,” as the Pinochet coup in Chile demonstrates. More
recently, he has explained why the Sandinistas “hate America”: “This is
understandable given their limited education and their years spent in
exile, in prison, or in the hills battling what they perceived as an
American-backed dictatorship.” These benighted creatures, so ignorant
of history, use anti-Americanism to provide “the energy for their political
movement, much as anti-Semitism provided the energy for Nazism.” 206
The literature of scholarship, intellectual commentary and journalism
abounds with such professions of awesome benevolence, which are
utterly immune to fact, illustrating a degree of fanaticism in the service
of the state religion that has few historical counterparts. And the same
thoughts animate the men in the field, who continue, today, to echo the
message of the press at the turn of the century. Ken Anderson, a
Harvard Law School student who worked in El Salvador with the
Interamerican Court of Human Rights of the OAS, describes his
experiences near a free-fire zone where he “watched the planes work
their way across the hills” and spoke to refugees who had fled after
families and friends were beaten to death by the soldiers in a war
against civilians that they will not forget.” 207 He asked an American
Embassy political officer about the peasant victims of the “slaughter
from the air” who are “counted as combatants” by the Embassy, in
particular, a nine-year-old girl whose “parents and family had been
blown up in a bombing attack” and “was now headed to an orphanage
filled with hundreds of children like her.” The US official “shrugged off
all those cases”:
A couple of years down the road, it’ll all be seen as the costs of
war. It’s better for the military to do whatever it has to do to
retake the region. Then we’ll come in with food and a lot of aid—
they’ll eat and forget.