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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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widely expressed over the relative success of five years of massacre and
torture in El Salvador; a similar response will surely replace current
doubts if the US succeeds in its aims in Nicaragua through its proxy
armies or the “invasion option.” We are only reliving history when liberal
Senators warn that we must bomb if Nicaragua obtains planes to defend
its national territory, thus threatening our very lives. “They attack us and
then won’t allow us to defend ourselves,” Foreign Minister Miguel
D’Escoto commented while rejecting US charges that Nicaragua plans
“offensive actions” against El Salvador and Honduras. This miracle of
hypocrisy is “like a torturer who pulls out the fingernails of his victim,
then gets angry because the victim screams in pain,” 212 or a cowardly
thug who sends a collection of goons to beat up some child in a
kindergarten whom he doesn’t like, then whines piteously if the child
raises his hands in self-defense.
This shameful picture should remind us, if we can summon up the
honesty, that our intellectual culture was virtually founded on the twin
pillars of hypocrisy and moral cowardice; Ronald Reagan, George Shultz
and their acolytes among the educated classes are nothing new. These
elements of the intellectual culture were recognized long ago, when the
Founding Fathers were preaching the doctrine of natural rights granted
to each person by the Creator, and bitterly deploring their own condition
of enslavement—the term constantly used—to the British tax collector.
Samuel Johnson asked: “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for
liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Reflecting on the same matter,
Thomas Jefferson, a slave-owner himself, remarked: “Indeed I tremble
for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot
sleep forever.” 213
Why then should we feign surprise when Reagan violates the Rule of
Law in attacking Nicaragua, while explaining, with reference to his
South African friends who are subjected to the “surge of violence” that