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

Free World Vignettes
dissidents.” An accurate report would state that Nicaragua does not
begin to approach the level of abuse today—not “a few years ago”—in
Guatemala or El Salvador. And it was not hundreds “arrested, tortured
or killed,” but rather “tens of thousands of murders committed since
1979 by military-manned death squads,” as the London Economist
accurately observes, with many more tortured and arrested, in El
Salvador alone, many thousands or possibly tens of thousands more in
Guatemala. 39 In reference to our friends, the occasional recognition of
the source of the violence must be given with a reduction by a factor of
100 and the US role omitted, and placed in the past; things are always
improving in our domains.
The practice is standard. Barbara Crosette writes in the Times that
after a military coup “which is believed” (namely, by approved unnamed
sources) to have involved the Communist Party, Indonesian General
Suharto “and others loyal to him” killed “thousands of Communist
suspects.” In fact, the number of people killed, mostly landless
peasants, was in the neighborhood of 1/2 million by conservative
estimate; again, diminution by a factor of 100, with the US support
omitted. 40 In contrast, in early 1977, when the Khmer Rouge had killed
perhaps tens of thousands of people (after having been turned into
“totalitarian fanatics” by “American ruthlessness,” as Philip Windsor
comments, referring to the horrendous bombings of the early 1970s that
killed unrecorded tens or hundreds of thousands), the press was
satisfied with no less than 2 million murdered, ignoring the far lower
estimates by US intelligence, later supported by Western scholarship.
Jean Lacouture, who invented the 2 million figure, observed a few
weeks later that the actual numbers might be in the thousands, not
millions, but held that this did not matter, a statement that won great
admiration here. His earlier 2 million figure, fabricated as he conceded,
remained the official one in the media here and abroad. 41
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
33