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

Free World Vignettes
In short, atrocities committed by US clients are to be reduced by a
factor of 100 with the crucial US role eliminated (if they are mentioned
at all), while the rather comparable atrocities of official enemies are to
be multiplied by a similar factor, with an enormous chorus of righteous
indignation and with the background US role generally ignored.
Returning to El Salvador in the Carter years, the obvious place to
learn about what was happening in the interior was the Honduran
border, where 25,000 peasants fled the rampaging army that was
destroying and burning down their villages in 1980, many more since.
But this is not Cambodia under Pol Pot, where a trip to the Thai-
Cambodian border could unearth stories that had ideological
serviceability, so well-behaved journalists have given the refugee camps
a wide berth. These camps were, however, visited by a congressional
delegation in January 1981. The delegation concluded that “The
Salvadoran method of ‘drying up the ocean’ involves, according to those
who have fled from its violence, a combination of murder, torture, rape,
the burning of crops in order to create starvation conditions, and a
program of general terrorism and harassment.” Refugees described
mutilation, decapitation, “children around the age of 8 being raped, and
then they would take their bayonets and make mincemeat of them”;
“the army would cut people up and put soap and coffee in their
stomachs as a mocking. They would slit the stomach of a pregnant
woman and take the child out, as if they were taking eggs out of an
iguana. That is what I saw.” 42 This report was suppressed by the media,
along with the facts generally; see note 34. But in the foreign press one
could read refugee accounts of bombing, napalm attacks, destruction of
villages, massacres, rape, torture by military forces, stories of “an
existence of almost incomprehensible brutality.” 43
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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