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

The Race to Destruction
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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domain. The Cold War long ago came to have a certain functional utility
for the superpowers, one reason why it persists. At the same time each
superpower expands its own deterrent force, to guarantee a space within
which it is free to resort to violence; for us, much of the world.
The picture comes into focus with relative clarity if we consider the
actual events of the Cold War, putting the rhetoric aside. The typical
event of the Cold War is an act of aggression or subversion by one of the
superpowers against an enemy within its own domains: East Berlin,
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Afghanistan—Greece, the Philippines,
Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, Indochina, the Dominican Republic, Chile,
El Salvador—and all too many others. In each case, intervention within
the system is justified at home by appeal to the threat of the Great
Satan. Such events constitute the major substance of the Cold War,
behind the rhetoric of superpower conflict. The latter conflict is real, in
that each superpower provides barriers to the ambitions of the other;
and latent, in that the system will eventually explode. But behind these
realities lies a good measure of tacit complicity in global management,
and deception about the reality of the modern world.
The point has been understood well enough by Third World victims of
the Cold War system, for example, Foreign Minister Toriello of
Guatemala, who pointed out, just prior to the CIA coup in 1954, that
the US exploits fears of Communist expansionism to prevent threats to
the Fifth Freedom; he was “voicing the thoughts of many of his (Latin
American) listeners,” Connell-Smith observes; hence the ovation he
received. 99 At home, reality has been successfully obscured, but there
are occasional glimmerings of insight. In 1951, Hans Morgenthau wrote
that “the forces that in the interwar period erected the specter of
Communist revolution into a symbol of all social reform and social
change itself are at work again . . .”: 100