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

The Challenge Ahead
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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The minds may have been “rendered impotent,” but not by
persuasion, it appears.
There are other respects in which the “shift to the right” among the
population proves to be a myth. Unlike the Kennedy years, the general
public no longer easily tolerates militarism and aggression. When
Kennedy attacked South Vietnam in 1962, there was no public outcry;
as noted earlier, the event does not even exist in US history, so
profoundly indoctrinated are the intellectual elites, as was the general
public at the time. As late as 1965, antiwar activists felt lucky to be
able to speak to groups of neighbors in private homes or to address
meetings in colleges where the organizers outnumbered the audience,
and public meetings were broken up by militant counter-demonstrators,
many of them students. Even in Spring 1966 it was impossible in
Boston, a center of liberalism, to run an open-air public anti-war
meeting, and a church to which it was moved was defaced with
tomatoes and other projectiles by an angry crowd—all of this arousing
no notice among people who later were to be outraged by heckling of
war criminals at public meetings and by “student violence,” much of it
mythical, apart from what was instigated by government provocateurs.
But when Reagan attempted to mobilize public opinion in support of
direct military intervention in El Salvador, he succeeded only in
organizing a large-scale and spontaneous popular movement of protest,
and was forced to back down from more ambitious plans and limit
himself to an extension and escalation of Carter’s murderous war.
Kennedy’s brinkmanship and nuclear adventurism aroused much
admiration, while Reagan’s rhetoric—which so far falls short of
Kennedy’s actions—has, in contrast, provided a major impetus for an
international disarmament movement. Case by case, much the same
comparison holds.
High-level Pentagon planners may believe that “The U.S. is going