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

The Challenge Ahead
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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suits their needs will not suffer the fate of Orwell’s Winston Smith or his
real life counterparts in much of the world. They will face
unpleasantness, vilification, a degree of risk, sometimes loss of
substantial privilege, but not torture, decapitation or psychiatric prison.
It is possible even for those who are not saints or heroes to come to
understand the world in which we live, and to act to stop the terror and
violence for which we share responsibility by turning the other way.
It can be done. Our own recent history shows that, and we need not
pretend to ourselves that we do not know the way. The mass popular
movement against the war in Indochina undoubtedly had significant
effects. It raised the costs to the war criminals who conducted it. It
prevented the state from declaring a true national mobilization, so that
the war had to be fought on deficit financing, with guns and butter,
leading to serious economic problems that finally impelled elite groups
to turn against it as an investment that should be liquidated. Anti-war
sentiment at home fuelled dissidence within the military, which began to
collapse, much to its credit. US elite groups learned a lesson familiar to
their imperial predecessors: a citizen’s army is unable to fight a war
against a civilian population. That task requires professional murderers.
Principled opposition to the war was minimal among elite groups, but
became widespread among the population. As late as 1982, after years
of dedicated brainwashing with no audible response, over 70% of the
general public regarded the war as not merely a “mistake” but
“fundamentally wrong and immoral,” a position held by only 45% of
“opinion makers” (including clergy, etc.) and by a far smaller proportion
of elite intellectuals, to judge by earlier studies that showed that even at
the height of anti-war activism after the Cambodia invasion of 1970,
only a tiny fraction of them opposed the war on principled grounds. 48
None of this “just happened.” It was the product of dedicated and
committed efforts over many years by innumerable people, the most