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

The Challenge Ahead
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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time was secretly preparing the escalation that he publicly opposed.
There was, indeed, a feature of American democracy that made these
limited successes possible: the inability of the state to use massive
violence against its own citizens. This permitted the public to make a
rare and indirect contribution to decision-making, by affecting the
calculus of costs of the planners. As I have emphasized throughout, this
feature of American democracy is not to be lightly dismissed.
Nevertheless, we may note that even the most violent totalitarian state is
not free from such calculations of cost. The leading Nazi planner Albert
Speer writes in his memoirs that “it remains one of the oddities of
[World War II] that Hitler demanded far less from his people than
Churchill and Roosevelt did from their respective nations.” Hitler was
never able to carry out “the total mobilization of labor forces” and other
measures of mass mobilization that could be undertaken in the
democracies, because of “the regime’s anxiety not to risk any shift in the
popular mood.” This necessity to pacify the domestic population severely
hampered the Nazi war effort, he points out, setting back armaments
production by several years, according to his estimate. 49
Consider a more recent and much different example, the case of East
Timor, where a huge massacre proceeded under Ford and particularly
Carter, with a death toll of 1-200,000, perhaps more, roughly a quarter
of the population by fairly conservative estimate, thanks to the support
of the US and its allies and the servility of the media and the
intellectuals—who, meanwhile, feigned great agony about the
simultaneous and in many ways comparable atrocities of Pol Pot, which
they had no way to alleviate, in sharp contrast to the Timor massacre,
which they could have terminated at once by pressure to withdraw the
crucial US support for the Indonesian aggressors. The Timorese
remnants were reduced to the level of Biafra and Cambodia, as was
finally conceded after the fact, and the killing and subjugation still go on