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

Free World Vignettes
emphasized by analysts concerned with facts, and regularly disregarded,
often with reckless abandon, when there are ideological points to be
scored. In the case of El Salvador, the record compiled by human rights
groups and journalists—many of them foreign or reporting out of the
mainstream—is so extensive, detailed and consistent that, exercising all
the care that is deemed appropriate in the case of our own state or its
clients, no rational person can doubt that we are implicated in terrible
crimes.
No one who surveys the record can reasonably doubt the conclusion
of Aryeh Neier of Americas Watch and Helsinki Watch: 60
. . . gross abuses of human rights are not incidental to the way the
armed forces of El Salvador conduct their war against the
guerrillas. In our view, the principal reason that those abuses
continue at such a high rate at a point when—one would guess—
the armed forces should have run out of politically suspect persons
to murder is that the murders instill terror. Terror is the means
whereby the armed forces maintain their authority.
As for the still more massive atrocities of the ground and air war in
the countryside, there is little reason for the armed forces or President
Duarte, who presides over the worst massacre in the history of his
country, to be overly concerned. The paymasters will be pleased,
whatever the cost, if the results are satisfactory, and most of the US
population knows little more than the citizens of Moscow do about
Afghanistan. “It is by the goodness of God,” Mark Twain once observed,
“that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things:
freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to
practice either of them.” 61
Terrorist violence is rarely purposeless. When its goals have been
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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