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

The Fifth Freedom
The idea that “we” confront “them” is a staple of the ideological
system, one that has as much merit as the tenets of other religious cults.
With this cautionary note, I will nevertheless continue to use these
misleading formulations, thus adopting—with some misgivings—one of
the conventional devices employed to prevent understanding of the
world in which we live.
A second question is whether Kennan is correct in suggesting that
“human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization”
should be dismissed as irrelevant to American foreign policy (except
when points can be scored in “ideological warfare”). A review of the
historical record suggests a different picture: that US policy has not been
neutral in these regards, but has sought to destroy human rights, to
lower living standards, and to prevent democratization, often with
considerable passion and violence. The reasons are not difficult to
discern: commitment to these values is often at odds with the Fifth
Freedom. Preservation of the Fifth Freedom quite regularly requires
measures that tend to harm human rights and living standards, and with
meaningful steps towards democracy, governments will tend to be more
responsive to domestic needs, thus threatening our control of the human
and material resources that must be at our command if we are to
“maintain the disparity.” We therefore quite regularly oppose human
rights and raising of the living standards in practice, and we oppose
meaningful democracy in much of the world to ensure that the Fifth
Freedom will not be threatened. We return in chapter 3, section 8, to a
closer look at these specific issues. In chapter 1, we took note of the
means to which we habitually resort when the Fifth Freedom is
challenged. Chapter 3 will be devoted to a more detailed examination of
the facts of the matter, which can hardly be comforting to a person of
any honesty and integrity.
Kennan extended the same thinking to the Western Hemisphere in a
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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