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

The Fifth Freedom
briefing for Latin American ambassadors in 1950. He observed that a
major concern of American foreign policy must be “The protection of our
raw materials”—in fact, more broadly, the material and human
resources that are “ours” by right. To protect our resources, we must
combat a dangerous heresy which, as US intelligence noted, had been
spreading through Latin America for many years: “The wide acceptance
of the idea that the government has direct responsibility for the welfare
of the people,” 16 what is called “Communism,” whatever the political
commitments of its advocates, in US political theology.
From whom must we protect our “our raw materials”? For the public,
throughout our history we have been defending ourselves from one or
another Evil Empire; currently, from the USSR. In the real world, the
enemy is the indigenous population which may attempt to use domestic
resources for their own purposes, thus joining what the President called
“the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” to thwart our ends; President
Kennedy, in this case. 17 Those who undertake this course may not be
Soviet allies to begin with; in Latin America, they have commonly been
Church-based self-help groups, advocates of capitalist democracy such
as Juan José Arévalo in Guatemala, popular organizations of the sort
defended by the martyred Archbishop Romero in El Salvador, and so on.
But they are likely to become Soviet clients, for the simple reason that
they will have nowhere else to turn for protection against the violence
that we regularly unleash against them. This is a net gain for American
policy, since it justifies the attacks we must carry out to destroy the
conspiracy to steal our resources. When the Fifth Freedom is threatened
in its domains, the US regularly resorts to subversion, terror or direct
aggression to restore it, declaring the target of these actions a Russian
client and acting to make this required truth a reality.
The Indochina wars are enlightening in this regard. By the late
1940s, the US had committed itself to support the French effort to
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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