The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism

The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: Volume I The Political Economy of Human Rights 

by 

Noam Chomsky,

 

Edward S. Herman

 Chomsky has a remarkable and enviable ability to describe foul behaviour in a way that remains both factual – with ample supporting evidence – and calm. It is possible to read this without being overwhelmed by the sheer evil and cynicism of the behaviour described but it is not easy. 

Post-War history is very strange and often makes no sense, because so much of it is not true. Most of us assume that World War II was fought to put a stop to fascism, but in Asia and Latin America especially, the fact is that fascism won. What the U.S. has done with its immense military and economic power since the conclusion of World War II has been to wage a continuous military and economic war against peasants across the globe, on behalf of unrepresentative, fascistic tyrannies and ruthless corporations extracting resources and wealth from Third World economies. 

How was it possible, for example, for the U.S. to be defeated in the Vietnam War? The answer rather depends on what you imagine this war was about and who were the enemy. No it was not a war against the Communists of North Vietnam, nor even a proxy war against Chinese Communism. It was a war against the peasants of South Vietnam, and its objective was to impose and maintain a puppet regime that was grotesquely corrupt, depressingly incompetent, horribly vicious, and utterly lacking in political roots. The more the U.S. protected its fascistic puppets the more the people hated them and the more they were punished for failing to submit to their own destruction. As the Americans faced defeat, the level of punishment inflicted on the people escalated obscenely. It is a foul and unacceptable model of behaviour that the U.S. has replicated many times, with variations on a theme. 

The rest is just a few quotes. 

...the U.S. leadership knew from its earliest involvement that the Communists in Vietnam were the only political movement with mass popular support and that the faction it supported was a foreign implant. (Diem, in fact, was imported from the United States.) Joseph Buttinger, an early advisor to Diem and one of his most outspoken advocates in the 1950s, contends that the designation “fascist” is inappropriate for Diem because, although his regime had most of the vicious characteristics of fascism, he lacked the mass base that a Hitler or Mussolini could muster. ...Henceforth in this book we will use the term “subfascist” as an appropriate designation for the members of the system of U.S.- sponsored client fascist states. [p33,34]

The U.S. assault on the Indochinese was quite consciously undertaken to smash them into submission to minority, subfascist agents chosen by the U.S. government. By a reasonable use of familiar terms this was plain aggression. If the facts were faced and international law and elementary morality were operational, thousands of U.S. politicians and military planners would be regarded as candidates for Nuremberg type trials. And the United States would be paying reparations proportionate to the vast destruction it caused. [p34]

The words “terror” and “terrorism” have become semantic tools of the powerful in the Western world. In their dictionary meaning, these words refer to “intimidation” by the “systematic use of violence” as a means of both governing and opposing existing governments. But current Western usage has restricted the sense, on purely ideological grounds, to the retail violence of those who oppose the established order. Throughout the Vietnam War these words were restricted to the use of violence in resistance to regimes so lacking in indigenous support that Joseph Buttinger rejects General Lansdale’s own designation “fascistic” as too complimentary. The essence of U.S. policy in South Vietnam, and elsewhere in Indochina, was intimidation by virtually unrestrained violence against the peasant population. [p97]

Wholesale violence by fascist client states is not terrorism. [p108]

Bernard Fall, writing in the early 1960s, raised the same question and provided a partial answer: “Why is it that we must use top-notch elite forces, the cream of the crop of American, British, French or Australian commando and special warfare schools, armed with the very best that advanced technology can provide, to defeat Viet-Minh, Algerians or Malay ‘C.T.s’ (Chinese terrorists), almost none of whom can lay claim to similar expert training, and only in the rarest of cases to equality in firepower? / The answer is very simple. It takes all the technical proficiency our system can provide to make up for the woeful lack of popular support and political savvy of most of the regimes that the West has thus far sought to prop up.” [p118]

Since the generals sponsoring the National Security Doctrine have been nurtured by and dependent on the U.S. military – intelligence establishment, and look to the United States as the heartland of anti-Communism and Freedom, it is little wonder that the economic doctrinal counterpart to the NSD is quite congenial to the interests of multinational business. The military juntas have adopted a “free enterprise – bind growth” model, on the alleged geopolitical rationale that growth means power, disregarding the fact the dependent growth means foreign power... in the economics of client fascism, that is, National Security Economics, the welfare of the masses is no longer a system objective – the masses become a cost of goods sold, something to be minimised – so that although the military juntas sometimes speak of long run benefits trickling down to the lower orders, ths is really an after-thought and not to be taken seriously. [pp287, 288] 

... since the world is one of good and evil, with “no room for comfortable neutralism” (Pinochet, echoing a familiar refrain of his U.S. mentor), and since free enterprise-growth-profits-USA are good, anybody challenging these concepts or their consequences is ipso facto a Communist-subversive-enemy. ... It also means that any resistance to business power and privilege in the interests of equity, or on the basis of an alternative view of desirable social ends or means, is a National Security and police problem. This applies to such organisations as peasant leagues, unions, student organizations or community or political groupings that might afford protection to the weak or threaten to become a political counterforce to elite domination.[p288]

...the definition of a “terrorist” offered by President Videla: “a terrorist is not just someone with a gun or a bomb, but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilizations.” (London Times, 4 January 1978.) The general deserves full marks for honesty at least. [p303]

Summarizing his investigation of U.S. police operations in Latin America, Langguth writes: “...the main exporter of cold war ideas, the principal source of the belief that dissent must be crushed by every means and any means, has been the United States. Our indoctrination of foreign troops provided a justification for torture in the jail cells of Latin America. First in the Inter-American Police Academy in Panama, then at the more ambitious International Police Academy in Washington, foreign policemen were taught that in the war against international communism they were “the first line of defence.” ... The U.S. training turned already conservative men into political reactionaries.” ... After the students have graduated they can still benefit from the assistance of U.S. advisors and international coordination that becomes useful when, for example, Uruguayan dissidents are to be assassinated by “death squads” that operate with impunity in Argentina. [p309]

Nicaragua ... sends the entire annual graduating class of its military academy for a full year of training at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone, ... the Nicaraguan military has wiped out whole districts on the convenient pretext of guerrilla collaboration. [pp325, 326]

Robert (‘Blowtorch’) Komer who was in charge of the “other war,” cheerfully reported in early 1967 that ‘we are grinding the enemy down by sheer weight and mass’ in what he correctly perceived as a “revolutionary, largely political conflict,” though he never drew the obvious conclusions that follow from these conjoined observations. Komer went on to recommend, rationally enough from the point of view of a major war criminal, that the United States must ‘step up refugee programs deliberately aimed at depriving the VC of a recruiting base” (his emphasis). Thus , the United States could deprive the enemy of what the Combined Campaign Plan 1967 identifies as its “greatest asset”, namely, “the people.”[p352]

By the standards applied at the trials of Axis war criminals after World War II, the entire U.S. command and the civilian leadership would have been hanged for the execution of this policy of discriminating use of firepower. My Lai was indeed an aberration, but primarily in the matter of disclosure.