Turning the Tide
Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace (Chomsky Perspectives)
by
by
This 1985 book remains fully topical in 2019, with helpful insights into the subversive US role in current developments in Brazil and Venezuela as well as the so called migration crisis in Central America, useful explanations of the socially and environmentally devastating practices of US backed corporate capitalism and a refutation of the alleged “shift to the right” in US politics. It is painful to read but it is hard to see how one can hold out hope for a democratic and sustainable future without confronting the evidence Chomsky assembles so comprehensively and convincingly.
Three large chapters and over 200 pages are devoted to an account of US sponsored and organized terrorism against the people of Central America with the objective of creating and supporting brutal dictatorships, under whose protection major corporations consume and destroy local resources in ways that are environmentally and socially rapacious, for the benefit of US investors. The bestiality and utter viciousness of US behaviour makes this material very difficult to read.
The way in which corporate interests emerged and seized control of American politics from the end of the Nineteenth Century is referred to, but Chomsky mainly addresses the period following World War Two, when the US enjoyed the prospect of global domination and basked in the confidence that comes with victory, assured that war is a highly profitable enterprise. The Elite in the US also learned that the methods of torture and mass murder of the Nazi system can be built upon in ways that serve their interests. In one section of the fourth chapter, Chomsky provides details of a range of Nazi criminals and sympathizers who were recruited by the CIA from Germany and other fascist states at the end of WW2 and redeployed to Third World countries, notably in Latin America, where their vile skills and experience were deployed to enable the US to develop and implement a system of state security based on terror, torture and murder which would secure fascist dictatorships in the majority of Latin American states and a self sustaining system for international collaboration between fascist states (including Israel in its roles as dealer in arms and subversive terrorism) to prevent popular, democratic or other anti-fascist movements from taking hold, or otherwise to subvert and wreck their achievements to ensure that no alternative to the security state was tolerated, even in a harmless pin prick in the middle of the sea like the tiny island of Granada.
Military budgets inevitably represent a vast burden on US taxpayers, in a country that declines to commit public resources to a decent welfare or healthcare system for its population. Chomsky’s review of the Cold War and of the nuclear arms race establishes the case that this has and had no defensive justification whatsoever; it is not only entirely aggressive but also frequently utterly wasteful and futile. One benefit it does offer is to permit a form of “military Keynesianism” by pumping unproductive expenditure into the economy at times when this is required not for any military reason, but purely for economic ones – made essential not least because corporate capitalism is inherently unstable and systematically harmful. The other function is to establish and maintain the level of fear required to stupify domestic political opposition – a benefit enjoyed as much in the Soviet system as the American one.
Naturally, the corporate elite is able to call upon and deploy the resources of the US state in pursuit of fascist goals abroad only to the extent that domestic democratic forces are effectively subordinated to the same corporate interests. Kennedy could attack South Vietnam to impose a corrupt and unpopular regime without a murmer of domestic opposition in the USA, but by the end of the sixties the US faced a Crisis of Democracy owing to the growth of a domestic political movement which questioned official propaganda, opposed the war and threatened the power of corporate interests: this called for vigorous counter measures. The book therefore explores the means by which democracy is subverted in the USA itself, and the interlocking of corporate and military interests, with reference primarily to the period of the Reagan administration, while emphasizing the extent to which Reagan simply took over existing policies and practices of the Carter administration in order to remove any illusion that the major parties differ in any important way in regard to their general ideology or their subordination to corporate power. Chomsky reviews the well aired opinion that the US experienced a shift to the right in the Reagan years, and he demonstrates that this is only true for the political and economic elites of both the main parties; educated Americans were far more vulnerable to indoctrination than the less educated, while ordinary US citizens strongly favoured the kind of health and welfare support that was being dismantled under this shift to the right. They did not vote for the right on grounds of political issues – they were never offered the option of policies they could support and were obliged to focus, if they were to vote at all, on tangential issues and distractions, not least on religious tribalism. Writing in 1985, Chomsky has anticipated and refuted the already questionable justification behind Clinton’s so called Third Way – a disaster in store for US working people and migrants alike.
The book is disturbing and often painful to read, made more challenging by Chomsky’s tendency to start in the middle of a story and end halfway through, while working through immense detail and many parenthetical asides that leave lesser mortals dizzy. [I speak on behalf of LMs everywhere. It would really be helpful for example to produce a simple, chronological account which spells out the mundane details, if only in the form of an occasional time chart.] I get the sense that Chomsky is burdened with so much that must be said that he can only endure it by writing in this manner.
Chomsky does acknowledge the risk that his work will overwhelm the reader and induce a sense of helplessness in the face of impossible odds. In his last chapter he sets out a constructive agenda for democratic action, and offers hope that this can be effective – while quietly mentioning that in that event, the elite will retaliate with all the resources they hold. We live in interesting times, to quote an old curse. However, he has already pointed out that the alternative is to “live in a world of lies and fantasies under the Orwellian principle that Ignorance is Strength.” [p237]
Some Quotes:
“If we had the honesty and the moral courage, we would not let a day pass without hearing the cries of the victims. ... We would listen to the extensive and detailed record of terror and torture compiled by Amnesty International, American Watch, Survival international and other human rights organizations. But we successfully insulate ourselves from the grim reality. By so doing, we sink to a level of moral depravity that has few counterparts in the modern world, and we may be laying the basis for our own eventual destruction as well.” [p238]
--------------
The revolutionary pacifist A. J. Muste once quoted this remark, thinking no doubt of World War II: The problem with war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson? [p63]
The pattern was set in the first area liberated by US forces, North [Africa], where in 1942 the US placed in power Admiral Jean Darlan, a leading Nazi collaborator who was the author of the Vichy regime’s anti-semitic laws... the American army next drove up the Italian peninsula, restoring the rule of fascist collaborators while dispersing the Italian resistance, which ahd fought courageously against up to six German divisions, after it had liberated much of Northern Italy.... From 1948, the CIA undertook large-scale clandestine intervention in Italian politics, labor and social life ... part of a more general European program... In Greece, the British army took over after the Nazis had withdrawn, displacing the Greek guerrillas and imposing a brutal and corrupt regime ... The US stepped into the breach under the Truman Doctrine in 1947, launching a murderous counterinsurgency war, complete with the full panoply of devices soon to be used elsewhere: massacre, torture, expulsion, re-education camps and so on. The US-organized war was in support of such figures as King Paul and Queen Frederika, whose background was in the fascist movements, along with outright Nazi collaborators... Twenty years later the US backed the first fascist restoration in Europe (also the first government headed by a CIA agent, Colonel Papadopoulos...)... [pp272-274]
General Reinhard Gehlen, who had headed Nazi military intelligence on the Eastern Front: in 1949, Gehlen’s team became the official espionage and counter-espionage service of the new West German state, under close CIA supervision. One aspect of the postwar project was the recruitment and protection of Nazi war criminals in the service of the war against the anti-fascist resistance and the Soviet bloc. In Asia, collaborators with Japanese fascism were often favoured, as in Korea, where even the Japanese police were used as the US “liberated” the southern part of the peninsula from its own population with violence, bloodshed and destruction of the indigenous socio-political system that sprang into existence as the brutal Japanese occupation was terminated....[p276]
The US showed little concern when pro-Franco, pro-German elements overturned Columbian democracy in 1949, creating what the New York Times described as ‘a totalitarian state, directly instigated by the government of Spain...” [p275] German funds were transferred to Latin America, which became the centre of a “Black International,” particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, as the US supported National Security States on the Nazi model throughout the region, using Italian fascists as well as Nazi war criminals who had been spirited out of Europe by US intelligence with the assistance of the Vatican and a network of fascist priests... [p276] Among those eagerly snapped up by US intelligence were Franz Six and his subordinate, Emil Augsburg ... Horst Mahnke ... Stanislaw Stankievich ... all of them prominent Nazi gangsters who had been involved in horrifying massacres of Jews and others on the Eastern front.[p277] Perhaps the best known of the Nazi war criminals incorporated into US operations in Europe was Klaus Barbie, ‘The Butcher of Lyon,” ... When he could no longer be protected in Europe, he was sent by the US to Bolivia, where he became a central figure in the fascist network there... The ‘Black International’ in Latin America included Dutch Nazi Alfons Sasson.. in Ecuador, Friedrich Schwend... in Peru, Wim Saussen ... in Argentina and Walter Rauff (the inventor of the first gas chambers) in Chile.. [pp278,9] The postwar project of crushing the anti-fascist resistance with Nazi assistance establishes a direct link between Nazi germany and the killing fields in Central America... El Salvador recruited “the men and the expertise for its death squads among those who had learnt their trade” from their Nazi tutors in Argentina, Chile and Bolivia. [p281]
In 1951, in a “historic turn”, Congress passed the Military Defense Assistance Act “that created new ties between Washington and Latin American armed forces”, and the US undertook training of Latin American officers at the school of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone. “By the end of 1954”, not merely coincidentally, “military dictators ruled thirteen of the twenty Latin American nations,” a new high for the twentieth century, including all Central American nations except Costa Rica. The Kennedy administration changed the emphasis of the military assistance program from “hemisphere defense” to “internal security” – meaning war against their own populations. ... This decision ... represented a change from toleration of “the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct complicity” in their crimes, to US support of “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.” The consequences, as we have seen, were horrendous, as much of Latin America was turned into a torture chamber under a rash of National Security States as a result, in a significant measure, of US policy initiatives. [p303]
In the technical sense of information theory, the claim that we are defending ourselves from some Great Satan conveys no information, ...[it] tells us no more than that we are listening to the spokesperson for some state. Thus , Hitler took the Sudetenland, invaded Poland and conducted the Holocaust for defensive reasons: Czechoslovakia was a dagger pointed at the heart of Germany, terrorists were killing innocent Germans, the Poles stubbornly refused to make peace, Germany had to defend itself against the Jews conspiring with the Bolsheviks and Western capitalism, and so on. There is virtually nothing that has not been rationalised in the name of security and defense. [p265]
Here we see the first real reason for the vast and constantly expanding military system: to permit free exercise of our Cold War policies of intervention and subversion, in accord with the overriding geopolitical conception. There is also a second good reason. The Pentagon has become our system of state intervention in the economy. The state quite naturally turns to this method when it is necessary to “get the country moving again”, to “reindustrialize” in Kennedy – Reagan rhetoric. In each of the three periods of major military expansion just reviewed, there was concern over domestic economic stagnation.” [p292]
It is a rare political leader who can face the public with the news that it is necessary for the poor to bribe the rich, who control investment, for the ultimate benefit of the economy. The citizen can, however, be mobilized to this effort in fear of the great enemy about to destroy us. ... As the American satirist H. L. Mencken once observed, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the population alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” [p299]
In the absence of any realistic alternative system of state capitalist industrial management, the nuclear freeze cannot arise as a serious issue within the political system, whatever popular attitudes may be. As Seymour Melman has emphasized for many years, the disarmament movement must assign the issue of economic conversion a central place on its agenda, or it will achieve very little. And this is no simple matter, because it bears on the institutional structure of power and privilege as the owners and managers of the society are well aware. Adopting the point of view of the dominant elites, one can see why ‘peace’ has become a dirty word, some kind of Russian plot: ...[p302]
Recourse to state violence being limited, particularly against people who have a share in wealth and privilege, those who wield private and state power must turn to other means. It becomes crucially important to follow the advice of the U.S. Operations Mission in Vietnam...”The ultimate target is the human mind. It may be changed, it may be rendered impotent for expression or it may be extinguished, but it still remains the critical target.” In such places as South Vietnam and El Salvador, the human mind may simple be extinguished, but at home it must be rendered impotent in other ways. ... The Vietnam syndrome, along with the incipient attempts of large parts of the population to enter the political system, to organize, to act to achieve social goals – these were the various forms of insubordination that constituted the Crisis of Democracy. [p313]
During the 1970s, the political wing of the nation’s corporate sector staged one of the most remarkable campaigns in the pursuit of political power in recent history, establishing a network of over 150,000 professionals in Washington who are engaged not only in securing defeat or passage of bills that concern them, but also “in a much more complex process, the shaping of the precise language of legislation and of the committee reports that accompany legislation. Business also established an elaborate system of private institutions engaged in research, scholarship and ideological pronouncements, dwarfing in scale anything that had existed before, with the aim of altering the terms of the policy debate by sheer mass to a new “conservative” consensus. [p315]
Edsall observes that “In advanced western democracies both on this continent and in Europe there is a direct and demonstrable correlation between government commitment to domestic social spending and the strength of the trade union movement. There exists in no Western democracy any other major organization that can defend progressive distributional policies of both taxation nd spending. Without a strong labor movement there is no broad-based institution equipped to represent the interests of those in the working and lower-middle classes in the formulation of economic policy.” [p316]
One expression of the current phase of the attack on democracy is a form of Newspeak devised for the 1980 and 1984 elections, the use of the term ‘special interests” with reference to working people, women, the aged, the handicapped, ethnic groups, etc: in short, the population at large. Only one group does not achieve the rank of “special interests”: the corporate elite. [p319]
It has been commonly argued that there has been a great “shift to the right” from the Kennedy to the Reagan years. ... But this is most misleading. In the first place, there was no Reagan landslide. In his 1980 victory, ... the turnout was the third lowest in American history, ...Reagan ... got little more than a bare majority of the popular vote and only 28 percent of the potential electorate. .. exit polls found that voters backed Reagan less because they shared his outlook than because they wanted an alternative to Carter. ... The reasons why voters paid little attention to issues as they voted, or did not even take the trouble to show up at the polls, are not obscure. It took a discerning eye to perceive a difference between the candidates, and history offers few reasons to believe campaign promises in any event. [p336 - 340]
What is needed is clear headed analysis and action over a broad range, often with quite specific and limited goals, not the paralysis that results from contemplation of awesome visions of destruction. [p350]
Whether one sees oneself as dedicated to reform or revolution, the first steps are education of oneself and others. There will be little hope for further progress unless the means to carry out these first steps are preserved and enhanced: networks of local organisations, media and publishers who do not bend to state and private power, and so on... To the extent that such a basis exists, a range of possible actions become available: political pressure within the system, community organising, civil disobedience, constructive efforts to create wholly new institutions such as worker-managed industry, and much else. As activity undertaken in such domains, including conventional political ation, extends in scale, effectiveness and popular engagement, it may well evoke state violence, one sign that it is becoming effective. [p355]
Three large chapters and over 200 pages are devoted to an account of US sponsored and organized terrorism against the people of Central America with the objective of creating and supporting brutal dictatorships, under whose protection major corporations consume and destroy local resources in ways that are environmentally and socially rapacious, for the benefit of US investors. The bestiality and utter viciousness of US behaviour makes this material very difficult to read.
The way in which corporate interests emerged and seized control of American politics from the end of the Nineteenth Century is referred to, but Chomsky mainly addresses the period following World War Two, when the US enjoyed the prospect of global domination and basked in the confidence that comes with victory, assured that war is a highly profitable enterprise. The Elite in the US also learned that the methods of torture and mass murder of the Nazi system can be built upon in ways that serve their interests. In one section of the fourth chapter, Chomsky provides details of a range of Nazi criminals and sympathizers who were recruited by the CIA from Germany and other fascist states at the end of WW2 and redeployed to Third World countries, notably in Latin America, where their vile skills and experience were deployed to enable the US to develop and implement a system of state security based on terror, torture and murder which would secure fascist dictatorships in the majority of Latin American states and a self sustaining system for international collaboration between fascist states (including Israel in its roles as dealer in arms and subversive terrorism) to prevent popular, democratic or other anti-fascist movements from taking hold, or otherwise to subvert and wreck their achievements to ensure that no alternative to the security state was tolerated, even in a harmless pin prick in the middle of the sea like the tiny island of Granada.
Military budgets inevitably represent a vast burden on US taxpayers, in a country that declines to commit public resources to a decent welfare or healthcare system for its population. Chomsky’s review of the Cold War and of the nuclear arms race establishes the case that this has and had no defensive justification whatsoever; it is not only entirely aggressive but also frequently utterly wasteful and futile. One benefit it does offer is to permit a form of “military Keynesianism” by pumping unproductive expenditure into the economy at times when this is required not for any military reason, but purely for economic ones – made essential not least because corporate capitalism is inherently unstable and systematically harmful. The other function is to establish and maintain the level of fear required to stupify domestic political opposition – a benefit enjoyed as much in the Soviet system as the American one.
Naturally, the corporate elite is able to call upon and deploy the resources of the US state in pursuit of fascist goals abroad only to the extent that domestic democratic forces are effectively subordinated to the same corporate interests. Kennedy could attack South Vietnam to impose a corrupt and unpopular regime without a murmer of domestic opposition in the USA, but by the end of the sixties the US faced a Crisis of Democracy owing to the growth of a domestic political movement which questioned official propaganda, opposed the war and threatened the power of corporate interests: this called for vigorous counter measures. The book therefore explores the means by which democracy is subverted in the USA itself, and the interlocking of corporate and military interests, with reference primarily to the period of the Reagan administration, while emphasizing the extent to which Reagan simply took over existing policies and practices of the Carter administration in order to remove any illusion that the major parties differ in any important way in regard to their general ideology or their subordination to corporate power. Chomsky reviews the well aired opinion that the US experienced a shift to the right in the Reagan years, and he demonstrates that this is only true for the political and economic elites of both the main parties; educated Americans were far more vulnerable to indoctrination than the less educated, while ordinary US citizens strongly favoured the kind of health and welfare support that was being dismantled under this shift to the right. They did not vote for the right on grounds of political issues – they were never offered the option of policies they could support and were obliged to focus, if they were to vote at all, on tangential issues and distractions, not least on religious tribalism. Writing in 1985, Chomsky has anticipated and refuted the already questionable justification behind Clinton’s so called Third Way – a disaster in store for US working people and migrants alike.
The book is disturbing and often painful to read, made more challenging by Chomsky’s tendency to start in the middle of a story and end halfway through, while working through immense detail and many parenthetical asides that leave lesser mortals dizzy. [I speak on behalf of LMs everywhere. It would really be helpful for example to produce a simple, chronological account which spells out the mundane details, if only in the form of an occasional time chart.] I get the sense that Chomsky is burdened with so much that must be said that he can only endure it by writing in this manner.
Chomsky does acknowledge the risk that his work will overwhelm the reader and induce a sense of helplessness in the face of impossible odds. In his last chapter he sets out a constructive agenda for democratic action, and offers hope that this can be effective – while quietly mentioning that in that event, the elite will retaliate with all the resources they hold. We live in interesting times, to quote an old curse. However, he has already pointed out that the alternative is to “live in a world of lies and fantasies under the Orwellian principle that Ignorance is Strength.” [p237]
Some Quotes:
“If we had the honesty and the moral courage, we would not let a day pass without hearing the cries of the victims. ... We would listen to the extensive and detailed record of terror and torture compiled by Amnesty International, American Watch, Survival international and other human rights organizations. But we successfully insulate ourselves from the grim reality. By so doing, we sink to a level of moral depravity that has few counterparts in the modern world, and we may be laying the basis for our own eventual destruction as well.” [p238]
--------------
The revolutionary pacifist A. J. Muste once quoted this remark, thinking no doubt of World War II: The problem with war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson? [p63]
The pattern was set in the first area liberated by US forces, North [Africa], where in 1942 the US placed in power Admiral Jean Darlan, a leading Nazi collaborator who was the author of the Vichy regime’s anti-semitic laws... the American army next drove up the Italian peninsula, restoring the rule of fascist collaborators while dispersing the Italian resistance, which ahd fought courageously against up to six German divisions, after it had liberated much of Northern Italy.... From 1948, the CIA undertook large-scale clandestine intervention in Italian politics, labor and social life ... part of a more general European program... In Greece, the British army took over after the Nazis had withdrawn, displacing the Greek guerrillas and imposing a brutal and corrupt regime ... The US stepped into the breach under the Truman Doctrine in 1947, launching a murderous counterinsurgency war, complete with the full panoply of devices soon to be used elsewhere: massacre, torture, expulsion, re-education camps and so on. The US-organized war was in support of such figures as King Paul and Queen Frederika, whose background was in the fascist movements, along with outright Nazi collaborators... Twenty years later the US backed the first fascist restoration in Europe (also the first government headed by a CIA agent, Colonel Papadopoulos...)... [pp272-274]
General Reinhard Gehlen, who had headed Nazi military intelligence on the Eastern Front: in 1949, Gehlen’s team became the official espionage and counter-espionage service of the new West German state, under close CIA supervision. One aspect of the postwar project was the recruitment and protection of Nazi war criminals in the service of the war against the anti-fascist resistance and the Soviet bloc. In Asia, collaborators with Japanese fascism were often favoured, as in Korea, where even the Japanese police were used as the US “liberated” the southern part of the peninsula from its own population with violence, bloodshed and destruction of the indigenous socio-political system that sprang into existence as the brutal Japanese occupation was terminated....[p276]
The US showed little concern when pro-Franco, pro-German elements overturned Columbian democracy in 1949, creating what the New York Times described as ‘a totalitarian state, directly instigated by the government of Spain...” [p275] German funds were transferred to Latin America, which became the centre of a “Black International,” particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, as the US supported National Security States on the Nazi model throughout the region, using Italian fascists as well as Nazi war criminals who had been spirited out of Europe by US intelligence with the assistance of the Vatican and a network of fascist priests... [p276] Among those eagerly snapped up by US intelligence were Franz Six and his subordinate, Emil Augsburg ... Horst Mahnke ... Stanislaw Stankievich ... all of them prominent Nazi gangsters who had been involved in horrifying massacres of Jews and others on the Eastern front.[p277] Perhaps the best known of the Nazi war criminals incorporated into US operations in Europe was Klaus Barbie, ‘The Butcher of Lyon,” ... When he could no longer be protected in Europe, he was sent by the US to Bolivia, where he became a central figure in the fascist network there... The ‘Black International’ in Latin America included Dutch Nazi Alfons Sasson.. in Ecuador, Friedrich Schwend... in Peru, Wim Saussen ... in Argentina and Walter Rauff (the inventor of the first gas chambers) in Chile.. [pp278,9] The postwar project of crushing the anti-fascist resistance with Nazi assistance establishes a direct link between Nazi germany and the killing fields in Central America... El Salvador recruited “the men and the expertise for its death squads among those who had learnt their trade” from their Nazi tutors in Argentina, Chile and Bolivia. [p281]
In 1951, in a “historic turn”, Congress passed the Military Defense Assistance Act “that created new ties between Washington and Latin American armed forces”, and the US undertook training of Latin American officers at the school of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone. “By the end of 1954”, not merely coincidentally, “military dictators ruled thirteen of the twenty Latin American nations,” a new high for the twentieth century, including all Central American nations except Costa Rica. The Kennedy administration changed the emphasis of the military assistance program from “hemisphere defense” to “internal security” – meaning war against their own populations. ... This decision ... represented a change from toleration of “the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct complicity” in their crimes, to US support of “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.” The consequences, as we have seen, were horrendous, as much of Latin America was turned into a torture chamber under a rash of National Security States as a result, in a significant measure, of US policy initiatives. [p303]
In the technical sense of information theory, the claim that we are defending ourselves from some Great Satan conveys no information, ...[it] tells us no more than that we are listening to the spokesperson for some state. Thus , Hitler took the Sudetenland, invaded Poland and conducted the Holocaust for defensive reasons: Czechoslovakia was a dagger pointed at the heart of Germany, terrorists were killing innocent Germans, the Poles stubbornly refused to make peace, Germany had to defend itself against the Jews conspiring with the Bolsheviks and Western capitalism, and so on. There is virtually nothing that has not been rationalised in the name of security and defense. [p265]
Here we see the first real reason for the vast and constantly expanding military system: to permit free exercise of our Cold War policies of intervention and subversion, in accord with the overriding geopolitical conception. There is also a second good reason. The Pentagon has become our system of state intervention in the economy. The state quite naturally turns to this method when it is necessary to “get the country moving again”, to “reindustrialize” in Kennedy – Reagan rhetoric. In each of the three periods of major military expansion just reviewed, there was concern over domestic economic stagnation.” [p292]
It is a rare political leader who can face the public with the news that it is necessary for the poor to bribe the rich, who control investment, for the ultimate benefit of the economy. The citizen can, however, be mobilized to this effort in fear of the great enemy about to destroy us. ... As the American satirist H. L. Mencken once observed, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the population alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” [p299]
In the absence of any realistic alternative system of state capitalist industrial management, the nuclear freeze cannot arise as a serious issue within the political system, whatever popular attitudes may be. As Seymour Melman has emphasized for many years, the disarmament movement must assign the issue of economic conversion a central place on its agenda, or it will achieve very little. And this is no simple matter, because it bears on the institutional structure of power and privilege as the owners and managers of the society are well aware. Adopting the point of view of the dominant elites, one can see why ‘peace’ has become a dirty word, some kind of Russian plot: ...[p302]
Recourse to state violence being limited, particularly against people who have a share in wealth and privilege, those who wield private and state power must turn to other means. It becomes crucially important to follow the advice of the U.S. Operations Mission in Vietnam...”The ultimate target is the human mind. It may be changed, it may be rendered impotent for expression or it may be extinguished, but it still remains the critical target.” In such places as South Vietnam and El Salvador, the human mind may simple be extinguished, but at home it must be rendered impotent in other ways. ... The Vietnam syndrome, along with the incipient attempts of large parts of the population to enter the political system, to organize, to act to achieve social goals – these were the various forms of insubordination that constituted the Crisis of Democracy. [p313]
During the 1970s, the political wing of the nation’s corporate sector staged one of the most remarkable campaigns in the pursuit of political power in recent history, establishing a network of over 150,000 professionals in Washington who are engaged not only in securing defeat or passage of bills that concern them, but also “in a much more complex process, the shaping of the precise language of legislation and of the committee reports that accompany legislation. Business also established an elaborate system of private institutions engaged in research, scholarship and ideological pronouncements, dwarfing in scale anything that had existed before, with the aim of altering the terms of the policy debate by sheer mass to a new “conservative” consensus. [p315]
Edsall observes that “In advanced western democracies both on this continent and in Europe there is a direct and demonstrable correlation between government commitment to domestic social spending and the strength of the trade union movement. There exists in no Western democracy any other major organization that can defend progressive distributional policies of both taxation nd spending. Without a strong labor movement there is no broad-based institution equipped to represent the interests of those in the working and lower-middle classes in the formulation of economic policy.” [p316]
One expression of the current phase of the attack on democracy is a form of Newspeak devised for the 1980 and 1984 elections, the use of the term ‘special interests” with reference to working people, women, the aged, the handicapped, ethnic groups, etc: in short, the population at large. Only one group does not achieve the rank of “special interests”: the corporate elite. [p319]
It has been commonly argued that there has been a great “shift to the right” from the Kennedy to the Reagan years. ... But this is most misleading. In the first place, there was no Reagan landslide. In his 1980 victory, ... the turnout was the third lowest in American history, ...Reagan ... got little more than a bare majority of the popular vote and only 28 percent of the potential electorate. .. exit polls found that voters backed Reagan less because they shared his outlook than because they wanted an alternative to Carter. ... The reasons why voters paid little attention to issues as they voted, or did not even take the trouble to show up at the polls, are not obscure. It took a discerning eye to perceive a difference between the candidates, and history offers few reasons to believe campaign promises in any event. [p336 - 340]
What is needed is clear headed analysis and action over a broad range, often with quite specific and limited goals, not the paralysis that results from contemplation of awesome visions of destruction. [p350]
Whether one sees oneself as dedicated to reform or revolution, the first steps are education of oneself and others. There will be little hope for further progress unless the means to carry out these first steps are preserved and enhanced: networks of local organisations, media and publishers who do not bend to state and private power, and so on... To the extent that such a basis exists, a range of possible actions become available: political pressure within the system, community organising, civil disobedience, constructive efforts to create wholly new institutions such as worker-managed industry, and much else. As activity undertaken in such domains, including conventional political ation, extends in scale, effectiveness and popular engagement, it may well evoke state violence, one sign that it is becoming effective. [p355]
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