El Salvador, of course, declared no cease-fire. On the contrary, when the FMLN declared a unilateral cease-fire as a gesture of good faith during the peace talks they had initiated a few weeks earlier, the Salvadorian military responded by launching operations into most of the guerrilla base areas and stepping up arrests of union activists and other repression. ibid.
We see here the ultimate achievement of thought control, well beyond what Orwell imagined. Large parts of the language are simply determined to be devoid of meaning. It all makes good sense. In a Free Society, all must goose-step on command, or keep silent. Anything else is just too dangerous. ibid. p317
The Communist Party was labelled ‘extremist’ and ‘undemocratic’ by US propaganda ... The Vatican announced that anyone who voted for the Communists in the 1948 election would be denied sacraments, and backed the conservative Christian Democrats under the slogan O con Cristo o contro Cristo. (Either with Christ or against Christ). A year later, Pope Pius excommunicated all Italian Communists.
A combination of violence, manipulation of aid and other threats, and a huge propaganda campaign sufficed to determine the outcome of the critical 1948 election, essentially bought by US intervention and pressures. ibid.
Italy: The US planned military intervention in the event of a legal Communist political victory in 1948 ... Washington’s intention to resort to violence if free elections came out the wrong way is not very easy to deal with, so it has been generally suppressed, even in the scholarly literature. ibid. p345
The CIA operations to control the Italian elections, authorized by the National Security Council in December 1947, were the first major clandestine operation of the newly formed Agency. As noted earlier, CIA operations to subvert Italian democracy continued into the 1970s on a substantial scale. ibid.
And with popular organizations weakened or eliminated, isolated individuals are unable to participate in the political system in a meaningful way. It will, over time, become largely a symbolic pageant or, at most, a device whereby the public can select among competing elite groups and ratify their decisions, playing the role assigned to them by progressive democratic theorists of the Walter Lippmann variety. ibid.
Throughout the decade, and well after ‘democracy’ was established, the Salvadoran Church and human rights groups continued to describe how the security forces of the ‘fledgling democracy’ with the full knowledge and cooperation of their US sponsors, imposed upon Salvadoran society a regime of ‘terror and panic, a result of the persistent violation of basic human rights’, marked by ‘collective intimidation and generalized fear, on the one hand, and on the other the internalized acceptance of the terror because of the daily and frequent use of violent means’. ibid.
Fifteen specialists in counterinsurgency were sent to El Salvador from the US Army School of Special Forces. From the start, the Battalion was engaged in the murder of large numbers of civilians. ibid.
In December 1981, the Battalion took part in an operation in which hundreds of civilians were killed in an orgy of murder, rape, and burning – over 1000, according to the Church legal aid office. Later it was involved in the bombing of villages and the murder of hundreds of civilians by shooting, drowning, and other methods, the vast majority being women, children, and the elderly. This has been the systematic pattern of special warfare in El Salvador since the first major military operation in May 1980, when six hundred civilians were murdered and mutilated at the Rio Sumpul. ibid.
The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights alleged in a letter to Defense Secretary Cheney that the killers of the Jesuits were trained by US Special Forces up to three days before the assassinations. ibid.
The Russians served the purpose for many years; their collapse has called for innovative and audacious tactics. As the standard pretext vanished, the domestic population has been frightened – with some success – by images of Qaddafi’s hordes of international terrorists, Sandinistas marching on Texas, Grenada interdicting sea lands and threatening the homeland itself, Hispanic narcotraffickers directed by the arch-maniac Noriega, and crazed Arabs generally, most recently, the Beast of Baghdad, after he underwent the usual conversion from favoured friend to Attila the Hun after committing the one unforgivable crime, the crime of disobedience, on August 2 1990. ibid.
Since each foreign triumph is in fact a fiasco, the aftermath must be obscured as the government-media alliance turns to some new crusade. ibid. p408
The notable rise in the moral and cultural level of the general population since the 1960s, including the unwillingness to tolerate atrocities and aggression, a grave disease called ‘the Vietnam syndrome, has further limited the options’. ibid. p408
The US has no problem with murderous thugs who serve US interests, and will attack and destroy committed democrats if they depart from their service function. ibid. p409
Those who do not follow the rules must be severely punished, and others must learn these lessons – but not the American public, who are to be regaled with tales about the nobility of our aspirations, the grand achievements of our leaders, and the moral depravity of others. ibid. p413
For many years, the US has stood virtually alone in blocking a diplomatic settlement in the Middle East ... Given US power, its opposition amounts to a veto. Accordingly, the peace process has been effectively deterred. ibid.
The prevailing judgement has been that enhancement of Israeli power contributes to US domination of the region. For such reasons, the US has always blocked attempts at diplomatic resolution. ibid.
The basic terms of the international consensus on the Arab-Israeli conflict were expressed in a resolution brought to the Security Council in January 1976, calling for a settlement on the pre-June 1967 borders. ibid.
Lying behind these gambits is the belief that US-backed Israeli violence has finally brought the Palestinians to heel. ibid.
The US veto effectively terminated any UN role in the peace process. ibid.
The Israeli rejection clearly showed that the basic problem is not Palestinian rights per se, but rather the fact that recognizing them would end Israeli control over the territories. ibid.
The available evidence indicates that the US kept to the international consensus until February 1971, when it rejected the Jarring-Sadat initiative. US isolation increased in the mid-1970s as the consensus shifted to recognition of a Palestinian right of self-determination. Coincidentally, it was in February 1971 that George Bush became part of the executive apparatus as UN Ambassador. A compliant bureaucrat, Bush has adhered to US rejectionism throughout, and gives no indication of any departure today. ibid.
Control over Middle East’ energy provides leverage in world affairs and guarantees a substantial flow of capital to the economies of the United States and Britain. ibid.
The invasion was understood to be an action taken to demonstrate that this program for global domination by force and crushing of any potential challenge was meant extremely seriously. Noam Chomsky
The Palestinians committed a serious crime: there was a free election in Palestine in January 2006 and they voted the wrong way. Now, that’s not acceptable. You can do all kind of things but not that. You don’t vote the wrong way in a free election. So the United States quite openly – Israel too of course – turned to punishing the Palestinians for this crime. Noam Chomsky, lecture Brown University April 2010
The reason why France and Germany are so reviled is that the governments are taking the position of the overwhelming majority of the population. And that’s considered a crime. Noam Chomsky, University of Colorado 5th April 2003
The right to use force and violence at will is accepted pretty much across the spectrum. Noam Chomsky, interview Abby Martin: The Empire Files, ‘The Empire’s Election Extravaganza’, Youtube 2015
The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, ‘We’re sorry we did it,’ that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it’s just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, ‘We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.’ Then you will see the beginnings of civilization. Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World
The United States actually has a dedicated and persistent commitment to undermine and deter democracy. Noam Chomsky, lecture Deterring Democracy, Youtube 2.09.17 1992
November 1989: Elections in Honduras which had been under US control at that time for ten years … There were two candidates: one of them represented large landowners, the other represented big industrialists; they had identical programmes; there was a campaign but it was just insults … The effective rulers were the military under US control. ibid.
Nicaragua had in fact elections in 1984 but those elections were not an ‘inspiring example of democracy’; the reason is they couldn’t be ‘controlled’. ibid.
‘The latest in a happy series of democratic surprises as democracy bursts forth in Nicaragua: the method was to wreck the economy and prosecute a long and deadly proxy war until the exhausted natives overthrow the unwanted government themselves at a cost to us that is minimal leaving the victim with wrecked bridges, sabotaged power stations and ruined farms and thus providing the US candidate with a winning issue ending the impoverishment of the people of Nicaragua’. ibid. Time magazine
If a country is democratic … it’s going to reflect popular interests but those are inconsistent with US interests. ibid.
‘US aid tends to flow to the most egregious violators of human rights in the hemisphere.’ ibid. Lars Schoultz