The Chomsky Challenge for Americans
Scholar and activist Noam Chomsky in 2012. (Hatem Moussa / AP)
It’s no wonder that most Americans are clueless about why “their” country is
feared and hated the world over. It remains unthinkable to this day, for
example, that any respectable “mainstream” U.S. media outlet would tell the
truth about why the United States atom-bombed the civilian populations of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Gar Alperovitz and other historians have shown,
Washington knew that Japan was defeated and ready to surrender at the end of
World War II. The ghastly atomic attacks were meant to send a signal to Soviet
Russia about the post-WWII world: “We run the world. What we say goes.”
However, as far as most Americans who even care to remember Hiroshima and
Nagasaki know, the Japanese cities were nuked to save American lives certain to
be lost in a U.S. invasion required to force Japan’s surrender. This false
rationalization was reproduced in the “The War,” the widely viewed 2007 PBS
miniseries on World War II from celebrated liberal documentarians Ken Burns and
Lynn Novick.
An early challenge to Uncle Sam’s purported right to manage postwar world
affairs from the banks of the Potomac came in 1950. Korean forces, joined by
Chinese troops, pushed back against the United States’ invasion of North Korea.
Washington responded with a merciless bombing campaign that flattened all of
North Korea’s cities and towns. U.S. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay boasted that
“we burned down every town in North Korea” and proudly guessed that Uncle Sam’s
gruesome air campaign, replete with napalm and chemical weapons, murdered 20
percent of North Korea’s population. This and more was recounted without a hint
of shame—with pride, in fact—in the leading public U.S. military journals of
the time. As Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading intellectual, explained five
years ago, the U.S. was not content just to demolish the country’s urban zones:
“
Since everything in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was then sent
to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the nation’s water
supply—a war crime for which people had been hanged in Nuremberg. And these
official journals … talk[ed] excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the
water pouring down, digging out the valleys and the ‘Asians’ scurrying around
trying to survive. The journals exulted in what this meant to those
Asians—horrors beyond our imagination. It meant the destruction of their rice
crop, which in turn meant starvation. How magnificent!
The United States’ monstrous massive crimes against North Korea during the
early 1950s went down George Orwell’s “memory hole” even as they took place. To
the American public they never occurred—and therefore hold no relevance to
current U.S.-North Korean tensions and negotiations as far as most good
Americans know.
Things are different in North Korea, where every schoolchild learns about the
epic, mass-murderous wrongdoings of the U.S. “imperialist aggressor” from the
early 1950s.
“Just imagine ourselves in their position,” Chomsky writes. “Imagine what it
meant … for your country to be totally levelled—everything destroyed by a huge
superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing. Imagine the
imprint that would leave behind.”
That ugly history rarely makes its way into the “mainstream” U.S. understanding
of why North Korea behaves in “bizarre” and “paranoid” ways toward the U.S.
Outside the “radical” margins where people read left critics and chroniclers of
“U.S. foreign policy” (a mild euphemism for American imperialism), Americans
still can’t grapple with the monumental and arch-imperialist crime that was
“the U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Chomsky’s term at the time) between
1962 and 1975.
Contrary to the conventional U.S. wisdom, there was no “Vietnam War.” What
really occurred was a U.S. War on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—a giant and
prolonged, multi-pronged and imperial assault that murdered 5 million southeast
Asians along with 58,000 U.S. soldiers. Just one U.S. torture program alone—the
CIA’s Operation Phoenix—killed more than two-thirds as many Vietnamese as the
total U.S. body count. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the widely publicized My
Lai atrocity was just one of countless mass racist killings of Vietnamese
villagers carried out by U.S. troops during the crucifixion. Vietnam struggles
with an epidemic of birth defects created by U.S. chemical warfare to this day.
America’s savage saturation bombing of Cambodia (meant to cut off supply lines
to Vietnamese independence fighters) created the devastation out of which arose
the mass-exterminating Khmer Rouge regime, which Washington later backed
against Vietnam.
As far as most Americans who care to think about the “Vietnam War” know from
“mainstream” U.S. media, however, the war’s real tragedy is about what it did
to Americans, not Southeast Asians. With no small help from Burns and Novick’s
instantly celebrated documentary on, well, “The Vietnam War” last year, we are
still stuck in the ethical oblivion of then U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s
morally idiotic 1977 statement that no U.S. reparations or apologies were due
to Vietnam since “the destruction was mutual” in the “Vietnam War.” As if
fearsome fleets of Vietnamese bombers had wreaked havoc on major U.S. cities
and pulverized and poisoned U.S. fields and farms during the 1960s and 1970s.
As if legions of Vietnamese killers had descended from attack helicopters to
murder U.S. citizens in their homes while Vietnamese gunships destroyed U.S.
schools and hospitals. Did the Vietnamese mine U.S. harbors? Did naked American
children run down streets in flight from Vietnamese napalm attacks?
The colossal crimes committed run contrary to Cold War claims that Washington
was fighting the spread of Soviet-directed communism. The U.S. wanted to
prevent Vietnam from becoming a good example of Third World social revolution
and national independence. The truth is remembered in Vietnam, where national
museums exhibit artifacts from Uncle Sam’s noble effort to “bomb Vietnam back
to the Stone Age” and tell stories of Vietnamese soldiers’ heroic resistance to
the “imperialist aggressors.”
One American who made the moral decision to put himself in “our” supposed
“enemy’s” position was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The people of Indochina, King
mused in 1967, “must find Americans to be strange liberators” as we “destroy
their families, villages, land” and send them “wander[ing] into the hospitals,
with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one
‘Vietcong’-inflicted injury. So far we have killed a million of them—mostly
children.” Further:
“
They languish under our bombs and consider us—not their fellow Vietnamese—the
real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of
their fathers and into concentration camps where minimal social needs are
rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. … They watch
as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their land. They must
weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the
precious trees. … They wander into the towns and see thousands of children,
homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They
see the children degraded by our solders as they beg for food. They see the
children selling their sisters to our solders, soliciting for their mothers.
Observing that the U.S. had become the world’s “leading purveyor of violence,”
King asked Americans to develop the maturity to “learn and grow and profit from
the wisdom of the [Vietnamese] brothers who are called the opposition.”
All good Americans were naturally horrified by the 9/11/2001 jetliner
attacks—the first serious foreign attack on the U.S. since the War of 1812.
Where was their humanitarian revulsion as U.S.-led economic sanctions killed
500,000 innocent Iraqi children (what Bill Clinton’s secretary of state,
Madeleine Albright, went on CBS to call “a price worth paying”) during the
first half of the 1990s? “Mainstream” U.S. media had little to say about this
terrible toll.
How many good Americans who understandably wept as they watched the World Trade
Center towers collapse had ever heard about the grisly slaughter the U.S. armed
forces arch-criminally inflicted on surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from
Kuwait in February 1991? Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:
“
U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at
the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. … On the sixty
miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched
skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun … for 60
miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every
tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are
known or likely. … U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all
humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created
an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions. …
[I]t was simply a one-sided massacre. …
Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring would have been impressed.
Imagine the imprint this senseless war crime must have left behind on Iraqis.
Thanks to its poor fit with American exceptionalist doctrine—according to which
Uncle Sam always tries to do the morally right thing, even if it sometimes goes
too far in overzealous pursuits of its consistently good intentions—this
gruesome imperial crime was only a minor story in U.S. “mainstream” media. The
same was true three years earlier when the American battleship USS Vincennes
shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 civilians on a clearly marked
commercial jet in Iranian air space over the Persian Gulf. (Two years later,
the Vincennes’ commander and his chief air-war artillery officer were given
medals for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” during this heroic slaughter of
harmless innocents.)
Imagine the U.S. response if, say, a Chinese navy ship had shot down an
American Airlines flight in U.S. airspace over San Francisco Bay.
The U.S. shootdown of Flight 655 is well remembered in Iran. Not so in the
United States of Imperial Amnesia, where official doctrine holds that, in
Albright’s words, “The United States is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”
” ‘Tis too much proved,” William Shakespeare wrote in “Hamlet,” “that with
devotion’s visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself.”
The tenacious hold of pious U.S.-exceptionalist dogma leads to soul-numbing
two-facedness. In May 2009, a U.S. airstrike killed more than 10 dozen
civilians in Bola Boluk, a village in western Afghanistan’s Farah province.
Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives were children.
Just 22 were males 18 years or older. As The New York Times somewhat
surprisingly reported: “In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to
… the Afghan Parliament, the governor of Farah Province, Rohul Amin, said that
as many as 130 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad
Naim Farahi. … The governor said that the villagers have brought two tractor
trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties
that had occurred. … Everyone was crying … watching that shocking scene. Mr.
Farahi said he had talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113
bodies being buried, including … many women and children.”
The initial response of the Obama Pentagon to this horrific incident—one among
many mass U.S. aerial civilian killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan beginning
in the fall of 2001—was to blame the deaths on “Taliban grenades.” Obama’s
secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, expressed “regret,” but the administration
refused to issue an apology or to acknowledge U.S. responsibility.
By telling contrast, Barack Obama had just offered a full apology and fired a
White House official for scaring New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One
photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people there of 9/11.
The disparity was remarkable: Frightening New Yorkers led to a full
presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more
than 100 Afghan civilians required no apology. No one had to be fired. And the
Pentagon was permitted to advance preposterous claims about how the civilians
perished—stories U.S. corporate media took seriously.
“Why, oh why, do they hate us?” So runs the plaintive American cry, as if
Washington hasn’t directly and indirectly (through blood-soaked proxies like
the Indonesia dictator Suharto and the death-squad regimes of Central America
during the 1970s and 1980s) killed untold millions and overthrown dozens of
governments the world over since 1945. As if the U.S. doesn’t account for
nearly 40 percent of the world’s military spending to maintain at least 800
military bases spread across more than 80 “sovereign” nations.
Maybe it has to do with a U.S. media that wrings its hands for months over the
deaths of four U.S. soldiers trapped on an imperial mission in Niger but can’t
muster so much as a tear for the thousands of innocents regularly killed
(victims of what Chomsky has called “the most extreme terrorist campaign of
modern times”) by U.S. drone attacks across the Middle East, Southwest Asia and
North Africa. Imagine what it is like to live in constant dread of annihilation
launched from invisible and unmanned aerial killing machines. The tens of
thousands of Yemenis killed and maimed by U.S-backed and U.S.-equipped Saudi
Arabian airs raids get no sympathy from most American media. Nor do the more
than 1 million Iraqis who died prematurely thanks to Washington’s arch-criminal
2003 invasion of Iraq, which was sold on thoroughly and openly false pretexts
and provided essential context for the rise of the Islamic State.
Maybe it’s also about the “good friends” that “we” (our “foreign policy”
imperial masters) keep around the world in the names of “freedom” and
“democracy.”
These partners in global virtue include:
● Thirty-six nations receiving U.S. military assistance despite being
identified as “dictatorships” in 2016 by the right-wing U.S. organization
Freedom House.
● The Saudi regime, the leading source and funder of extremist Sunni jihadism
and the most reactionary government on earth, currently using U.S. military
hardware and ordnance to bomb Yemen into an epic humanitarian crisis.
● The openly racist occupation and apartheid state of Israel, which has
sickened the morally sentient world this spring by systemically sniper-killing
dozens of young, unarmed Palestinians who have had the audacity to protest
their sadistic U.S.-backed siege in the miserable open-air prison that is Gaza.
● Honduras, home to a violently repressive right-wing government installed
through a U.S.-backed military coup in June 2009.
● The Philippines, headed by a thuggish brute who boasts of killing thousands
of drug users and dealers with death squads.
● Rwanda, a semi-totalitarian state enlisted in the U.S.-backed multinational
rape of the Congo, where 5 million people have been killed by imperially
sponsored starvation, disease and civil war since 2008.
● Ukraine, where a right-wing government that includes and relies on
paramilitary neo-Nazis was installed in a U.S.-assisted coup four years ago.
You don’t have to be a leftist to have the elementary moral decency to do the
Chomsky exercise of imagining yourself in other nations’ shoes—on the wrong
side of the Pax Americana and its dutiful, consent-manufacturing “mainstream”
media. Four years ago, the University of Chicago’s “realist” U.S. foreign
policy expert John Mearsheimer had the all-too-uncommon decency (at least among
U.S. “foreign affairs” specialists) to reflect on the Ukraine crisis and the
New Cold War as seen from Russian eyes.
“The taproot of the crisis,” Mearsheimer wrote in the nation’s top
establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, “is [U.S.-led] NATO expansion and
Washington’s commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrated
into the West,” something Vladimir Putin quite naturally saw as “a direct
threat to Russia’s core interests.” And “who can blame him?” Mearsheimer asked,
adding that grasping the reasons for Putin’s hostility ought to have been easy
since the “United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying
military forces anywhere in the Western hemisphere, much less on its borders.”
“We need not ask,” Chomsky reflects, “how the United States would have reacted
had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for
Mexico and Canada to join as well. The merest hints of the first tentative
steps in that direction would have been ‘terminated with extreme prejudice,’ to
adopt CIA lingo.”
You never heard about Mearsheimer’s take, much less Chomsky’s, even (or
especially) in liberal media outposts like MSNBC and CNN, where progressives
learn to love the CIA and the FBI.
The dominant U.S. media now is warning us about the great and resurgent danger
of Iran developing a single nuclear weapon. U.S. talking heads and pundits also
are leading the charge for the “complete denuclearization of the Korean
peninsula [of North Korea].”
It is unthinkable that anyone in the reigning American exceptionalist U.S.
media-politics-and-culture complex would raise the question of the
denuclearization of the United States. It’s no small matter. The world’s only
superpower, the only nation to ever attack civilians with nuclear weapons, is
embarking on a super-expensive top-to-bottom overhaul of a U.S. nuclear arsenal
that already houses 5,500 weapons with enough menacing power between them to
blow the world up five times over. This $1.7 trillion rebuild includes the
creation of provocative new first-strike weapons systems likely to escalate the
risks of nuclear exchanges with Russia and/or China. Everyday Americans could
have opportunities to more than just imagine what the innocents of Nagasaki
experienced in August 1945.
But don’t blame Donald Trump. Our current reality was initiated under Obama,
leader of a party that is positioning itself as the real and anti-Russian and
CIA-backed party of empire in the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections.
This extraordinarily costly retooling heightens prospects for human
self-extermination in a world in dire need of public investment to end poverty
(half the world’s population “lives” on less than $2.50 a day), to replace
fossil fuels with clean energy (we are marching to the fatal mark of 500 carbon
parts per atmospheric million by 2050—if not sooner), and to clean up the
titanic environmental mess we’ve made of our planet.
The perverted national priorities reflected in such appalling, Darth
Vader-esque “public investment”—a giant windfall for the high-tech U.S.
weapons-industrial complex—are symptoms of the moral collapse that Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. warned the United States about in the famous anti-war speech he
gave one year to the day before his assassination (or execution). “A nation
that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on
programs of social uplift,” King said, “is approaching spiritual death.”
That spiritual death is well underway. Material and physical death for the
species is not far off on America’s eco- and nuclear-exterminating path, led in
no small part by a dominant U.S. media that obsesses over everything Trump and
Russia while the underlying bipartisan institutions of imperial U.S. oligarchy
lead humanity over the cliff. Americans might want to learn how to take
Chomsky’s challenge—imagine ourselves in others’ situation—before it’s too late
to imagine anything at all.
Paul Street
Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He is
former
