Noam Chomsky - History of US Rule in Latin America

well I I think I should start by defending my country which has just been accused of lying and and I I don't think the charge is really accurate because to accuse someone of lying presupposes that they have a certain capacity to tell the truth like you don't you don't say that a two-year-old is lying you know if the two-year-old says something false and since the presupposition can't be sustained I think the charge of lying is really unfair so I think you should withdraw the the United States has had four presidents who've received the Nobel Peace Prize I haven't checked but I presume that's a record for heads of state and all four have left their imprint on Latin America on our little region over here that has never bothered anybody as Secretary of War Henry Stimson described the hemisphere in May 1945 he was at that time explaining to the world what the post-war global system would be and one of its conditions would be that all regional organizations must be disbanded with the exception of our own which are to be expanded including our little region over here the Western Hemisphere and in fact much more ambitious aims which were spelled out and indeed implemented and this was correct his position was correct as others explained for example the very influential Liberal Democrat Abe Fortas who said that for us to expand our systems including our little region over here is part of our obligation to the security of the world because what is good for us is good for the world that's self-evident well if we look through the four presidents and their imprint it was significant so let's start with the Theodore Roosevelt first one Roosevelt was a shocking racist I don't use the analogy lightly but it's a fact that you have to go to the Nazi archives to find anything similar so here's a couple of his examples about our little region here the expansion of the peoples of white or European blood during the past four centuries has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place that's despite what the remnants of Native Americans or blacks or Filipinos or others might mistakenly believe actually genocide denial has been a leading and highly valued feature of the intellectual and moral culture in the United States and remained so right until the present striking examples right today with regard to the conquest of half of Mexico Roosevelt explained that it was inevitable and in the highest degree desirable for the good of humanity at large that the American people should ultimately crowd out the Mexicans it was out of the question to expect Texans to submit to the mastery of the weaker race and of course stealing Panama from Colombia was also in the highest degree desirable for the good of humanity I won't go on with Teddy Roosevelt whose statue graces Mount Rushmore the second Nobel Prize Peace Prize laureate also on Mount Rushmore is Woodrow Wilson the most honored and arguably the most vicious and brutal of the Nobel Prize laureates his invasion of Haiti for example killed thousands of people maybe 20,000 according to Haitian historians a restored virtual slavery left much of the country in ruins Wilson is famous as a apostle of democracy and he demonstrated his love of democracy by sending the Marines in to disband Parliament at gunpoint for a good reason they had refused to pass what was called progressive legislation that allowed us corporations to buy up the country so therefore they were kicked out but since we do believe in elections there was a referendum F under marine rule at in which five percent of the population participated and 99 percent voted for the progressive legislation so American corporations proceeded to buy up what remained of Haiti which was once the richest colony in the world it's worth remembering now may be the symbol of hopelessness and despair attributed to the West at the same time Wilson sent the Marines to invade the Dominican Republic that was almost as bad as Haiti but not quite because as the military commanders pointed out in the Dominican Republic they were [ __ ] not [ __ ] so you had to treat them a little better not much but some both countries were left under the rule of the vicious National Guard's it's a policy that had been first instituted in the Philippines a few years earlier and Philippines remain under their rule in effect that followed in in Hispaniola decades of torture and terror and violence and misery all of this comes down to us in history under the framework of what's called wilsonian idealism which is a leading principle of u.s. foreign policy as any of you know who've taken courses in modern history and international relations well the third Nobel laureate presidential Nobel laureate was Jimmy Carter for whom human rights was the soul of our foreign policy his his policies in Latin America were explained by Robert Pastore he's a Latin American specialist and way at the dovish extreme Pasteur explained why the administration had to support the murderous Somoza regime in Nicaragua and when they could no longer sustain him they had to try to sustain maintain the us-trained National Guard even I'm quoting pastor now even after it was massacring the population with the brutality that a nation usually reserves for its enemy killing some 40,000 people and the reason why the Carter Administration had to keep supporting them is Elementary quote Pasteur again the United States did not want to control Nicaragua or other nations of the region but it also did not want developments to get out of control it wanted Nicaraguans to act independently except when doing so would affect you as interests adversely that's a fair statement of policy at the dovish extreme the Cold War was of course invoked but it was not remote irrelevant what we do find however is an operative principle that runs right through history and is recognized to their credit even by Reaganite scholarship serious Reaganite scholars who concede ruefully that democracy is a good thing for in the eyes of u.s. administration's if and only if it's consistent with strategic and economic interests the leading scholar rake neo Reaganite Thomas Carruthers concludes that for some crazy strange reason all US presidents are schizophrenic there's just a curious pathology which settles over people when they enter into the White House and they do sincerely support democracy but with this funny clause added if and only if it conforms the u.s. strategic and economic interests so it's fine in Eastern Europe but different in Central America Latin America or in fact anywhere in our little region over here or elsewhere well on to the fourth Prez Nobel laureate President Obama his first major act in Latin America is not actually the first welcome back to others but the first major one was to separate the United States from almost all of Latin America and from Europe by accepting the military coup that overthrew Haitian democracy this is virtually alone the United States refused to withdraw its ambassador as even European countries had done in Latin American countries and in general sort of repeated some of the words of the Organization of American States but as you just heard repeated them with its fingers crossed the United States quickly recognized the elections that were held under the military regime when did I say Haiti sorry I meant Honduras trouble is it's all the same so it's very easy to interject fact you can repeat the sentences and interchange the names makes it very easy makes it very easy to give talks about the foreign policy yeah so thanks for the correction the the United the Obama administration very quickly recognized the elections alone almost alone the American ambassador Obama's ambassador to Honduras Hugo Lorenz called the elections a great celebration of democracy he wasn't being original he was echoing Kennedy's ambassador Kennedy Johnson ambassador to Brazil Lincoln Gordon this was right after the us-backed military coup in 1964 it was prepared by the Kennedy administration but carried out a few weeks after the assassination that too was extremely important it instituted the first of the neo-nazi style national security states that spread through the continent with a notable domino effect led to the worst repression worst plague of repression in the history of the hemisphere which is saying a lot Gordon Lincoln Gordon exalted that the coup was the most decisive victory for freedom in the mid 20th century he added quietly that the democratic forces that had taken over would create a greatly improved climate for private investments so like Honduras the who was a great celebration of democracy and in Honduras the effects presumably similar and in the Honduran case as you heard in the songs before it will also crucially preserve for Washington its military base at Palmer Ola during the 1980s that was called the unsinkable aircraft carrier for the US run forces attacking Nicaragua from under from their Honduran bases under Ronald Reagan's terrorists wars in Central America in the 80s and that base is increasingly valuable to the United States because as a result of quite significant changes in the in South America primarily the United States has been kicked out of all of its military bases there the last one was just a few months ago it was expelled from the monta military base in in Ecuador the president correa of Ecuador when he was running in the recent election said that he would indeed permit the u.s. to retain the month-out base but only on condition that the United States allowed Ecuador to have a military base near Miami and that wasn't accepted for some reason so the US was expelled from the Monta base well it's not the Empire doesn't give up and the US is reacting it's since gained access to seven military bases in the one country of South America that remains a loyal client Colombia and President Obama added on to more quietly two naval bases in Panama and other quasi colony all of this is part of a much more general program of remilitarization of the dangerous moves towards independence that also includes reconstituting the 4th Fleet naval fleet which which operates in South American and Caribbean waters it was dismantled in 1950 but it has just been reinstituted now it has these two new bases in Panama the base in Colombia is one of the bases in Colombia the pollak Aero base is intended as was revealed by a leaked Air Force document it's intended to be a beta base for surveillance of the hemisphere and the longer-term plans are to link it up with the new Africa Command which extends over Africa and that becomes part of the global surveillance and control system which permits aggression and intervention anywhere over the world for the benefit of humanity of course that goes without saying well on the there's also an increase sharp increase in training of Latin American officers who's our their mission official mission is to deal with the youth gangs and radical populism radical populism has a very special meaning in Latin American history well on the Honduran elections again Obama's State Department official in charge of Western Hemisphere affairs of on suela was just quoted he told the press that the issue is not who is going to be the next president the Honduran people decided that they chose between two supporters of the military coup while the elected president was holed up in the Brazilian Embassy Obama's representative to the OAS as the Organization of American States meanwhile instructed the backward Latin peons that they should join the United States in the real world they should abandon their world of magic realism and should recognize the military coup just as Big Brother did Obama did break new ground in support for the military coup there are two government US government funded organizations that are technically supposed to support democracy in the world one of them is the International Republican Institute the others the National Democratic Institute and since the entire spectrum of opinion is represented we can be sure that there's going to be an honest outcome well the International Republican Institute which is marginally more reactionary and violent regularly supports military coup to overthrow elected governments on without any without blinking an eye recently in Venezuela in 2002 and Haiti in 2004 but in those two cases the National Democratic Institute held back the Democrats weren't an office then including these two cases in Honduras for the first time Obama's National Democratic Institute agreed to observe the elections under military rule unlike the Organization of American States and the United Nations and others who are still wandering in the realms of magic realism well notice that this is the third military coup in the current in the new millennium the first was in Venezuela in 2002 that was openly supported by Washington which had to back down and turn the subversion after the coup was overturned by a popular uprising the second in 2004 that was in Haiti that was carried out by the two traditional torturers of Haiti France and the United States which have essentially destroyed the country they intervene the elected president the jean-bertrand Aristide was packed off to Central Africa the United States has been trying to bar him from the Western Hemisphere but some of those magic realists are entirely obeying so it's been a while in now and then the Honduran coup is the third coup in this millennium Obama's contribution to the quite traditional pattern well it I don't have to explain because it's obvious that connections between the United States and doors are so close military economic and others that the United States had enormous leverage and it could it would have been a very simple matter to join Europe and Latin America to protect under democracy but Obama clearly preferred the traditional policy the traditional policy is concealed under what kind of pleasant rhetoric of the kind I quoted before but it's also understood so scholarship understands it quite well the one of the standard scholarly history of hemispheric relations by a well-known British scholar Gordon canal Smith says that while paying lip service to the encouragement of representative democracy in Latin America the United States has a strong interest in just the reverse apart from procedural democracy especially the holding of Elections which only too often have proved farcical like when we've just seen there's a problem in authentic democracy the problem is that it might respond the popular concerns well as Kyle Smith goes on to explain the United States has been concerned with fostering the most favorable conditions for her private overseas investment and accordingly there is no serious question of US intervention in the case of the many right-wing military coos the right-wing is a kind of an understatement except one they had of course intervention to support or to initiate them as is constantly done but matters are quite different still quoting when her own concept of democracy closely identified with proper private capitalistic enterprise is threatened by communism the communism is a common cover term that's used to refer to the threat of independent development that's responsive to domestic concerns it really takes a large dose of what has sometimes been called intentional ignorance not to see the glaringly obvious facts which have remarkable consistency in clarity well there is of course another u.s. Nobel prize-winner Peace Prize winner who's left his imprint on the hemisphere Henry Kissinger is quoted before there are more than enough tortured and mutilated corpses more than enough widows and orphans and more than enough misery and starvation to testify to his contribution so I'll ignore them and keep to some of his profound thoughts when he was supporting reagan's terrorist wars Kissinger explained that if we cannot manage Central America it will be impossible to convince threatened nations in the Persian Gulf and in other places that we know how to manage the global equilibrium the latter phrase is a euphemism for our rule of the globe and others we may not frighten them enough to accept our orders unless at least we can manage Central America right nearby when Kissinger was leading the effort to overthrow the IND government the elected government in Chile his National Security Council observed that if the United States could not control Latin America it could not expect to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world that is to impose its rule effectively in the world so a lot is at stake in controlling Latin America and in managing Central America and in fact overthrow of democracy in Honduras takes its place and deeply rooted very consistent policies and attitudes in government in the intellectual culture the media is much of scholarship and so on it traces back to the earliest foreign policy Hertz of the newly founded Republic the infant Empire George Washington called it named the famous famous document is the Monroe Doctrine in the 1820s it which said essentially keep out this is our little region over here well that couldn't be implemented at the time there was a deterrent it wasn't the Russians it was the British the British fleet was just too powerful and the British Army was that's why Canada is not technically a colony of the United States though it's more and more becoming one in practice but many several efforts to invade Canada were beaten back by British force the and the u.s. also couldn't conquer Cuba as it wanted to do in the 1820s because the British fleet was in the way and in general the Monroe Doctrine couldn't be implemented but it was understood by the deeper thinkers that that was a temporary affair John Quincy Adams who's considered the great grand strategist of early American foreign policy and in fact the probably the author certainly the intellectual author of manifest destiny in the Monroe Doctrine he explained in 1820s that yes we can't conquer Cuba now the British are in the way but if we wait the Cuba will sooner or later fall into our hands by the laws of political gravitation the way an Apple falls from a tree meaning we're going to get stronger and stronger British you're going to get weaker and weaker and pretty soon we'll be able to conquer Cuba well that in fact happened in 1898 Theodore Roosevelt who was incidentally incredible charlatan put his uniform you know made sure the photographs were taken properly in you know led the famous effort of the Rough Riders to help what was called liberating Cuba in fact what it meant was preventing Cuba from liberating itself from Spain as it was just about to do and turning it into a virtual colony as it remained until 1959 and it has been under constant unremitting terror and economic warfare ever since for pretty good reasons this is the first foreign policy goal of the infant Empire and for it to move towards independence is pretty Shoppach shocking in fact we know why the attack on Cuba is a savage and it is to realize how savage it is you really have to look at the details and it began with extensive terror straight terror under Kennedy and Johnson and went on but particularly savage and striking is the economic warfare I mean huge resources go into ensuring to tracking every ship in the world to make sure that it doesn't stop somewhere and pick up some steel that might have Cuban nickel in it and if it does it's going to have to be barred from US ports much more effort goes into this than to say tracking terrorist finances and sort of minor things like that it's really an obsession and the reasons are explained in the internal documents that it's very free country so we had a lot of internal records go back to the Kennedy Johnson years the explanation was that all of this is necessary at that time significant terror activities because of Cuba's successful defiance of policies going back 150 years meaning to the Monroe Doctrine no Russians that's to scare the domestic population it's successful defiance of the Monroe Doctrine which established that this little region over here is for us to run and independent countries are not tolerated well it's a good Cuba cases of kind of as an interesting one in the study of American foreign policy I mean for decades the American population u.s. population has been in favor of normalization of relations of relations with Cuba by large margins but it's normal for the population to be disregarded that's called democracy but what's less normal is that American business is in favor of it not typically foreign policy is almost a reflex of business interests but in this case major sectors of American industry and agribusiness pharmaceuticals energy corporations no big guys are in favor of normalizing relations but the state is overruling and that is unusual and I think that reflects one of the few really meaningful significant principles of International Affairs most of it is kind of at the level of whistle will sigh and idealism but there are some real principles and one of the major principles I think ought to be called the Mafia doctrine International Affairs are very much like the Mafia the Godfather does not tolerate disobedience it's too dangerous if it doesn't how tiny it is can be some small storekeeper somewhere who isn't paying his protection money that can't be tolerated because tomorrow Kissinger's terms the virus can spread contagion elsewhere others may get the same idea so it's not enough to send your goons in to get the money because the Don really doesn't heat it you have to beat him to a pulp and make it clear to everyone else that this kind of behavior is not tolerated maybe in the realms of magic realism but not in the real world here we have to make sure that there's disciplined and successful defiance cannot be tolerated it's a bad message gee Arthur Schlesinger well-known liberal historian who was Kennedy's chief latin america one of his chief Latin American advisers he explained it when he presented to the incoming president President Kennedy the report of a Latin American mission that Kennedy had established to sort of lay out policies for the hemisphere and he pointed out that Cuba's real problem on the problem he said is the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into your own hands which might influence other countries in Latin America where people are suffering from the same kind of repression and violence and once you allow that then the virus might spread contagion and the whole system of domination that might euro and that's what you hear consistently in internal policy planning from liberals like Schlesinger and Kennedy to whatever you call Henry Kissinger I'm not sure I don't want to use the word that comes to mind so you make up your word but right across the spectrum that's rational policy which is why it is never abandoned to the public it's called the domino theory know if Vietnam Falls Ho Chi Minh will conquer California and so on and so forth that's what you present to the public and of course when these things never happened you say well it was a mistake you know it didn't understand and so on but the authentic duck domino theory is never retracted because it's right it is perfectly true that if you allow a successful defiance somewhere others might get the same idea and try to take matters into their own hands and pretty soon the system of domination erodes and collapses actually that's what's beginning to happen now in South America and is very worrisome to us planners that's why you have the kinds of actions I briefly mentioned before well that's all of this is pretty straight in in the internal record as I said we're lucky to be in a very free country where we can really get access to what internal planning is we're also from another point of view lucky to be in a very disciplined country so no ever hears about it but it's there if you want to do the work for the National Security Council highest planning body back in the early 50s explai doubt the primary threat to US interests in latin america said the primary interest is posed by radical and nationalistic regimes that appeal to the masses of the population and seek to satisfy the popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses and develop development for domestic needs and these tendencies conflict with the demand for a political and economic climate conducive to private investment with adequate repatriation of profits and protection of our raw materials the last phrase George Kennan who explained that it's kind of like an accident that the raw materials happen to be somewhere else they're really ours we got to protect them and in fact a large part of the subsequent history follows from these conceptions which are completely unchallenged and make perfect sense you know if you're the Godfather those are exactly the right principles so they're not challenged that's zalaya problem he was starting to stray from orthodoxy he was beginning to offer a very mild challenge to these fundamental principles the new york times using terminology that is rare for them so I give them credit reported that the coup reflected a class division rare term and us discourse it reacted whether it's reflected a young political and economic divide for the small upper class zalaya was becoming a threat to what they call democracy meaning the rule of the most powerful business and political forces in the country okay that's successful defiance and he was really going pretty far for example he he raised the minimum wage a little bit and miserable minimal wage in a country where 60% of the population live in poverty but if you're an observant Don you notice things like that and it's dangerous you start with raising the minimum wage pretty soon you lose control of the world world if we can't control Latin America and we can't control the world so something so plainly he had to go it wasn't a small thing well Honduras is a sufficiently small and weak state yeah and it's sufficiently under US control so that it was possible to resort to the classic method military coup conceal'd of course with some polite rhetoric well there have been major challenges to u.s. rule and they continue in there taking new forms actually last month we had an enlightening demonstration of our incapacity or maybe unwillingness to consider what these challenges tell us was our interesting month the month November 2009 it was largely devoted to celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union surely a memorable event and there were eloquent testimonies to the lesson that we learn from these amazing events the power of non-violence and the power of idealism and that's true enough if we keep ourselves focused and the laser light on the crimes of enemies looks a little different when we look elsewhere so for example there was another 20th anniversary in November just one week after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that was the anniversary of the termination of a 25 year campaign to crush a major challenge the u.s. rule in our little region over here that campaign began in 1962 with John Paul Pope John Paul the 23rd and Vatican 2 in the same year incidentally 1962 John F Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American military which of course we determine from hemispheric defense to internal security hemispheric defense Teleca antiquated holdover from the Second World War but internal security means something it means violent crushing of any disobedience internal to the society well Vatican 2 1962 the set fourth gave a stimulus to a very important movement in Latin America extremely important the Vatican to in effect was the first attempt in seventeen hundred years to restore the Christianity the Christianity had been captured by the Roman Empire in the fourth century and changed from the resolution from the religion of the persecuted to the religion of the persecutors is quoting the theologian Hans kung the Emperor Constantine took over Christianity it had been a radical pacifist religion so of course in the first three centuries is he there were martyrs and persecutions and so on but it became the religion of the Roman Empire the cross which had been symbol of the suffering to the poor and it was on the shield of the Empire and since then essentially the rule of the rich the religion of the rich rich well there been some attempts to change it but they were crushed pretty quickly but vatican ii was the first major attempt it was a king says i think rightly in a real revolution in the history of the church and the don didn't fail to notice it what happened was that especially in latin america you got the beginnings of what came to be called liberation theology the priests and nuns laypersons went out to the peasantry organized based communities as they were called encourage people to read the gospels see what they actually said listen to their radical pacifist message and try to begin to organize to take your fair fares into your own hands that's dangerous and didn't take long for a reaction to set in fact the first major reaction was in 1964 the one I mentioned the establishment of the first national security state in Brazil and then comes the Hinault effect brazil's a big powerful country and of course there's somebody up there in the north pushing the dominoes and then comes the whole play Brazil Chile you know Argentine the Argentine killers who were Reagan's favorites and so on and it's pretty clear what they were about so the standard scholarly source on the United States and human rights in Latin America bailar Schultz very well-known scholar now he explains that the goal of the National Security States was to destroy permanently a perceived threat to the existing structure of socio-economic privilege by eliminating the political participation of the numerical majority that's accurate that's what's been going at lips what the process that was set in motion in reaction to the heresy of trying to revive Christianity John Paul 23rd well the throughout this whole period among the period of horrendous terror and slaughter reached Central America in the 80s right through this period the practitioners of liberation theology were a prime target among them were the martyrs of the church whose execution 20 years ago was commemorated last month with a resounding silence they were killed six leading Latin American intellectuals Jesuit priests were murdered by the daily Salvadoran battalion which had just come from several months of training at Fort Bragg Special Warfare school in Fort Bragg North Carolina and the JFK properly named Special Warfare school and in fact just days before the assassination they got a refresher course from a couple of dozen Special Forces who were sent up there to instruct them and then came the murders also the murder of Julio Elba and her daughter Selina who just happened to be there and I leave any witnesses for this kind of thing it's almost totally forgotten one survivor there was one survivor of the massacre my father nan Sabrina he spoke at Boston College a couple of weeks ago and probably the only commemoration of any of this he reminded the audience that for the elbe and Celina are the symbols of the suffering masses of El Salvador and in fact the world and therefore they must not be forgotten just as the Jesuit intellectuals must not be forgotten like all they symbolize and it's therefore crucial that all of this be completely erased from memory now these are not small events this is a major war to reverse an effort to revive Christianity pretty-pretty more significant thing and it was passed in silence what we do is look at the marvelous lesson of non-violence and idealism in the other fellows backyard well there's a lot of debate about who deserves the credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall but there's no debate at all about who deserves the credit for the 25 year war to demolish the heretical attempt to revive the Church of the Gospels the school of the Americas since been renamed which is famous for training of Latin American killers it proudly announces as one of its talking points you know advertising points that Liberation Theology was defeated with the assistance of the US Army no ambiguity so very proud of it well all of this and a lot more like it we have to drive from memory for one reason because it would enable us to understand what's happening 100 that's just a another footnote to history you know following the standard pattern and for good reasons good plausible reasons which are easily understood for the culture in general it's a highly praiseworthy to lament the crimes of official enemies we may even castigate ourselves for our failure to do more to help the victims of our enemies but our own crimes have to be buried very deep and Orwell's memory hole that's it these are crucial principles of Imperial culture they have to be guarded zealously that's what schools and universities and newspapers and so on are about they got to be guarded if criminal violence is going to proceed on course always for the good of humanity as President Obama reminded us again in the Nobel Prize address to the usual great acclaim yeah thank you thank you there you go we go and as they're the most of the countries have thrown out the IMF Argentina for example restructured and paid off its debt with help of Venezuela Brazil did the same and the IMF which is essentially a branch of the Treasury Department was one of the techniques of control of the countries well you know that's very much weakened and the fact that they've already well weathered the recession like better than Europe and the United States said again gives them a starting point so but the struggle just goes on you know those in power domestically and that those in domestic power don't give up just like in Honduras same in Bolivia and other places they want to hang on to what they will that they want to own the countries they've already owned always on and they've got help from the United States and the one thing we can do is we can that help so that's up to us but the opportunities are greater towns with names like San Diego and San Francisco and Oakland it's a yeah I'm in the u.s. Concord almost half of Mexico the first that took Texas still Texas for the reasons that Roosevelt explained you can't allow the Texans to be under the rule of a weaker race and then conquered Mexico that was with strong support from progressives you know like Walt Whitman the national poet you know leading progressive that I can't quote them exactly but he wrote something about what has miserable week Mexico to do with the future of the noble human race you have to remember that this was a period and unfortunate it's not over but this was very overt area of extreme racism there was an anglo-saxon mythology that had been developed it was developed in England 15th century so and then was picked up in the United States but the basic story was goes back to Tacitus that there was an Aryan race which suddenly appeared you know somewhere around where Iran is and they were just a different species a tall blond that will go back a century you know the biologists were showing that their heads were round or you know which is better to be rounded and and they were a unique you know blue-eyed blond conquered everything great commitment to law and freedom and so on and they emerged there and then they started moving they moved west everything's got to be west so they moved to the to germany to the black forests and there they became the Teutons who were a perfect race but then difficulties began because some of them intermarried with the people's near them and so the race degenerated and then you get the people of the Mediterranean you know kind of dirty and dark-haired and things like that but the real good ones just exterminated everyone so they kept the purity of the race and and the good ones became the angles and the Saxons who went to the English Channel and then crossed it and exterminated everyone then they maintain racial purity they didn't get rid of all the Celt some of them hung around and Ireland and places like that but they did a pretty good job of it and then after that they went to the colonists came to America going west and that's us you know we're the anglo-saxons and you get it in Thomas Jefferson you know like it's it's Universal in the nineteenth century where the anglo-saxons Jefferson and others thought we ought to go back to the 8th century before the race was poisoned by you know immigration to England from elsewhere than the Norman Conquest when they had the perfect system of laws and the most just so and so and the racial characteristics were pretty precise like Benjamin Franklin he didn't think the Germans qualified he said they were a little too swarthy no but and they didn't pick our customs properly so as and then by the time you get and of course they ended the Native Americans will I'm obviously an inferior race so therefore was right to exterminate them and as Roosevelt pointed out in the quotes that I mentioned it was they were the beneficiaries of our exterminating them just like the Filipinos and so on because that was a sacrifice to create a superior race and so on I mean racism in the United States is not just anti black racism it's far deeper and that's why every wave of immigrants has been treated with real racial abuse takes a Boston like now in a century go numb century a half ago in Boston the Irish were considered like dogs you know you'd have restaurants with the sign saying the dogs are Irish and the average lifespan of an Irish mail was I think under 20 years old you know not the so-called Huns were treated the same way everyone from South Eastern Europe the Jews the worst were the Chinese the first total exclusion ratio exclusion act was against the Chinese they were afraid of him but then comes along the move to the West you know after you've conquered the national territory conquered Mexico superior race and so on you have to move west then comes 1898 conquer steal basically Hawaii conquer the Philippines kill a couple hundred thousand of them and then the idea is to go on to China at that point Theodore Roosevelt made one of his major contributions which laid the basis for the Pacific Wars of the Second World War he designated that you Japanese is honorary Aryans so they were not they looked yellow but they really weren't so they could be civilized and they could sort of pave their way into China and the East and we keep going until we circle the earth and get back to our original homeland you know wherever it was like Iran or something and you know you read this this is a dominant ideology it's all over the place you know so yeah conquest of Mexico was part of that there was another reason for it you're supposed to I've taken economics courses I guess those of you had the tragedy of going to college or something so if you take an economics course you read Adam Smith actually you worship Adam Smith you know read him if you read him you learn things that you're not supposed to know but for example he was against division of labor that's not supposed to know that but he did give advice to the United States to the new colonies and his advice to them was exactly the advice pretty much that eka not economists today give to the third world he said you got a follow of fishing principles in the United States if you want to develop an efficient principles mean you pursue your own comparative advantage term hadn't yet been introduced but he described it is do what you're good at like raising for you know catching fish and so on and rely on superior British manufacturers that gives economic efficiency it's exactly what we tell the world and he said furthermore you know you happen to have a lot of resources there but don't monopolize them now the major resource in those days was cotton cotton was kind of like oil today it was the fuel of the Industrial Revolution which started off everywhere with textiles so you guys grow a lot of cotton but don't monopolize it because monopolies are economically inefficient you can prove that now prove it with theorems then you could just prove it without theorems but so that was the advice well you know the United States did manage the shake off the British so it didn't have to follow sound economic principles and therefore Alexander Hamilton created an import substitution economy the u.s. forgot about comparative advantage at very high tariffs to keep out superior British goods this went right through the 19th century I was able to develop a textile industry in a steel industry had the highest tariffs in the world this went onto the mid 20th century and as far as monopolies were concerned the u.s. tried hard to monopolize cotton that's what the Mexican Texan Texas annexation and the Mexican War were largely about the idea of the Jacksonian democrats Pullen tyler and those guys is that if we can conquer these areas we will be able to get a monopoly over cotton production and we'll be able to bring the british to their knees remember the british with a big enemy they were the powerful country in those days so we'll be able to bring him to earn to their knees by monopolizing cotton in fact what they were doing what is what saddam hussein was accused of doing crazily when he invaded kuwait you remember the line he's going to conquer saudi arabia and take all the oil and you know we'll be all dead for some reason well that was a that was a fantasy but what happened with the cotton was not a fantasy and that was a substantial part of the reason for conquering Tex Texas stealing and then stealing what's now California Arizona New Mexico parts of Utah the whole southwest there were other reasons like the racial racist reasons but this was a part of it so there's a lot history is actually an interesting topic like you said there's a lot of interesting things in it if you don't stage with what you're taught in school and you actually look into what happened so yeah you shouldn't know about the Mexican War was 1846 248 Columbia is the Columbia has far and away the worst human rights record in Latin America since around 1990 after you know through the 80s the worst atrocities were carried out by the us-backed dictatorships El Salvador Guatemala was probably the worst and so on through the 90s Columbia got the championship became the leading human rights violator and almost reflexively it became the leading recipient of US military aid in the hemisphere now Columbia has a long history of violence and terror and so on but took off again in the 90s and that became the leading recipient of US military aid outside of Turkey Turkey was he carrying out even more atrocities so they were ahead of Colombia by the late 90s the Turkish atrocities declined in Colombia moved into first place actually I'm putting aside Israel in Egypt which are a separate category but outside that category Colombia won the championship in the Western Hemisphere and then in the world by late 90s that was called plan plan Colombia was a Clinton plan it was technically directed against it was specially directed against drug trafficking but it's it's mostly counterinsurgency I mean I actually been down there southern Colombia it's a it's a miserable place you know the the peasants down there are the campesinos you know the Africa Lumbee ins and indigenous people are being attacked by everybody you can imagine are they being attacked by the military by the paramilitaries now they're being attacked by FARC the guerrillas one of the probably the only real achievement of Plan Colombia Clinton's clan Colombia was to militarize the conflict so completely that the guerrilla movements which had some kind of a social base and social programs just turned into their army preying on the peasant it's another under attack by all of them but probably the worst of all is the US Air Force or actually it's called the Colombian Air Force but the u.s. planes probably mercenaries flying them who are carrying out chemical warfare and just destroying everything it's called fumigation and it's supposedly no supposed to kill coca plants but of course it kills everything else too and what it does is drive the peasants off the land and Colombia now has the second largest displaced persons population the world after Sudan they're all often the slum somewhere around you know around the cities and as soon as they're driven off the land income the the big mining corporations you know took the and agribusiness and you know Monsanto with the Amana crop genetically modified agriculture and ranches run open by rich people and so on and it's a real Horror Story actually just to tell you a person I mean I was supposed to go down there right after Christmas just a couple of days ago I was told by human rights activists do violent to go there so I just you can't go right now and well okay that's called pacification or something the but Colombia Colombian government is the one close US ally it's stands out from the region and that's why the basis went to Colombia this question of the drugs is something that really ought to be thought about I mean it's taken for granted in the United States that we have the right to establish military bases in other countries to send troops in and the CIA and DEA agents and so on to get them to stop producing a product that we don't like now you know hard drugs aren't good for anybody but if you compare it with say tobacco I mean that's it's undetectable deaths from tobacco are way higher than this from all the hard drugs together and you know soft of drugs like like cannabis marijuana maybe it's not good for you but that it's not a killer furthermore tobacco kills other people like more way more people die from passive smoking than die from hard drugs passive smoking meaning you're around somebody who's smoking well you know suppose that say China established military bases in Colombia to carry out chemical warfare in Kentucky and North Carolina to destroy this lethal crop that's killing huge numbers of Chinese I mean is that all right I mean it's part of the Imperial mentality is we don't we it doesn't register since we're the owners of the world we knew anything we want you know and if we want to say you know invade Afghanistan because we don't like somebody or we want to put milk at the carry out chemical warfare in southern Colombia because they're doing something we claim that then okay we have a perfect right to do it alright putting that aside you have to really ask yourself whether controlling a coca production is it has anything to do with the purpose of all of this I mean this kind of there's a principle of law well-known principle of law that you can infer intention from predictable consequences of actions okay now for decades the United States has been fighting what's called the drug war to try to get rid of say opium production it's had essentially no effect on opium production but it has had other effects perfectly predictable effects in Colombia it's a cover for counter insurgency in the United States it's a technique for reintroducing slavery what it's done in effect in the United States the drug war was escalated by Nixon a little bit after that it made him since the Reagan years this is a shoot the incarceration rate up to the sky and it's mostly black males well you look at the history of african-americans it's been slavery all the way I mean everybody knows you know aside from free blacks it was slavery up to the Civil War but what is less known is that there was a period ten-year period called reconstruction when it was sort of kind of freedom but after after reconstruction there was a compact of the north and the south to essentially reinstitute slavery and the way it was done was by criminalizing black life so if a black man is standing on a street corner and you know you can arrest him for vagrancy a fee doesn't look down properly when a white woman passes you can arrest him for you know attempted rape or something and once they're in jail they're there forever because you can't pay the judges and you can't pay the lawyers and so on so essentially black life was criminalized and you had a new slave class which was worse than slavery for good capitalist reasons if you own a slave he's capital you got to maintain it if you're just taking a slave out of the criminal system and putting him to work in a mine or a factory he's dispensable it's kind of like free labor just throw him out so in fact it was worse than slavery and it's the basis for a large part of the American industrial revolution the mines and the steel mills and so on a lot of it was in this southern areas where was based on slave labor well that went on until the Second World War during the Second World War you needed free labor labor for you know war plants and so on and then for a couple of decades after the Second World War there was a substantial economic growth industrial Ruth so black men could get jobs as auto workers and you know you could they could live you can start moving into relatively decent life well by the 70s that essentially was over the economy moved towards financialization towards the elimination of the industrial industrial production the neoliberal policies were introduced you've got this huge superfluous population again what do you do with them throw them into jail and in fact that's exactly what happens so the consequence of the drug war here was primarily domestically it was to re-incarcerated a large part of the black population also Hispanic population and to and in fact they are again factory labor so you they're cheap and easily exploitable labor it's called voluntary but we're in jail you know voluntary has a special meaning but the and you know when people complain about say Guantanamo it's so kind of a little ironic because American prisons aren't that much different their torture chambers it's a horrible system so that's one effect at home the effect abroad is counterinsurgency and there were other consequences it's a way of frightening the rest of the population here imposing what's called the law and order so if you want to frighten and control the population I have to be afraid of something and they can be afraid of you know Hispanic market traffickers trying to destroy us and that sort of thing that worked very well so it's had a and the fact that it consistently fails in its alleged purpose namely reducing drug use or even availability of drugs it doesn't matter because it's succeeding and it's actual purposes you know do you think that we'd be able to understand that in fact the three quite conservative Latin American ex-presidents is a do Cardoso and Gaviria I think recent about a year ago put put out a did a you know headed a study which called for just elimination of the drug war they say it's got nothing to do with with controlling drugs and a lot of Latin American countries of under us is involved but others are just reducing slowly decriminalizing drugs for personal use and so on the US wants to maintain it but I think that's because it has other functions now Colombia is right the center of this Colombia may not be the main producer of poppy anymore it very well might be Mexico Mexico is now a major narco state there are huge areas of Mexico near the border which are just given over to the northern border us were to opium production and the u.s. pretends it doesn't know anything about it but journalists in Mexico say you can just you know fly over it in a Piper Cub or something you can just see it you can't miss it a lot of these are areas from which the population essentially fled as a result of NAFTA which undermines agricultural productions one of its purposes so people flee to the cities you have big open areas the drug cartels pick them up and they're apparently protected by the army and the narco traffickers who work together and it's claimed that about 25% of the Mexican economy is not just narco trafficking but you know we don't do certify Mexico because it's an ally but Colombia is the one real holdout in Latin America so far but it's you know it's a pretty ugly place on the other hand I get back to an earlier question I don't really think it can be used as a base for attacking other places in Latin America there's just not the capacity for that here but it was much more striking in other parts of the country like the Midwest and the Southwest in fact what happened is that a very substantial mass movement developed of solidarity which was something totally new in the history of imperialism thousands probably tens of thousands of people many from church groups many from evangelical groups went down to Central America to live with people in very dangerous situations to help them and just to give them some protection by the presence of a white face no I mean that never happened in the whole history of imperialism like nobody from France ever went to live in an Algerian village to protect people or in Vietnam nobody thought of it but it turned into a major mass movement I remember going to you know churches and Kansas rural Kansas where people know more about Central America than you know than anybody around here that's certainly more than the CIA but that's not much of a compliment and it a lot of them stayed especially the evangelicals and out of that grew other movements like witness for peace and the Christian protection groups which are all over the world and they do very important things I mean they're in the Middle East you know they're in Asia everywhere it's not as visit it wasn't as visible as say the sixties demonstrations for the same reason because it was you know it's in it's in the mainstream it's in sort of town rural towns in Maryland or in Kansas and things like that and that doesn't make make the news but it it was happening and a lot of it remained and it's the basis for the existing solidarity movements which have spread it's there isn't the kind of organized activism about Central America that there was during the period of the big massacres you know so when you're killing a couple hundred thousand people and the tortures and massacres and the sort of thing well you know this is a lot easier to organize people when it's happening sort of quietly and you're just back to normal repression and suffering it's more invisible so it you know you don't have civil disobedience and people getting arrested and things like what you described but it's Layton and I think it can be brought back well I'll say a word about what was going on over there no it was very clear that that the Regan government wanted an outright declared war us bases I mean they're a threat to the region and in fact in the right after the bases were established there was a meeting of unas or the Union of South American Nations or would have the newly formed organization admitted somewhere in Argentina to consider the problem of the bases and it is regarded as a threat to the region but the chances that the US would use the basis to invade Venezuela I think are pretty slight in the the u.s. just doesn't have the capacity to invade other countries at this point they're a threat to the region and in fact in the right after the bases were established there was a meeting of unas or the Union of South American Nations or would have the newly formed organization admitted somewhere in Argentina to consider the problem of the bases and it is regarded as a threat to the region but the chances that the US would use the bases to invade Venezuela I think are pretty slight I mean the the u.s. just doesn't have the capacity to invade other countries at this point it's stretched to the limits that's if not beyond and I don't think they could get away with it either South America would blow up so so they're a threat but I think the real threat is what came out in the leaked air force documents that it's a component of a surveillance and control system that extends over the hemisphere most of the hemisphere and links up to the Africa coming which is relatively new and is part of the system of controlling Africa and it's and it's part of now a global system you know the u.s. is the only country in the world that has anything like a global system of surveillance and control and potential aggression but if there isn't it if they're going to use forces anywhere I suspect it would be client forces and I don't think Colombia wants to get into a war at this point

Channel: PHubb

Views: 561,225

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Keywords: Noam, Chomsky, indigenous, Haiti, Honduras, Latin, America, US, imperialism, MIT

Id: NKwJI9axblQ

Length: 74min 53sec (4493 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2009