% FROM THE NOAM CHOMSKY ARCHIVE
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% Filename:    articles/chomsky.loot.ideology
% Title:       Letter from Lexington (column)
% Author:      Noam Chomsky
% Appeared-in: Lies of Our Times (LOOT), November 1991
% Source:      aritza@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
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Letter from Lexington

October 7, 1991

Dear LOOT,

We can learn a good deal about the way the world works by
observing what fails to reach the threshold in the ideological
institutions, remaining invisible. Academic studies are sometimes
instructive in this regard. In the _Political Science Quarterly_
(Summer 1991), Doris Graber reviews Nicholas Berry's _Foreign
Policy and the Press: An Analysis of The New York Times' Coverage
of U.S. Foreign Policy_, ``a must-read for anyone interested in
how the press covers foreign policy.''  Berry's study ``confirmed
his theory and disconfirmed its rivals.''  His theory is that
``If policies turn out to be failures, the media feature the
views of vocal critics,'' though only ``credible, quotable,
political sources'' need apply. The disconfirmed rival theories
are not identified, but they must be theories that claim that the
media fail even to criticize failure. All advocates of the view
that the media surpass totalitarianism are therefore properly
chastized.

Excluded, by fiat, is the subversive thought that it might not be
enough for the media to be obedient servants, adopting the
doctrines of the powerful without critical analysis and
evaluating them only in terms acceptable within the corridors of
power: success or failure. Those with higher expectations for a
free society are too far out even to be perceived.

Omissions in major stories of the past month reveal interesting
tacit assumptions that guide policy and shape its doctrinal
disguises. One focus of attention was the confirmation hearings
for Robert Gates as CIA director. As they ended, Elaine Sciolino
reviewed the record, identifying the Big Questions: the
candidate's contrition and arrogance, his ``character and
style,'' the sincerity of ``his personal confession,'' etc.
(``Hearings on Gates Show Many Layers of His Personality,''
_NYT_, Oct. 6, p.  1). One sentence in her summary notes that
Gates ``believed that direct military action was the only way to
deal with the Sandinista government in Nicaragua,'' but Sciolino
rightly ignores this marginal issue, which did not interest
Congress or the media.

The reference is to a Gates memorandum of Dec. 14, 1984 to CIA
chief William Casey (_NYT_, Sept. 20, p. A20). The deputy
director for intelligence opens by stating that ``It is time to
talk absolutely straight about Nicaragua.'' We must ``accept that
ridding the Continent of this regime is important to our national
interest,'' dropping the ``fig leaf of curtailing the flow of
arms to El Salvador'' and other pretenses that ``can easily be
politically dismissed'' (though they continued to be trotted out
by the _Times_ and other loyalists when needed). We must pursue
``a comprehensive campaign openly aimed at bringing down this
regime,'' adopting whatever means are necessary, including
economic sanctions (soon instituted) and, if feasible,
``quarantine'' and military force (air strikes, etc.). ``Hopes of
causing the regime to reform itself for a more pluralistic
government are essentially silly and hopeless,'' Gates writes
immediately after the 1984 elections, which were illegitimate
because victory of US clients (``pluralism'') could not be
enforced. Either we recognize ``that the Western Hemisphere is
the sphere of influence of the United States,'' so that we may
``rid the Continent'' of anyone we do not like by whatever means
we choose, or we decide ``totally to abandon the Monroe
Doctrine.''

These thoughts do not bear on Gates's qualifications. Also
unnoticed is the fact that he has solid grounds for his
interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, for example, the
observations by Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State Robert
Lansing: ``In its advocacy of the Monroe Doctrine the United
States considers its own interests. The integrity of other
American nations is an incident, not an end. While this may seem
based on selfishness alone, the author of the Doctrine had no
higher or more generous motive in its declaration.'' President
Wilson found Lansing's argument ``unanswerable,'' though he felt
it ``impolitic'' to make it public. Evidently, little has
changed.

An indirect affirmation of the same stance appears in Vincent
Canby's favorable review of a film by Susan Meiselas, which, he
notes, reflects her pro-Sandinista sympathies (_NYT_, Oct. 5, p.
11). The film, Canby relates, is ``a somber meditation on what
sometimes looks like the futility of all social struggle.'' Apart
from a few vague phrases about ``outside pressures,'' the reader
is left in the dark about certain rather important reasons for
the ``futility''---accurately revealed in the Gates memorandum
and the reaction to it.

Basic assumptions are revealed further in the lack of response to
Bush's rejection of economic sanctions against the coup regime of
Haiti: ``the problem with that one is you start hurting the
Haitian people'' (Thomas Friedman, ``U.S. and Latins Moving to
Isolate Haiti,'' _NYT_, Oct. 3, 1991, last paragraph). Silence is
appropriate; it would be superfluous to point out the utter
hypocrisy of the comment in the light of Bush's record. The tacit
assumption is that the President is, of course, a thuggish
hypocrite whose declarations are not taken seriously by any sane
person, and are merely a cover for our shared intent to rule the
hemisphere---indeed the world---by any means necessary, ridding
our domains of anyone who gets in our way.

Omissions in the September 26 issue of the _Times_ obliquely
illustrate the same assumptions. Writing on Iraq, Andrew
Rosenthal quotes without comment a US official: ``If you're going
to build any kind of credibility for a new world order, you've
got to make people accountable to legal procedures, and Saddam's
flaunted every one'' (``The Bush-Hussein Duel,'' p. 1). On the
back pages, the same day, we find a few paragraphs from a Reuters
dispatch headed ``U.S. Forgives $260 Million Managua Debt.''
Omitted from the dispatch is a paragraph reporting that a few
days earlier Nicaragua had dropped the World Court suit against
the US (_Boston Globe_, Reuters, ``US writes off Nicaragua's
debt,'' Sept. 26, p. 13). That action had not merited report in
the _Times_, and was barely noted elsewhere (_BG_, ``Nicaragua
drops suit against US,'' Sept. 18, p. 70). A year earlier, the
_Times_ had casually observed that US aid was being withheld to
coerce Nicaragua to abandon ``the judgment of as much as $17
billion that Nicaragua won against the United States at the
International Court of Justice'' (Mark Uhlig, ``U.S. Urges
Nicaragua to Forgive Legal Claim,'' _NYT_, Sept. 30, 1990). The
silences of September 26 provide a perfect background for our
stern injunction that all must be ``accountable to legal
procedures'' if our ``new world order'' is to be credible.

Other stories of the month go on routinely about the President's
``great dreams'' and ``vision on the future,'' the ``historic
window of opportunity'' afforded by the triumph of US arms and
the collapse of the Evil Empire, etc., etc. (R.W. Apple, ``Is
Time Running Out for Bush to Remake the Middle East?,'' _NYT_
Week in Review, Sept. 22, p. 1). Two factors have made it
possible for Bush ``to dream such great dreams'' about Israel-
Arab peace and other matters, Apple observes: (1) there is now no
fear that ``regional tensions'' might lead to superpower
confrontation; (2) ``no longer must the United States contend
with countries whose cantankerousness was reinforced by Moscow's
interest in continuing unrest.''

The factors are accurately identified, but a translation from
Newspeak is needed. Factor (1) is that with the Soviet deterrent
gone, the US can now use force freely to impose its will, a
consequence that, not surprisingly, evokes fear and desperation
throughout much of the world. The second phrase expresses the
conventional doctrine that the US stand is necessarily right and
just, so that those who oppose it are ``cantankerous'' agents of
Soviet disruption. In the case under discussion, this category
includes all NATO allies, the nonaligned countries, indeed
virtually every state in the world except Israel and the US, as
illustrated by the annual UN votes calling for opening the peace
process that the US has always barred because it conflicts with
US rejectionism. But the historical facts have been expunged with
such efficiency that there is little fear that some Winston Smith
will plaintively recall that 2+2 = 4.

Similar achievements underlie the nod of approval for PLO
``realism'' in authorizing Palestinians who meet with US-Israeli
approval to attend the US-run ``peace conference,'' where they
will be permitted to ``negotiate'' their acceptance of the Shamir
plan but to discuss nothing else, as James Baker explained
unambiguously in early 1989. An editorial in the _Boston Globe_
is typical (Oct. 6). It states that ``the principal causes of the
PLO's weakness are the defeat of Saddam Hussein, the political
and monetary cost of Arafat's alliance with Saddam, and the
evanescence of the Soviet superpower.'' A further crime was the
failure to expel the perpetrators of a thwarted terrorist action
in May 1990, which led to the cancellation of the US-PLO
dialogue, and Arafat's support for Iraq's conquest of Kuwait
(which the PLO publicly opposed).

These doctrines are convenient for advocates of US-Israeli
rejectionism. Their falsity is readily demonstrated by the fact
that the Bush-Baker conditions were imposed in the early days of
the US-PLO negotiations, long before the invasion of Kuwait, and
without concern for the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the Bush-Baker
plan simply perpetuated the US rejection of Palestinian rights,
in opposition to virtually the entire world.  As for the US-PLO
dialogue, it opened with the demand by the US that the PLO
abandon any hope for a nonrejectionist international conference
and call off the ``riots'' (the Intifada), ``which we view as
terrorist acts against Israel,'' thus restoring the status quo.
Israel's Defense Minister, Yitzhak Rabin of the Labor Party,
welcomed the sham dialogue as a device to grant Israel time to
crush the Intifada by force, as it proceeded to do. The facts
having been barred by the guardians of political correctness, the
editors and their colleagues are free to invent history to suit
doctrinal needs.

If inconvenient truths were not beyond the pale, some curious
journalist might ask about the origins of the Israeli law that
bars any contacts with the PLO, sending Israeli peace activists
and other undesirables to jail (Clyde Haberman, ``Israel Jails
Abie Nathan for New Arafat Contact, _NYT_, Oct. 7) and denying
Palestinians the right even to select their own representatives
for the capitulation. A leading Israeli legal commentator
provides the answer: the law was instituted at ``the personal
initiative of head of state [David] Ben-Gurion'' in order to bar
any contact with Yitzhak Shamir and his fellow-terrorists, who
had just murdered UN mediator Folke Bernadotte. It was not until
the Likud victory of 1977 that the proscription were officially
revoked (Moshe Negbi, ``The Law to Prevent Contact with the Head
of State,'' _Hadashot_, Sept. 13). A serious journal might also
contemplate the more general consequences of the condition that
advocates of terror are to be barred from the negotiating table.
We'll wait a long time for that.

Another major story of the past month was Bush's initiative to
reduce nuclear weapons. Again, some background was missing.
Standard doctrine, across the spectrum, has been that nuclear
weapons were needed as a ``shield'' for intervention, so that the
US could pursue its ``global interests'' by ``conventional means
or theater forces,'' which can serve as ``meaningful instruments
of military and political power'' under the ``nuclear umbrella''
(Reaganite Eugene Rostow, Carter Defense Secretary Harold Brown).
With the ``umbrella'' no longer needed, it can be (partially)
folded, though the instruments of coercion must remain at the
ready for use against the traditional victims. The basic point
was explained by the respected statesman Lloyd George after
British pressure had prevented the 1932 disarmament convention
from banning bombardment of civilians: ``we insisted on reserving
the right to bomb niggers,'' he observed forthrightly. That
remains the bottom line.

Those who regard themselves as ``on the left'' might be heartened
by another omission, this one in a front-page story on the ``new
leftist orthodoxy mockingly called political correctness''
(Anthony DePalma, ``In Campus Debate On New Orthodoxy, A
Counteroffensive,'' _NYT_, Sept. 25, p. 1). DePalma reviews the
condemnation of this ``orthodoxy'' by President Bush and many
others, who claim that opponents of racism, sexism, etc., are
posing a dangerous threat to the freedom that has hitherto
reigned on campus. Suppose, for the sake of argument, we grant
the accuracy of all the condemnations and the implicit claims
about the golden age before the new ``orthodoxy'' took hold.
Still, one obvious question comes to mind. Why is it taken for
granted, across the board, that to oppose racism and sexism, and
to call for respect for other cultures, is a ``leftist'' position
---hence by implication, one that decent folk must abjure? The
tacit assumption is not addressed. Its implications are not
without interest.

Sincerely yours,


Noam Chomsky