% FROM THE NOAM CHOMSKY ARCHIVE
% http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu:/usr/tp0x/chomsky.html
% ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/user/cap/chomsky/
% Filename:    articles/chomsky.loot.soviet-coup
% Title:       Letter from Lexington (column)
% Author:      Noam Chomsky
% Appeared-in: Lies of Our Times (LOOT), October 1991
% Source:      aritza@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
% Keywords:    Soviet coup, Cuba
% Synopsis:    
% See-also:    

Letter from Lexington

September 8, 1991

Dear LOOT,

The important events of late August in the Soviet Union have
elicited some curious coverage and commentary. The U.S. was a
distant and passive observer, and Washington basically had no
policy, simply watching events run their course. That picture,
however, is not acceptable.

The required version is that the U.S. is a benign if sometimes
stern guardian of international order and morality, guiding
errant elements along a constructive path. George Bush, in
particular, has been assigned the image of Great Statesman, with
extraordinary talent for diplomacy and global management. The
picture is about as plausible as the tales of Ronald Reagan, the
Great Communicator, who initiated a modern revolution---a
construction quickly put to rest when this pathetic figure was no
longer useful, and it could be conceded that he hadn't a thought
in his head and was scarcely able to read his lines. With regard
to Reagan's successor, the evidence for his consummate skills, to
date, reduces to his unquestioned ability to follow the
prescriptions of an early National Security Policy Review of his
administration, which advised that failure to defeat ``much
weaker enemies . . . decisively and rapidly'' would be
``embarrassing'' and might ``undercut political support,''
understood to be thin (Maureen Dowd, _NYT_, Feb. 23, 1991).

To reconcile reality with preferred image, there were some
gestures towards Bush's allegedly critical role in bringing the
August crisis to a successful conclusion. But the efforts were
pretty feeble, and lacked spirit. Some, however, deserve credit
for trying. Take regular _Boston Globe_ columnist John Silber,
the president of Boston University and a likely aspirant to high
political office (``Democrats' disarray boosts Bush's apparent
invulnerability,'' _BG_, Sept 1, 1991). Silber repeats the
standard doctrine that ``the president's skill in dealing with
the demise of communism heightens the disarray of the Democratic
Party.'' In particular, ``President Bush's handling of the failed
coup in the USSR has been masterly. His well-publicized telephone
calls to Boris Yeltsin put the United States firmly on the side
of the democratic resistance, a position cemented by the shrewd
decision to send Ambassador Strauss to Moscow immediately, with
instructions to ignore the junta.''

In the face of such brilliant and imaginative moves on the
diplomatic chess board, what can the opposition do but wring its
hands in despair?

The lack of policy was evident from James Baker's briefing after
the coup had collapsed (``Baker's Remarks: Policy on Soviets,''
_NYT_, Sept. 5, 1991). The Secretary of State presented a
``four-part agenda.'' Three parts were the kind of pieties that
speech writers produce while dozing: we want democracy, the rule
of law, economic reform, settlement of security problems, etc.
One part of the agenda did, however, have a modicum of substance,
the third item, on ``Soviet foreign policy.'' Here, Baker focused
on his ``efforts to convene a peace conference to launch direct
negotiations and thereby to facilitate a viable peacemaking
process in the Middle East.'' As _Times_ diplomatic correspondent
Thomas Friedman explains in an accompanying gloss, the Soviet
Union should ``work together with the United States on foreign
policy initiatives like Middle East peace.''

What is of interest here is what was missing. ``Soviet foreign
policy'' does indeed have a role in the Bush-Baker Middle East
endeavor. The Soviet role is to provide a (very thin) cover for a
unilateral U.S. initiative that may at last realize the U.S.
demand, stressed by Kissinger years ago, that Europe and Japan be
kept out of the diplomacy of the region. Baker's phrase ``direct
negotiations'' is the conventional Orwellian term for the leading
principle of U.S.-Israeli rejectionism: the framework of the
``peace process'' must be restricted to state-to-state
negotiations, effectively excluding the indigenous population and
any consideration of their national rights and concerns. They
offer no services to the U.S. and, accordingly, have no
meaningful rights. That is the core principle of the rigid
rejectionism that the U.S. has upheld for 20 years in virtual
international isolation (apart from both major political
groupings in Israel), and now feels that it may be in a position
to impose.

These matters, however, fail the test of political correctness,
and therefore are given no expression in the mainstream. As noted
earlier in these columns, even the basic terms of the
Baker-Shamir-Peres plan, to which negotiations are restricted,
have fallen under this ban.

With the USSR gone from the scene, another foreign policy goal
may be within reach: ``replacement of the Castro regime with one
more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more
acceptable to the U.S.,'' a goal that we must achieve ``in such a
manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention.'' These
are the words of the March 1960 planning document of the
Eisenhower administration that set in motion the subversion and
economic warfare sharply escalated by John F. Kennedy and
continued by his successors (Jules R. Benjamin, _The United
States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution_, Princeton, 1990,
207).

If Washington is to achieve its longstanding goals in the
required manner---avoiding ``any appearance of U.S.
intervention'' ---the ideological institutions must play their
part. Crucially, they must suppress the record of aggression,
vast campaigns of terror, economic strangulation, cultural
quarantine, intimidation of anyone who might seek to disrupt the
ban, and the other devices available to the superpower overseer
dedicated to ``the true interests of the Cuban people.'' Cuba's
plight must be attributed to the demon Castro and ``Cuban
socialism'' alone. They bear full responsibility for the
``poverty, isolation and humbling dependence'' on the USSR, the
_New York Times_ editors inform us (Sept. 8, 1991), concluding
triumphantly that ``the Cuban dictator has painted himself into
his own corner,'' without any help from us. That being the case,
by doctrinal necessity, we should not intervene directly as some
``U.S. cold warriors'' propose: ``Fidel Castro's reign deserves
to end in home-grown failure, not martyrdom.'' Staking their
position at the dovish extreme, the editors advise that we should
continue to stand aside, doing nothing, watching in silence, as
we have been doing for 30 years, so the naive reader would learn
from this (quite typical) version of history.

The enhanced ability of the U.S. to achieve its goals without
deterrence or interference is not exactly welcome news in most of
the world. But we are unlikely to hear very much about the
trepidations of the Third World over ``the breakdown of
international military equilibrium which somehow served to
contain U.S. yearnings for domination'' (Mario Benedetti, _La
Epoca_, Chile, May 4, 1991). Nor were we informed of Third World
reactions when Dimitri Simes, senior associate at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, observed in the _New York
Times_ that the ``apparent decline in the Soviet threat . . .
makes military power more useful as a United States foreign
policy instrument . . . against those who contemplate challenging
important American interests''---the ``threat'' being the
deterrent to U.S.  military power and the support afforded
targets of U.S.  subversion and violence (``If the Cold War Is
Over, Then What?,'' _NYT_, Dec. 27, 1988). The fears, however,
are very real, particularly after the U.S.-U.K. operations in the
Gulf. They will be readily understood by anyone who can escape
the doctrinal straightjacket.

The improved conditions for U.S. subversion and violence do not,
however, offer the right note to sound on the occasion of the
demise of the official enemy. For reflections on more exalted
themes, we may turn to _New York Times_ correspondent Richard
Bernstein, who muses on the ``New Issues Born From Communism's
Death Knell'' (_NYT_, Aug. 31, 1991, p. 1).

For more than 70 years, Bernstein explains, ``the fiercest
arguments and the sharpest conflicts among intellectuals'' have
been ``about Marxism-Leninism and social revolution, about the
nature of the Soviet Union and about the existence of Communism
as a major ideological force in a bipolar world.'' ``The most
obvious power exercised by the Soviet Union over the Western
mind,'' he continues, ``was its extraordinary power of
attraction, its capacity to instill idealistic visions of a new
world in which exploitation would be swept away by a tide of
revolution.''  After the appeal of the USSR itself faded, ``the
debate took on new forms'': ``from the 1960's to the 1980's, an
argument raged . . . about . . . countries like China, Ethiopia,
Cuba and Nicaragua, which seemed to many on the left to embody
the revolutionary virtues admittedly tarnished in the Soviet
Union itself.'' Throughout, the Cold War conflict ``had the
effect of polarizing the domestic debate'' in the U.S. between
these two ideological extremes, Harvard Professor Joseph Nye
observes. But with ``the debate about Communism'' losing ``its
force and centrality,'' Bernstein asks, ``what issues will
consume left and right, liberals and conservatives, in the
future?'' Perhaps the newspapers and journals of opinion will
expire, now that the all-consuming issues are dying away, no
longer ``raging'' in their pages.

Let us put aside the accuracy of this account of ``the left'';
and, for the sake of argument, let us also accept the picture of
``the arguments and conflicts'' that have ``polarized the
domestic debate'' for over 70 years. We now ask a simple
question. How has this central debate of the modern era been
reflected in the _New York Times_, the Newspaper of Record,
dedicated to the highest standards of journalistic integrity,
free and open to all shades of thought and opinion?

The question has, in fact, been investigated, beginning with the
classic 1920 study of _Times_ coverage of the Bolshevik
revolution by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, who demonstrated
that it was ``nothing short of a disaster . . . from the point of
view of professional journalism,'' merely vulgar jingoism and
subservience to the state both in editorial policy and in the
news columns that this policy ``profoundly and crassly
influenced.'' Moving to the present, there has been extensive
study of _Times_ coverage of the ``raging'' issue of Nicaragua,
demonstrating that the Lippmann-Merz critique remains quite
accurate. News coverage was, as usual, ``profoundly and crassly
influenced'' by the doctrine of service to state power that
defines the editorial stance. Even columns and op-eds were
restricted, with startling uniformity, to the politically correct
doctrine that the Sandinista curse must be expunged and Nicaragua
restored to the ``regional standards'' of such more acceptable
models as El Salvador and Guatemala. In the years between, the
record is much the same as in these two extraordinary cases.

Not every topic has been investigated. Thus, I do not know of
studies of _Times_ coverage of the ``raging debate'' over the
revolutionary virtues of Ethiopia or of _Times_ expositions of
the ``extraordinary power of attraction'' of Marxism-Leninism and
its ``capacity to instill idealistic visions'' of revolution and
utopia. Even if we translate these rhetorical flights to
something resembling reality, however, we know exactly what we
will discover about just how open the Newspaper of Record has
been to debate, discussion, even inconvenient fact.

In brief, for more than 70 years the _New York Times_ (hardly
alone, of course) and state-corporate power have marched in
impressive unison. Now, hearing ``Communism's Death Knell,'' it
is permissible to concede that there were some burning issues,
though not to present them in a sane and meaningful form. And it
must pass entirely without notice, not even a faint flicker of
recognition, that the real issues have been virtually excluded
from the doctrinal system. It's an intriguing performance.

The ``death knell'' of Soviet tyranny has indeed sounded, though
what takes its place may also not be too pleasant to behold. But
Stalinist values remain alive and well, and the cultural
commissars have no end of work ahead of them.

Sincerely,


Noam Chomsky