here's an excerpt from a slighty bigger article. Just focused on cuba.
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[Bernie Dwyer] The US media has branded several nations as terrorist nation or as harbouring terrorists or as being perpetrators of terrorist attacks. Cuba has been pigeonholed as falling into one if not all of these categories when we know that Cuba has suffered more terrorist attacks against it than any other country. How serious do you take these accusations against Cuba? Is the drum beat getting louder?
[Noam Chomsky] Louder than when? Not louder than when Kennedy invaded Cuba and then launched Operation Mongoose leading right to the missile crisis which practically destroyed the world. But, yes, it’s picking up. The fact that the United States can label other countries as terrorist states itself is quite remarkable because it not a secret that the United States is incontrovertibly a terrorist state.
The US is the only country in the world that has been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism. The words they used were: “unlawful use of force” in their war against Nicaragua. That’s international terrorism. There were two Security Council resolutions supporting that judgement. The US of course vetoed them. And that was no small terrorist war. It practically destroyed the country. US terrorism against Cuba has been going on since 1959 and the fact that the US can label Cuba a terrorist state when it has been carrying out a major terrorist campaign against Cuba since 1959, picking up heavily in the’60s and peaking in the ‘70s in fact, that’s pretty astonishing.
But I think if you do a careful study of the American media and intellectual journals and intellectual opinions and so on, you will find nothing about this and not a word suggesting that there is anything strange about it. And if you look at the scholarly literature on terrorism by people like Walter Laqueur and other respected scholars, and take a look at the index, you find Cuba mentioned often and if you look at the page references, what is mentioned is suspicions that Cuba may have been involved in some terrorist actions, but what you will not find is a reference to the very well documented US terrorist operations against Cuba.
And that is not controversial. We have reams of declassified government documents on it. There is extensive scholarship on it, but it cannot enter into public discourse. It’s a pretty remarkable achievement, not just of the media but of the intellectual community altogether. It’s not very different in Europe. If you did an investigation in England you would probably find pretty much the same.
[Bernie Dwyer] The US and the people of the US have nothing to fear from Cuba. Cuba is not a threat. So why is the government doing such a closed job on Cuba?
[Noam Chomsky] The United States, to its credit, is a very free country, maybe the freest country in the world in many respects. One result of that is that we have extremely rich internal documentation. We have a rich record of high level planning documents which tell us the answer to your question. And that’s an achievement of American democracy. However, almost nobody knows about it and that is a failure of democracy.
So the information is there. It’s in the scholarly literature. It’s in the declassified record and it answers your question very clearly. So when the Kennedy administration took over, for example, it immediately organised a Latin American mission. Latin America was going to be a centre piece of the Kennedy administration policy. It was headed by a well-known American historian, Arthur Schlesinger, who was adviser to the president. Schlesinger’s report of the Latin American mission has been declassified for the last number of years and the mission explains to Kennedy the importance of overthrowing the government of Cuba.
The reason is that they are concerned about, virtually quoting, the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one’s own hands which will have a lot of appeal to suffering and impoverished people around the hemisphere who are facing very similar problems. We don’t want that idea to spread. If you go on in the declassified records, you find descriptions by the CIA and the intelligence agencies of how the problem with Cuba is what they call its successful defiance of US policies going back a hundred and fifty years. That’s a reference to the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine, which the US was not powerful enough to implement at the time, stated that the US would become the dominant force in this hemisphere and Cuba is not submitting to that. That is successful defiance of a policy that goes back a hundred and fifty years and that can’t be tolerated. They make it very clear. They are not worried about Cuban aggression or even subversion or anything. They are worried about Cuba’s successful defiance and that’s not just Cuban. That’s common.
When the US overthrew the government of Guatemala in 1954 - again we have that rich record of declassified documents - what they explain is that the threat of Guatemala was that its the first democratic government had enormous popular support. It was mobilising the peasantry, instituting social reforms and this was likely to appeal to surrounding countries that might want to do the same thing. And that couldn’t be tolerated or else the whole framework of US domination of the hemisphere would collapse.
And it was the same in South East Asia and the rest of the world. The threat of independent nationalism has always been a primary threat. And actually if you go back far enough, remember the American colonies when they liberated themselves from England, they were regarded by European statesmen as a tremendous threat. The Czar, Metternich and others were extremely upset by this threat of republicanism which might appeal to others and undermine the conservative world order and its moral foundations. It’s the kind of thing that you can’t really accept. It’s basically the threat of independence, of taking matters into your own hands, that can’t be accepted. And anyone who wants to know about this can find it out.
As I say, it’s a very free country. We have a rich documentary record of high level planning going way back and it’s constantly the same thing. I mean why did the United States, Britain and France support Mussolini and Hitler as they did? Well, because they were afraid of what they called the masses in Italy and Germany. If the masses, inspired by the Soviet Union, might try to take matters into their own hands and threaten the rights of property and power, and the only people who can stop them are Hitler and Mussolini, then that’s why they supported them almost to the day that the war began. These are old policies and they’re understandable. They’re understandable if you want the world to be subordinated primarily to domestic power interests.
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[Bernie Dwyer] The US media has branded several nations as terrorist nation or as harbouring terrorists or as being perpetrators of terrorist attacks. Cuba has been pigeonholed as falling into one if not all of these categories when we know that Cuba has suffered more terrorist attacks against it than any other country. How serious do you take these accusations against Cuba? Is the drum beat getting louder?
[Noam Chomsky] Louder than when? Not louder than when Kennedy invaded Cuba and then launched Operation Mongoose leading right to the missile crisis which practically destroyed the world. But, yes, it’s picking up. The fact that the United States can label other countries as terrorist states itself is quite remarkable because it not a secret that the United States is incontrovertibly a terrorist state.
The US is the only country in the world that has been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism. The words they used were: “unlawful use of force” in their war against Nicaragua. That’s international terrorism. There were two Security Council resolutions supporting that judgement. The US of course vetoed them. And that was no small terrorist war. It practically destroyed the country. US terrorism against Cuba has been going on since 1959 and the fact that the US can label Cuba a terrorist state when it has been carrying out a major terrorist campaign against Cuba since 1959, picking up heavily in the’60s and peaking in the ‘70s in fact, that’s pretty astonishing.
But I think if you do a careful study of the American media and intellectual journals and intellectual opinions and so on, you will find nothing about this and not a word suggesting that there is anything strange about it. And if you look at the scholarly literature on terrorism by people like Walter Laqueur and other respected scholars, and take a look at the index, you find Cuba mentioned often and if you look at the page references, what is mentioned is suspicions that Cuba may have been involved in some terrorist actions, but what you will not find is a reference to the very well documented US terrorist operations against Cuba.
And that is not controversial. We have reams of declassified government documents on it. There is extensive scholarship on it, but it cannot enter into public discourse. It’s a pretty remarkable achievement, not just of the media but of the intellectual community altogether. It’s not very different in Europe. If you did an investigation in England you would probably find pretty much the same.
[Bernie Dwyer] The US and the people of the US have nothing to fear from Cuba. Cuba is not a threat. So why is the government doing such a closed job on Cuba?
[Noam Chomsky] The United States, to its credit, is a very free country, maybe the freest country in the world in many respects. One result of that is that we have extremely rich internal documentation. We have a rich record of high level planning documents which tell us the answer to your question. And that’s an achievement of American democracy. However, almost nobody knows about it and that is a failure of democracy.
So the information is there. It’s in the scholarly literature. It’s in the declassified record and it answers your question very clearly. So when the Kennedy administration took over, for example, it immediately organised a Latin American mission. Latin America was going to be a centre piece of the Kennedy administration policy. It was headed by a well-known American historian, Arthur Schlesinger, who was adviser to the president. Schlesinger’s report of the Latin American mission has been declassified for the last number of years and the mission explains to Kennedy the importance of overthrowing the government of Cuba.
The reason is that they are concerned about, virtually quoting, the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one’s own hands which will have a lot of appeal to suffering and impoverished people around the hemisphere who are facing very similar problems. We don’t want that idea to spread. If you go on in the declassified records, you find descriptions by the CIA and the intelligence agencies of how the problem with Cuba is what they call its successful defiance of US policies going back a hundred and fifty years. That’s a reference to the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine, which the US was not powerful enough to implement at the time, stated that the US would become the dominant force in this hemisphere and Cuba is not submitting to that. That is successful defiance of a policy that goes back a hundred and fifty years and that can’t be tolerated. They make it very clear. They are not worried about Cuban aggression or even subversion or anything. They are worried about Cuba’s successful defiance and that’s not just Cuban. That’s common.
When the US overthrew the government of Guatemala in 1954 - again we have that rich record of declassified documents - what they explain is that the threat of Guatemala was that its the first democratic government had enormous popular support. It was mobilising the peasantry, instituting social reforms and this was likely to appeal to surrounding countries that might want to do the same thing. And that couldn’t be tolerated or else the whole framework of US domination of the hemisphere would collapse.
And it was the same in South East Asia and the rest of the world. The threat of independent nationalism has always been a primary threat. And actually if you go back far enough, remember the American colonies when they liberated themselves from England, they were regarded by European statesmen as a tremendous threat. The Czar, Metternich and others were extremely upset by this threat of republicanism which might appeal to others and undermine the conservative world order and its moral foundations. It’s the kind of thing that you can’t really accept. It’s basically the threat of independence, of taking matters into your own hands, that can’t be accepted. And anyone who wants to know about this can find it out.
As I say, it’s a very free country. We have a rich documentary record of high level planning going way back and it’s constantly the same thing. I mean why did the United States, Britain and France support Mussolini and Hitler as they did? Well, because they were afraid of what they called the masses in Italy and Germany. If the masses, inspired by the Soviet Union, might try to take matters into their own hands and threaten the rights of property and power, and the only people who can stop them are Hitler and Mussolini, then that’s why they supported them almost to the day that the war began. These are old policies and they’re understandable. They’re understandable if you want the world to be subordinated primarily to domestic power interests.
