Noam Chomsky: Liberating the Mind from Orthodoxies

I’ve always had a lot of Chomsky here on the website, and in my head. I put some links below for further reading and included this excerpt…..to  keep from having a n empty page…It’s taken from an interview so it reads a little weird in some places….DgsWilson

Humanitarian intervention is an orthodoxy and it’s taken for granted that if we [the U.S.] do it, it’s humanitarian. The reason is because our leaders say so. But you can check. For one thing, there’s a history of humanitarian intervention. You can look at it. And when you do, you discover that virtually every use of military force is described as humanitarian intervention. The major recent academic study of humanitarian intervention is by Sean Murphy, Humanitarian Intervention: The UN in an Evolving World Order. He’s now an editor of the American Journal of International Law. He points out, correctly, that before the Second World War, there was the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928 that outlawed war.

Between the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the UN Charter in 1945, there were three major examples of humanitarian intervention. One was the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and north China. Another was Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and a third was Hitler’s takeover of the Sudetenland. They were accompanied by exalted and impressive humanitarian rhetoric, which as usual was not entirely false. Even the most vulgar propaganda has elements of truth. What you have to do is look at the U.S. reaction. So in the case of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and north China, the official U.S. reaction was, “We don’t like it, but we don’t care, really, as long as American interests in China, meaning primarily economic interests, are guaranteed.”

Same with Mussolini. The State Department hailed Mussolini for his magnificent achievements in
Ethiopia and also, incidentally, for his astonishing accomplishments in raising the level of the
masses in Italy. This is the late 1930s, several years after the invasion. Roosevelt described
Mussolini as “that admirable Italian gentleman.” In 1939 he praised the fascist experiment in
Italy—as did almost everyone, it’s not a particular criticism of Roosevelt—and said it had been
“corrupted” by Hitler, but other than that it was a good experiment.

How about Hitler’s taking over the Sudetenland in 1938? One of Roosevelt’s major advisers was
A.A. Berle. He said that there’s nothing alarming about the takeover. It was probably necessary for the Austrian Empire to be reconstituted under German rule, so it’s all right. That’s a typical remark. That’s the way every monster is described, a moderate standing between the extremes of right and left, and we have to support him, or too bad. That’s a famous remark of John F. Kennedy’s about Trujillo reported by Arthur Schlesinger, the liberal historian and Kennedy aide. Kennedy said something like, We don’t like Trujillo. He’s a murderous gangster. But unless we can be assured that there won’t be a Castro, we’ll have to support Trujillo. The threat of a good example or it’s sometimes called the virus effect. The virus of independent nationalism might succeed and inspire others. Actually, the war in Vietnam started the same way.

Noam Chomsky, 9/11

Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare

Noam Chomsky, Hegemony Or Survival – America’s Quest for World Domination

Noam Chomsky, Liberating The Mind From Orthodoxy

Noam Chomsky, Media Control

Noam Chomsky, Miseducation

Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions

Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions

Noam Chomsky, Preventive War – The Supreme Crime