Chomsky: Torture has been America’s ‘routine practice’ since ‘early days’
Published: June 3, 2009
Updated 7 months ago
Left-wing social critic and political activist Noam Chomsky is not surprised that Americans felt “shock and indignation” when the Bush administration torture memos were released — but he is surprised that anyone would consider them surprising.
“Torture has been routine practice from the early days of the Republic,” Chomseky writes in Z Magazine’s June issue. “Accordingly, it is surprising to see the reactions even by some of the most eloquent and forthright critics of Bush malfeasance: for example, that we used to be ‘a nation of moral ideals’ and never before Bush ‘have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for’ (Paul Krugman). To say the least, that common view reflects a rather slanted version of history.”
To rebut claims that American ideals are the reality and “the distortions of the American idea” a temporary falling-away from that reality, Chomsky offers a brief review of the history of American imperialism, focusing on the 20th century.
“After the success of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Cuba in 1898,” Chomsky writes, “the next step in the mission assigned by Providence was to confer ‘the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples’ of the Philippines. … These fortunate souls were left to the mercies of the U.S.-established Philippine constabulary within a newly devised model of colonial domination, relying on security forces trained and equipped for sophisticated modes of surveillance, intimidation, and violence.”
“In the past 60 years,” Chomsky continues, “victims worldwide have also endured the CIA’s ‘torture paradigm.’ … There is no hyperbole when Jennifer Harbury entitles her penetrating study of the U.S. torture record Truth, Torture, and the American Way. It is highly misleading, to say the least, when investigators of the Bush gang’s descent into the sewer lament that ‘in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way.’”
According to Chomsky, the only notable innovation of the Bush administration was to carry out torture itself, rather than farming it out to proxies — an earlier practice to which the Obama administration has now reverted.
Chomsky also cites a 1980 study showing “that U.S. aid ‘has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens.’ … Not surprisingly, U.S. aid tends to correlate with a favorable climate for business operations and this is commonly improved by murder of labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists.”
Chomsky further notes that when the US signed the International Convention on Torture, it carefully excluded the forms of “mental” torture, such as sensory deprivation, that were at “the core of the CIA torture paradigm.”
After making his historical case, Chomsky returns to the distorting effects of the belief that such crimes represent a falling away from American ideals and not the norm. “As long as such ‘exceptionalist’ theses remain firmly implanted,” he writes, “the occasional revelations of the ‘abuse of history’ can backfire, serving to efface terrible crimes.”
“The My Lai massacre was a mere footnote to the vastly greater atrocities of the post-Tet pacification programs, ignored while indignation focused on this single crime. Watergate was doubtless criminal, but the furor over it displaced incomparably worse crimes at home and abroad. … Torture is hideous enough; the invasion of Iraq is a far worse crime.”
“Quite commonly, selective atrocities have this function,” Chomsky concludes. “Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that lie ahead.”
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Excellent article. Thanks!
All the more reason to stop torture once and for all by prosecuting as many of the Republican Torture Program perpetrators as we can.
Torture by Americans will end only if we enforce our Federal Law by Prosecution.
TORTURE IS A FEDERAL CRIME
SEE http://tinyurl.com/besdd3
It is Never Debatable and Never Morally Correct.
IT is a heinous Federal Capital Crime.
WHY IS OBAMA PROTECTING BUSH AND CHENEY?
They obviously violated Federal Law.
If you do nothing else for your Country today,
SIGN THE PETITION
To Prosecute Them For Torture
http://ANGRYVOTERS.ORG
Over 250,000 have signed
Join them and call yourself a Patriot
.
There is a difference between torture practiced in war by front-line troops, and the acceptance and solidification of torture as an ethical and legal practice. One is the result of actions committed by individuals under extreme stress, while the other is the result of armchair warriors who have no such excuse.
Chomsky is of course right in pointing to the high level acceptance of torture during earlier wars. The Phillipine-American war in particular is either rife with examples, or one in which such examples have been extraordinarily well preserved*.
Even Teddy Roosevelt argued that waterboarding was appropriate. Indeed the course of the Iraq II in terms of propaganda and acts against the enemy is reminiscent of the actions in the Phillipine-American war.
But such torture has never been enshrined in law and practice as it is now, and that is a significant difference.
*
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Philippine-American_War#American_torture_and_atrocities_against_Filipinos
Go Chomsky!
Stop Torture!
jhk: I patriot now -thanx
Count on Chomsky to put it straight…our government (CIA) has been responsible for lots of illegal acts around the world including torture. We need to prosecute those responsible, hell Cheney admits it and says he would do it again. Why isn’t he in jail?
Never been a big fan of the left academic’s strategy of pricking the bubble of ‘false consciousness’, so that people will view their role in history and then somehow act in the present to correct it. It always struck me as a ’substitution’ to simply raise the profile of the academic, to either dominant movements, so they can ride to the top of any change in the status quo, or control them so they simply feed the existing political options.
In fact as far as the Left goes, never seen a bit of evidence that anything Chomsky has written over the years or any of his ilk that has ever been listened to, including this old chestnut. Don’t forget to mention Sherman’s March, while your at it.
So who is Chomsky audience, now?
The people who already knew this? Like presumably the government that is full of intellectuals who read this stuff and already know it?
The people who might have read it and said Chomsky doesn’t know history and is a leftwing pinko in order to avoid the truth?
The people who are no more convinced by any of the modern evidence of torture being done?
or, the people that have no problem with torture or war or mayhem and have no use for international laws, because it ultimately furthers the hegemonic dominance of the US empire? Can Chomsky get on to the record as to whether he actually supports international law or does he believe that all foreign law is conditional on whether they serve the interests of the US Empire.
Suffice it to say, that old Chomper is still a patriot of the American ideal and truly believes that the US is still a model for freedom and democracy, and that somehow a pack of slave owners fighting a turf war over custom houses somehow divined the blueprint for human development…
- just like as an academic he believes that if the people knew the truth they would respond to it or like his central thesis with MC –
- just like if the NY Time’s owners allowed their staff of journalists to be more objective and less time promoting the corporate ideals of the ownership, then the average American would be better informed and then they would make better political choices.
Britain is full of Great Men and Torturers and a fake history and an academic history…makes no difference there. In fact, the academics and intellectuals of UK Labour are are exactly the types that read most of Chomsky?
He’s so boring and double-edged with his history lectures and make NO BONES about the fact that Chomsky is a full time supporter of individual rights, regardless of how unworkable that concept is in international relations.
Chomsky correctly notes that “Torture is hideous enough; the invasion of Iraq is a far worse crime.” Unfortunately this revered icon of the left does not logically follow through on his thought by stating that the invasion of Iraq would not have been able to have been carried out if not for the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Chomsky, like so many of those on the left, refuses to even look at the evidence which would cast enormous doubt upon the Bush administration’s explanations as to what happened on that day. Instead he has stated that it is “totally insane” to even believe in an alternative theory as opposed to what those in the Bush administration would have us believe happened on 9/11. But he has even gone further by saying that it “doesn’t really matter” who was responsible for the terrorist attacks in Sept. of 2001.
These beliefs which are more indicative of what one would hear on Fox “News”, and, whether intentional are not, have the effect of stifling dissent regarding the true story of what happened on that fateful day. By dismissing if not demonizing those who wish to seek the truth concerning the circumstance of 9/11, Chomsky, of all people, ends up becoming a conduit for the official narrative that has been so falsely spun by both the Bush administration and the mainstream media of this country.
“But such torture has never been enshrined in law and practice as it is now, and that is a significant difference.”
THAT is indeed the difference.
That can only be changed and Torture Stopped
By Prosecution of all that Violated US Federal Torture Laws.
WHY IS OBAMA PROTECTING BUSH AND CHENEY?
They obviously violated Federal Law.
If you do nothing else for your Country today,
SIGN THE PETITION To Prosecute Them For Torture
http://ANGRYVOTERS.ORG
Over 250,000 have signed
Join them and call yourself a Patriot