{"id":277881,"date":"2024-10-21T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2024-10-21T11:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=277881"},"modified":"2024-10-20T06:50:01","modified_gmt":"2024-10-20T05:50:01","slug":"noam-chomsky-on-how-the-us-sanitizes-the-horror-of-its-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/10\/noam-chomsky-on-how-the-us-sanitizes-the-horror-of-its-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"Noam Chomsky on How the US Sanitizes the Horror of Its Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Literary Hub<\/p><\/div>\n

The Author of \u201c<\/em>The Myth of American Idealism\u201d Explores the Origins of US Hegemonic Foreign Policy<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

16 Oct 2024 <\/em>– The basic principles of contemporary American strategy were laid out during World War II. As the war came to its end, American planners were well aware that the United States would emerge as the dominant power in the world, holding a hegemonic position with few parallels in history. During the war, industrial production in the US more than tripled; meanwhile, its major rivals were either severely weakened or virtually destroyed.<\/p>\n

The US had the world\u2019s most powerful military force. It had firm control of the Western Hemisphere\u2014and of the oceans. High-level planners and foreign policy advisers determined that in the new global system the US should \u201chold unquestioned power\u201d while ensuring the \u201climitation of any exercise of sovereignty\u201d by states that might interfere with its global designs.<\/p>\n

Winston Churchill captured the dominant sentiment when he said that \u201cthe government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations,\u201d because rich countries had no \u201creason to seek for anything more,\u201d whereas \u201cif the world-government were in the hands of hungry nations there would always be danger.\u201d Leo Welch of the Standard Oil Company expressed a similar aspiration when he said the US needed to \u201cassume the responsibility of the majority stockholder in this corporation known as the world,\u201d and not just temporarily, but as a \u201cpermanent obligation.\u201d<\/p>\n

From 1939 to 1945, extensive studies conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department resulted in a policy they called \u201cGrand Area\u201d planning. The Grand Area referred to any region that was to be subordinated to the needs of the American economy and was considered \u201cstrategically necessary for world control.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe British Empire as it existed in the past will never reappear,\u201d mused one planner, and thus \u201cthe United States may have to take its place.\u201d Another stated frankly that the US \u201cmust cultivate a mental view toward world settlement.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the war came to its end, American planners were well aware that the United States would emerge as the dominant power in the world, holding a hegemonic position with few parallels in history.<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Grand Area had to include at least the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British Empire, which we were then in the process of dismantling and taking over. Ideally it would also include western and southern Europe and the oil-producing regions of the Middle East; in fact, it was to include everything, if that were possible. Detailed plans were laid for particular regions of the Grand Area and also for international institutions that were to organize and police it.<\/p>\n

George Kennan, head of the State Department planning staff and one of the leading architects of the post-World War II order, outlined the basic thinking in an important 1948 planning document:<\/p>\n

We have about fifty percent of the world\u2019s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population in this situation, we cannot fail to be object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity\u00a0\u00a0 We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction\u2026 We should cease to talk about vague and\u00a0\u00a0 unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The planning staff recognized further that \u201cthe foremost requirement\u201d to secure these ends was \u201cthe rapid fulfillment of a program of complete re-armament\u201d\u2014then, as now, a central component of \u201can integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

This policy of military and economic supremacy is openly stated everywhere from the 1940s planning documents to the National Security Strategies put out by the George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Implementing it has not just involved ignoring democracy and human rights, but often actively opposing them with tremendous ferocity.<\/p>\n

The US planners specified the function that each part of the world was to have within the US-dominated global system. The \u201cmajor function\u201d of Southeast Asia was to be \u201ca source of raw materials and a market for Japan and Western Europe,\u201d in the words of Kennan\u2019s State Department Policy Planning Staff in 1949. The Middle East was \u201ca stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history,\u201d as well as \u201cprobably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment.\u201d<\/p>\n

That meant nobody else could interfere, and \u201cnationalism\u201d (the control of the country\u2019s resources by its own people) was a serious threat. As a State Department memo put it in 1958, \u201cin a Near East under the control of radical nationalism, Western access to the resources of the area would be in constant jeopardy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Policy in Latin America, CIA historian Gerald Haines explained, was designed \u201cto develop larger and more efficient sources of supply for the American economy, as well as create expanded markets for US exports and expanded opportunities for the investment of American capital,\u201d permitting local development only \u201cas long as it did not interfere with American profits and dominance.\u201d<\/p>\n

With regard to Latin America, Secretary of War Henry Stimson said, \u201cI think that it\u2019s not asking too much to have our little region over here.\u201d President Taft had previously foreseen that \u201cthe day is not far distant\u201d when \u201cthe whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Latin American countries advocated what a State Department officer described as \u201cthe philosophy of the New Nationalism,\u201d which \u201cembraces policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses.\u201d Another State Department expert reported that \u201cLatin Americans are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country\u2019s resources should be the people of that country.\u201d<\/p>\n

These mistaken priorities ran directly counter to Washington\u2019s plans. The issue came to a head in a February 1945 hemispheric conference, where the United States put forth its \u201cEconomic Charter of the Americas,\u201d which called for an end to economic nationalism \u201cin all its forms.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first beneficiaries of a country\u2019s resources must be US investors and their local associates, not \u201cthe people of that country.\u201d There can be no \u201cbroader distribution of wealth\u201d or improvement in \u201cthe standard of living of the masses,\u201d unless, by unlikely accident, that happens to result from policies designed to serve the interests of those with priority.<\/p>\n

The basic missions of global management have endured to this day, among them: containing other centers of global power within the \u201coverall framework of order\u201d managed by the United States; maintaining control of the world\u2019s energy supplies; barring unacceptable forms of independent nationalism; and keeping the U.S. domestic population from sticking their noses in.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The human costs of the pursuit of dominance are for the most part kept out of the press, or not dwelt upon, and thus do not reach most of the public. Wars are sanitized.<\/p>\n

As Adam Smith pointed out, they can even become a kind of \u201camusement\u201d for those who live far from the battlefield and only encounter conflicts as abstractions or collections of statistics. For those who safely inhabit \u201cgreat empires,\u201d Smith said, \u201creading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies\u201d is exciting, and peace can even be disappointing, because it \u201cputs an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Discussions of foreign policy are often cool, abstract, and antiseptic. Feminist scholar Carol Cohn, investigating the community of \u201cdefense intellectuals\u201d who specialize in planning for nuclear war, was disturbed by \u201cthe elaborate use of abstraction and euphemism, of words so bland that they never forced the speaker or enabled the listener to touch the realities of nuclear holocaust that lay behind the words.\u201d<\/p>\n

Americans are never shown what it actually looks like when a US drone strike hits a wedding party, or a child is crushed by a US tank.<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She found the men \u201clikeable and admirable,\u201d but was \u201ccontinually startled by\u2026the bloodcurdling casualness with which they regularly blew up the world while standing and chatting over the coffee pot.\u201d Abstraction and euphemism also protect us from having to look into the eyes of the victims. They are removed from our consciousness. They do not speak.<\/p>\n

Those who see war up close know just how much worse it is than even terms like \u201chorror\u201d and \u201csuffering\u201d can convey. Ashleigh Banfield, who was ousted by NBC<\/em> after speaking critically of the Iraq War, said in the lecture that got her fired that Americans did not understand what the war was really like because they were seeing curated images that didn\u2019t show the reality of civilian casualties.<\/p>\n

Journalists embedded with US troops, for instance, would show soldiers firing M16s into a building, but not \u201cwhere those bullets landed\u201d or what happens when a mortar explodes. \u201cA puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

But the puff of smoke was what Americans saw, with the result that \u201cthere are horrors that were completely left out of this war.\u201d Americans are never shown what it actually looks like when a US drone strike hits a wedding party, or a child is crushed by a US tank. They are rarely exposed to the accounts of those who have witnessed such gruesome spectacles, or to the voices of the family members who mourn the victims.<\/p>\n

Chris Hedges, who spent decades as a war correspondent for The New York Times<\/em>, writes:<\/p>\n

If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of the schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan or Ukraine and listen to the wails of their parents, the clich\u00e9s about liberating the women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan or Ukrainian people would be obscene Television reports give us the visceral thrill of force and hide from us the effects of bullets, tank rounds, iron fragmentation bombs, and artillery rounds. We taste a bit of war\u2019s exhilaration, but are protected from seeing what war actually does, its smells, noise, confusion, and most of all its overpowering fear.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The casualties of war do not appear in US armed forces recruitment material, and Donald Trump infamously specified he didn\u2019t want \u201cwounded guys: in his military parade, because they wouldn\u2019t look good. War must be scrubbed clean.<\/p>\n

*************<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

From\u00a0<\/em>The Myth of American Idealism<\/a> by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson. Used with the permission of the publisher, Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright \u00a9 2024 by Val\u00e9ria Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson.<\/em><\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, logician, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as “the father of modern linguistics,” Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy, and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He has spent more than half a century at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is Institute Professor Emeritus, and is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, mass media, US foreign policy, social issues, Latin American and European history, and more. His latest books are <\/em>Failed States, The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy<\/a> and <\/em>Hegemony or Survival<\/a>, both in the <\/em>American Empire Project<\/a> series at Metropolitan Books. <\/em>noamchomsky@\u200bemail.arizona.edu<\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 lithub.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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