Year 501
Contents
- Preface to the 2015 Edition
- Part I: Old Wine, New Bottles
- Part II: High Principles
- Part III: Persistent Themes
- Part IV: Memories
- Glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- About the Author
© Noam Chomsky 1993
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Original edition published by South End Press in Cambirdge, Massachusetts.
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This edition published in 2015 by
Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
www.haymarketbooks.org
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ISBN: 978-1-60846-449-4
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Trade distribution:
In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com
All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com
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This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.
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Cover design by Josh On. Cover photo of US soldiers in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, during a rescue operation to Black Hawk MEDEVAC helicopter. © Larry Towell / Magnum Photos
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
Preface to the 2015 Edition
In a penetrating (and rare) analysis of what Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist calls “the Origins of European Genocide,” Richard Gott predicted that “the rulers of the British Empire will...be perceived to rank with the dictators of the twentieth century as the authors of crimes against humanity on an infamous scale.” In a no less rare acknowledgment of these monstrous crimes, British historian of imperialism Bernard Porter wrote in the
Times Literary Supplement
that with evidence accumulating, the conclusion “looks almost plausible.”
1
A rather different picture was presented in the
New York Review of Books
. Here we read that the Europeans who reached the western hemisphere “found a continental vastness sparsely populated by farming and hunting people whose primitive technology was hopelessly inferior to the Europeans'. In the limitless and unspoiled world stretching from tropical jungle to the frozen north, there may have been scarcely more than a million inhabitants.” This version of history dispenses with perhaps 80 million people, who had rich and complex civilizations, cities, extensive commerce and many significant technological achievements.
2
Denialism on a truly impressive scale.
It is, indeed, true that the victims throughout the world were “hopelessly inferior” in one crucial respect: they lacked the European technology and culture of war, and were “appalled by the all-destructive fury of European warfare,” as military historian Geoffrey Parker observes, a phenomenon already clear to Adam Smith.
No letters appeared in reaction to the extreme denialism in a leading intellectual journal. However, four months later,
3
the editors published a “clarification,” keeping to population estimates in North America and ignoring the rest. That too elicited no published comment.
The present book reviews some of what was known decades earlier, hardly in arcane sources.
A particularly vicious form of imperial conquest is settler colonialism, which unlike other forms of conquest displaces the indigenous populations, not in attractive ways. The invasion of North America by English colonists is one such case, of course of extraordinary significance in world history. To be sure, the conquest was undertaken with the noblest of intentions, from its earliest days. The colonists were simply responding to the desperate pleas for assistance on the part of the natives. The Great Seal of the Massachusetts Bay colony, created in 1629 shortly after the colony was granted its charter by King Charles I, depicts an Indian holding his spear pointing downward in a sign of peace, with a scroll coming from his mouth on which is inscribed a plea to the colonists to “Come over and help us.” The colonization was thus an early episode of “humanitarian intervention.”
Like others who followed in their footsteps, leading figures of the new Republic were puzzled by the consequences of their kind response to the plea of the natives. The colonists “constantly respected them,” Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story observed, but nevertheless, the native population disappeared like “the withered leaves of autumn”âa mystery that he could only attribute to “the wisdom of Providence,” inscrutable to mere mortals.
Others, however, had no doubts about what they were doing. Revolutionary War hero General Henry Knox, the first secretary of war in the newly liberated American colonies, described “the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union” by means “more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru,” which would have been no small achievement. In his later years, John Quincy Adams recognized the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty, [to be] among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgment.” They were not alone.
More convenient, however, is denialism. We live with it constantly. Skipping to the present, the prevailing convention is illustrated with considerable clarity by two major stories of the last days of 2014: the release of the executive summary of the Senate report on torture and the establishment of relations with Cuba. Both events elicited extensive commentary, featuring the conventional denialism.
In the case of the Senate report, the denialism was captured accurately in a casual statement buried in a
New York Times
analysis, pointing out that “The report spends little time condemning torture on moral or legal grounds. Instead, it addresses mainly a practical question: Did torture accomplish anything of value? Looking at case after case, the report answers with an unqualified no.”
4
In brief, the Holy State can do no wrong. At worst it can engage in failed efforts.
There were many laments about public opinion polls revealing that a large majority approved of the use of torture that had been revealed by the Senate report, by almost 2 to 1 among those closely following the story.
5
But concerns that were expressed over public attitudes were misplaced. The public largely agreed with the Democratic Senate investigators that the only issue is whether torture worked, differing only on a factual question: Did it work or not? Perhaps the public was misinformed, but the values expressed by the large majority appear to conform to those of the liberal Democrats who compiled the report.
It would be too much to expect recognition that torture is as American as apple pie and a primary source of American wealth and power, beginning 500 years ago when the first slaves arrived. The brutal slave labor camps of the South produced the cotton that fueled the industrial revolution and enriched the merchants and bankers and manufacturers of the Northeast. They were instrumental in the establishment of the most advanced industrial installations of the day along with a wide range of industrial spin-offs, and more generally played a critical role in creating the modern economy, not only in the United States but in England and the continent. Sadistic torture was a crucial element of this hideous history. It was responsible for the remarkable fact that productivity in cotton picking increased more rapidly than in industry. The primary technical innovations responsible for this achievement were the whip and the gun. The shameful history does not end with emancipation.
6
Torture has also been a staple of US interventions, though for many years before the Cheney-Rumsfeld era, it was more normal to farm the practice out to surrogates, a crime renewed in the rendition programs.
The radical denialism in the case of Cuba is no less impressive. As in the Senate report on torture, the president's announcement of the move toward normalization of relations made it clear that there can be no moral or legal issue with regard to the crimes of the Holy State. As usual that passed with scarcely a comment.
But President Obama made sure to surpass the disgraceful norm. His oration to the nation declared that:
Proudly, the United States has supported democracy and human rights in Cuba through these five decades. We've done so primarily through policies that aim to isolate the island, preventing the most basic travel and commerce that Americans can enjoy anyplace else. And though this policy has been rooted in the best of intentions, no other nation joins us in imposing these sanctions, and it has had little effect beyond providing the Cuban government with a rationale for restrictions on its people.⦠Today, I am being honest with you. We can never erase the history between us.
7
Whatever one thinks of Obama, he cannot be accused of ignorance of the history that he is erasing in this performance. It includes a murderous terrorist war designed to bring “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba in historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger's phrase, referring to the campaign assigned by the president to his brother Robert Kennedy as his highest priority. Apart from killing thousands of people along with large-scale destruction, the terrors of the earth were a major factor in bringing the world to the brink of a terminal nuclear war, as recent scholarship reveals. The administration resumed the terrorist attacks as soon as the missile crisis subsided, and they continued for many years after. Contemporary writers prefer to evade the unpleasant topic by keeping to “bizarre assassination plots against Fidel Castro,”
8
real enough, but a minor footnote to the terrorist war launched by the Kennedy brothers after the failure of their Bay of Pigs invasion.
The actual history includes as well the crushing economic warfare that strangled Cuban development and has long been strongly opposed by the whole world (Israel excepted). It includes military occupation of southeastern Cuba, including its major port, despite requests by the government since independence to return what was stolen at gunpoint. Dedication to revenge against the impudent Cubans who resist US domination has been so extreme that it has overruled the wishes of powerful segments of the business community for normalizationâpharmaceuticals, agribusiness, energyâan unusual development in US foreign policy. Washington's cruel and vindictive policies have virtually isolated the United States in the hemisphere and elicited contempt and ridicule throughout the world. Washington and its acolytes like to pretend that they have been “isolating” Cuba, as Obama intoned, but the record shows clearly that it is the United States that is being isolated, probably the primary reason for the partial change of course.