Introduction
Noble Goals and Mafia LogicEvery ruling power tells itself stories to justify its rule. Nobody is the villain in their own history. Professed good intentions and humane principles are a constant. Even Heinrich Himmler, in describing the extermination of the Jews, claimed that the Nazis only “carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people” and thereby “suffered no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character.” Hitler himself said that in occupying Czechoslovakia, he was only trying to “further the peace and social welfare of all” by eliminating ethnic conflicts and letting everyone live in harmony under civilized Germany’s benevolent tutelage. The worst of history’s criminals have often proclaimed themselves to be among humankind’s greatest heroes.
Murderous imperial conquests are consistently characterized as civilizing missions, conducted out of concern for the interests of the indigenous population. During Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s, even as Japanese forces were carrying out the Nanjing Massacre, Japanese leaders were claiming they were on a mission to create an “earthly paradise” for the people of China and to protect them from Chinese “bandits” (i.e., those resisting Japan’s invasion). Emperor Hirohito, in his 1945 surrender address, insisted that “we declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to ensure Japan’s self- preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement.” As the late Palestinian American scholar Edward Said noted, there is always a class of people ready to produce specious intellectual arguments in defense of domination: “Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.”
Virtually any act of mass murder or criminal aggression can be rationalized by appeals to high moral principle. Maximilien Robespierre justified the French Reign of Terror in 1794 by claiming that “terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.” Those in power generally present themselves as altruistic, disinterested, and generous. The late leftist journalist Andrew Kopkind pointed to “the universal desire of statesmen to make their most monstrous missions seem like acts of mercy.” It is hard to take actions one believes to be actively immoral, so people have to convince themselves that what they’re doing is right, that their violence is justified. When anyone wields power over someone else (whether a colonist, a dictator, a bureaucrat, a spouse, or a boss), they need an ideology, and that ideology usually comes down to the belief that their domination is for the good of the dominated.
Leaders of the United States have always spoken loftily of the country’s sacred principles. That story has been consistent since the founding. The U.S. is a “shining city on a hill,” an example to the world, an exceptional “indispensable nation” devoted to freedom and democracy.4 The president is the “leader of the free world.” The U.S. “is and will remain the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known,” as Barack Obama put it. George W. Bush described the U.S. as “a nation with a mission— and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace.” The U.S. government is honorable. It is capable of
mistakes, but not crimes. A crime would require malicious intent, of which we have none. The U.S. is continually deceived by others. It can be foolish, naïve, and idealistic— but it is never wicked.
Crucially, the United States does not act on the basis of the perceived self- interest of dominant groups in society. Only other states do that. “One of the difficulties of explaining [American] policy,” Ambassador Charles Bohlen explained at Columbia University in 1969, is that “our policy is not rooted in any national material interest . . . as most foreign policies of other countries in the past have been.” In discussion of international relations, the fundamental principle is that we are good—“we” being the government (on the totalitarian principle that state and people are one). “We” are benevolent, seeking peace and justice, though there may be errors in practice. “We” are foiled by villains who can’t rise to our exalted level. The “prevailing orthodoxy” was well summarized by the distinguished Oxford- Yale historian Michael Howard: “For 200 years the United States has preserved almost unsullied the original ideals of the Enlightenment . . . and, above all, the universality of these values,” though it “does not enjoy the place in the world that it should have earned through its achievements, its generosity, and its goodwill since World War II.”
The fact that the United States is an exceptional nation is regularly intoned, not just by virtually every political figure, but by prominent academics and public intellectuals as well. Samuel Huntington, professor of government at Harvard, writing in the prestigious journal
International Security, explained that unlike other countries, the “national identity” of the United States is “defined by a set of universal political and economic values,” namely “liberty, democracy, equality, private property, and markets.” The U.S. therefore has a solemn duty to maintain its “international primacy” for the benefit of the world. In the leading left- liberal intellectual journal,
The New York Review of Books, the former chair of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace states as fact that “American contributions to international security, global economic growth, freedom, and human well- being have been so self- evidently unique and have been so clearly directed to others’ benefit that Americans have long believed that the [United States] amounts to a different kind of country.” While others push their national interest, the United States “tries to advance universal principles.”
Usually, no evidence for these propositions is given. None is needed, because they are considered true as a matter of definition. One might even take the position that in the special case of the United States, facts themselves are irrelevant. Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory, developed the standard view that the United States has a “transcendent purpose”: establishing peace and freedom not only at home, but also across the globe, because “the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world- wide.” As a scrupulous scholar, he recognized that the historical record is radically inconsistent with this “transcendent purpose.” But he insisted that we should not be misled by this discrepancy. We should not “confound the abuse of reality with reality itself.” Reality is the unachieved “national purpose” revealed by “the evidence of history as our minds reflect it.” What actually happened is merely the “abuse of reality.”
Needless to say, because even oppressive, criminal, and genocidal governments cloak their atrocities in the language of virtue, none of this rhetoric should be taken seriously. There is no reason to expect Americans to be uniquely immune to self- delusion. If those who commit evil and those who do good always both profess to be doing good, national stories are worthless as tests of truth. Sensible people pay scant attention to declarations of noble intent by leaders, because they are a universal. What matters is the historical record.
The received wisdom is that the United States is committed to promoting democracy and human rights (sometimes called “Wilsonian idealism” or “American exceptionalism”). But the facts are consistent with the following theory instead: The United States is very much like other powerful states. It pursues the strategic and economic interests of dominant sectors of the domestic population.9 In practice, this means that the United States has typically acted with almost complete disregard for moral principle and the rule of law, except insofar as complying with principle and law serves the interests of American elites. There is little evidence of authentic humanitarian concern among leading statesmen, and when it does exist, it is acted upon
only to the extent that doing so does not go against domestic elites’ interests. American foreign policy is almost never made in accordance with the stated ideals, and in fact is far more consistent with what Adam Smith called “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind” in “every age of the world,” namely: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people.”
We might also call this the Mafia Doctrine. Its logic is straightforward and completely rational. The Godfather’s word is law. Those who defy the Godfather will be punished. The Godfather may be generous from time to time, but he does not tolerate disagreement. If some small storekeeper fails to pay protection money, the Godfather sends his goons, not just to collect the money, which he wouldn’t even notice, but to beat him to a pulp so that others do not get the idea that disobedience is permissible. But Godfathers, too, are known to convince themselves that they are kindly and benevolent.
We might also think about this violence prerogative as the “Fifth Freedom,” the one Franklin D. Roosevelt forgot to mention when he laid out his famous Four Freedoms:
freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and
freedom from fear. The United States has always claimed a fundamental additional freedom underlying the others: crudely speaking, the freedom to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced. Maintenance of this freedom is the operative principle that accounts for a substantial part of what the U.S. government does in the world. When the Four Freedoms are perceived to be incompatible with the Fifth (which occurs regularly), they are set aside with little notice or concern.
We can turn to a single page of history to see how Mafia logic works.
Here is an extract from a paper prepared by the National Security Council Planning Board in 1958, discussing issues arising in the Middle East. The paper poses a question facing the United States and presents the argument for two possible stances to take:
Question: Should the United States be prepared to support, or if necessary assist, the British in using force to retain control of Kuwait and the Persian Gulf?
1. The argument for such action: An assured source of oil is essential to the continued economic viability of Western Europe. Moreover, the UK asserts that its financial stability would be seriously threatened if the petroleum from Kuwait and the Persian Gulf area were not available to the UK on reasonable terms, if the UK were deprived of the large investments made by that area in the UK, and if sterling were deprived of the support provided by Persian Gulf oil. If [Egyptian president Gamal Abdel] Nasser obtains dominant influence over the Persian Gulf oil-producing areas, Western access to this oil on acceptable terms might be seriously threatened. The only way to guarantee continued access to Persian Gulf oil on acceptable terms is to insist on maintaining the present concessions and be prepared to defend our present position by force if necessary.
2. The argument against such action: If armed force must be used to help retain this area (or even if there is a public indication of willingness to use force), the benefits of any actions in the direction of accommodation with radical Pan- Arab nationalism will be largely lost and U.S. relations with neutral countries elsewhere would be adversely affected. Such accommodation would better provide the basis for continued assurance of access to Kuwait and Persian Gulf oil.13
Note the complete absence of any consideration of the interests of the people of Kuwait, who are effectively nonpersons, or “unpeople,” a term from Orwell that Mark Curtis has updated. Note, too, the absence of any discussion of
rights. What right does the United States have to use force to help the British retain control of Kuwait and the Persian Gulf? What right do the British have to retain such control? Morally speaking, of course, the answer is “none whatsoever.” But it is accepted as a basic presumption that we are allowed to use force whenever and wherever we want in order to pursue our “interests.” The only necessary debate, then, is whether or not force
does serve our interests. (There could be backlash, for instance, from Arab nationalists who resent us.) Immoral actions create public relations problems, but their immorality is irrelevant. Likewise, the Godfather might worry that excessive use of force could jeopardize certain crucial relationships. But when he shows restraint, it is not for moral reasons.
At the height of John F. Kennedy’s attacks on Cuba, to take another example, the pragmatic consequences for the United States were a subject for discussion, but the rights of the people under attack were simply irrelevant. In a review of internal documents, Latin Americanist Jorge Domínguez observes that: “Only once in these nearly thousand pages of documentation did a U.S. official raise something that resembled a faint moral objection to U.S. government- sponsored terrorism.” A member of the National Security Council staff suggested that raids that are “haphazard and kill innocents . . . might mean a bad press in some friendly countries.” The same considerations were present throughout the internal discussions during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as when Robert Kennedy warned that a full- scale invasion of Cuba would “kill an awful lot of people, and we’re going to take an awful lot of heat on it.” These attitudes prevail to the present, with only the rarest of exceptions. It is “U.S. interests” that matter.
But the term “national interest” is itself a euphemism, for what is usually meant is the interest of a small sector of wealthy domestic elites. The American working class, whose members die in the country’s wars, do not have their “interest” served in any way by the wars that kill them. Nor are their interests served by government spending money on weapons that could be used to repair school buildings. Indeed, when American actions abroad are exposed to the judgment of public opinion, they often prove deeply unpopular with the “nation” whose “interests” they are supposedly serving. A sophisticated propaganda system must keep the public in the dark, for if the truth were known, it would become immediately apparent that the public has a very different view of its “interests” than U.S. elites have.
We should also remember this the next time we hear talk about what “the Russians” or “Iran” have done. Totalitarians wish us to think that a country speaks with one voice, that it has a “national interest.” While it is the convention to refer to actions by the state as if they were actions by the country as a whole, and is unavoidable in discussions of policy, the formulation is ultimately misleading. The thousands of heroic antiwar protesters thrown in prison by Vladimir Putin have just as much claim to represent Russia as their ruler does.17 This is why it is an error to treat this book as arguing that “the United States is terroristic and destructive,”
if the “United States” is understood to refer to some kind of collectivity of all Americans. Many in the United States have taken to the streets, and risked their lives and livelihoods, to oppose the acts of their government— when they have been permitted to learn about them, that is.
Copyright © 2024 by Noam Chomsky. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
