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I ask Chomsky if the United States was targeting Nicaragua because U.S. officials didn't like
the threat of a good example. (The example being countries taking an independent course
which isn't subordinate to the interests of U.S. business elites, the threat that countries
may improve the lives of their people with independence from U.S. power.) ... what was
it, a "threat of a good example?” Yes, the same as Cuba. I mean the case of Cuba we know
– I mean Nicaragua's recent, we don't have internal documents. Cuba we have a rich store
of internal documents. It's a very free country [the U.S.], we know a lot about the government.
The Kennedy and early Johnson administrations were concerned about what they called Cuba's
“successful defiance” of U.S. foreign policy, which goes back to the Monroe Doctrine,
1820's, no Russians. Monroe Doctrine asserts the U.S. right to control the hemisphere.
And Cuba carrying out “successful defiance” of that. Ask your favorite Mafia don what
that means.
Furthermore, Arthur Schlesinger, who headed Kennedy's Latin American Mission, and was
his advisor and well known historian. He – In his internal – The internal documents that
he wrote for Kennedy, he says the problem is what he's called “the spread of the Castro
idea” of taking matters into your own hands which will appeal to impoverished people throughout
the hemisphere who were suffering conditions very much like that of the Batista dictatorship
that Castro overthrew. So we got to stop it. Not resources, they don't have resources – you
know tropical fruit. Ah they – It's successful defiance and the threat of spreading the idea
of taking matters into your own hands and running your own affairs. That's got to be
stopped. It's the same with Vietnam, the U.S. didn't go after Vietnam because of its resources.
I mean Eisenhower made some speeches about it but it was nonsense.
I'm not sure you said in so many words but do you think, would you think that they should
have had elections in 1956.
Who should have had elections?
In Vietnam, wasn't there an agreement in 1954?
Yes there was. In fact, the U.S. didn't agree to it. But the Geneva – there was an agreement
at Geneva, a treaty of the parties in which they agreed to a temporary demilitarized,
a temporary separation, North and South, with unifying elections to be, to take place in
1956. Well, you know, the U.S. knew they were going to come out the wrong way so they undermined
it, prevented them.
So is this an over simplification but in Vietnam would you say we were fighting against democracy?
Of course. I mean, I don't know what kind of democracy it would have been but we were
certainly trying to undermine democracy. But the main thing was to prevent independence.
They didn't care whether it was democratic or totalitarian, democratic would have been
just as bad as totalitarian. Prevent independence. And there was a reason, there was concern
– we have, again, the internal records, there was concern that an independent Vietnam
might become a model of successful development which would spread throughout the region,
successful independent development, independent of the U.S., spread to other places and maybe
reach Indonesia which was really valuable. And that might even force Japan to accommodate
to Asian, an independent Asian mainland becoming its technological center. I mean that's what
the U.S. fought World War II in the Pacific to prevent.