Part 2, NOAM CHOMSKY: The New World Order
November 23, 1991
NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, that hits the nail on the head. The primary concern of the United States in
the Third World has, in fact, always been the problem of meaningful democracy which is, in
fact, a threat to power and privilege. And that has to be crushed. It has to be crushed
abroad, and it has to be crushed at home. And without understanding that, you understand
very little about domestic or foreign affairs, or about American society and culture.
Now, of course, the methods for crushing democratic forces at home and abroad
are different. Abroad, you can do it pretty much in the way that it's done by totalitarian
states. They use violence. In fact, unrestricted violence. At home, over centuries
of popular struggle, the capacity of the state to coerce and control has been limited, so
a whole variety of other devices have been needed. But it's been well understood -- and
it's a major theme of intellectual discourse, if you like, for centuries -- that methods
have to be found to control and divert what they call "the rascal multitude" and
to keep them from interfering in what is none of their business; namely, the management of
public affairs. As Walter Lippmann put it: "The elements that rule have to be
protected from meddling and ignorant outsiders." That is, the mass of the population.
And if you can't do it by force, you do it by other means.
Well, a few weeks after this report on the extraordinarily positive relations
with the Mexican tyranny, a leading journal in Mexico published an article reporting on a
conference in Mexico -- a conference on international trafficking of children, minors --
the report quotes a leading researcher at the National University, the autonomous
university in Mexico, from the Institute for Law Research, who writes:
"Every year, twenty thousand Mexican children are sent,
illegally, to the United States for organ transplants or for sexual exploitation, or for
various experimental tests."
The conference report also quotes a report of the United Nations saying that
over a million children a year suffer from slavery, forced participation in criminal acts,
prostitution, and organ transplant sales to rich countries. Well, is any of this true? The
answer to that is: Nobody really knows, and more importantly, nobody cares -- at least
nobody important cares. It's not the kind of thing we discuss around here. But
whether it's true or not (it may be; it may not be) an interesting fact about our domains
is that this is very widely believed. There are lots and lots of reports like this one
from all through Latin America and other parts of the Third World -- domains, largely, of
the United States, that report such things. You can get similar reports from the London
Anti-Slavery Society and others. And whether they're true or not, the fact that they're
widely believed, alone, is a reflection of the reality of life in the areas where our
influence has been overwhelming.
This became much worse during the Reagan-Bush years which was a period of an
enormous catastrophe of capitalism throughout the entire World, aside from the
state-capitalist industrial countries themselves which, in various ways, were able to
protect themselves from it.
Latin America is a striking example. We might proceed with Latin America by
quoting .... I'll just pick something that happened to arrive in the mail yesterday, a
Latin American church journal which has an article from Uruguay, by a Uruguayan
journalist, called: "The War Waged on Latin American Street Kids" (that's the
English translation of it). And he describes (I'll give some quotes) the war being waged
against millions of abandoned children throughout Latin America where death squads, run
by the police and financed by the business sector, target and exterminate street kids who
are trying to survive as beggars, thieves, prostitutes, drug runners or cheap factory
workers. Some of the victims are gunned down while they are sleeping beneath bridges, on
vacant lots or on doorways. Others are kidnapped, tortured or killed in remote areas.
In Brazil, where U.S. influence has been decisive .... the overthrow of
Brazilian democracy was described as the greatest victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth
century by the [Reagan] Administration, when it took place with no little U.S. support
.... In Brazil, the bodies of young death squad victims are found in zones outside the
metropolitan areas with their hands tied, showing signs of torture, and riddled with
bullet holes. Street girls are frequently forced to work as prostitutes. In one town, in
the first six months of 1991, a thousand so-called "disposable children" were
assassinated. In Guatemala City -- another place where we have succeeded in imposing the
kind of values we like -- the majority of the five thousand street kids work as
prostitutes. They are found with their ears cut off and their eyes gouged out, and so on.
In Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, reports indicate that an average of three children
under the age of eighteen are killed daily by these death squads financed by the business
community. Almost all murders have been attributed to those death squads.
Going on, the journalist points out that this is a region where a hundred and
eighty-three million people live in abject poverty, so that death by violence is only one
of the threats for street children. Regional statistics show that every minute,
twenty-eight children die from hunger. According to UNICEF, sixty-nine million children
survive by doing menial labor, robbing, running drugs, and prostitution.
In Ecuador, about a hundred thousand children from age four up work ten- to
twelve-hour shifts, in one region, in Western-run, mostly U.S.-run corporations. Panama
had a system of protection for minors, but the minors' protective tribunal buildings were
bombed during the 1989 U.S. invasion, rendering work there nearly impossible. Following
the invasion, the number of criminal gangs robbing stores in search of food increased. In
Peru, fifty thousand of the six hundred thousand children born this year will not survive
their first year. In one Brazilian state on the Bolivian border, approximately a thousand
children work as slaves, extracting tin. Another two thousand adolescents work as
prostitutes. According to union sources, children work eighteen hours a day in water, up
to their knees, and are paid a daily ration of bananas and boiled yucca, according to the
labor union reports. Going on (I won't go on reading it), the journalist ends up saying:
"Until recently, the image of the abandoned Latin American
child was of a ragged child sleeping in a doorway. Today, the image is of a body lacerated
and dumped in a city slum."
Well, we may feel proud of our contributions to this picture of capitalist
democracy, triumphant in the "New World Order". And that's what the "New
World Order" is all about: an intensification of the horrors of the old world order.
