Noam Chomsky on How America Sanitizes the Horror of Its Wars

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.

The US had the world’s most powerful military force. It had firm control of the Western Hemisphere—and of the oceans. High-level planners and foreign policy advisers determined that in the new global system the US should “hold unquestioned power” while ensuring the “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs.

Winston Churchill captured the dominant sentiment when he said that “the government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations,” because rich countries had no “reason to seek for anything more,” whereas “if the world-government were in the hands of hungry nations there would always be danger.” Leo Welch of the Standard Oil Company expressed a similar aspiration when he said the US needed to “assume the responsibility of the majority stockholder in this corporation known as the world,” and not just temporarily, but as a “permanent obligation.”

From 1939 to 1945, extensive studies conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department resulted in a policy they called “Grand Area” planning. The Grand Area referred to any region that was to be subordinated to the needs of the American economy and was considered “strategically necessary for world control.”

“The British Empire as it existed in the past will never reappear,” mused one planner, and thus “the United States may have to take its place.” Another stated frankly that the US “must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement.”

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.

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:

We have about fifty percent of the world’s 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   We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction… We should cease to talk about vague and   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.

The planning staff recognized further that “the foremost requirement” to secure these ends was “the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete re-armament”—then, as now, a central component of “an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States.”

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.

The US planners specified the function that each part of the world was to have within the US-dominated global system. The “major function” of Southeast Asia was to be “a source of raw materials and a market for Japan and Western Europe,” in the words of Kennan’s State Department Policy Planning Staff in 1949. The Middle East was “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history,” as well as “probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment.”

That meant nobody else could interfere, and “nationalism” (the control of the country’s resources by its own people) was a serious threat. As a State Department memo put it in 1958, “in a Near East under the control of radical nationalism, Western access to the resources of the area would be in constant jeopardy.”

Policy in Latin America, CIA historian Gerald Haines explained, was designed “to 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,” permitting local development only “as long as it did not interfere with American profits and dominance.”

With regard to Latin America, Secretary of War Henry Stimson said, “I think that it’s not asking too much to have our little region over here.” President Taft had previously foreseen that “the day is not far distant” when “the whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.”

The Latin American countries advocated what a State Department officer described as “the philosophy of the New Nationalism,” which “embraces policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses.” Another State Department expert reported that “Latin Americans are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of that country.”

These mistaken priorities ran directly counter to Washington’s plans. The issue came to a head in a February 1945 hemispheric conference, where the United States put forth its “Economic Charter of the Americas,” which called for an end to economic nationalism “in all its forms.”

The first beneficiaries of a country’s resources must be US investors and their local associates, not “the people of that country.” There can be no “broader distribution of wealth” or improvement in “the standard of living of the masses,” unless, by unlikely accident, that happens to result from policies designed to serve the interests of those with priority.

The basic missions of global management have endured to this day, among them: containing other centers of global power within the “overall framework of order” managed by the United States; maintaining control of the world’s energy supplies; barring unacceptable forms of independent nationalism; and keeping the U.S. domestic population from sticking their noses in.

*

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.

As Adam Smith pointed out, they can even become a kind of “amusement” for those who live far from the battlefield and only encounter conflicts as abstractions or collections of statistics. For those who safely inhabit “great empires,” Smith said, “reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies” is exciting, and peace can even be disappointing, because it “puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.”

Discussions of foreign policy are often cool, abstract, and antiseptic. Feminist scholar Carol Cohn, investigating the community of “defense intellectuals” who specialize in planning for nuclear war, was disturbed by “the 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.”

She found the men “likeable and admirable,” but was “continually startled by…the bloodcurdling casualness with which they regularly blew up the world while standing and chatting over the coffee pot.” 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.

Those who see war up close know just how much worse it is than even terms like “horror” and “suffering” can convey. Ashleigh Banfield, who was ousted by NBC 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’t show the reality of civilian casualties.

Journalists embedded with US troops, for instance, would show soldiers firing M16s into a building, but not “where those bullets landed” or what happens when a mortar explodes. “A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me,” she said.

But the puff of smoke was what Americans saw, with the result that “there are horrors that were completely left out of this war.” 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.

Chris Hedges, who spent decades as a war correspondent for The New York Times, writes:

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 clichés 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’s exhilaration, but are protected from seeing what war actually does, its smells, noise, confusion, and most of all its overpowering fear.

The casualties of war do not appear in US armed forces recruitment material, and Donald Trump infamously specified he didn’t want “wounded guys: in his military parade, because they wouldn’t look good. War must be scrubbed clean.

______________________________

From The Myth of American Idealism 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 © 2024 by Valéria Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson.