By Noam Chomsky
November marked the anniversary of major events in 1989: “the biggest year in world history since 1945,” as British historian Timothy Garton Ash describes it.
That year “changed everything,” Garton Ash writes. Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms within Russia and his “breathtaking renunciation of the use of force” led to the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9—and to the liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian tyranny.
The accolades are deserved; the events, memorable. But alternative perspectives may be revealing.
German chancellor Angela Merkel provided such a perspective—unintentionally—when she called on all of us to “use this invaluable gift of freedom to overcome the walls of our time.”
One way to follow her good advice would be to dismantle the massive wall, dwarfing the Berlin wall in scale and length, now snaking through Palestinian territory in violation of international law.
The “annexation wall,” as it should be called, is justified in terms of “security”—the default rationalization for so many state actions. If security were the concern, the wall would be built along the border and made impregnable.
The purpose of this monstrosity, constructed with U.S. support and European complicity, is to allow Israel to take over valuable Palestinian land and the main water resources of the region, thus denying any viable national existence for the indigenous population of the former Palestine.
Another perspective on 1989 comes from Thomas Carothers, a scholar who served in “democracy enhancement” programs in the administration of former President Ronald Reagan.
After reviewing the record, Carothers concludes that all U.S. leaders have been “schizophrenic”—supporting democracy if it conforms to U.S. strategic and economic objectives, as in Soviet satellites but not in U.S. client states.
This perspective is dramatically confirmed by the recent commemoration of the events of November 1989. The fall of the Berlin wall was rightly celebrated, but there was little notice of what happened one week later: on Nov. 16, in El Salvador, the assassination of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, along with their cook and her daughter, by the elite, U.S.-armed Atlacatl battalion, fresh from renewed training at the JFK Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, N.C.
The battalion and its cohorts had already compiled a bloody record through the grisly decade in El Salvador that began in 1980 with the assassination, by much the same hands, of Archbishop Oscar Romero, known as “the voice of the voiceless.”
During the decade of the “war on terror” declared by the Reagan administration, the horror was similar throughout Central America. The reign of torture, murder and destruction in the region left hundreds of thousands dead.
The contrast between the liberation of Soviet satellites and the crushing of hope in U.S. client states is striking and instructive—even more so when we broaden the perspective.
The assassination of the Jesuit intellectuals brought a virtual end to “liberation theology,” the revival of Christianity that had its modern roots in the initiatives of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II, which he opened in 1962.
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