Michele Zephier

“In the early eighties, the atrocities amounted to virtual genocide in the Mayan highlands of Guatemala under a killer later sentenced for genocide. While it was underway, he was lauded by Reagan as a fine man, “totally dedicated to democracy” and given a “bum rap” by human rights organizations. People are still fleeing from that bitter legacy. The decade of the eighties began with the assassination of the archbishop and closed in 1989, symbolically, with the assassination of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, in their rooms at the Jesuit university of San Salvador. The assassins also murdered their housekeeper and her daughter to make sure there would be no witnesses. This was right at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the celebration of the liberation of Soviet satellites. The murderers were from a US-trained brigade, the Atlacatl Brigade, known as El Salvador’s finest, which had already compiled a horrible record of murders and atrocities.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“A good bit has been learned about the wars in El Salvador and Guatemala since Deterring Democracy was published thirty years ago. As the wars wound down, Truth Commissions were established in both countries. Their research revealed that the overwhelming majority of the crimes were carried out by the security forces that were armed, trained, directed by the Reagan administration. I’ll come back to all of that and its backgrounds, particularly since the Kennedy years. This is bipartisan. It’s highly instructive. There has never been a Truth Commission here. That’s unthinkable, a violation of common sense. Truth Commissions often have a considerable impact, in Argentina, to take one case. So does their absence. The most important country in Latin America, Brazil, did not have one. They had a brutal military dictatorship, but there was no reckoning. Actually, the Catholic Church did publish an inquiry, but there was no real Truth Commission. The effects are in the headlines right now. In Brazil, something similar to military dictatorship is taking shape. It’s tolerated, even supported, in part because people don’t even remember the military dictatorship and its many crimes. Younger people may not even know about it.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“I’m just going to say, there’s an obverse meaning to take away from the common sense understanding of how our society operates. That obverse meaning is this: In America, if you don’t succeed, you are either not working hard enough, or you are not playing by the rules, or both. So if you don’t succeed, and this is the obverse of thinking about the American dream as it’s laid out, essentially, your failure is your own fault. This is another corollary of the individualized notion of how society works. All the opportunities are there. If you fail, it is your fault. There is nothing structural or systemic or unfair getting in your way, either historically, contemporaneously, or into the future.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“Hegemony, as I’m using the term here, is governance with the consent of the governed. The alternative form of governance is coercion. Now think about it, if you’re an elite and you want to govern people, which of these forms is preferable? Well, of the two, hegemony is much more desirable for the governors since governance with consent does not produce opposition and resistance by definition. If people are consenting to be governed, why would they object? Why would they resist?”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance