Book summary “Power and Terror”: summary

Introduction

You live in a world where powerful nations claim to defend freedom while waging violent wars abroad. Official rhetoric paints state violence as defensive, yet it often functions to crush democratic movements and secure economic control. This creates deep confusion when you try to understand why foreign populations grow resentful.

Powerful imperial nations practice double standards by condemning terrorism of the weak while committing systemic state terror and resource exploitation abroad.

The book examines these mechanisms through four distinct inquiries into global politics.

• How do institutions normalize state violence?
• Why does foreign aid support repressive regimes?
• In what ways do major media outlets manufacture consent?
• What actions can you take to resist imperial control?

1. The Nature of Power and Terror

Atrocities committed by powerful imperial nations against the rest of the world are treated as normal historical background, whereas violence directed against the West is treated as a historic rupture.

Atrocities committed by powerful imperial nations are treated as normal background, whereas violence directed against the West is treated as a historic rupture.

Noam Chomsky argues that the historical novelty of September 11 lies not in the scale of the atrocity, but in the identity of the victims. For centuries, imperial powers have routinely carried out violence abroad while remaining immune from attacks on their own soil. When small groups use modern technology to strike back, mainstream commentary reacts with shock, ignoring the structural roots of the violence.

The United States itself was founded when religious fundamentalists from England exterminated millions of indigenous people, an event completely removed from modern American consciousness.

Victors Justice

The legal frameworks established after World War II institutionalized victor's justice, defining war crimes based entirely on whether the defeated party committed them and the victors did not. At the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, legal definitions of war crimes were deliberately constructed to exclude actions perpetrated on a massive scale by the Allied victors. Practices such as the large-scale bombing of urban population centers or the intentional destruction of vital agricultural infrastructure were prosecuted when done by enemies, but ignored or praised when done by Western military forces.

The U.S. Air Force destroyed North Korea and bombed irrigation dams to cause massive flooding and starvation among the rice-dependent population, describing the destruction with immense pride just years after executing German leaders for lesser acts.

Rationality Versus Apologetics

Examining the roots and motivations behind a crime or terrorist attack is a requirement of basic sanity and prevention, rather than an apology for the act. Critics frequently accuse those who analyze the grievances behind anti-Western terrorism of being apologists for terrorists. Chomsky points out that understanding the causes of any crime, whether a street crime or state aggression, is the only rational way to prevent future occurrences. Dismissing the reasons simply because they involve criticism of state policy guarantees further violence.

You can observe instances where quoting mainstream publications like the Wall Street Journal or declassified government records regarding the grievances exploited by groups like Osama bin Laden's network gets labeled as apologetics because it challenges state policy.

The fundamental definition of a moral hypocrite is someone who refuses to apply to their own nation the exact same moral and legal standards they demand of others. Mainstream intellectuals and political commentators consistently display extreme ideological discipline by refusing to apply universal moral principles to Western foreign policy. Suggesting that powerful democratic nations should face the same punitive measures or military retaliation that they inflict on adversaries is treated as unthinkable insanity.

While U.S. intellectuals overwhelmingly supported the bombing of Afghanistan, suggesting that Washington should be bombed in retaliation for U.S. wars against countries like Nicaragua or Cuba is considered completely incomprehensible.

2. State Terror and Foreign Aid

Foreign and military aid flows disproportionately to regimes that violate human rights because such governments suppress opposition and improve the investment climate. Suppressing union organizers, peasant leaders, and social programs naturally results in egregious human rights violations as a corollary.

Lars Schoultz studied Latin American aid twenty years prior, and Edward Herman conducted a worldwide study comparing Amnesty International torture records with U.S. foreign aid, finding a high correlation. While the U.S. government does not specifically desire torture, it seeks to improve the investment climate for extracting resources.

Central America Interventions

During the Reagan administration, Central America became a primary focus of the War on Terror, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths and widespread atrocities. In El Salvador and Guatemala, the army acted as the terrorist force, successfully defeating liberation theology and punishing the Catholic Church for siding with the preferential option for the poor.

Two hundred thousand people approximately were killed in Central America, creating over a million refugees and orphans, with seventy thousand others killed in El Salvador. El Salvador became a leading recipient of U.S. military aid, culminating in the murder of an archbishop and six leading Jesuit intellectuals by elite forces trained and armed by the U.S.

Because Nicaragua had an army and state apparatus, it responded to U.S. aggression by taking the case to the World Court and the UN Security Council. The World Court condemned the United States for the unlawful use of force and international terrorism, ordering reparations. The U.S. responded by escalating the war, attacking soft targets like health clinics, and vetoing a UN Security Council resolution.

The United States ignored the World Court judgment, escalated the war with bipartisan support, and issued official orders to attack health clinics and agricultural cooperatives until the population voted for the U.S. candidate in 1990.

Privatization of Terror

As specific nations reduced their domestic insurgencies, top recipients of U.S. military aid shifted to countries carrying out severe state terror against internal populations. After El Salvador repressed its population, Turkey became the leading recipient of U.S. military aid during its campaign against the Kurdish population in the 1990s. When Turkey's campaign succeeded, Colombia took first place in receiving military aid while maintaining a horrific record of killing trade unionists and human rights defenders.

U.S. military aid to Turkey under the Clinton administration was four times higher than in the entire Cold War period up to 1984, funding jet planes and tanks used against the Kurds, which caused three million refugees and fifty thousand killed in Kurdish regions, alongside ten to twenty political murders a day in Colombia.

To bypass human rights legislation, congressional oversight, and public scrutiny, states outsource violent counterinsurgency operations to paramilitary groups or private military companies. This allows governments to claim they are clean while continuing suppression and resource extraction under plausible deniability.

In Colombia, the army relies heavily on paramilitaries referred to by human rights monitors as the sixth division of the army, while the U.S. utilizes private companies like DynCorp and MPRI through constructive engagement.

3. Middle East Interventions and Media Complicity

Public hatred toward U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East stems from consistent opposition to independent development. You can trace this hostility back to the Anglo-American condominium that blocks democratization to secure regional oil reserves. Status quo governments survive because Washington supports corrupt regimes while suppressing Arab nationalism.

Major commercial media outlets in the United States do not operate under direct government control, but rather as large corporations that voluntarily share the interests of the corporate and government establishment.

Mainstream media corporations naturally avoid exposing topics like state-involved genocide or harmful foreign policy decisions. Doing so conflicts with their own corporate interests and alignment with the ruling system. You rarely see editors challenge the institutional framework of the state.

Editors across the United States refused to publish the fact that the U.S. made a massive deal to send military helicopters to Israel on October 3, 2000, just days after Israel began using U.S. helicopters to attack civilian targets. This silence spans decades of interaction with newspaper editors over forty-five years in Boston.

Declassified national security records from 1958 reveal that top U.S. planners recognized a campaign of hatred among Arab populations. Subsequent regional surveys verified that moneyed Muslims strongly oppose U.S. support for oppressive regimes, unilateral backing of Israeli military occupation during its thirty-fifth year, and devastating sanctions against Iraq.

Israel and U.S. Strategy

Israel functions as an offshore military base and strategic asset for the United States to repress independent Arab nationalism. U.S. intelligence noted support for Israel in 1958 as a logical corollary to opposing Arab nationalism.

The alliance firmed up in 1967 when Israel smashed Arab nationalism. In 1970 during Black September, when Syria moved to protect Palestinians in Jordan, the U.S. asked Israel to mobilize its air force to deter Syria, after which U.S. aid to Israel quadrupled.

The Media and Corporate Alignment

Intended military interventions are driven by strategic and economic dominance over massive oil reserves rather than official justifications concerning human rights or weapons of mass destruction. Official rhetoric demonizing leaders like Saddam Hussein for past atrocities ignores the historical reality that the U.S. and Britain actively supported and armed him during those exact periods, including when he used chemical weapons.

In early 1990, just months before the invasion of Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush sent a senatorial delegation led by Bob Dole to convey greetings to Saddam Hussein and assure him to ignore critical press comments. The U.S. overthrew Iran's elected nationalist government in a 1953 military coup to secure resources.

The U.S. authorized Saddam Hussein to use aircraft to crush Shiite and Kurdish rebellions in March 1991 right after the Gulf War. Iraq holds the second-largest oil reserves in the world, driving the strategic need for establishing credibility through military force and imposing a compliant regime.

4. Global Domination and Resistance Tactics

Activist efforts should focus on speaking truth to the people rather than power, using educational campaigns and popular organizing to dismantle oppression.

Noam Chomsky disagrees with the Quaker slogan of speaking truth to power. Power already knows the truth and it is a waste of time to try to inform political leaders. Instead, you should join and listen to ordinary people who are willing to commit themselves to dismantling, constraining, and overthrowing oppressive power structures.

During World War II, U.S. state planners developed the concept of the Grand Area to ensure total American economic and military supremacy over the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, and Middle Eastern energy resources. State Department and Council on Foreign Relations planners met extensively from 1939 to 1945 to design a post-war world dominated by the U.S. Control over Middle Eastern oil was recognized as the key to substantial global control. Following the war, this strategy involved expanding influence across Eurasia, establishing NATO to contain Europe within a U.S.-run military alliance, and treating any disobedient state according to the Mafia principle, which forbids independent sovereignty.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. defense and foreign policy planning maintained its massive military apparatus and intervention forces by shifting pretexts from countering the Soviet threat to managing third-world technological sophistication and radical nationalism. The George Bush administration's post-Cold War plans dictated that intervention forces must remain directed at the Middle East and other regions to handle problems that could not be blamed on the Kremlin. The underlying U.S. goal remained the suppression of independent nationalism and the preservation of the defense industrial base to support high-tech state-subsidized industries. Concurrently, NATO expanded eastward in violation of verbal agreements with Gorbachev to operate as a worldwide intervention force controlling global energy systems.

Strategic plans like NATO 2020 explicitly state that the alliance must be prepared to operate far beyond its borders without limit as a worldwide U.S. military intervention force. General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, explicitly stated that the openly stated goal of dropping the atomic bomb was to subdue the Russians. During the 1950 period, the U.S. held half of the world's wealth. By the 1970 period, U.S. wealth reduced to about 25 percent of the global total.

Speaking Truth to the People

Popular tactical campaigns such as tax resistance and economic divestment serve primarily as educational and organizing tools to shift public policy, similar to historical campaigns against South African apartheid. Reflecting on his participation in a national tax resistance movement in the 1965 era where he withheld taxes for about ten years, Chomsky notes that government responses are unpredictable and tactical judgments are delicate. However, symbolic campaigns like divestment can successfully build popular education and organizing power, just as anti-apartheid campaigns eventually forced a shift in U.S. policy toward South Africa despite initial state resistance.

In 1988, Nelson Mandela's African National Congress was officially classified by the U.S. State Department as a notorious terrorist group while South Africa was a favored ally, but popular divestment campaigns eventually forced a major shift in U.S. policy. During the 1980s, South Africa caused sixty billion dollars of damage in surrounding countries with U.S. and British support. During the Reagan years, South Africa killed one and a half million people in surrounding countries.

Tax Resistance and Divestment

Conclusion

You can now see how the pieces of the global imperial system fit together into a unified whole. Powerful states maintain dominance through state terror and foreign aid while hiding these actions behind a veil of righteous rhetoric. Major media institutions reinforce this structure by filtering out dissent and manufacturing consent for foreign interventions. When you look past official justifications, you find a consistent pattern of resource extraction and strategic control.

To resist these forces and build a more just world, you must apply practical rules to your daily civic life.

1. Question official pronouncements and examine the historical context behind major international conflicts.
2. Reject double standards by holding powerful states to the same moral and legal codes demanded of others.
3. Support independent media outlets and alternative sources of information that challenge establishment narratives.
4. Organize within your local community to build popular solidarity and foster grassroots political education.
5. Direct your activism toward educating the public rather than petitioning power structures that rely on your compliance.

10 Key Ideas

1. Legal frameworks established after World War II institutionalized victor's justice by defining war crimes based entirely on whether the defeated party committed them and the victors did not.
2. Atrocities committed by powerful imperial nations against the rest of the world are treated as normal historical background, whereas violence directed against the West is treated as a historic rupture.
3. Foreign and military aid flows disproportionately to regimes that violate human rights because such governments suppress opposition and improve the investment climate.
4. To bypass human rights legislation, congressional oversight, and public scrutiny, states outsource violent counterinsurgency operations to paramilitary groups or private military companies.
5. Public hatred toward U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East stems from consistent opposition to independent development and support for corrupt regimes that suppress Arab nationalism.
6. Israel functions as an offshore military base and strategic asset for the United States to repress independent Arab nationalism.
7. Major commercial media outlets in the United States do not operate under direct government control, but rather as large corporations that voluntarily share the interests of the corporate and government establishment.
8. Following World War II, U.S. state planners developed the concept of the Grand Area to ensure total American economic and military supremacy over the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, and Middle Eastern energy resources.
9. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. defense and foreign policy planning maintained its massive military apparatus and intervention forces by shifting pretexts from countering the Soviet threat to managing third-world technological sophistication and radical nationalism.
10. Activist efforts should focus on speaking truth to the people rather than power, using educational campaigns and popular organizing to dismantle oppression.