It is an act of thinking about people halfway around the people to wonder how we can get our government's boot off their necks. Chomsky's point, not mine:
> Returning to the quite appropriate question, whether "new societies
> can grow by building democratic institutions" or only by
> totalitarian means, I think that honesty requires us to recognize
> that this question must be directed more to American intellectuals
> than to third-world ideologists. The backward countries have
> incredible, perhaps insurmountable problems, and few available
> options; the United States has a wide range of options, and has the
> economic and technological resources, though, evidently, neither the
> intellectual nor moral resources, to confront at least some of these
> problems. It is easy for an American intellectual to deliver
> homilies on the virtues of freedom and liberty, but if he is really
> concerned about, say, Chinese totalitarianism or the burdens imposed
> on the Chinese peasantry in forced industrialization, then he should
> face a task that is infinitely more important and challenging—the
> task of creating, in the United States, the intellectual and moral
> climate, as well as the social and economic conditions, that would
> permit this country to participate in modernization and development
> in a way commensurate with its material wealth and technical
> capacity. Large capital gifts to Cuba and China might not succeed in
> alleviating the authoritarianism and terror that tend to accompany
> early stages of capital accumulation, but they are far more likely
> to have this effect than lectures on democratic values. It is
> possible that even without "capitalist encirclement" in its various
> manifestations, the truly democratic elements in revolutionary
> movements—in some instances, soviets and collectives—might be
> undermined by an "elite" of bureaucrats and technical
> intelligentsia. But it is almost certain that capitalist
> encirclement itself, which all revolutionary movements now have to
> face, will guarantee this result. The lesson, for those who are
> concerned to strengthen the democratic, spontaneous, and popular
> elements in developing societies, is quite clear. Lectures on the
> two-party system, or even on the really substantial democratic
> values that have been in part realized in Western society, are a
> monstrous irrelevance, given the effort required to raise the level
> of culture in Western society to the point where it can provide a
> "social lever" for both economic development and the development of
> true democratic institutions in the third world—and, for that
> matter, at home.
--ravi