In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival. - Noam Chomsky

For my part, of course, there’s no question about justifying the American and Saigon government terror. But what about the harder question, that of the terror practiced by the National Liberation Front? Was this a legitimate political act? The easiest reaction is to say that all violence is abhorrent, that both sides are guilty, and to stand apart retaining one’s moral purity and condemn them both. This is the easiest response and in this case I think it’s also justified. But, for reasons that are pretty complex, there are real arguments also in favor of the Viet Cong terror, arguments that can’t be lightly dismissed, although I don’t think they’re correct. One argument is that this selective terror — killing certain officials and frightening others — tended to save the population from a much more extreme government terror, the continuing terror that exists when a corrupt official can do things that are within his power in the province that he controls.

Nobody doubts that the Russians committed aggression, that Saddam Hussein committed aggression. We attribute to them rational goals, maybe they wanted to control the energy of the Middle East or something. With regard to ourselves, it's impossible... We just cannot adopt towards ourselves the same sane attitudes that we adopt easily, in fact reflexively, when others commit crimes... And if anyone says it, educated people, liberal intellectuals, are infuriated. Because it suggests that we could do something that's not noble. We can make mistakes, that's easy. You can criticize mistakes. You can criticize low-level crimes, like Abu-Ghraib, you can criticize that. You can criticize My Lai. But not the educated, civilized people, the kind of people we have dinner with, see at concerts, sitting in air-conditioned offices planning mass-murder. So that's beyond criticism. On the other hand, if it's half-crazed G.I.s in the field, uneducated, don't know who's going to shoot at them next, you can blame them, you can say how awful they are. You can criticize Lynndie England, disadvantaged young woman, very different from us. But how about the guys who organized and planned it? No.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.