In his 1992 book, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Noam Chomsky attributed the role
of the US administration in its interventions in places like El Salvador, Chile
and Nicaragua in part to the desire to negate the ‘threat of a good example’.
He argued that these countries were showing their neighbours that ownership of
the means of production could be retained within the country rather than handed
over to US multinationals, and that it was possible to run a country reasonably
successfully without it being a de facto colony of the US. Such ‘good examples’
had to be crushed as soon as possible, lest the lesson should spread. Various
methods have been used in pursuit of this purpose over the years, from ‘agent
...