Culture of Terrorism
How power shapes what we see
Description
In late 1986, a small Beirut magazine broke a story that would consume Washington for two years: the Reagan administration had secretly sold weapons to Iran and funneled the profits to the contras fighting Nicaragua's government, in defiance of a congressional ban. Hearings followed, careers ended, Oliver North became a household name. And out of the wreckage came a settled national story about what had gone wrong. Noam Chomsky, writing his book The Culture of Terrorism in the immediate aftermath, was interested in something the hearings never touched.
Chomsky, a linguist at MIT already decades into a second life as a critic of American power, read the scandal against the grain. The problem the political class agreed to investigate was procedural: the executive had bypassed Congress, lied, run a rogue operation from the basement of the White House. What that framing quietly protected, he argued, was the policy itself — a war against Nicaragua that Congress had funded and the courts had condemned, waged by proxies who burned clinics and cooperatives. The outrage was reserved for the deception, not the deeds.
That gap, between what a scandal exposes and what it conveniently buries, is the book's real subject. It uses the Iran-Contra moment as a way into a larger question about how a country talks to itself about its own violence — and who gets called a terrorist.
The question we’re asking : When a government's own actions match the definition of terrorism, why does the word never attach to them?What we’ll see : How official narratives, a compliant press, and a shared set of unspoken assumptions decide which violence counts and which disappears.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The Iran-Contra scandal that wasn't
The Iran-Contra affair, as it entered American memory, was a story about broken rules. A cabal inside the executive branch had sold arms to a hostile power and diverted the money to Nicaraguan rebels after Congress cut off funding through the Boland Amendment. The investigations that followed treated this as the heart of the matter: unauthorized action, deception of the legislature, a constitutional crisis about who controls foreign policy. Chomsky's argument is that this framing was itself a kind of achievement — a way of turning a debate about ends into a debate about means.
What dropped out of view, he notes, was the war the money paid for. The contras were not an abstraction. Through the mid-1980s they operated against soft targets inside Nicaragua: health clinics, agricultural cooperatives, schools, and the civilians who staffed them. Chomsky assembles the documentation — human rights reports, testimony, the accounts of Americans who worked in the countryside — to describe a pattern of attacks on undefended civilian life. By any neutral definition, he argues, this was terrorism. The scandal machinery had no category for it.
02Chapter 2 — The terrorism the record doesn't count
Chomsky spends much of the book on a definitional problem that turns out to be political rather than semantic. Terrorism, in official usage, is violence directed at civilians for political ends. Applied consistently, he argues, the definition would capture a great deal of what powerful states do, including the United States and its clients. Applied as it actually is, it captures only the violence of enemies. The word does not describe a category of act; it describes a relationship to power.
He works through cases the American press treated as peripheral. In El Salvador and Guatemala, governments armed and trained with United States support conducted campaigns against their own populations — death squads, massacres of villages, the killing of priests and organizers — on a scale that dwarfed the acts routinely labeled terrorist in the coverage of the period. These were not called terrorism. They were folded into the language of counterinsurgency, of stability, of a difficult but necessary struggle against communism. The victims became statistics in a security narrative rather than casualties of terror.
03Chapter 3 — The manufacture of consent
The engine that keeps the double standard running, for Chomsky, is not censorship but the press itself. A free media in a democracy does not need directives from the state; it produces the acceptable range of opinion on its own, through the ordinary workings of ownership, sourcing, access, and professional common sense. The result is a debate that can be genuinely vigorous while resting on premises nobody questions. One can argue fiercely about whether the contra war was being run well without ever asking whether it should be run at all.
He is precise about how the boundaries get set. On Nicaragua, the mainstream spectrum ran from hawks who wanted more aggressive support for the contras to doves who worried the policy was costly or counterproductive. Both ends shared the assumption that the United States had the right to determine Nicaragua's future and that its intentions were fundamentally benign. The possibility that the war was straightforwardly criminal, as the World Court had found, sat outside the conversation. Dissent was permitted; it just had to accept the frame.
04Chapter 4 — What the culture agrees not to see
The title of the book points past any single scandal. A culture of terrorism, for Chomsky, is not merely a government that sponsors violence; it is a whole society that has arranged its language and its attention so that certain of its own actions cannot be perceived clearly. The deepest exercise of power he describes is not the mining of a harbor or the funding of a proxy army. It is the capacity to set the terms of debate so completely that the relevant questions never surface — to make some conclusions literally unthinkable inside a free and argumentative press.
This is why he resists the comforting reading of Iran-Contra as an aberration. Aberrations imply a healthy baseline from which the system briefly departed. His claim is the opposite: the scandal revealed the baseline. The willingness to attack civilians abroad, the reflex to reframe the crime as a procedural lapse, the media's cooperation in narrowing the story — these were not malfunctions but the machinery working as designed. What looked like accountability was the culture metabolizing its own violence and emerging reassured.
05Conclusion
The Iran-Contra hearings ended the way Chomsky expected. A handful of officials were charged, some convictions were later overturned, and the political class declared the system healed. The war against Nicaragua wound down not because it was judged criminal but because it had become expensive and inconvenient. The World Court ruling was never honored. The vocabulary that sorted violence by the identity of its author survived the scandal entirely, ready for the next occasion.
