including countries in which the United States has strong economic interests. This, Chomsky says, has prompted the United States to repeatedly intervene to quell "independent development, regardless of ideology" in regions of the world where it has little economic or safety interests. In one of his works, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Chomsky argues that this particular explanation accounts in part for the United States' interventions in Guatemala, Laos, Nicaragua, and Grenada, countries that pose no military threat to the US and have economic resources that are not important to the US establishment. Chomsky claims that the US government's Cold War policies were not primarily shaped by anti-Soviet paranoia, but rather toward preserving the United States' ideological and economic dominance in the world. In his book Deterring Democracy he argues that the conventional understanding of the Cold War as a confrontation of two superpowers is an "ideological construct." He insists that to truly understand the Cold War one must examine the underlying motives of the major powers. Those underlying motives can only be discovered by analyzing the domestic politics, especially the goals of the domestic elites in each country: Chomsky says the US economic system is primarily a state capitalist system, in which public funds are used to research and develop pioneering technology (the computer, the internet, radar, the jet plane etc.) largely in the form of defense spending, and once developed and mature these technologies are turned over to the corporate sector where civilian uses are developed for private control and profit. Chomsky often expresses his admiration for the civil liberties enjoyed by US citizens. According to Chomsky, other Western democracies such as France and Canada are less liberal in their defense of controversial speech than the US. However, he does not credit the American government for these freedoms but rather mass social movements in the United States that fought for them. The movements he most often credits are the abolitionist movement, the movements for workers' rights and trade union organization, and the fight for African-American civil rights. Chomsky is often sharply critical of other governments who suppress free speech, most controversially in the Faurisson affair but also of the suppression of free speech in Turkey. At the fifth annual Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture hosted by the Heyman Center for the Humanities in December 2009, Chomsky began his speech on "The Unipolar Moment and the Culture of Imperialism"