A great human being …
Noam Chomsky on the Populist Groundswell, U.S. Elections, the Future of Humanity, and More
The renowned linguist, cognitive scientist, and historian on where we stand as an economy, as a country, and as human beings
We recently interviewed Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. He shared his thoughts with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) on foreign policy, dissent in the internet age, public education, corporate predation, who’s really messing with American elections, climate change, and more.
Lynn Parramore: You’ve been looking at politics and international relations for quite a long time. Over the decades, what are the continuities in these areas that stand out in your view?
Noam Chomsky: Well the continuities are the message of the Athenians to Melos: “the powerful do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must” [from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War“]. It’s often disguised in humanitarian terms. The modalities and the context change. The situations change but the message stays the same.
More below the fold …
LP: What do you see as the most significant changes?
NC: There are some steps towards imposing constraints and limits on state violence. For the most part, they come from inside. So for example, if you look at the United States and the kinds of actions that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson could carry out in Vietnam, they were possible because of almost complete lack of public attention.
I don’t know if you know, but as late as 1966 in Boston we could barely have an anti-war action because it would be violently broken up with the support of the press and so on. By then, South Vietnam had been practically destroyed. The war had expanded to other areas of Indochina. The Reagan administration, at the very beginning, tried to duplicate what Kennedy had done in 1961 with regard to Central America. So they had a white paper more or less modeled on Kennedy’s white paper that said the Communists are taking over. It was the usual steps, the propaganda, but it collapsed quickly. In the case of the Kennedy white paper, it took years before it was exposed as mostly fraudulent, but the Wall Street Journal, of all places, exposed the Reagan white paper in six months. There were protests by church groups and popular organizations and they had to kind of back off. What happened was bad enough but it was nothing like Indochina.
Iraq was the first time in the history of imperialism that there were massive protests before the war was even officially launched. It’s claimed by people that it failed, but I don’t think so. I mean, they never began to do the kinds of things that they could have done. There were no B-52 raids on heavily populated areas or chemical warfare of the kind they did in Indochina. By and large the constraints come from inside, and they understood that. By the time you got to the first Bush administration, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they came out with a national defense policy and strategic policy. What they basically said is that we’re going to have wars against what they called much weaker enemies and these have to be carried out quickly and decisively or else there will be embarrassment–a way of saying that popular reaction is going to set in. And that’s the way it’s been. It’s not pretty, but it’s some kind of constraint.
There are increasingly conditions in international law, like the Rome Treaty [the 1957 treaty that established the European Economic Community] and so on, but great powers just ignore them if they can get away with it, and getting away with it means ignoring the constraints of other states, which, in the case of, say, the U.S., don’t amount to much. Or internal constraints from changes inside the society, which have put in conditions of some significance, I think.
It’s almost unimaginable now that the U.S. could carry out the kind of war it did in Indochina, which is something recognized by elite opinion. A typical example is Mark Bowden’s op-ed in the New York Times the other day about [Walter] Cronkite and how he changed everything. Well, what did Cronkite say? He said, it doesn’t look as if we’re going to win. That’s the criticism of the war. That’s the way it was perceived at the time, and that’s the way it’s still perceived by intellectual elites. But if you look at public opinion–which doesn’t really get investigated much so it’s not too clear what it means, but it’s interesting–the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was running polls on all sorts of issues in the 70s and 80s, and when the Vietnam War ended in 1975, about 70 percent of the population described the war as fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake.
H/T des monde @EuroTrib
At every turn, the American government has shown its commitment to democracy and freedom abroad to be as shallow as its commitment to equality at home. Again and again, it has proven that its fear of democratic control over the world’s resources ran deeper than its pro-democratic rhetoric.
As Henry Kissinger, who served as a foreign-policy adviser to three presidents, said of the efforts by the Nixon administration to topple Chile’s elected socialist government, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” The same went for 1980s attempts to undermine leftist governments in tiny Nicaragua and even tinier Grenada.
More recently, this pattern has been repeated in the Middle East — now the central battleground for the US and its imperial competitors, because of its role as the center of global oil production.
If the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were initially justified by elites as necessary to defend American lives, destroy Al Qaeda, and eradicate terrorism, they accomplished none of those aims. Nor have they resulted in democratic governments in either country.
On the contrary, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in these wars have only destabilized the region and intensified sectarian divisions. Rather than supporting democratic movements, the United States has backed dictatorial regimes in Egypt and Bahrain, and helped strengthen the most vicious and reactionary monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Inspired by the recent front page story – A Day for Iraq War Hawks to Say They’re Sorry .
○ The Seven Deadly Sins of Failure in Iraq: A Retrospective Analysis of the Reconstruction
○ We didn’t stop the Iraq war. But we transformed British politics | The Guardian Opinion – 2013 |
○ Afghanistan again? The American Military’s repetition-compulsion complex
