Noam Chomsky Speaks
on NAFTA, the media, activism, the Internet,
Haiti, Chiapas, Bosnia, and BurundiWith Jimmer Endres and Jon Slenk
March 9, 1994
This interview was recorded at the studios of WRCT Pittsburgh on the morning of March 9, 1994. This transcription appeared in the March 23 issue of the Student Union (Carnegie Mellon University). This interview was broadcast on "Eyes Wide Open" (WRCT Pittsburgh) on March 15 and 22. Noam Chomsky and WRCT Pittsburgh release this document into the public domain. You may copy and distribute it on a not-for-profit basis provided that this notice remains.
| Welcome to "Eyes Wide Open." Today we have a very special guest, who in a reversal of the cliche, does unfortunately need an introduction. Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, where he has revolutionized linguistics twice since the late fifties. Besides that career, Chomsky -- in his spare time -- is a leading critic of US foreign policy and its servants in the domestic media. He produces ten or twenty articles and, typically, two or three books a year on the topic.
Outside of the United States, Chomsky is well known, and his analysis of US foreign policy is widely heard and widely respected. Here at home, the institutions that come under his scrutiny, by and large, choose to answer his criticism by studiously ignoring him. Hence the necessity of this introduction.
Chomsky is a regular contributor to Z Magazine and Lies Of Our Times, and his recent books include: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (with Edward S. Herman) [Pantheon, 1988], Deterring Democracy [Verso, 1991], and Year 501: The Conquest Continues [South End Press, 1993].
We spoke by phone with Noam Chomsky at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on the morning of March 9, 1994.
Jon Slenk: Edward S. Herman and you have formulated an interesting propaganda model which we'd be interested in finding out more about. First of all, could you just give a thumbnail sketch of this model?
Noam Chomsky: The propaganda model, in my view, is kind of a truism. It says that you'd expect institutions to work in their own interests, and that they wouldn't function for long otherwise. If you take a look at the structure of the American media, there's various layers and components -- the National Enquirer that you pick up at the supermarket is not the same as the Washington Post -- but the basic structure with regard to the information part of it, not just the entertainment part, is that there are what are sometimes called "agenda-setting media": a number of major media outlets -- the Washington Post, the New York Times, the newsweeklies, CBS news, and so on -- there's a small number of those. They have the essential resources, they set the framework. Other, smaller media scattered around the country basically take their framework and adapt it, because if the newspapers in, say, Pittsburgh want to know about Somalia, very few of them are going to be able to send out their own correspondents.
Slenk: So, for example, the AP news wire.
Chomsky: Yeah, AP news is another one, right. They basically set the structure of the thing. If you take a look at these agenda-setting institutions, they are big corporations -- in fact mega-corporations. They're linked into even bigger conglomerates for the most part; they're also highly profitable. They, like other corporations, have a product and a market. The market is other businesses. So the economic structure of a newspaper is that it sells readers to advertisers.
Jimmer Endres: In other words, they're not trying to sell newspapers to people.
Chomsky: No. Very often a journal, if it's in financial trouble, will try to cut down its circulation. And in fact what they'll often try to do is up-scale their circulation because that increases their advertising rates. In effect, what they're doing is selling audiences to advertisers. For the agenda-setting media -- say the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, those -- they're actually selling very privileged audiences to other businesses. The readers of those journals are in the political class and the decision-making class, overwhelmingly. Suppose you're an intelligent Martian looking at this system. What you see is big corporations selling relatively privileged audiences in the decision-making classes to other businesses. Now you ask the question, What picture of the world do you expect to come out of this? A plausible answer: one that reflects the perspectives and interests and tastes and so on of the sellers, the buyers, and the market. It would be pretty surprising if that weren't the case.
I don't call this even a theory; it's virtually an observation. And the big job is to see if that's true. The next thing is to try to test the conclusions, that are natural, and would be surprising if they weren't true, and see if they in fact are confirmed. And they're just confirmed to an overwhelming extent. These predictions have been tested -- I mean, this isn't physics, but by the standards of the social sciences, it's very hard to think of anything that's been that well-confirmed.
Endres: Why don't we do that now? Why don't we apply this model to some current stories?
Chomsky: I should say that the real test -- although I'm happy to do that, I think that that's just what we ought to do -- let me just make it clear that if you really want to test the model, you don't just look at a particular story. What you have to try to do is to show systematic behavior. If you take a look at our joint book [Manufacturing Consent], it tries to find parallel cases where power interests in the United States would want them to be interpreted differently, and then asks whether in fact the media system does interpret them differently.
That's a long task. The first chapter of the book looks at human rights violations in enemy countries and in our own domains, and shows just a radically different treatment of them. That's systematic study. But let's look at particular cases, that's fine.
Endres: How is the American media treating Bosnia? What I've noticed is that there's a focus on atrocities, and misery; you see black and white photo essays in Time, showing people suffering, and there's this kind of dramatic soap-opera quality to it. The only motive that I can imagine is to get people upset, and terrified, and to have them say "we ought to do something," and to prepare us for war, really.
Chomsky: In the case of Bosnia, here a comparative analysis is to the point. Instead of just asking, How are they covering Bosnia, let's ask how they're covering parallel atrocities in different places. There are some. For example, what's happening in Angola is comparable, probably worse than what's going on in Bosnia. There are the same UN observers in both places; they say Angola is worse. In Sarajevo, for example, I think about 9,000 people have been killed in the last couple of years. But in one town in Angola, Cuito, which has been under bombardment for years, about 25,000 have been killed. And the atrocities seem a good bit worse.
Now, there's a comparison: two events taking place in the world, let's say comparable, though in fact Angola's probably worse. We can take a look at the coverage. And it's striking that you would naturally ask about Bosnia and not about Angola. There has been no coverage of Angola, essentially. Occasionally, you'll find a little thing. Actually I think I've clipped just about everything I've found. And there's some; if you're really looking, you can find it out. So for example what I just told you was in the press, but you really had to search. The British press covers it more closely.
So why this great disparity? Well, that's an interesting question. Now we have a question to ask.
Endres: Besides the obvious, there might be sort of a racist element to the disparity there.
Chomsky: Partly, it's racist, but I think it's more. What happens in the Balkans poses threats and dangers to rich, privileged people -- to the wealthy countries in Europe, to the United States itself, and so on. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled to Germany. The thing could extend to central Europe. Now, these are serious problems that the Europeans and the United States are worried about. On the other hand, if people slaughter each other in Angola, you know, it doesn't harm us, so we don't care, so let 'em do it. Furthermore, there's another factor. In the case of the Balkans, it's easy to focus the blame -- Serb peasants, who are probably communists anyway. Obvious bad guys. In the case of Angola, it's a little trickier. The major blame lies on a man who the United States was hailing as one of the great heroes of the twentieth century and one of the greatest freedom fighters, and pouring aid and military aid on him; every time he came to the United States he was hailed as a great hero.
Endres: This is sounding like a broken record.
Chomsky: And probably, he's still getting aid from South Africa, and possibly even the United States through Zaire, our ally.
Endres: What's his name?
Chomsky: Jonas Savimbi. If you go back ten years, he was showing up at the big conservative fund-raising rallies, and Jeane Kirkpatrick was talking about him as one of the great heroes of our time, and so on and so forth. He was the recipient of enormous US aid through South Africa and Zaire, to try to keep that war going. We were one of the very few governments, maybe the only government, not to recognize the government of Angola and in fact to be fighting a war to overthrow it.
Well, okay, there was an election, and he lost. By a lot. And then he went to war right away. And that's torn the country to shreds. And that's just not a good story. On the other hand, if you can be very pious about the atrocities committed by the miserable Serb peasants, well, that's a lot easier.
So those are differences. And the race difference is also there. You're right about that.
Now, there we have a comparison. And that tells us something about the media.
It's not the only case, incidentally. Like Burundi, for example. Just yesterday a missionary reported a couple hundred people killed, and in one week a few months ago, one week, there were something like a hundred or two hundred thousand people killed.
Endres: What! In Burundi? This is recently?
Chomsky: Yeah, it was within the last few months. I didn't see it reported in the United States, but it was all over the British press.
Endres: That's unbelievable!
Chomsky: Well, no, I'm afraid not. It's just not a concern to US interests, so the media don't care. That's the number of people who have been killed in all the fighting in the Balkans. And that was about one week. The United States has no particular interests there one way or another.
This isn't the first time, incidentally. Ed Herman and I wrote a book back in 1979 on these questions [Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. I (The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism) and vol. II (After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology). South End Press, 1979]. We didn't call it the "propaganda model," but it was the same story: looking at comparative reporting. We distinguished three kinds of atrocities: what we called "benign atrocities," "nefarious atrocities," and "constructive atrocities."
Constructive atrocities are the ones we like. So they get very favorable coverage. When the present government of Indonesia came into power in 1965, the first thing it did was massacre about 750,000 people within four months. And that was reported. It was reported with great euphoria; it was one of the greatest things that ever happened. Actually in a recent book of mine, Year 501, I have a chapter in which I just run through the press coverage of that. They were delighted. Time magazine was talking about the "boiling bloodbath" which is killing hundreds of thousands of people, and talking about how great it is, and so on and so forth. That was a constructive atrocity.
Endres: In what terms could you frame a "boiling bloodbath" as something constructive?
Chomsky: Oh, you know, they were killing communists. Meaning landless peasants. They were killing landless peasants, mostly, and they were in fact destroying the only mass political party in the country, namely the Communist Party. And this was '65, so this was offered as a justification for our war in Vietnam. The idea was that because we were holding strong in Vietnam, we encouraged the Indonesian generals to carry out the "necessary task" of "cleansing their society" by massacring hundreds of thousands of people.
Endres: I can't help but laugh, but it's not funny.
Chomsky: No, it's not funny. Take a look at that chapter. You can barely believe it. The New York Times was talking about "a gleam of light in Asia", "hope where there once was none." So that's a constructive bloodbath. It's great; we love it, we applaud it.
A nefarious bloodbath is one that's committed by some enemy, say Pol Pot. And there, we started beating our breasts, and "How can human beings be so horrible?" and "Oh, God, what's the world coming to?" and the usual stuff. That's a nefarious bloodbath.
And then a benign bloodbath is one where we just don't care one way or another.
Endres: Angola or Burundi.
Chomsky: Actually, we gave the example of Burundi. This was 1979, and there had just been a huge massacre there in which a couple hundred thousand people were killed, and it also wasn't covered. That was a benign bloodbath.
The same is true here, today, in that categorization: Bosnia is a nefarious bloodbath -- you know, we can focus the blame on the bad guys, and besides, we care about it because the interests of rich white people could be harmed. Burundi is a benign bloodbath; we don't care one way or another. And Angola, it doesn't fit nicely. It's kind of semi-constructive, it's our guy doing it, probably still supported by us, for all I know.
So those are differences, and those are systematic differences. We had two full volumes of material on that in '79 and a lot more in the later book. Bosnia is a case in point. Now, if you take a look at the actual coverage, in my opinion it's better than the norm. And the reason is that the United States has no specific interest. We've essentially ceded control over that one to Europe. However, there are some things which are really not being reported as they should be, in my opinion.
The question of justice in Bosnia by this point, you can forget about it -- nobody cares, and they're not going to do anything about it. The only question is how can you dampen down the conflict so that the least damage is done to people.
Endres: Are those questions being addressed?
Chomsky: Well, there are some interesting and important issues, which are not being discussed, and ought to be, because they're things Americans ought to be thinking about. They have to do with American society.
What's really needed there, as the UN commanders are saying constantly, is more ground troops. The only thing that can sort of quiet things down, a little bit, is ground troops, who can separate warring elements, be a buffer, provide some humanitarian aid, and so forth. They haven't done a perfect job by any means, but it's been a basically constructive job.
Well, there's one country that won't send ground troops. Namely, us. We'll bomb. You know, the United States is happy to bomb. But they'll send no ground troops.
Endres: For the obvious reasons.
Chomsky: Actually, the reason is something that is not discussed, and ought to be discussed. The United States is disqualified from any participation in anything of a humanitarian nature. The reason is very simple. We have a unique military doctrine. I know of no other country that has it. It is US military doctrine that US military forces are not allowed to be placed under any threat. Other countries aren't like that. The rules of engagement for the Canadian and French and Indian and other forces in Bosnia are very tight. They can be under mortar attack and they don't shoot back. On the other hand, with US forces, look at Somalia. If some teenager looks at you the wrong way, you send in the helicopter gunships. Because our forces are not allowed to be under any threat. Now that disqualifies the US from participation in anything that involves civilians -- any sort of civil conflict, anything with civilian elements -- because we just use massive force to get rid of anybody we don't like. And that goes right back to the days of Indian fighting. This is a deeply rooted US business. We use massive force to destroy, and we have to be free from any attack. I think you can find the explanation for it in American history. The United States has never been under attack, since the War of 1812. We just attack others. And we're overwhelmingly powerful most of the time, so we just wipe 'em out.
These are reasons that it makes sense for the US not to send forces; it would be a disaster.
But these are things that ought to be discussed. Why is it that we are off the world spectrum on this? That's something that we ought to be thinking about.
Endres: Well, being off the world spectrum, I don't think that these questions are going to be raised.
Chomsky: Well, here you see the real -- I wouldn't call it a defect, it's just so obvious -- but a property of the media system, the whole information system. Things that are very unpleasant about the United States are not going to be discussed. And that's very pertinent at this point, because exactly what is needed there is ground forces. Not bombers.
Endres: Let's talk a little bit about the US now. A phrase that pops up in your writing a lot, especially when you're talking about this propaganda model, is "the doctrinal system." What exactly do you mean by that phrase, "the doctrinal system"?
Chomsky: Every country's got one. It's the system that filters outside reality -- the world, domestic society, what's happening, history -- and presents it to the public. It includes schools, universities, journals of opinion, mass media, that whole range of systems. That's the doctrinal system.
Endres: And how does it work in this country, as opposed to other places? In particular, I'm interested in hearing what you think of the educational system, both public schools and universities.
Chomsky: Well, actually, American universities -- I've spent a lot of time in universities around the world, and I think American universities are the best in the world. But that's not to say they're wonderful; there's a lot of problems with them. There's a good reason why there's a flow of, say, graduate students here, much more than from here. We also have a mass higher education system, which is rare. And it sort of functions, by comparative standards; it's not great, again, but by comparative standards, it functions quite well. Certainly far better than, say, continental Europe.
On the other hand, if you look at the way the world is presented through our doctrinal system, it is profoundly distorted. Let's take one thing that's changed, because this is interesting. The original sin of American society is the extermination of the native population. That's not very pretty. There were maybe eight or ten million native Americans here, at a level of civilization that was not very different from the colonists, in many respects -- stone houses, advanced agriculture, organized societies, constitutional systems, lots of things.
Endres: In fact, the Founding Fathers acknowledged this, although that has been buried.
Chomsky: Oh, yeah. Even as late as the late nineteenth century, when you read, say, Henry Adams' history of the Jeffersonian period, he starts off by talking about the "invasion of America." And, you know, they knew what was going on.
Endres: You don't hear that today.
Chomsky: No. Now, you ask, How was this incident dealt with? That's kind of like asking, How do the Germans deal with the Holocaust? Well, for hundreds of years, it was totally falsified. I remember my own schooling, but when my daughter went to school, and she was a fourth grader in 1969, right after the My Lai massacre I was looking through one of her textbooks, fourth grade textbooks. And there happened to be a discussion of the Pequot massacre; it happened in 1640, right around here. And it was praised, as a magnificent thing. It was being described through the eyes of some kid, and he says I wish I were a man and had been there, you know, that sort of thing.
I mean, this was a brutal massacre, in which the colonists waited until the men had left the village, and then went in and just murdered all the women and children, hoping that would intimidate the Pequots enough so that they would flee, which they did. And that was being praised.
Endres: I grew up in Northeastern Ohio, the Great Lakes area, where I was taught to think that it was a good thing that we used germ warfare -- infected blankets -- to kill the Pontiacs and those people.
Chomsky: Really? Well, I grew up the same way. When I was a kid, we played Cowboys and Indians. We were the Cowboys and we killed the Indians. This is as if they played Aryans and Jews in Germany, you know, where the Aryans go out and kill the Jews. This went on in our country -- I don't know when you went to school -- but I think into the 1970s, at least.
Endres: I was in fourth grade in 1979, I guess.
Chomsky: Yeah, so into the 1980s this was going on -- just fantastic. Well, it's changed, finally. Which is interesting. The change started in the sixties, with all the movements and the ferment. They had a big civilizing effect on the country. It was slow to come; International Women's Day yesterday is another example of it. That's on the agenda because of the sixties movements. By now, I'm pretty sure, if you look at the elementary schools you're not going to find that stuff, in most places at least. What you find isn't going to be all that great, but it won't be that, at least. It won't be celebration of slaughter.
Well, those are changes: very slow, it's hundreds of years -- and shameful; we ought to think about it. But that's an example of how things can change, and sometimes even do. And it's kind of interesting to see that this change has caused extreme frenzy. The whole hysteria about Political Correctness is largely a reaction to the fact that the country's getting more civilized. And there are a lot of people who are terrified of it. They want the good old days, you know, when you smashed people in the face, and we were great and everybody else was rotten and you kick 'em if you don't like 'em. And the fact that a lot of young people don't like that any more is driving elite groups to absolute frenzies. It's an interesting campaign, this PC thing.
Endres: How does this work? It's interesting that our system, unlike in Asia and to a lesser extent Europe, there is no Ministry of Education. Everything is nominally local and community-based. How does this kind of orthodoxy continue?
Chomsky: That's an interesting question. We have a very uniform ideological system, and pretty narrow. And how it works is quite interesting. This ought to be the major topic of study, actually, for cultural studies in the United States. We study how propaganda works in other countries, say, Russia or something; that's not very interesting, because it's transparent. The way it works here is very interesting. We have a very free society, maybe the freest in the world, in the sense that the government doesn't have a lot of capacity to intervene to control things, as compared with other countries. Much less than in England and Canada, say. On the other hand, it's very doctrinaire, very uniform; it's deeply fundamentalist. We're sort of like Iran -- that's no joke, actually -- if you look at us on cross-cultural studies. In fact, there was an article in the Christian Science Monitor yesterday, criticizing the media because they don't reflect the religious sentiments of Americans. And they give some figures, which are probably accurate. The United States is just way off the spectrum of Western countries in this regard. We're deeply fundamentalist, very doctrinaire; the elite intellectual culture is extremely narrow, even by our own standards. I just gave a talk last night on "Prospects for Democracy" and one of the things I did was to just take a look at how the question of how democracy was understood from Thomas Jefferson right up through the early part of the twentieth century -- people like John Dewey -- and compare the way it's looked at now. And it's quite interesting. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was bitterly opposed to corporations, and banking institutions, which barely existed in his day. They were just coming into existence.
Endres: That was the major debate between Jefferson and Hamilton at the time.
Chomsky: Yeah. And Jefferson warned that if they continued to exist we would just turn into a "slave state." Adam Smith had similar views. Go right up to leading democratic thinkers -- like, say, John Dewey, very mainstream, the leading American social philosopher in the 1920s. For him, democracy meant that you had to dismantle the private system of power. Politics, he said, is just the "shadow" cast by big business over the public system. And obviously, unless you get rid of the shadow, you don't have any politics. Workers have to take control over industry, you have to have industrial democracy, you have to dismantle absolutist private power of any kind and place it under public control -- all of this stuff is as American as apple pie.
Endres: And it's not what you get from the versions of these figures that have gone into the pantheon.
Chomsky: Of course it's not what you get -- if it's even mentioned, it's considered some Maoist, Marxist lunacy. But this is just straight American thought, up until recently, when we've become extremely narrow, and by now, democracy just means big business casts its shadow over the political system. Period.
Slenk: Do you think that all this implies that things are getting worse in general in America, or better? For example, your comment on younger generations accepting this political correctness -- is this a positive indication? Is it widespread enough? Should we really feel like there is hope?
Chomsky: Well, I think things are going in both directions, like usually. There isn't a single tendency. The willingness of people to confront some of the realities of our history for the first time, like the extermination of the native population; the concern for women's issues and respect for other cultures; concerns for the environment; opposition to atrocities and aggression; those are all positive developments. You can trace them straight back to their origins in the movements of the 1960s, which have since expanded and proliferated and reached a very substantial part of the population. That's all to the good; we're just becoming a more civilized place.
On the other hand, there's a reaction to it, as there always has been in American history. If you look through our history, there's a regular cycle of political ferment, activism, labor organizing, and independent thought, and it's always followed by sharp repression.
Endres: Is that a typically American cycle? Or is that more general?
Chomsky: I wouldn't say it's typically American, but it's somewhat more striking than in other comparable countries which happen to be a bit more tolerant. This is a business-run society. Business is highly class-conscious; they're fighting a vicious class war, and they know it, and they want to keep people basically demoralized, and separated and atomized.
So you take a look at the 1890s. There was a lot of popular ferment, and then there was a big red-scare sort of thing, which crushed it. After the First World War, the same thing happened. The Wilson administration ran a very vicious red scare, which made the country very quiescent in the 1920s. Labor was beaten back, independent thought was eliminated, and so on. In the 1930s, with the Depression, ferment started again -- the war kind of put things on hold -- but right in the late forties, there was a big counter-attack. The victories for labor were reversed; the rights of organizing were effectively eliminated. There was a very sharp narrowing of the political spectrum; it was called McCarthyism but he was actually a latecomer. The 1950s were very quiet again, like the twenties. During the sixties, again you had ferment, connected with the Vietnam war and other things. And this time there was also a counter-reaction, a big counter-reaction. That's why you have big foundations like Bradley and Olan and the rest of them, trying to narrow and beat back the eduational system, so it becomes even more right wing and all that sort of stuff.
And interestingly, this time it didn't work. That's an exception in American history. This time the ferment is continuing, maybe even expanding. And that's what we're right in the middle of. It's kind of an ideological struggle in which there's a lot of things going on. It's pretty complex. In the general population, there's a good deal of questioning and dissidence. The elite culture, on the other hand, is trying very hard to narrow it, to beat it back, to get back to quiescence and obedience. And it's a continuing struggle. It's a good sign.
Endres: You seem to be spilling more ink on the domestic scene recently, if only because the global arrangements are shifting such that the consequences are becoming more apparent domestically -- for example the fallout from the movements towards so-called free trade.
Chomsky: That's absolutely right. This is in part just a consequence of the globalization of the economic system, which is in fact turning the United States into kind of a third world.
Endres: In what way?
Chomsky: Well, you know, a typical third world country has very sharp disparities of wealth and poverty. The wealth -- in Mexico or Brazil or something -- is very narrowly concentrated, a few percent of the population. And there's a huge superfluous population which is basically worthless for wealth production, and there they live in various kinds of misery and terror. This very sharply two-tiered model is typical of our dependencies of the third world. And we're not quite that way yet, and we're rich enough so that we probably won't be, but we're moving in that direction. Structurally it's looking like that more and more.
That's partly a result of the internationalization of the economy. In the last twenty years it's become a lot easier to shift production elsewhere, to shift banking elsewhere, to move capital very quickly from one place to another to seek the maximal possible profit, which means maximum exploitation, minimum concern for the environment, and so on. That's a terrific weapon against the domestic populations. And it's used that way. NAFTA and GATT are exactly aimed at that.
Endres: Sure. If you hadn't read the New York Times, or any of the papers that follow its agenda, you would see that that's what NAFTA is about. But of course all the coverage was to tell about all the wonderful things that it was going to do for us.
Chomsky: It'll do wonderful things for a sector of the population. In fact, if you really look closely, they even tell you who they are. The day after the vote on NAFTA, which of course the press was highly enthusiastic for since it was a big business thing, the day after the vote, the New York Times published its first analysis of the effect on the New York region. And it was quite illuminating, not that it was a surprise, but it was interesting to see them say it. They were very upbeat; they said it was going to be great. And then they told you who the gainers would be, and who the losers would be. Well, it turns out the gainers would be banks, investors, corporate lawyers, public relations firms, you know, that kind of stuff. And the losers -- there was about a sentence on the losers -- among the losers they said would be women, blacks, Hispanics, and semi-skilled workers. Semi-skilled workers is about 75% of the workforce.
Endres: Me, in other words.
Chomsky: The population. They're the losers. But the right guys, they'll be doing great. So therefore it was very upbeat. And that's exactly correct. These are social policies which are designed to increase polarization. Very likely to have the same effect in Mexico.
Endres: What does the uprising in Chiapas -- in the southernmost and poorest state of Mexico -- what does that have to tell us about NAFTA?
Chomsky: A lot.
Endres: And are those lessons being even observed?
Chomsky: Well, yeah, there are people here who are observing them, actually.
Endres: I'm talking about in the mainstream.
Chomsky: In the mainstream, well, that's interesting. I'll tell you a personal story. I was asked by the Washington Post, for the first time in my life, to write an op-ed on this. And I did, a long one. They asked me for a long, two-thousand word op-ed, which I wrote, and it was supposed to go in the weekend review section. And at the last minute, in fact I think after the deadline, it was killed by some top editor. So it didn't appear, although it does appear in In These Times, a couple of weeks later.
And it's about exactly this topic. The Chiapas uprising was timed for the day of the beginning of NAFTA; that was symbolic. Not because their problems start with NAFTA, but because they describe NAFTA as a "death sentence" for the indigenous populations and in fact for the poor generally. And the Chiapas revolt had enormous support within Mexico. The Mexican government backed off from just destroying it by violence because there was just too much popular support. Polls showed about 75% support. Which is not surprising, because this "economic miracle" in Mexico that everyone raves about left out about 85% of the population -- not only left them out, but they declined in absolute terms during the period of the "miracle."
Endres: That's standard.
Chomsky: Yeah, that's exactly what these policies are designed for. But we only talk about the rich guys, and they did fine, so it's a miracle.
Compare Chiapas to South Central Los Angeles a couple of years ago, the uprising there. In a sense, they were about the same thing. They were about the social policies which are marginalizing and making superfluous a huge part of the population. South Central Los Angeles is an area where people used to have jobs. There were industries, there were furniture factories, heavy industry. Well, they've gone to places where you can get cheaper labor and you don't have to worry about the environment. So these people are essentially useless. They have no human rights any more because they don't contribute to wealth production. And they're just declining.
Well, Chiapas is a similar situation. Of course, Chiapas is objectively, much poorer -- fewer television sets and bathtubs and so on. On the other hand, it's striking that in Chiapas, one of the most impoverished sectors of the hemisphere, there is still a lively, vibrant society, which has a cultural tradition of freedom and social organization. So they were able to respond in a highly constructive way. They were able to organize, they have positions, they have public support.
Now take a look at South Central Los Angeles. That was just a riot. This is the response of a completely demoralized society, where it's just disintegrated. It doesn't have social bonds, it doesn't have goals, doesn't have hopes. And that's the difference. That tells a lot about the United States, actually.
Endres: The media picture of the Zapatistas is not the one you're painting here. They can't refer to them without noting the fact that they're "gun-toting" and "ski-mask-wearing;" of course they leave out the part that if the Mexican government knew who they were, they would be delivered to their relatives as a pile of bones, as happened a few weeks ago.
Chomsky: Of course. The problem is, the Mexican government knows that they just reflect the general population. They can read the polls that say 75% support. In fact, they've had a tremendous appeal in Mexico. This Subcommander Marcos, this guy who's the spokesman, he's one of the big popular figures in Mexico.
Endres: I read something, there's a poll that says he's considered the sexiest something or other.
Chomsky: The commercial system is of course picking him up and trying to cheapen it, like they do with rock music and stuff, but it reflects something. It reflects the appeal. They've really captured the imagination of people in Mexico and they have a very constructive program. You look at their program and it makes a lot of sense.
Slenk: It seems like you process a potentially insane amount of bad news. And I wonder, What is it that either keeps you going or keeps you hopeful? You've commented that you have a basic faith in people's common sense. Is this what you're holding out for?
Chomsky: Yeah, basically. It varies, depending on mood, but it doesn't mean much. I mean, what's the difference what I think? But if you look at history and just your personal experience, it seems to me there's plenty of evidence to indicate that people are perfectly capable of doing quite wonderful things. They often don't, they often do quite horrible things. Any sane person is going to try to shift the balance. What more can one say? It doesn't matter what you think the probabilities are. Suppose you think that the probabilities are, say, two percent that things can get better. Well, okay, then you pay attention to that two percent.
Endres: I personally happen to share your faith in people. People have an ability to use their common sense to figure out what the hell's going on, and analyze it in constructive ways, and defend themselves from manipulation. People can certainly do that. But they're not. Do you have any opinions on why that is?
Chomsky: Sure. Let's take a family in downtown Boston where, say, the husband's a telephone lineman and the wife's a secretary, and they've got three kids, and they both have to work full time and maybe overtime just to feed them. If they don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's going on in the world, well, I don't consider that a crime.
On the other hand, let's go over to the Harvard Faculty Club, where they have basically nothing to do. They have every resource and they're highly privileged. Suppose that they refuse to figure out what's happening in the world, and in fact work very hard to not see it, and to prevent others from seeing it. Well, that's different. In fact, that's the reality.
Endres: I have two acquaintances: one is a poli sci undergrad at Columbia; she's specializing in Latin American concerns. The other is a graduate student at George Washington in third world debt-wonking. One would expect that they would at least reflect a basic understanding of the concerns of the people in those areas: not so. Furthermore, in conversation with these people -- who I hasten to add are bright young people -- to even bring up basic questions of assumptions about US power, say, is to invite a dose of venom.
Chomsky: That's right. But that's the way the doctrinal system works. It is a system that filters and shapes and controls to try to lead to conformity to power and lack of questioning. And in fact, people who don't succumb to those rules are usually filtered out in some fashion. That's serious. Here we're getting to the core of the propaganda system.
Endres: Abstractly, that's the core. Let's turn it around and look at some very pragmatic concerns for activism, for what we can do. How can we go about counteracting that?
Chomsky: No big secrets. You try to construct organizations, construct your own media, engage in constructive activities, often local activities; international issues like NAFTA, health care, welfare issues, whatever's locally going on in your neighborhood. There's tons of things. By involving people in those things, they learn. They become educated, they see the world differently. If it can extend to a sufficient scale, it can have a real impact. As I said, the country's a lot different from what it was thirty years ago, just in those kinds of ways.
Slenk: You've managed to shine in two very important fields. In linguistics, you've been amazing, and also in your outspokenness on the propaganda model. How do you manage to do this? Do you sleep?
Chomsky: Yeah, sometimes. I got back from a talk last night about midnight, and started going through huge piles of newspapers and tons of mail and so on and so forth. And I got started again this morning, and here we are [10:00am]. That's the way it goes all the time.
Slenk: Have you done this mostly on your own? Have you had plenty of aid? It seems like striking out on your own this way is suicidal.
Chomsky: On this side of the fence, you do it alone.
Slenk: Really?
Chomsky: Oh, yeah. I mean, somebody will address my letters or something. But it's obvious that you're not going to get resources for this kind of work. In fact they'd pay me not to do it. Other forms of association develop which are very helpful. There are a lot of people around the world who are in the same position, and without any planning, you tend to get into contact. So a lot of my correspondence is around the world. A lot of my time, in fact, is spent clipping journals, newspapers, professional journals and so on -- actually I bought a Xerox machine for this -- and Xeroxing materials to send to people overseas, who are interested in similar things and don't have access to what I see. And they do the same for me. So there's a ton of information flow around the world, from essentially dissidents in many countries. And it turns out to be extremely informative.
So places that I'm interested in, I just know more. I can easily get to know more than they do in the CIA or any academic research center. And the reason is that I have smart agents, not dumb agents. They know what's important and they can dig things out. The countries that I'm really interested in, say Israel -- I could never read the Hebrew press by myself, it's just too much of a job. But if I have friends there, clipping for me and sending me articles, they're picking what is important -- we sort of share understanding. And I do the same for them. A lot of the work I've done on southeast Asia, Timor and so on, comes mostly from the Australian press. Just tons of stuff from there. And it's reciprocal.
These turn out to be extremely useful networks. These are the ways in which people lacking in resources can pool their efforts, and end up being quite powerful. That's exactly what organization means. And these days, it can be international. A lot of these people are personal friends who I've never seen.
Endres: This brings us to another interesting question. You brought this up in the Rolling Stone interview, and in some other places, talking about honest journalists who -- fully aware of the constraints that they face -- are "working within the system," for lack of a better phrase. The only person I can think of in this country, although I certainly don't read everything, is Alexander Cockburn. Who else is there?
Chomsky: Oh, there are quite a few. I purposely didn't mention any names because some of them are very well-known people, and they don't want me to say publicly that they are trying to see how much they can get around the constraints of the major media.
Endres: Because it's a pretty intricate chess game.
Chomsky: It is, yeah. But some of the top investigative reporters, for example, are very conscious of the way the system works, and in fact kind of play it like a violin. They look for moments when things can be sneaked through.
Endres: What kind of tactics do they use? How does this play itself out?
Chomsky: Well, there are a lot of tactics. If you're in the media, you right off know that every couple of years there's a scandal, like Irangate or something like that, because the whole system's so corrupt that occasionally things blow up. After a scandal, there's kind of a window of opportunity: the media always open up a bit after a scandal. The constraints on what's allowed in drop a little bit and you can sneak in stories. And people do that. They'll store up stories on topics that they've researched, and wait for a time when it's going to be a little more lax and you can put it in.
Or you look for the right editor. You frame things, you write things very carefully. Actually I know people who have gone from the newsweeklies to television, precisely because -- although they get much less time and space on television, you get maybe ninety seconds -- it's your ninety seconds. There's not a lot they can do with it. If you send something to the newsweeklies they totally rewrite it and it comes out the opposite of what you meant.
Endres: You were talking about global networking, which my impression is that you do with paper mail. For me, the Internet is just an amazing resource.
Chomsky: That's right.
Endres: Do you use the Internet much?
Chomsky: To some extent. By now, a fair amount of the material I get comes through the Internet. I just find I can't use it much, because the amount of information is such that I get totally swamped. I have friends who filter it for me, and that's a help.
Endres: In general, what do you think are the positive and negative impacts of technology, particularly communications technology, on democracy and activism?
Chomsky: Well, that's a big issue. In fact, it's kind of reminiscent of what happened with radio about the 1920s and '30s. When radio came along -- it's like the Internet, it's a fixed resource, it's not like selling shoes. Which means it was obviously going to be government regulated. No alternative. And the question is, How would it work? Would it be devoted to the public interest, and be essentially a democratizing instrument, or would it be turned over to private power, and commercialized?
There was a struggle over it. There were public interest groups, and church groups, and labor unions, and so on, who wanted it to be a public interest entity. And they lost. It was totally commercialized. And the United States, I think, was alone in the world in that respect. Every other country I know of, at least, went the other way. When television came along, again the US split from the rest of the world, but it wasn't even an issue this time; business just took it over, period.
We're now facing a similar question.
Endres: This is a very vital and vibrant fight at the moment.
Chomsky: Absolutely. And it's very important to know how it goes. It could turn out, as you described, to be a democratizing force, with public participation, or it could end up being a mechanism for corporate propaganda, creating artificial wants, and buying things faster and so on. I think it's going to be the second, just because of the balance of forces.
It doesn't have to be. It could be very significant. This is something that people ought to fight about, because it doesn't have to turn out that way.
Endres: You've said numerous times that you feel "privileged" to have been able to witness people fighting for their freedoms in Vietnam, and Laos, and Palestine, and Nicaragua, and maybe other places, for all I know. In what ways can those people -- active and engaged and fighting -- teach us, here in the US, and in what ways are our fights different?
Chomsky: It's different, but increasingly similar. Take Chiapas, Mexico. They have a lot to teach us. They teach us how a very impoverished and oppressed community has succeeded in maintaining a vibrant tradition of freedom and democracy which we have lost, we have allowed to slip out of our hands, and which we better recover, or the world's going to be in trouble.
Endres: Why is it so important for the rest of the world that we maintain a humanistic culture?
Chomsky: The United States is so rich and powerful that nothing much can happen in the world if we don't let it happen. There won't be any freedom in Mexico if we don't allow it.
Take Haiti, right next door. Haiti is a case where there was a major victory for democracy. A really major victory. Here again is a deeply impoverished country which developed a very rich array of popular organizations, grassroots organizations, and they swept into office a candidate with a populist program which was extremely successful. The international lending institutions were full of praise for it, and gave them all sorts of aid.
Endres: You're talking about [Jean-Bertrand] Aristide.
Chomsky: Aristide. And he was overthrown very quickly, and since then the United States has been trying to keep him out. That's what we're trying to do right now, in fact.
Endres: Contrary to what the tenor of the story has been.
Chomsky: Yeah. You just look at the details and it's quite clear. The US is just trying to drag it along.
In fact, it's not well known, but there's supposed to be an embargo [imposed after the coup by the Organization of American States]. US trade with Haiti increased last year under Clinton. Furthermore, Haiti is exporting food to the United States. This is a starving country. The exports of food from Haiti to the United States went up by a factor of thirty-six last year. That's fruit, nuts, citrus, melons, things like that. It's mind boggling.
Meanwhile, they can't figure out how to tell the Dominican military to monitor the border. The Dominican military, they're like in our pocket, but we can't figure out how to tell them to monitor the border [to stanch the illegal flow of petroleum and narcotics that props up the military government].
The Haitian military lives on narcotrafficing. Take a look: you'll notice that the US Navy and Air Force have not stopped a single vessel--plane or ship -- bringing drugs in and out of Haiti. I mean, they're blockading the place. They stop every single refugee boat, but they can't find any narcotrafficers. In fact, they were asked about this by the Black Caucus, and they got an answer, which was reported in the press with a straight face: they said, `Well, the problem is that the Haitian military' -- namely, the narcotrafficers, who we work with on this, interestingly -- `they don't have radar.' The US Navy and Air Force can't figure out a way to remedy this defect, naturally.
The thing is a joke. The US is standing by while the popular organizations get decimated. They want an arrangement in which Aristide does what they call "broaden his government." "Broaden" means kick out the two thirds of the population that voted for him, and bring in the military and the business sectors and let them run it. That's broadening the government. And then he'll be allowed to be a symbolic figure. And if the Clinton administration can just drag this out for a year or two, it's finished, because his term's over.
Endres: I'm going to resist the temptation to ask you to end on an upbeat note, but I'll give you a chance to plug the media outlets that often carry you.
Chomsky: Well, that's really important. One of the very important developments of the past thirty years in fact has been the expansion of all sorts of independent media outlets -- alternative radio, alternative press -- and that's reached an awful lot of people, and has helped revitalize this declining democratic tradition. That's really a very significant development, in my opinion.
Endres: What magazines do you write for?
Chomsky: Right now, I write mainly for Z Magazine and Lies of Our Times, and as I say I just had something in In These Times, and occasionally elsewhere.
Endres: Which are good and highly recommended. It has just been a thrill for us to have a chance to talk to you.
Chomsky: Oh, I'm delighted. I hope we can do it again. Good luck with what you're doing.
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