Interview with David BarsamianDecember 13, 1989
For Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado.
Noam Chomsky, long-time political activist, writer and professor of linguistics at MIT, is the author of numerous books and articles on U.S. foreign policy, international affairs and human rights. Among his books are The Fateful Triangle, Turning the Tide, Pirates and Emperors, On Power and Ideology, The Chomsky Reader, The Culture of Terrorism, Manufacturing Consent (with Edward S. Herman), Language and Politics and Necessary Illusions.
| David Barsamian: I'd like to ask you a few questions and then we'd like to open it up to our listeners. The U.S. economy has been structured on what you call alternatively "the Pentagon system" or "military Keynesianism," that is, a state subsidy of high-technology industry. In light of the U.S./U.S.S.R. rapprochement, what moves, if any, do you see the state and corporate managers of the U.S. economy taking to preserve their power and privilege?
Noam Chomsky: I think they are concerned about it. You can read in the Wall Street Journal, for example, articles with headlines like "Unsettling Specter of Peace Concerns U.S. Analysts." And rightly so. This has been the major technique of state industrial management since about 1950, the technique by which the government policy essentially compels the public to subsidize research and development for high-technology industry. But also, beyond that, for the pharmaceutical companies and others. There's no obvious alternative available. For the moment, there is a kind of leveling of military expenditure. Actually, this year's military budget was the biggest ever. It's supposed to level off at about that for a while. For the foreseeable future they're talking about cutbacks, but if you look they're really not cutbacks, they're just a lack of projected expansion. Even those modifications are generally going to hit outlays, they'll cut down the force level, for example, while keeping the procurement level the same. For the moment, at least, the plans are to maintain those parts of the military system which do in effect feed into advanced industry. There are some very serious problems coming up. The Reagan Administration, which pushed this state intervention in the economy well beyond the norm, also in the last year or so began to organize Pentagon-based consortia, Semetech is the main one. In order to keep the semiconductor industry viable, Silicon Valley, etc., there is no clear alternative on the horizon to more public funding, meaning in our system through the Pentagon. So right now there's no obvious alternative being suggested. Yesterday there was some testimony in Congress by former Secretary of Defense McNamara and others calling for a very substantial military cutback, McNamara proposed about 50%, arguing strictly on military grounds and doubtless on military grounds what he said was even highly conservative, but as far as I can see from the papers he didn't address these problems, which are the central ones.
Barsamian: You've said that if there were going to be a move toward conversion, that is, getting away from the Pentagon system, that it's going to involve something like a social revolution.
Chomsky: It's hard to conceive of how it could be done. It's true that other industrial democracies do it. Germany and Japan, for example, have a much lower percentage of military expenditures and have devised other ways for government coordination and subsidy for the industrial system.
Barsamian: MITI, for example, in Japan is the state consortium that organizes the economy.
Chomsky: Yes. In Japan there's a ministry, MITI, Ministry of International Trade and Industry, which serves as a kind of coordinating agency. The Japanese economy is very differently structured. There are big financial-industrial conglomerates and they through the coordination of MITI basically lay out the planning, distribute investments, etc. for the forthcoming period. That gives a pretty high level of planning. The culture is quite different. The population is very docile and they basically do what they're told. It's straightforward for the Japanese government and industry simply to say, look, here's the level of consumption for next year and here are the prices. I don't think that would wash in the United States. The population is too independent.
Barsamian: Have you noticed any hostility or traces or racism vis-a-vis Japan? I have, and that's why I'm asking you. You see it in cartoons and editorials and in a new Hollywood film out called Black Rain. Things like: the Japanese work too hard, they save too much, they have unfair trade practices, etc.
Chomsky: Of course there's a lot of that, and there's a good deal of concern about Japan. It's true that their level of saving is far higher. The quality of their goods is much better. They're buying in very heavily into central sectors of the American economy right now. For the first time there's major Japanese investment in the U.S. high-tech industry, which is one of the last things that still functions around here, mainly through Pentagon facilitation. More visible than that is buying Columbia Pictures and Rockefeller Center, but picking up the leading sectors of the high-tech industry is much more significant in the long run. The Japanese soon will be in a position to constrain U.S. military expenditures, since they control a good deal of the advanced technology that's required for fancy military production, and some Japanese have actually threatened it.
Barsamian: In your view, have the American media played their traditional role of obscuring reality from the American public, in this case the fact that the Pentagon system of economics in the United States has seriously eroded and corroded this country's ability to manufacture consumer goods?
Chomsky: That certainly hasn't been a very big topic, I doubt whether you'll see an article about it. It's a mixed story. Without the Pentagon system we'd need some other system of state capitalist industrial management. The fact of the matter is that although there's a lot of talk about capitalism and free enterprise and free markets, no one who's actually involved in the business world believes a word of it. It's fine for after-dinner speeches and editorials, but when push comes to shove, the sectors of the economy that work and the industrial economies that are successful are those that have a substantial state coordinating and subsidizing component. The same business-man who will make a passionate speech about free trade in an after-dinner speech will also go off to Washington and make sure that the subsidies keep flowing. The question is what alternative system is going to be set up.
Barsamian: Do you have something in mind?
Chomsky: That's where I think there ought to be social revolution. It seems to me that these decisions should not be made by business and the representatives of business who we call government. These should be popular decisions. They should be made beginning from the plant floor and from the community, and that would mean social control over investment. That's a social revolution.
Barsamian: That leads into my next question: Do you think the outbreak of popular democracy in Eastern Europe might be viewed with some trepidation by U.S. elites? What if it were to spread to this country?
Chomsky: As you notice, they're really dragging their feet for all kinds of reasons. For one thing, popular movements are always frightening, even when they're overthrowing some enemy, because there's a spreading effect. It's not the kind of thing that ought to happen. It leads to these "crises of democracy" that elites are always worried about. There is a possible contagious effect. Also, it's bringing about changes in Europe that U.S. elites are pretty wary about. Western Europe is moving towards greater integration and also greater independence, and it's looking to restore what are in effect quasi colonial relations with the East. Japan probably has the same idea with regard to exploitation of Siberia. That kind of integration of the Eurasian economies, with a large part of the current Soviet bloc becoming a kind of Third World to be exploited by Europe and Japan, that would turn the United States into a second-class actor on the world scene. The United States is very concerned to make sure that the blocs are maintained, the Warsaw Pact, NATO. NATO functions to keep U.S. influence in Europe and a degree of control, and in fact the confrontation makes Europe to some extent reliant on the United States. The United States has been trying to block East-West trade and has been pretty isolated in that. In general, there's a good deal of conflict brewing.
Barsamian: It seems that so much of at least the promotion of the Pentagon system within the United States is predicated on the "Evil Empire" or some kind of enemy: the Russians are coming, the terrorists are coming, the Libyans, the Nicaraguans, right now it's the drug lords. Who is going to be the enemy to fuel this system?
Chomsky: I think it's going to be very hard with the Russian threat becoming less and less credible. There's was always a tremendous amount of exaggeration and hype about the Russian threat, but at least there was some substance behind it. It was, after all, an Evil Empire. That wasn't false. It was brutal and it had missiles and it did ugly things. That had very little relation to any of the alleged threats to us, but that much was real. There was an attempt in the 1980s to try to find substitutes: international terrorism, crazed Arabs running around to kill us. Don't forget that that had a degree of success, enough to just about kill the tourist industry in Europe in 1986 because Americans were afraid to go to Europe because of Libyans, who weren't there. Right now, in this last fall, there was an effort to manufacture hysteria about a drug war which was supposed to take the place of the Evil Empire. These things have a short life span. They work for a while, but it's very hard to keep them up. I don't think it's going to be so easy to find a credible enemy. Maybe it'll be the Japanese.
Barsamian: Joel Brinkley, in the New York Times of Sunday, December 10th, in a long article on the intifada, begins his piece with "24 months into the revolt, many Palestinians are beginning to lose their buoyant mood." My question to you is, what kind of measures are the Israeli military authorities taking that might be contributing to a lessening of Palestinian buoyancy?
Chomsky: There is, first of all, an increase in violence. They're shooting much more freely. Casualties are going up. Killings of children are going up. The constraints on use of live ammunition are reducing. But that's the least of it. What they're actually doing is extending over the territories I think the world's most extensive system of totalitarian control. The worst thing that's going on right now is arbitrary acts. There's what's called, for example, the "invisible transfer." In the last couple of months, hundreds of people, almost all women and young children, have been forcibly expelled from their villages and sent across to Jordan. The troops come in the middle of the night, 3 o'clock in the morning helicopters come into the village, using collaborators, and go into particular homes, wake the family up with loudspeakers, call for all the men to go into the village square and congregate. Then the troops come in, tell the women you've got five minutes to pack up with your children and get on a taxi which you're going to pay for and go to the Jordan River, where you will pay for travel across the bridge. If you don't do it we'll do it for you, we'll stick the kid in the cab and send him. When the man come back their families are gone. There's a lot of things like that, either humiliation or arbitrary acts of punishment or control of every aspect of life. Right now, for example, they're reviving the old village leagues. That was an attempt made in 1982 to control the population through networks of corrupt collaborators called village leagues, local people. Most typically local populations are controlled by local collaborators, that's the way South Africa ran the black ghettos, in fact it's the way the Nazis ran the Warsaw ghetto. The village leagues didn't work at the time, but now they're trying to reinstitute them. It will mean that a number of corrupt officials collaborating with the Israelis will have control over every aspect of life. If you want a driver's license, if you want to cross the street, if you want to get married -- you pay these guys off. All in all, there's a network of very tight controls, arbitrary harassment, daily humiliation, severe punishments, beatings, a whole network of actions to make the population understand that life is going to be totally unlivable unless they completely submit to Israeli authority and, as the expression goes, don't raise their heads.
Barsamian: You cover some of these issues in your January, 1990 article in Z magazine entitled "The Art of Evasion: Diplomacy in the Middle East." I was wondering if you could talk about the non-violent tax-resistance campaign that was going on in the West Bank Palestinian town of Beit Sahuor, particularly a comment that you made to me a couple of weeks ago that the American peace movement really failed on this one.
Chomsky: This was a completely non-violent protest in a Christian town on the West Bank, by West Bank standards a relatively well-off town. The protest was a tax resistance protest, refusal to pay taxes, which is a very legitimate act. The taxes are not used for the benefit of the local population. They're extortion, really, and are used for imprisoning them more effectively. They refused to pay their taxes. Yitzhak Rabin, the Defense Minister, stated very clearly that they're going to be severely punished for this. The town was placed under curfew. There were lots of arbitrary arrests and beatings. It ended up with confiscation of most of the property in the town, the robbery of most of the property in the town. They were very steadfast about it. They kept at it and they're still keeping at it. To get back to the point you raised: There is a non-violent movement in the United States which exhorts people to undertake non-violent resistance and talks and lauds non-violent resistance. People who talk about non-violent resistance can be taken seriously, as the more serious advocates of non-violence have pointed out, A.J. Muste and others. They can be taken seriously if they don't just talk but if they in fact put themselves on the line, participate as best they can in supporting on-going non-violent resistance. Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence. That's pretty obvious. You can't have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp, to take an extreme case, but the same holds generally. Non-violent resistance can succeed if there's erosion of the capacity to oppress, and that means participation within the camp of the oppressor. We're directly involved in all of this. The United States funds it, pays for it, encourages it. There was no reaction here that I noticed, no detectable reaction in support of these non-violent resistance activities. This has been true for many years, long before the intifada there were efforts at non-violent resistance on the West Bank which were simply crushed by force. Merchant strikes, for example. When merchants struck in protest against the occupation, the Israeli Army would just come in and weld their shops closed or break in and force them to open or take them out and arrest them. Naturally, that breaks up any act of non-violent resistance. Since there was no reaction here and essentially no reaction in Israel, the oppression could continue. That tells us that the call upon people to resort to non-violent means is not being made seriously. Maybe it's the right thing to do or maybe it isn't the right thing to do, but you can't take seriously people who call on others to carry out non-violent resistance but who don't participate to help them when they do it.
Barsamian: In your article you state that the Baker plan is the Shamir plan.
Chomsky: Actually the Shamir-Peres plan, because the two parties in Israel, contrary to what's reported here, are in consensus agreement. There's basically no difference between them on these issues.
Barsamian: Is there any room for Palestinian representation within that formula?
Chomsky: No. They're very explicit about it. As far as I'm aware, the terms of the Baker-Shamir-Peres plan have never even been published here, at least anywhere near the mainstream, which is kind of interesting, since this is the only proposal on the table as far as the U.S. government is concerned and as far as the U.S. media are concerned. So here's the only proposal on the table, as they constantly drum into us, and they don't tell us what it is. The Baker-Shamir-Peres plan begins with what are called its basic premises, which are three: first, that there can be "no additional Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan." The point is, both parties in Israel will assert, there already is a Palestinian state, namely Jordan. If the Palestinians and the Jordanians don't agree, that's their problem, but Israel has determined that that already is a Palestinian state and there can't be another one. That means that there's no issue of Palestinian self-determination. They've already got it. There can't be another one. That's the first premise. The second premise is that there can be no negotiations with the PLO, which Israel agrees is the representative for the Palestinians in the territories. The reason why there can be no negotiations with the PLO has made very clear and explicit. Prime Minister Shamir a couple of days ago said in the Knesset that he was willing to talk to Satan but not to the PLO. The reason is not that the PLO is a terrorist organization, he went on, but because if you talk to the PLO you're talking about a Palestinian state, and that we will never accept. So point number two in the basic premise is no negotiations with the political representatives of the Palestinians, the reason being that that would involve the question of a Palestinian state. The third basic premise is that there will be no change in the status of Gaza, Samaria and Judea, the occupied territories, except in accord with the guidelines of the government, and those guidelines exclude the possibility of Palestinian self-determination. Those are the basic premises of the agreement. Then it goes on about the modalities for reaching this result. That's not a serious proposal, which is why the United States is alone in the world in supporting it. The Times itself has point out that there's no other country apart from the United States which has endorsed this plan. But in this respect I should say that the subservience of the media is mind-boggling. Take the New York Times. They've never reported the terms of this plan. They've said, look, this is the only plan there is, there's nothing else on the table. They have pointed out explicitly that there isn't another country in the world that supports it outside the United States, but just yesterday there was an article in the New York Times headlined "Soviets Trying to Become Team Player in Mideast." They're trying to become a team player. What does that mean? They've moved away from their support for radical positions in their policy of confrontation with the United States and they now want to join with the United States. So to become a team player means to join with the United States off the spectrum of world opinion. What were those "radical positions" that they were advocating? They were advocating a two-state settlement like just about everyone else in the world. You can't imagine what's in the minds of people who could write this sort of thing. They say that the United States is totally isolated but the Soviets are trying to become a "team player" by joining with us. In other words, if the world isn't on our side, the world's just wrong. And we're the team, even if the whole world's on the other side.
Barsamian: As you so often have pointed out, the peace process is by definition anything that the United States proposes.
Chomsky: That is the way it works, but I must say that it's kind of astonishing to see the extreme levels of self-delusion and deception that are reached in a highly ideological society like ours. People can read that headline: Soviets Trying to Become Team Player in Mideast, to join us in opposition to the rest of the world, and not laugh.
Barsamian: Let's talk about Central America. The five Central American presidents in Costa Rica on December 12 issued an accord in which they said, among other things, that they expressed their "decisive support of Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani and his government as a faithful demonstration of their commitment to democracy and they energetically demand in addition that the FMLN publicly renounce all types of violent actions that may directly or indirectly affect the civilian population." I'm interested to know why Daniel Ortega would sign such an agreement.
Chomsky: His back's against the wall. They're desperate to try to get the United States to live up to the earlier agreements on disbanding the contras, and apparently they're willing to sign anything. This is a great victory for the United States, this accord yesterday. The only explicit thing that's said in the agreement is that the United States must immediately stop any kind of funding for the contras and must send funds through the United Nations, but of course everyone understands that the United States will disregard that, because the United States doesn't obey any international laws or agreements. That's a given. So though that's there, it's completely meaningless. Washington has already announced that it's meaningless. So we can put that aside. However, the reason why it's a major victory for the United States is that for years the United States has been trying to draw a parallel between the FMLN guerrillas and the contras. The parallel is ludicrous on the face of it. The FMLN is an indigenous guerrilla force consisting mainly of people who were driven to the hills by U.S.-organized terror. They fight within their own country with essentially nothing in the way of support. The contras, on the other hand, are a foreign-organized mercenary army constructed by the United States, the superpower that runs the region, based in a foreign country, provided with armaments at a level that goes beyond that of many Latin American armies, unheard of by any guerrilla force. They have no political program. They don't even have the remotest resemblance to guerrillas. So for the United States to establish that parallel -- the parallel has been regarded as ridiculous over the years, but through the unremitting use of violence and terror the United States has succeeded in establishing that parallel, and it has also succeeded in establishing the legitimacy of this murderous terror state which its own population doesn't regard as having anything to do with democracy. El Salvador has polls. They're never published here because they have the wrong results, but over the years when the United States was raving about Salvadoran democracy the polls were showing that about ten percent of the population saw a democratic process in operation. The point is nobody can look at that government or the conditions under which it was elected and say the word "democracy" without shuddering. But the United States, just by virtue of its monopoly over the means of violence and terror, has succeeded in establishing its conditions. And of course the requirements in the accords that the United States is supposed to live up to are immediately recognized as meaningless because the United States doesn't live up to agreements.
Barsamian: Given what you have just said, and also in light of the rather astonishing and sustained FMLN attack in November and early December of 1989 in the capital city of San Salvador, how are the media in the U.S. and the political leadership going to persuade the American public that on the one hand you have this parallel of the struggling, budding democracy in El Salvador vs. this horrible dictatorship in Nicaragua?
Chomsky: How are they going to convince them? I think it's been done already. It's been done years ago. There's been virtual unanimity in the U.S. media -- this goes back to the early 1980s -- that El Salvador is a fledgling democracy and that Nicaragua is a totalitarian state that never had an election. Here the American media are basically unanimous. As you know, I've done a lot of detailed analysis of this, and departures from this party line are at the level of statistical error. In these matters the United States is as uniform as the best organized totalitarian state.
Barsamian: We're going to go to some phone calls now.
Caller: My question is this: Given everything that's going on, the total lack of responsiveness of the U.S. government to Central America, to the Middle East, to our own domestic problems as well, and given that these are both Democratic and Republicans doing it, that those that fund the death squads in El Salvador and the brutality on the West Bank, that's done with votes from the Democratic party, it seems to me that we really do need some kind of a social, if not revolution, then a very fast evolution. My question is how to build it. It seems to me that whatever we do has to end up going through the political arena. I don't want to make this a forced choice; if you see a third way I'd like to hear it. It seems to me that we've really got a choice of either working within the Democratic party or of trying what you could call either a third party or truly a second party. Both of those ways have been tried in the past and neither has succeeded. Do you have any comment on which of these two ways is more likely to succeed?
Chomsky: I think it is a kind of forced choice. The fact is that I have nothing against working through a two-party system if one existed. The point is that political parties don't grow out of a social vacuum. They reflect the social reality. The social reality in the United States is that this is a business-run society. Those who control investment decisions and control resources also overwhelmingly control the political system. We don't have a two-party system in the United States. We have a one-party system, and we've had it through most of American history. That one party consists of two shifting factions of the business party, the "property party," as C. Wright Mills called it. That's why, as you said, the parties basically agree: because they represent the same social sectors. They represent those who fund them. They represent the interests of owners, managers, relatively privileged sectors, etc. There are exceptions to this, but again, it's kind of around the margins. There's very little political participation in the United States. Incumbents in Congress almost always win. In the last election I think it was something like 98% incumbency, which is less turnover than there was in the Politburo in the pre-Gorbachev period, which means that there's really no issues coming up. People aren't shifting around because they reflect different sectors of the population or different issues. They stay because they're there. In presidential elections, nobody even pretends that there are any issues. In the 1988 election the only question was could Dukakis figure out a way to duck the mud being thrown at him by Lee Atwater. That was the issue in the 1988 election. In earlier elections the issue was could Ronald Reagan remember the lines that he was told to read. But issues don't arise. And when they do the population doesn't care about them. So to talk about operating within the political system is a little misleading. We don't have a political system, except rather marginally. If I could reframe your question: The question would be, How can we create a functioning political system. That means, how can we create the social background out of which political issues can arise and the population can become actively involved in formulating political positions, in putting them on the agenda, clarifying them, determining which ones they want and which ones they don't want, and then struggling for them. That would be a social revolution. Then you could do it through the present formal system. That's the kind of change that's required. That doesn't happen here because there just aren't ways for people to get together at a sufficient level to enter into this process. Maybe you can do it in local elections in Boulder because the scale is small enough so that it can be done. But to do it on a large community level or the state level or the national level requires organization and resources. In many industrial democracies it's done through the unions, but the United States basically doesn't have unions. We have a very class-conscious business class, and that's it. That's where class consciousness ends. They've seen to it that unions are very weak and even when they functioned, except for a brief period, they were basically business unions. It's hard to remember now that there was a bitter decade-long struggle with a lot of heroism and a tremendous resistance and dedication to try to achieve a 40-hour week. The 40-hour week lasted a couple of years after it was achieved. By now it's an idle dream. For families now it's more like a 100-hour week, because one wage earner isn't enough for the family to survive. But workers don't expect to work a 40-hour week. The achievements of the union movement, which were not unreal, are being very rapidly eroded. There's been a steady decline in real wages in the United States since 1973. That's absolutely without any historical precedent. It's in part because of the success of the business classes and their class warfare, destroying any organized resistance. That's just one major aspect of the depoliticization of the society. Formally, the formal democratic system looks good on paper. I don't think that paper reforms are very important. The question is, does it function? The answer is: It functions as a reflection of the social reality, but that social reality happens to marginalize from decision-making all but a very small sector of highly privileged parts of the population.
Caller: It seems that, Professor Chomsky, you are merely a critic of society and you don't have a definite program or political alternative or system that you are clearly advocating. In what you write and what you say you give only the barest and vaguest solutions. You talk vaguely of a social revolution or something of this nature, but you don't say concretely what you believe in. Another point I'd like to ask you about is if you think the Pentagon budget, which is only about 6% of the GNP, and military procurement is only 2% or 3% of the GNP, if you think that exists to benefit high-tech industries, it seems like it would make more sense for the government to directly fund high-tech industries if they wanted to do that. Probably the public would be even more supportive of it, like they are in Japan. Number three: I've heard you criticize and criticize and go on and on about what you dislike about the United States' political and economic system. Is there anything, anything that you have ever said, or could you say something now, about the U.S. political and economic system that you approve of, that you think is an achievement, a success? I like to hear if you can say anything positive about the politics and economics of this country.
Chomsky: On the first point: You say I haven't written about what I believe is an alternative. That's just not true. I've written a lot about it. You probably haven't read it, but then it's not easily accessible. I've written quite a lot about what I think a libertarian society should look like and what it would mean to take the radical democratic ideals of the Enlightenment, for example, and translate them into a form in which they would apply to a modern industrial society. I could go on to describe it. I'll be glad to give you references, but point number one is just not true. Point number two: The figures about percentage of GNP are almost totally meaningless. The point is that the corporate managers in advanced industry -- this is true of electronics, computers, pharmaceuticals, etc. -- except that the government, meaning the public, will pick up the costly parts of the production process, the parts that are not profitable -- research and development. That's got to be paid for by the public. Furthermore, the public, through the Pentagon, provides a state-guaranteed market, which is available for waste production if commercial markets don't work. That is a gift to the corporate managers. It's a cushion for planning. When something can be sold on the market, you sell it. If not, the public purchases it and destroys it. Furthermore, the public pays the cost while the corporation makes the profit. If you take a look at particular industries you can see how this works. Take, say, the computer industry, the core of the modern industrial economy. I'm kind of smoothing the edges here, but the story is essentially accurate. You can put in tenth-order effect, if you like. In the 1950s, computers were not marketable, so the public paid 100% of the cost of research, development and production through the Pentagon. By the 1960s, they were beginning to be marketable in the commercial market, so the public participation declined to about 50%. The idea is that the public pays the costs, the corporations make the profits. Public subsidy, private profit; that's what we call free enterprise. By the 1980s there were very substantial new expenditures required for advances in fifth-generation computers and new fancy parallel processing systems, etc. So the public's share in the costs went up very substantially through Star Wars and the Pentagon, etc. That's the way it works. Percentage of GNP doesn't tell you anything relevant to this process. As to why the government doesn't just come to the population and play it the Japanese way: The answer is, in my view, and this has been the answer that business has given and I think they're right, that the public here wouldn't tolerate it. This is not a docile, submissive population like Japan. You can't come to the population here and tell them: Look, next year you're going to cut back on your consumption by this amount so that IBM can make more profits and then maybe ten years from now your son or your daughter will get a job. That wouldn't wash. What you tell people here is: The Russians are coming, so we better send up a lot of missiles into space and maybe out of that will come something useful for IBM and then maybe your son will get a job in ten years. Those last parts you don't bother saying.
Caller: Who are you quoting? Are you quoting yourself or some analyst in the military or what?
Chomsky: What I'm saying is what politicians in the United States say.
Caller: I've never heard them say that.
Chomsky: You've never heard a politician in the United States say, the Russians are coming, we have to have more missiles.
Caller: I never heard them say that we need it because we have to fund some high-tech industries.
Chomsky: You didn't hear what I just said. I said that the last two sentences I added were not what is publicly said. How you do it in the United States is you say, look, we've got to defend ourselves, we need Star Wars, we need the Pentagon system, and the effect of that is to achieve what I just described with regard to the computer industry, or the semiconductor industry, or whatever. That is because this is a relatively free society. If politicians were to approach the public telling them, look, we've decided that next year you're going to cut back on your consumption so that IBM will make more profit, the reaction in the United States would be a healthy reaction: Who are you to tell me to cut back so that IBM will make more profit? If it's going to be a social decision of that kind, I want to take part in it. And that's precisely why business does not want to be put in those terms. They do not want social policy, which is going to you organized people, to become involved in making decisions over investment. This issue has come up over the years, many times, in the business press. Go back to the 1940s. It was recognized, as any economist will tell you, that you can get the same priming effect for industry, maybe even more efficient, through other forms of government intervention besides military production.
Caller: Right. That's my point.
Chomsky: Sure you can do that, but it's irrelevant, and business understands exactly why it's irrelevant. You can read editorials in Business Week going back to the late 1940s where they point out there are two techniques: one technique is the military system, the other technique would be social spending, infrastructure development, hospitals, services, etc. or useful production. But the latter is no good. It will work from a technical, economic point of view, but it has all sorts of unwelcome side effects, for example, it tends to organize public constituencies. If the government gets involved in carrying out activities that affect the public existence directly, people will want to get involved in it.
Caller: Professor Chomsky, it's a pleasure to ask you these questions. I'm from Canada, where your books are obtainable in virtually every bookstore. Your last book, Necessary Illusions, is on a paperback non-fiction bestseller list. I don't see the same availability of your thoughts in America. That's the first question: Why is that? The second question is: Do you have any comment on the elite media coverage of the situation in El Salvador regarding the six Jesuit priests? The third question is, regarding the Middle East: A comment that I'm hearing again and again from people like Martin Peretz and others regarding the Palestinians is that these are Muslims, they're tribal savages, they're pre-Enlightenment and they pose a threat to Israel. Israel is a democracy. Why should we consider allowing another dagger to be pointed at Israel's existence? I'd appreciate your comments on those three questions.
Chomsky: As for the availability of books, your description is correct, but that's only one part of it. For example, this book that you mentioned was based on lectures that were delivered over Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on problems of thought control in industrial societies. It would be next to impossible for anything comparable to happen in the United States on any major public outlet. The United States is different from most other societies in that respect. Most industrial societies, even ones that are very much like us, have a good deal more openness on their public media to dissident opinion. There are a lot of reasons for that. The previous caller had asked whether I had ever said anything nice about the United States. The answer is, very often. One of the things that's extremely nice about the United States is the degree of freedom that it has. It is a free society, much more so than any other, and that very freedom has led to problems. If you can't control people by force, you have to figure out other ways to control them. Corresponding to American freedom, which is unusual, are very highly sophisticated measures of ensuring that that freedom doesn't work, and one of them is the one that you're describing. A whole array of devices have been developed to ensure that dissident opinion just isn't heard, although it isn't suppressed either, given American freedoms. So what you're describing is true, and I could elaborate the way it works if you like.
With regard to the second point, the coverage of the murder of the priests: The murder of the priests was considered an outrageous act here, and that particular action was covered reasonably well. It's always considered a mistake for a friendly government to commit atrocities essentially in front of television cameras. They should commit them when nobody's looking, and killing of priests, obviously by the military, that's bad news. Therefore, there was some coverage of it. But the coverage will decline, and under U.S. pressure there may be a decision made. If the government of El Salvador is smart, they'll find some scapegoat, a lieutenant, and put him on trial and then put him away in some country house somewhere for the crime. But the chances that they'll go after the authorities who are responsible, say, the higher officers of the First Brigade, that's very unlikely, and it's even more unlikely that the American press will point out what that means. What does it mean, for example, that the one witness had to be spirited out of the country to the United States so that she could survive? What does that tell us about the democratic society we're supporting if the one witness to the murder of six priests can't be kept in the country because she'll be murdered? Exactly what does that tell you? It's clear what it tells you, but that wasn't the lesson that was drawn from it in the editorials. So the event itself was covered, and after that the cover-up begins, and it will be continuing.
On the matter of the Palestinians, I'm sure that what you heard is what many people say, and the only thing that I can respond to, apart from the false statements, is the level of racism it reflects. That reflects the assumption that there are human beings, the Jews, the Israelis, who are human beings and have rights, and then there are these strange animals, the indigenous population, who aren't human beings and who don't have rights, and what right do those animals have to threaten the human beings? That's not something that's unique in European or American history. It was attitudes like that that made it possible for those who conquered the United States, the European settlers, to basically wipe out the indigenous population, who, as George Washington once put it, were not really humans, they were just wolves who looked like men. As long as that's true, you can do anything you like to them. I think those are the attitudes that you're reflecting, the same attitudes expressed by the worst sectors of white South Africans. There's no arguing with those positions, any more than you could argue with a Nazi who told you that the Jews weren't human.
Caller: I have a couple of questions about Eastern Europe. The first one is: Are you concerned about some of the forces that may be unleashed, especially nationalism, with the recent democracy movements? Secondly, do you see any down side or any unanticipated consequences to German reunification?
Chomsky: I think both of those are very serious concerns. The Soviet Empire, ugly and tyrannical as it was, did keep the lid on some extremely ugly manifestations. Eastern European nationalism has its very unpleasant aspects, to put it mildly. This is not something unique to Eastern Europe. It's been true all over the world. The history of Western Europe consists of centuries of murderous, barbarous violence while one ethnic group dedicated their existence to destroying some other one. That continued up until 1945. The only reason it stopped then was because the next step would have been to destroy the world. So the establishment of the state system in Europe, which is basically the imposition of a certain formal political system on a network of rival groups who often bitterly hate one another, was a bloody, murderous process. The process hasn't been consummated in the East. As the Russian imperial system begins to erode, it's going to be rearing its head, and it could be an extremely ugly one. We've already seen that in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and we'll see that elsewhere. So yes, I think you're quite right in pointing to that as a very serious problem. It's similar in some respects to what happened when the Ottoman Empire was removed from large parts of western Asia. The Ottoman Empire was a pretty ugly affair, but it did reflect the realities of the region in a way in which the European-imposed state system does not. So it did allow some degree of local community control and it didn't impose sharp borders. You could travel from one end of the Ottoman Empire to the other without passing through customs barriers and troops. The European-imposed state system didn't correspond to the realities of the region at all, and it's been a violent and brutal affair. The same in Africa. The same everywhere. Chances are that will happen in Eastern Europe.
With regard to German unification, that's something that worries everybody. A Frenchman quipped that he loves Germany, loves it so much that he's glad there are two of them. The history of Germany is not so pretty, and a reunified Germany frightens a lot of people. The story of German partition is a pretty complicated one. Right after the war, the United States and Britain were influential -- whether they were decisive you could argue, but they were certainly influential -- in bringing about partition in the first place. The reason was that there was concerned about a unified labor movement in Germany, and influences from the Eastern zone, primarily ideological influences, which would strengthen socialist elements, working-class elements in Western Germany and undermine the British and American project of restoring the old conservative order. That's why people like George Kennan, early on, in 1946, called for "walling off" West Germany from the Eastern zone, that was Kennan's phrase, and stopping what the British Foreign Office called "Russian political aggression," meaning ideological and political influences from the East. That was one factor in the partition of Germany. In 1952, Stalin made an interesting offer -- we don't know if it was serious or not because it was immediately rejected -- calling for reunification of Germany under Four-Power control with free elections, the only condition being that a reunified Germany not join a hostile Western military alliance. Any Russian leader, no matter who it is, is going to insist upon that, for obvious historical reasons. The United States rebuffed that out of hand. In fact it was barely reported, just dismissed, so we don't know if he was serious. The United States much preferred a Europe split into two military pacts: NATO, which was being established at the time, and the Warsaw Pact, which came a couple of years later. There have been several other Russian proposals of this kind over the years, always rejected. Right now you'll notice that the United States is still very ambivalent about it. If you read James Baker's speech in Berlin, which appears in today's papers, you'll notice he was all effusive about democracy in Europe, reunification of Germany, etc. But the bottom line was the same: a reunified Germany has to be part of NATO, he said, meaning it has to be part of a Western military alliance in which the United States will dominate. It's highly unlikely that any Soviet leadership or any East European public would accept that, given the history. It's not so likely that the rest of the West would accept it either, but that's the bottom line. So far, at least, we have not been willing to conceive of the possibility of a neutralized Germany, and that's the only sane possibility for unification.
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