June 16, 1993
DB: It's about 7:00 a.m. here in Boulder, 9:00 where you are in Lexington. What is your morning routine like? Do you start off with reading the Boston Globe and the New York Times?
Yes, and The Wall Street Journal. The Financial Times. Whatever.
DB: Is the morning a good time for you to work or are you interrupted with a lot of phone calls like this one?
Usually, quite a lot.
DB: The Boston Globe, your daily newspaper, has just been acquired by the New York Times. The Globe is one of the last major papers in the country not owned by a chain. What are your thoughts on that?
It's a natural continuation of a tendency that's been going on for a long time. Ben Bagdikian, for example, has been documenting it year after year. It's a natural phenomenon. Capital tends to concentrate. I frankly doubt that it would make much difference in the nature of the newspaper, at least for a few years. However, over time it probably will.
DB: There is a well-documented trend in the concentration of media ownership. Do you see any countertrends?
What you are doing right now is a countertrend. It's just like everything that's going on in the world. There's a trend toward centralization of power in higher and higher levels, but there's also a countertrend towards regionalization, including what's called "devolution" in Europe, creation of grassroots movements, construction of alternatives. The new electronic technology, in fact, has given opportunities for lots of spreading of alternatives. Cable television offers alternatives. So things are going in both directions. Institutionally, the major tendency is centralization. The other tendency in the opposite direction, which is the only hopeful one, in my opinion, is much more diffuse and has nothing much in the way of organized institutional forms. But it's certainly going on at every level.
DB: There are also computer networks.
They offer lots of possibilities. There are tens of thousands of people hooked up, maybe hundreds of thousands hooked into various networks on all kinds of topics and lots of discussion goes on and lots of information comes through. It's of varying quality, but a lot of it is alternative to the mainstream. That's still pretty much of an elite privilege at this point.
DB: I recently got a letter from a listener in Lafayette, Colorado, a few miles from Boulder. He heard your talk "Manufacturing Consent," which you gave at the Harvard Trade Union Program in January. I thought the listener's comments were telling. He said after hearing the program that it left him feeling "as politically isolated as the PR industry would have us." He asked, "How do we get organized? Is everybody too tied down by monthly bills to care?" So there are multiple questions and concerns there.
How do we get organized? There's a simple answer: you go ahead and do it. People have gotten organized under much more onerous conditions than these. Suppose, for example, you're a peasant in El Salvador in a Christian base community which tries to become a peasant cooperative. The conditions under which those things took place are so far beyond anything we can imagine that to talk about the problems we face seems superfluous. Sure, there are problems. People are weighed down with bills, they have personal problems. But most of us live under conditions of extraordinary privilege by comparative standards. The problem of getting organized is a problem of will.
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DB: Isn't one of the functions of the media to marginalize people like this listener who wrote and to convince them that affairs must be left to the experts and you stay out of it.
Of course. But notice that it's done differently in El Salvador. There they send in the death squads. Here what they do is try to hook you on sitcoms. It's true that both are techniques of control, but they are rather different techniques.
DB: You're a scientist. Talk about the notions of objectivity and balance in the media and in scholarship. Who determines those kinds of things?
There's a big difference between the sciences and humanistic or social science scholarship or the media. In the natural sciences you're faced with the fact of nature as a very hard taskmaster. It doesn't let you get away with a lot of nonsense. At least in the more well developed areas of the sciences, it's difficult for error to perpetuate. Theoretical error, of course, can perpetuate because it's hard to detect. But if a person does an experiment and misstates the results, that's likely to be exposed very quickly, since it will be replicated. There's a fairly stern internal discipline, which by no means guarantees that you're going to find the truth. But it imposes standards that are very hard to break away from. There are external conditions that determine how science proceeds: funding, etc. But it's qualitatively different from other areas, where the constraints imposed by the outside world are much weaker. Much less is understood. The empirical refutation is much harder to come by. It's much easier to simply ignore things that you don't want to hear.
So let's go back to your opening comment about the Times taking over the Globe. The east-coast press has been flowing with praise for this and saying that because of the Times' high journalistic standards there's no concern that this will have any danger. There are thousands of pages of documentation in print which demonstrate that the Times' journalistic standards are anything but high. In fact, they're grotesque. But it doesn't matter, because the critical analysis can simply be ignored. It has the wrong message. Therefore you ignore it. That's the kind of thing that's very easy in journalism or any of the other ideological disciplines. You just ignore what you don't like, and if you are on the side of the powerful, it's easy to get away with it.
The other day I read a summary article in the Washington Post by a good reporter who knows a lot about Central America, the lost decade in Central America. His article expresses all sorts of puzzlement about why Central America is worse off than it was in 1980 despite the enormous amount of American aid that went into the region. It asks whether this American aid was well-spent, whether it was well-designed, whether it went in the right areas. He asks what went wrong with our enormous effort to bring democracy and social development to Central America.
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The author (Douglas Farah) of that article, at least when he's not writing for the Post, knows the answer perfectly well. The U.S. led a devastating terrorist war throughout the region to try to prevent democracy and social development. These billions of dollars of aid that he talks about were billions of dollars spent to destroy these countries. That's why they are worse off than before. But the Post can't say that. No matter how overwhelming the evidence is, it's perfectly possible simply to disregard it and to go on with fantasies that are much more pleasing to powerful interests and to oneself. In journalism, or in a good deal of what's called "soft scholarship," meaning outside the hard sciences, that's quite easy to do. The controls are very weak, and it's very easy simply to ignore or to deflect critical analysis. In the hard sciences it just won't work. You do that and you're left behind. Somebody else discovers things and you're out of business. Years ago C. P. Snow talked about what he called the two cultures of the humanities and the hard sciences. He was much criticized for that. But there's something to it. They are rather different in character. There are further blurring comments that have to be made, but roughly speaking the difference is real.
So to answer the question, within the more developed natural sciences, although nobody has any illusions about objectivity, there is a kind of peer-pressure control that reflects the constraints imposed by nature. In the other areas, work is commonly considered objective if it reflects the views of those in power.
DB: The concept of objectivity in journalism definitely seems to be something that's situational and mutable.
If you look at serious monographic work in diplomatic history, the situation is somewhat different. Although there, choices and focus and concentration and framing are themselves often quite ideological and can hardly fail to be. More honest people will recognize that and make it clear. The less honest will make it appear that they're simply being objective.
DB: But of course one of the central myths of the media is that they are objective and balanced.
Sure. That's part of their propaganda function.
It's obvious on the face of it that those words don't mean anything. What do you mean by balanced? What's the proper measure of balance? There's no answer to that question. If the media were honest, they would say, Look, here are the interests we represent and this is the framework within which we look at things. This is our set of beliefs and commitments. That's what they would say, very much as their critics say. For example, I don't try to hide my commitments, and the Washington Post and New York Times shouldn't do it either. However, they must do it, because this mask of balance and objectivity is a crucial part of the propaganda function.
In fact, they actually go beyond that. They try to present themselves as adversarial to power, as subversive, digging away at powerful institutions and undermining them. The academic profession plays along with this game. Have a look at academic conferences on the media. One I went through in detail was held at Georgetown University. It was run by a dovish, rather liberal-leaning Quaker. It was about media coverage of Central America and the Middle East. The way the conference is framed is this: First came a series of statements opening the discussion by people who said the media and journalists are overwhelmingly biased against the government. They lie. They try to undermine the U.S. government. They're practically communist agents. After these bitter attacks on the media for their adversarial stance, another set of papers were presented which said, Look, it's pretty bad, we agree. But it's not quite as bad as you say. That's our job, to be subversive, and that's what you have to face up to in a democratic society. Then these two positions were debated.
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There is obviously a third position: the media are supportive of power interests. They distort and often lie in order to maintain those interests. But that position can't be expressed. In fact, in the conference I'm talking about, one hundred percent of the coverage on Central America was within the bounds I've described. On the Middle East, where the media are just grotesque, it was only ninety-six percent within those ludicrous bounds. The reason was that they allowed one statement by Eric Hoagland, a Middle East scholar who made an accurate statement, and that's the four percent, which nobody ever referred to again. That's the way the media like to present themselves, naturally, and that's the way the academic profession likes to see them presented. If you can present the media as being critical, antagonistic to power, maybe even subversive, that makes an enormous contribution to the propaganda function. Then they say, Look how critical of power we are. How could anyone go beyond us?
DB: In an article about the acquisition of the Boston Globe in the Times a few days ago, it was pointed out that the Globe was one of the first papers in the United States to lead the crusade against U.S. intervention in Vietnam. You were reading this paper throughout that period. Is that accurate?
Yes, it's very accurate. They published the first editorial calling for withdrawal from Vietnam. The editor at that time was a personal friend and I followed this quite closely. They did a big study to determine if it would be possible to publish this editorial and still get away with it. They finally agreed to do it. My recollection is that that was in late 1969, that is, about a year-and-a-half after Wall Street had turned against the war. I think it's probably true that that was the first mainstream call for withdrawal of U.S. forces. Of course, it was not framed in terms of a call to withdraw the U.S. forces that had attacked Vietnam, but rather, We should get out, it doesn't make sense, etc. That tells you something about the U.S. media. What it tells you is a year-and-a-half after the business community determined that the government should liquidate the effort because it was harmful to U.S. economic interests, about that time the courageous press timidly began to say, well, maybe we ought to do what the business community announced a year-and-a-half ago, without even conceding the simple truth: that it was a war of U.S. aggression, first against South Vietnam, then all of Indochina. Some elementary truths are too outrageous to be allowed on the printed page.
DB: Do you see knowledge as a commodity? Is it something that's traded and purchased and sold? Obviously it's sold: one sells oneself in the marketplace.
I'd be a little cautious about the knowledge part. What passes for knowledge is sold. Take, say, Henry Kissinger as an example. He certainly sells himself in the marketplace. But one should be very skeptical about whether that's knowledge or not. The reason is that what's sold in the marketplace tends to be pretty shoddy. It works. It's knowledge or understanding shaped or distorted to serve the interests of power. Or, to go back to the hard sciences, their knowledge is certainly sold. Take American high-tech industry, or the pharmaceutical industry. One of the ways in which the public subsidizes the corporate sector is through university research labs, which do straight research. But the benefits of it, if something commercially viable comes out of it, are handed over to private corporations. I don't know of any university departments which contract out directly to industry, but there are things not too far from that.
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DB: Would you say information is a commodity?
People make such statements. I'm a little leery about them. When you say that information is a commodity, it can certainly be sold, traded, in elementary ways, like a newspaper joins Associated Press and purchases [articles] or you go to a bookstore and buy a book. Information is sold. That's not a deep point, I don't think.
DB: What about ways of acquiring knowledge outside of the conventional structures, the colleges and universities?
First of all, even within the conventional structures, colleges, universities, the New York Times, etc., if you read carefully, you can learn a lot. All of these institutions have an important internal contradiction: On the one hand, they wouldn't survive if they didn't support the fundamental interests of people who have wealth and power. If you don't serve those interests, you don't survive very long. So there is a distorting and propaganda effect and tendency. On the other hand, they also have within them something that drives them towards integrity and honesty and accurate depiction of the world, as far as one can do it. Partly that just comes out of personal integrity of people inside them, whether they're journalists or historians. But partly it's because they won't even do their job for the powerful unless they give a tolerably accurate picture of reality. So the business press, for example, often does quite good and accurate reporting, and the rest of the press too, in many cases. The reason is that people in power need to know the facts if they're going to make decisions in their own interests. These two conflicting tendencies mean that if you weave your way between them you can learn quite a lot.
To get back to your question: Outside these institutions there are all sorts of things people can do. Let's go back to the article I mentioned in the Washington Post about Central America. Central American activists in Boulder or plenty of other places, when they look at that article just collapse in laughter. They know the facts. They didn't find out the facts from reading the Washington Post, for the most part. They found them out through other sources. The Central American solidarity movements had access to extensive information and still do, through direct contacts, through alternative media, through people travelling back and forth, that is completely outside the framework of the mainstream media. For example, one thing that this article states is that the United States compelled the Marxist Sandinistas to run their first free election in 1990. Everyone in the Central American solidarity movements, and plenty of other people, knows that that's complete baloney and that there was a free election held in 1984, except it came out the wrong way, so therefore it was wiped out of history by the U.S. In fact, the author of this article certainly knows it as well. But for him to say it in the Washington Post would be like standing up in the Vatican and saying Jesus Christ didn't exist. You just can't say certain things within a deeply totalitarian intellectual culture like ours. Therefore, he has to say what he says, and maybe even believes it, although it's hard for me to imagine. Everybody has to say that. But people in the popular movements know perfectly well that it's not true and know why it's not true, because they've found other ways to gain understanding of the world.
In case you heard a big bang in the background, that was one of the piles of books in my study collapsing on the floor, as happens regularly.
DB: I can see you surrounded by mountains and stacks of papers and books.
Occasionally they decide that the laws of physics won't handle it and they fall on the floor, which is what just happened.
DB: You commented to a friend that the amount of material that you lose is "awesome," but it seems to me that the amount of material that you retain is awesome as well.
It doesn't feel that way to me. I feel mostly the loss. As I see it disappearing it's agonizing. I know if I don't write about something within a couple of years it will be gone, lost in these piles. The trouble is, all of us feel like this. You're so far out of the mainstream that the few people who follow these issues closely and who write about them know that if they don't deal with something it's out of history. For example, the Nicaraguan election is in history, at least for people who care, primarily because Edward Herman did some very good research on it. It doesn't matter to the Washington Post. For them it's out of history, period, because those are the orders from those who are on high. But for people who want to know, you can look at Herman's work.
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DB: Something you've been saying over the years strikes me as somewhat contradictory. When you talk about the connection between U.S. aid and human rights abuses, you say that connection is "obvious," and at the same time you say that there's no way to know about these things and you have to be a fanatic, as you describe yourself, to find these things out. Doesn't that leave people intimidated and disempowered?
If I put it that way I'm being a little misleading. As an individual, you have to be a fanatic to find it out. On the other hand, if you're part of a semi-organized movement, like the Central America solidarity movements, you don't have to be a fanatic, because you have access to alternative sources of information.
Again, take Edward Herman, my friend and colleague, who did an extensive study of the relation between U.S. aid and torture. He found them very highly correlated. We published information about it in jointly written books of ours and elsewhere. He's also published his own books that describe this in detail.
The leading Latin American academic specialist on human rights, Lars Schoultz at North Carolina, published an article in about 1980 on U.S. aid and human-rights violations, primarily torture, in Latin America. He found exactly the same thing. As he put it in his article, U.S. aid tends to flow to the most egregious human rights violators in the hemisphere. They are consistently the highest aid recipients. He also showed that this correlation has nothing to do with need, that it includes military aid, and that it runs through the Carter period. In the Reagan period it shot through the roof. You can find those things out. I've reported them. Herman's reported them.
If an isolated individual like that person you mentioned earlier wanted to figure this stuff out, he'd have to be kind of a fanatic. It would take immense research to even find that anybody ever talked about these topics. You're not going to find them in the New York Times index. What you'll find is article after article about our profound commitment to human rights. On the other hand, if you are part of the popular movements you have easy access to such material and you don't have to be a fanatic at all. You just have to have your eyes open.
DB: In the tremendous amount of mail that you receive, are these views of isolation reflected? What is the temper of the mail?
Overwhelmingly. There is a film (Manufacturing Consent) by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick that's been playing around the world, often on national television and around this country, too, though a little less prominently. I get a lot of letters, hundreds, maybe thousands. Very commonly the tone is very much like what the person you mentioned said. This also happens if I occasionally appear on TV in the United States, on Bill Moyers or Pozner/Donahue. I get a lot of letters saying, I was very interested to hear what you had to say. I thought I was the only person in the world who had thoughts like this. Where can I learn more about it? Sometimes I cringe when the letters say, How can I join your movement? Meaning I haven't at all gotten across what I was trying to.
DB: You steadfastly refuse to see the film Manufacturing Consent. Why?
Partly because there's that feeling that however much they might have tried, there's something inherent in the medium which personalizes and gives the false and indeed ridiculous impression that leads to questions like, "How can I join your movement?"
DB: How much time do you spend responding to mail per week?
I hate to think about it. Probably twenty-five hours or so.
DB: It's actually increased since the last time I spoke to you.
It goes up and up. I was away for a couple of weeks in Europe and the Middle East giving lectures. When I came back, I think it took me over two weeks of doing nothing else, just to clear away the mail.
DB: These are individual responses. I know people are absolutely amazed when they do hear from you. They are stunned at the graciousness of your replies.
These letters are often extremely serious and very thoughtful. I should say that on one topic, finally, I had to write a form letter, saying, Sorry, I can't respond.
DB: What was that?
Take a guess.
DB: JFK. Conspiracy theories.
That's it. It just got to the point where I couldn't respond any more. Within the bounds of a twenty-four-hour day I couldn't answer the letters. So much to my regret I had to say, sorry, I can't do it.
DB: Does that interest in conspiracy theories tell you something about the political culture?
It tells you something about what's undermining the left. For people who feel a need to believe in conspiracies, here's one sitting there waiting for them. Just imagine the CIA deciding, How can we undermine and destroy all of these popular movements? Let's send them off on some crazy wild goose chase which is going to involve them in extremely detailed microanalysis and discussion of things that don't matter. That'll shut them up. That's happening. In case anybody misunderstands, I don't believe this for one moment, but it's the kind of thing that goes around.
DB: It's curious that there are elements of what is called the "left" in this country that have embraced this so fervidly.
In my opinion, that's a phenomenon similar to this feeling of impotence and isolation that you mentioned. If you really feel, Look, it's too hard to deal with real problems, there are a lot of ways to avoid doing so. One of them is to go off on wild goose chases that don't matter. Another is to get involved in academic cults that are very divorced from any reality and that provide a defense against dealing with the world as it actually is. There's plenty of that going on, including in the left. I just saw some very depressing examples of it in my trip to Egypt a couple of weeks ago. I was there to talk on international affairs. There's a very lively, civilized intellectual community, very courageous people who spent years in Nasser's jails being practically tortured to death and came out struggling. Now throughout the Third World there's a sense of great despair and hopelessness. The way it showed up there, in very educated circles with European connections, was to become immersed in the latest lunacies of Paris culture and to focus totally on those. For example, when I would give talks about current realities, even in research institutes dealing with strategic issues, participants wanted it to be translated into post-modern gibberish. For example, rather than have me talk about the details of what's going on in U.S policy or the Middle East, where they live, which is too grubby and uninteresting, they would like to know how does modern linguistics provide a new paradigm for discourse about international affairs that will supplant the post-structuralist text. That would really fascinate them. But not what do Israeli cabinet records show about internal planning. That's really depressing.
DB: This was your first visit to Egypt?
Yes. Incidentally, when that happens in Egypt it's very sad. When it happens all over the West as it does, it's maybe comical or unpleasant but not devastating.
DB: I just got back from Amsterdam, where I did some interviews and gave some talks. Precisely those kinds of convoluted, very pretentious questions were asked.
I've seen the same in Holland. These are ways in which intellectuals can separate themselves from actual, ongoing struggle and still appear to be lefter than thou. Nobody's radical enough for them. That way you advance your career, you separate yourself from things that are going on. You don't have to get involved in popular activities. You don't have to learn about the world, let alone do anything about it. I'm overstating. I don't want to say this is true of everybody, by any means, but there are elements of it. These are other ways of reacting to the fact that dealing with the problems of the world is hard and unpleasant. Especially if you begin to do it effectively, there are personal costs.
DB: It also creates a tremendous gap between them and so-called "people."
Sure. Nobody can understand this stuff. That has the effect of intimidating people, especially young people coming into the colleges who look at this and say, My God, to be a radical I'm going to have to understand all these ten syllable words. It's hopeless. I'd better do something else.
DB: What did you learn about the Islamic movement in Egypt?
I don't want to overstate. I wasn't there long enough to learn a lot. But I should say that I did meet a pretty wide range of people, people I knew and those who were recommended to me, and most of those I came across who were seriously thinking through problems of Egypt and the region were the intellectuals who were associated with the Islamic movement. The ones I met were kind of on the secular wing of those movements. I didn't meet clerics. But these are people who regard themselves, and are regarded as, oppositionists and part of the Islamic movement. They plainly do have grassroots connections. They themselves describe the movement as split between the more progressive sectors and the "rigid" sector, meaning the real deep fundamentalists, who say, We go back to Koranic law, sharia, and that's the end of it. But they themselves are thinking about domestic and regional development and local problems in ways which are not at all unrealistic. Furthermore, these movements actually do things. They provide health care, run welfare programs, and try to deal with people's problems. They're almost unique in that respect. Everyone agrees to that, even the people who hate them.
DB: What's the motor that's pushing this movement in Egypt?
You just walk around Cairo and you can see the motor. There was a period of secular nationalism, of which Nasser was the leading figure. It failed, or was destroyed, partly by itself and partly from outside. Sadat, around 1980, undertook a policy which translates as "opening up," in effect, structural adjustment, neo-liberal policies. There were the usual effects, seen all over the world, completely predictable by now. They increased very sharply the split in the society between great wealth and privilege and enormous misery and suffering, with the proportions being by no means balanced. People are suffering. And they see right next to them enormous wealth and privilege. The government is totally corrupt and doesn't do anything. It's a police state, not a harsh police state, but you can't forget it for long. What happens under those conditions? People turn to something else. It's happening all throughout the region.
DB: Is it not really happening throughout the world as there's global impoverishment?
These tendencies are going on throughout the world. The rich western countries are imposing these neo-liberal policies, as they're called, on the Third World. They have plenty of power. The debt crisis, for example, is being used as a very effective weapon to try to force most of the Third World into these programs, which are lethal. The rich countries themselves don't accept those policies. They don't accept free market policies for themselves. They're too destructive. However, as the economy becomes more global, more internationalized, there is an automatic effect of bringing back Third World tendencies into the rich countries themselves. It's not very mysterious. American capitalists can be very rich, but American workers are going to have to compete with people in what are, in effect, Third World countries.
DB: There was a photo in the paper here a couple of weeks ago of the University of Colorado graduating class. One senior held up a sign: "Will work for food."
You see that right outside of rich shopping centers near where I live. The wealthy countries will never, and never have, accepted the neo-liberal principles, the free market principles they impose on the poor. The consequences of imposing them on the poor are slowly to have this Third World model seep back into the rich countries themselves. It's very striking in the U.S. You can see it in Europe, particularly in England, and on the continent you're beginning to see it as well. There's nothing secret about it. The business press -- Business Week, The Financial Times, etc. -- are very open in saying, American and especially European workers are going to have to give up their "luxurious" social programs. They're going to have to stop being "pampered" and accept labor mobility, meaning lose their security, because corporations can go over to Eastern Europe. In Poland they can get trained workers at ten percent of the wage of the "pampered" west European workers. No benefits, and a highly repressive government that breaks up strikes. Therefore you guys better recognize what's in store for you. There was an article in the Financial Times recently with a wonderful headline: "Green Shoots in Communism's Ruins," meaning Communism is a wreck, but there are some green shoots, a few good things. The good thing was that as capitalist reforms are imposed in Eastern Europe, pauperization and unemployment follow, which lowers wages and makes it possible for western corporations to move in and make huge profits. Those are the "green shoots."
DB: There is of course a huge increase in unemployment in western European countries. That has an attendant social component in the many attacks against immigrant communities.
Unemployment and loss of hope lead to social breakdown. We're much more advanced in that respect. There's a kind of breakdown of social structure in American urban communities which is amazing to most of the world. Take, say, Cairo. Cairo is a very poor city, extremely impoverished. There's nothing like it here. Nevertheless there is a sense of community that exists that doesn't exist here. You feel safer walking through the streets there than here. You don't stumble over homeless people. People are taken care of somehow. It's the same in Nicaragua or many other Third World countries that haven't totally broken down. We are beginning to get Third World characteristics, but under conditions of social breakdown. That's very dangerous. That's why you can have people cheering when someone wins a court trial (in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) after having blasted away somebody (Yoshihiro Hattori) that dared to step on his lawn. That appalled most of the world. They just couldn't understand it.
DB: Your latest book as of this morning -- Howard Zinn likes to add that caveat -- is Letters from Lexington. Do you have any more books planned?
I promised to write up lectures on international affairs and the Middle East that I gave in Cairo. That will be published by American University Press (Cairo).
DB: Is the summer a good time for you to work, when you're away from the interviews, the phone calls, the classes?
As you know, I turn off the phone. That's about the only time I can try to get anything done.
DB: Later this year you're going to turn sixty-five.
You don't believe that propaganda, do you?
DB: Have you thought about slowing down, cutting back on your schedule at all?
There are an awful lot of things I'd like to do that I'm just not getting to. There isn't all that much time.
DB: You know that anecdote that Mike Albert tells when he went to Poland some years ago, he found people who thought that there were two Noam Chomskys, one who did the linguistics work and the other who did the political work?
Partly because the name doesn't sound as strange to them there.
DB: There was a serious reactor explosion in a town named Tomsk in central Russia. Is the name of that town at all connected to Chomsky?
It could be. Nobody really knows the etymology. Roman Jakobson, a great Slavic linguist and scholar, always told me that he was convinced that that was the origin, a corruption of Tomsk, Thomas basically.
DB: Is Avram your actual given name?
It is, but my parents never used it, so I use my middle name. It's almost become my legal first name by now. Just to show you the good old days of real sexism, I once had to get a copy of my birth certificate and I discovered that a clerk who hadn't believed my name had crossed it out and written in pencil above it "Avrane Naomi." Well, why Avrane? Because girls are allowed to have crazy names, not boys.
DB: Just to back up a little bit. You also went recently to Northern Ireland. What did you find there in terms of economic conditions and the political situation?
I spent my time either in West Belfast, which is mainly Catholic and a very repressed area, or southern parts of Northern Ireland, within what is called "bandit country," places where the British troops can only go in in fairly substantial force and where there have been plenty of atrocities. I talked to human rights activists. I was at the Center for Human Rights talking to Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein, and others, and to a lot of people. The country is under military occupation. There's no secret about that. There are armored personnel carriers going through the streets, armed blockades right in the middle of Belfast center, etc. There is plenty of killing by paramilitaries on both sides. There is open debate about the extent to which or if the British forces are connected to the loyalists, the mainly Protestant paramilitary, and there is probably some connection, but nobody knows how much. In the Catholic community, listening to the stories was very much like walking around the West Bank a couple of years ago, the same kinds of humiliation and beating and torture. There aren't a lot of ways to have your boot on someone's neck. It always turns out about the same.
DB: It echoes the religious conflicts of the Middle Ages in Europe.
The British, back in the mid-seventeenth century, carried out real ethnic cleansing. The indigenous population in what's now Ulster was mostly driven out, often into central Ireland.
DB: Was there settler colonialism?
Yes. They brought in Scottish and other British settlers to replace them. They took most of the fertile land. Traveling through South Armagh, near the border, I spent some time with a local civil rights group that was set up after several young men were murdered by British troops, who are now coming up for trial, years later. A farmer whose son had been killed took me around and showed me what things were like. They raise cattle, but they can only raise young cattle, because the earth is too infertile to grow grass good enough to raise adult cattle. So they raise calves and send them off somewhere. Every acre is completely reclaimed. You've first got to pull out all the rocks and move them somewhere else and try to level the ground. These are the areas to which the Irish were driven, off into the rocky hills, by the British who cleansed the fertile areas and brought in their own settlers. It was a couple of centuries ago, but the residue is still there.
DB: Do you see any solution to the problem of Northern Ireland?
There are contrary tendencies going on in Europe. There's a tendency toward centralization in the European Community executive, which is almost totally insulated from public pressure, and there's a countertendency toward regionalization. So local regions, whether Catalonia, the Basque country, Wales, or whatever, are beginning to become more involved in developing their own cultural authenticity and forms of independence and ways of self-government. In the context of this regionalization and devolution, it's not impossible that the former British Isles could break down into a kind of federal arrangement, maybe as part of a broader European federalism. It would involve a degree of independence in a number of areas: Scotland, Wales, England, Northern Ireland, the Republic, and in that context I think you might imagine a solution. I don't see much else. Within a couple of years the population of Northern Ireland is going to be about fifty-fifty Catholic and Protestant, according to demographic projections.
DB: I have to tell you, going back to the level of mail that you get, some years ago I wrote you a letter, and that was my first contact with you. You responded. That led to a correspondence. Then we starting doing interviews. It really helped to get Alternative Radio going. I can bear witness and give testimony to the enormous efficacy of your efforts. I think I speak for a lot of people who appreciate what you're doing. It does make a difference.
It's reciprocal. I very much appreciate what thousands of people are doing everywhere, which is making a difference -- a big difference. These activities of many, many people around the country and the world have made a tremendous difference over the last thirty years.
DB: It's incremental. People want to see dramatic changes, but the culture and politics change rather slowly.
They do, but it's very different from what it was. Under conditions like those in the 1960s, you would have had to wait until the fall of 1969 for the first newspaper to timidly suggest that maybe we ought to stop the aggression in Vietnam.
DB: Thank you, and have a restful summer. How's your foot?
It's OK. It's just a fractured bone.
Crime and Gun Control
December 6, 1993
DB: I know I didn't get you up because it's well known that you stay up and work through the night, drinking tons and tons of coffee.
That's why I sound so groggy.
DB: I want to talk to you about a couple of domestic and foreign policy issues and then take calls from our listeners. You can tell a great deal about a society when you look at its system of justice. I was wondering if you would comment on the Clinton crime bill, in which some of the provisions are to hire 100,000 more cops, build boot camps for juveniles, spend more money for prisons, extend the death penalty to about fifty new offenses, and make gang membership a federal crime, which is interesting, considering that there is something about freedom of association in the Bill of Rights.
One of the consequences of the developments over the past twenty or thirty years has been a considerable increase in inequality. This trend accelerated during the Reagan years. The society has been moving visibly towards a kind of Third World model, which has to do with all sorts of things going on in the international economy as well as very explicit social policy. Huge sectors of the society are simply becoming more or less superfluous for wealth creation, which is considered the only human value. The consequence of this is an increasing crime rate, as well as other signs of social disintegration. People are very worried, and quite properly, because the society is becoming very dangerous. Most of the crime is poor people attacking each other. But it spills over to more privileged sectors. As a result there's a great deal of fear about crime.
A constructive approach to the problem would require dealing with its fundamental causes, and that's off the agenda, because we must continue with social policy aimed at strengthening the welfare state for the rich. So there's no constructive response. The only kind of response that the government can resort to under those conditions is pandering to these fears with increasing harshness and attacks on civil liberties and moves to control the useless population, essentially by force, which is what this is all about.
DB: What are your views on capital punishment?
It's a crime. I agree with Amnesty International on that one, and indeed with most of the world. The state should have no right to take people's lives.
DB: There's quite a bit of controversy on gun control. Advocates of free access to arms cite the Second Amendment. Do you believe the Second Amendment permits unrestricted, uncontrolled possession of guns?
What laws permit and don't permit is a question that doesn't have a straightforward answer. Laws permit what the tenor of the times interprets them as permitting. But underlying the controversy over guns are some serious questions. Literally, the Second Amendment doesn't permit people to have guns. But laws are never taken literally, including amendments to the Constitution or constitutional rights.
Underlying the controversy is something which shouldn't be discounted. There's a feeling in the country that people are under attack. I think they're misidentifying the source of the attack, but they feel under attack. Decades of intensive business propaganda have been designed to make them see the government as the enemy, the government being the only power structure in the system that is even partially accountable to the population, so naturally you want to make that be the enemy, not the corporate system, which is totally unaccountable. After decades of propaganda people feel that the government is some kind of enemy and they have to defend themselves from it. Many of those who advocate keeping guns have that in the back of their minds. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't heard it so many times. That's a crazy response to a real problem.
DB: What role do the media play in fostering those attitudes?
At the deepest level, by contributing to this notion of getting the government off our backs. It's not that that doesn't have its justifications, too. The government is authoritarian and commonly a hostile structure for much of the population, but it is partially accountable and potentially very extensively accountable to the general population.
The media grossly mislead by contributing to the sense that the government is the enemy and displacing real power from view, suppressing the sources of real power in the society, which lie in the totalitarian institutions, by now international in scale, that control the economy and much of social life and in fact certainly set conditions within which government operates and control it to a large extent. This happens sometimes in comical ways and sometimes in deeper ways.
People simply have no awareness of the system of power under which they are indeed suffering. As a result, as intended, they turn against the government. People fear that they're overtaxed. By comparative standards they're undertaxed. When people talk about a tax-based health plan, meaning one that doesn't just soak the poor, like the Clinton plan is intended to do, you get a reflex response: more pointy-headed bureaucrats stealing our money and running our lives. On the other hand, payment of far higher "taxes" -- regressive to boot -- to a far more bureaucratized and oppressive insurance company that is completely unaccountable, that's OK because you aren't supposed to see it.
To get back to gun control, people have all kinds of motivations, but there is definitely a sector of the population that considers themselves threatened by big forces, ranging from the Federal Reserve to the Council on Foreign Relations to big government to who knows what and are calling for guns to protect themselves.
DB: I don't know how much you watch local or national network news, but there has been a discernible trend over the last few years. The influence of local news primarily dealing with crimes, rapes, and kidnappings, is now spilling over into the national network news.
That's true. But it's always the surface phenomenon. Why is there an increase in violent crime? Is that connected to the fact that there has been a considerable decline in income for the large majority of the population and opportunity for constructive work? Is it connected to NAFTA, for example, and the basic phenomena of which NAFTA itself is a symptom? Sure it is. But until you ask why there is an increase in social disintegration and what this has to do with policies that are directing resources towards the wealthy and privileged sectors and away from the general population, until you ask those questions you can't have even a concept of why there's rising crime or how you should deal with it.
DB: There's a juxtaposition I want to pose to you now. Anthony Lewis, in a very strong pro-NAFTA column in the New York Times, before the vote, writes that an anti-NAFTA vote would mean "the end of nearly fifty years of rising world prosperity. That's all. Since World War II the world has experienced extraordinary growth. The engine for that growth has been international trade. Vastly increased trade in an age of more and more rapid transportation and communication." Juan de Dias Parra, the head of the Latin American Association for Human Rights, in a meeting in Quito, Ecuador, says, "In Latin America today there are 7 million more hungry, 30 million more illiterate, 10 million more families without homes, 40 million more unemployed persons than there were twenty years ago. There are 240 million human beings in Latin America without the necessities of life, and this when the region is richer and more stable than ever, according to the way the world sees it." How do you reconcile those points of view?
It just depends on which people we're worried about. The World Bank came out with a study on Latin America about two months ago in which they warned that Latin America was facing chaos and even the things they're concerned about would be threatened, because of the extraordinarily high inequality, which is the highest inequality in the world, and that's after a period of substantial growth rates. For example, take Brazil, which is a very rich country with enormous resources. It would be one of the richest countries in the world if it weren't for its social and economic system. It is ranked around Albania and Paraguay in quality of life measures, infant mortality, etc.
On the other hand, it's had one of the highest growth rates in the world. It's also been almost completely directed by American technocrats for about fifty years. The inequality that the World Bank describes is not just something that came from the heavens. There was a struggle over the course of Latin American development back in the mid-1940s, when the new world order of that day was being crafted. The State Department documents on this are quite interesting. They said that Latin America was swept by what they called the "philosophy of the new nationalism," which calls for increasing production for domestic needs and reducing inequality. Its basic principle was that the people of the country should be the "first beneficiaries of the development of a country's resources." That's the philosophy of the new nationalism, as the State Department described it.
The U.S. was sharply opposed to that and came out with an economic charter for the Americas that called for eliminating economic nationalism, as it's called, "in all of its forms" and insisting that Latin American development be "complementary" to U.S. development, meaning we'll have the advanced industry and the technology and the peons will produce export crops and do some simple operations that they can manage. But they won't develop the way we did.
The U.S., of course, won, given the distribution of power. In countries like Brazil the U.S. just took over. It was one of the "testing grounds for scientific methods of development on the American capitalist model," as propaganda had it. And so it was, and so you get the consequences you describe. It's true, as Lewis says, that there has been very substantial growth. At the same time there's incredible poverty and misery, which has also increased. Over the past thirty years, there has been a sharp increase in inequality. The growth has slowed down considerably in the last ten years, but there has been growth. Much more dramatic has been the separation of the top sector of the population from the rest. So if you compare the percentage of world income held by the richest twenty percent and the lowest twenty percent, the gap has dramatically increased. That's true whether you consider countries, which is a little mystical, but taking the top twenty percent of countries and the bottom twenty percent of countries, that gap has about doubled. Take the top twenty and the bottom twenty percent of people, the gap has increased far more and is much sharper. That's the consequences of a particular kind of growth.
Incidentally, what Lewis calls "trade" -- he's using the conventional term, but it's a bit misleading. In fact, substantially misleading, for reasons we've already discussed. If the Ford Motor Company moves something from an assembly plant in Mexico to an assembly plant in the U.S., that's called trade. But it's not trade in any serious sense, and in fact the centrally managed policies within these totalitarian structures account for about 40% of the interchanges that are called "trade". These policies often involve radical violations of market principles which are not considered by GATT and NAFTA because they are not designed to extend the market system but to extend the power of corporations who want to benefit from this kind of market distortion.
DB: So you see this trend of growth rates and increasing poverty simultaneously continuing?
Actually, growth rates have been slowing down a lot. In the past twenty years, growth is roughly half of what it was in the preceding twenty years. That tendency of lower growth will probably continue. One factor that has to do with that is the enormous growth of unregulated, speculative capital. That growth has accelerated rapidly basically since Nixon broke down the Bretton Woods system around 1970. By now the unregulated financial capital is estimated by the World Bank at about $14 trillion, and about $1 trillion or so of that moves around every day. That creates pressures for deflationary policies.
That's what that financial capital wants. It wants low growth, low inflation. The huge amounts of capital, which overwhelm national states, make it very difficult to carry out stimulative programs. In the poorer societies it's hopeless. Even in the richer societies it would be very hard. What happened with Clinton's trivial stimulus package was a good indication. It amounted to nothing, $19 billion. It was shot down instantly. Financial capital, which is now an extraordinarily large part of the capital available internationally, has an anti-growth effect. It is driving much of the world into a low-growth, low-wage equilibrium. The figures are really astonishing. John Eatwell, one of the leading specialists in finance at Cambridge University, estimates that in 1970 about ninety percent of international capital was used for trade and long-term investment and ten percent for speculation. In 1990 those figures were reversed: ninety percent for speculation. Also the quantity has grown enormously. The effects of that, as he points out, are what I just said.
DB: The Boulder Daily Camera is part of the chain of Knight-Ridder newspapers. In yesterday's edition they ran a box with questions and answers: "What Is GATT?" "What Is the Uruguay Round of GATT?" Here's the part I wanted to ask you about. In the question, "Who would benefit from a GATT agreement?" the answer given is, "Consumers would be the big winners." Does that track with your understanding of GATT?
If you mean by "consumers" rich ones, yes. Rich consumers will gain. People who have lost their jobs, for example -- and that will be true both in the rich countries and the poor -- obviously are not going to be better consumers. Take a look at NAFTA, where the analyses have already been done, and even appeared in the press after the vote. Before that, there was a huge hype about how important the vote is, of which the Lewis column that you mentioned is a case in point. Do you remember the date of that article?
DB: It was November 5.
Before the vote. That's the kind of stuff that was appearing before the vote. I noticed a quite striking difference the day after the vote. Immediately after the vote, the New York Times and other journals began for the first time discussing the consequences of NAFTA. That was interesting. Not that it was a surprise, but it shows what they knew all along. The day after the vote the New York Times had its first article on the expected impact of NAFTA in the New York region. This generalizes for GATT also.
It was a very upbeat article. They talked about how wonderful it was going to be. They said there would be a big improvement in finance and services, particularly. They'll be the big winners. Banks, investment firms, PR firms, corporate law firms will do just great. They said that some manufacturers will benefit, namely the publishing industry and chemical industry, which is highly capital-intensive, not many workers to worry about Also the pharmaceutical industry, the big beneficiaries of the increased protectionist elements concerning "intellectual property". They'll all do fine and it will just be wonderful.
Then they said that, well, there will be some losers, too. The losers will be women, Hispanics, other minorities, and semi-skilled workers, who comprise maybe seventy percent or more of the work force. They will be losers. But everyone else will do fine. In other words, exactly as anyone who was paying attention knew, the purpose of NAFTA was to split the society even further. There will be benefits for a smaller -- it's a rich country, so the small sector's not tiny -- but a smaller sector of highly privileged people, investors, professionals, managerial classes, and so on, the business-related classes. It will work fine for them, and the general population will suffer.
The prediction for Mexico is pretty much the same. The leading financial journal in Mexico, which is very pro-NAFTA, estimated that Mexico would lose about twenty-five percent of its manufacturing capacity in the first few years and about fifteen percent of its manufacturing labor force. In addition, cheap U.S. agricultural exports are expected to drive even more people off the land. That's going to mean a substantial increase in the unemployed workforce in Mexico, which of course will drive down wages. On top of that, organizing is essentially impossible. Notice that although corporations can operate internationally, unions cannot. So though unions can operate in different states of the U.S., they cannot cross borders, which means there is no way for the work force to fight back against the internationalization of production.
The net effect is expected to be a decline in wealth and income for the majority of the population of Mexico and for the majority of the population of the U.S., while there will be exactly that growth and increase in consumption that the Boulder paper talks about, the increase in income that Lewis talks about. Those are completely consistent. A country like Brazil is the extreme example, and a very dramatic example because of its enormous wealth and because of the fact that we've been running it for fifty years. It's a very good model to look at.
Very high growth rates, tremendous prosperity, a lot of consumption in a very narrow sector of the population. And overall, the quality of life at the levels of Albania and Paraguay.
DB: Chile is another country that's recently been heralded in a number of articles as reflecting that model growth rate.
There was a really funny pair of stories yesterday. The New York Times had a story about the election in Chile and about how nobody was paying much attention to it. The headline was something about Chilean satisfaction with the political system. It talked about how everyone is so satisfied and so happy that nobody's paying much attention to the election.
The London Financial Times, hardly radical, they had a story on the election which was exactly the opposite. They quoted some data, some polls that showed that seventy-five percent of the population are very unsatisfied, "disgruntled" was their word, with regard to the political system, which allows no options. They said that indeed there is apathy about the election, but that's a reflection of the breakdown of the social structure of Chile, which was a lively, vibrant, democratic society into the early 1970s and then was essentially depoliticized through a reign of fascist terror.
People work alone, the associations were broken down. People are trying to fend for themselves. The economy is not doing badly, but it's based almost entirely on primary exports, fruit, copper, and so on. It's very vulnerable to world markets.
But the crucial thing is the dramatic breakdown of social relations and social structure, which is pretty striking in Chile, because it was a very vibrant and lively society for many, many years. The retreat into individualism and personal gain is the basis for the apathy. Nathaniel Nash wrote the Chile story for the Times. There's a section in there, a subheading called "Painful Memories." It said many Chileans have painful memories of Salvador Allende's fiery speeches, which led to the coup in which thousands of people were killed. Notice they don't have painful memories of the torture, the fascist terror, just of Allende's speeches as a popular candidate. These are the ways in which the world is recreated for our edification.
DB: This is a 7 a.m. early edition of Alternative Radio and we're talking to Professor Noam Chomsky. If you'd like to join this conversation, give us a call. One thing you've been talking about is the mystification of the notion of nation and country. You discussed it in a recent Z Magazine article. I was struck by a November 15 front-page New York Times article. The headline is "Nation Considers Means To Dispose of Its Plutonium. Options are unattractive," we are told, and there are "no easy or quick answers to a problem that will not go away." So the nation is considering how to dispose of essentially what was a creation of private capital, plutonium.
That's the familiar idea that profit is to be privatized but the cost is to be socialized. So in a sense it's correct to say that the costs are the costs for the nation, the people. But the profits weren't for the people, nor are they making the decisions to produce plutonium in the first place, and they're not making the decisions about how to dispose of it. Nor or they deciding on what ought to be a reasonable energy policy, which is no small issue. There are major questions about energy policy that ought to be right on the top of the social and political agenda today, things connected, say, with global warming.
Let me give you an example. There was a study that came out in Science magazine about a month ago reviewing recent studies on global warming. The possibilities they were considering as plausible were that if the year 2000 goals on carbon dioxide emission are met, which is not likely, then within a couple of centuries, by 2300, the world's temperature would have increased by about ten degrees Centigrade, which would mean a rise in sea level that would probably wipe out a good bit of human civilization as it's currently constituted. Of course this doesn't mean that the effects set in in three hundred years. They start setting in much sooner.
Maybe it will be worse. Maybe it will be better. But possibilities like that will not be faced by any sane person with any equanimity. There's nothing being done about them at all. The same study says that in order to avoid this it will be necessary to undertake quite radical changes of a kind not even contemplated. These are what ought to be front-page stories and ought to be the focus of public attention and concern. The matter of disposing of plutonium has largely to do with weapons production. But there are quite serious questions about nuclear power that can't just be dismissed.
Call-ins
Listener: You have established a fairly loyal following. I am fearful that there may be this saturation point of despair just from knowing the heaviness of the truth that you impart. I would like to strongly lobby you to begin a process of maybe devoting ten or fifteen percent of your appearances or books or articles towards tangible detailed things that people c
