Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

See, one of the interesting features of the 1980s is that to a large extent the United States had to carry out its foreign interventions through the medium of mercenary states. There’s a whole network of U.S. mercenary states. Israel is the major one, but it also includes Taiwan, South Africa, South Korea, [...], they’re international terrorist networks of mercenary states. It’s a new phenomenon in world history, way beyond what anybody has ever dreamt of. Other countries hire terrorists, we hire terrorist states, we’re a big, powerful country.

But this 42-page document is kind of interesting. It outlines a massive international terrorist network run by the United States. It lists the countries that were involved, the ways we got them involved. All of it is focused on one thing in this case, the war in Nicaragua. But there were plenty of other operations going on, and if you expanded it to look at, say, Angola, and Afghanistan, and others, you'd bring in more pieces. One of the main players is Israel: they've helped the United States penetrate black Africa, they've helped support the genocide in Guatemala; when the United States couldn't directly involve itself with the military dictatorships of the southern cone in South America, Israel did it for us. 

I think that’s the important point. If you want to measure the achievement of the popular movements here, you have to ask, what would things have been like if they hadn’t been around?

[Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup engineered by the C.I.A. in 1973.]

See, there’s a classic technique when you want to overthrow a government: you arm its military. That’s the standard thing, for obvious reasons. You want to overthrow a government, who’s going to overthrow it for you? Well, the military, they’re the guys who overthrow governments. In fact, that’s the main reason for giving military aid and training all around the world in the first place, to keep contacts with our guys in the place that counts, the army.

If you read American secret documents, this is all stated very openly, actually. For example, there’s a now-declassified Robert McNamara [Secretary of Defense]-to-McGeorge Bundy [Special Assistant to the President for  National Security Affairs] intercommunication from 1965 with a detailed discussion of Latin America, in which they talk about how the role of the military in Latin American societies is to overthrow civilian governments if, in the judgment of the military, the governments are not pursuing the “welfare of the nation,” which turns out to be the welfare of American multinational corporations. 

So if you want to overthrow a government, you arm its military, and of course you make it hard for the civilian government to function. And that’s what was done in the Chile case: we armed the military, we tried to cause economic chaos, and the military took over.Okay, that’s sort of classic. In fact, that’s almost certainly what the Iran part of the Iran-contra affair was about. The arms shipments to the Iranian military didn’t have anything to do with a secret deal to release American hostages [held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon beginning in 1985], and they didn't have anything to do with "October Surprises" either, in my viewthat the Reagan electoral campaign secretly promised arms to Iran if Iran delayedthe release of earlier U.S. hostages until after the 1980 Presidential election]. What they had to do with was the classic device of arming the military so they would carry out a coup and restore the old arrangement that existed under the Shah. There's verygood evidence for this; I can talk about it if you like,

But Chile was a straight, classic operation—clandestine in a sense, but not all that clandestine. For instance, arming the Chilean military was completely public: it was in public records, it was never secret. 17 It’s just that nobody in the United States ever looks, because the media and the intellectual class are too disciplined, and ordinary people out there don’t have the time to go and read Pentagon records and figure out what happened. So it was clandestine in the sense that nobody knew about it, but the information was 

all available in public records, there was nothing hidden about it. In fact, Chile was kind of a normal C.I.A. operation, it was likeIndonesia [in a 1965 U.S.-backed coup].18 There were some clandestine parts to it -and there are parts that still haven't come out yet-but it was not really deep covert action. And it was nothing like the Central Amnerican activities of the 1980s, they're just radically different in Scale.

I mean, there have been clandestine operations—I don’t want to suggest that it’s novel. Like, overthrowing the government of Iran in 1953 was clandestine.19 Overthrowing the government of Guatemala in 1954 was clandestine—and it was kept secret for twenty years. 20 Operation MONGOOSE [a major terrorist operation against Cuba], which so far wins the prize as the world’s leading single international terrorist operation, started by the Kennedy administration right after the Bay of Pigs, that was secret.

government secrecy is not for security reasons, overwhelmingly—it’s just to prevent the population here from knowing what’s going on. there is a complex system of filters in the media and educational institutions which ends up ensuring that dissident perspectives are weeded out, or marginalized in one way or another. And the end result is in fact quite similar: what are called opinions “on the left” and “on the right” in the media represent only a limited spectrum of debate, which reflects the range of needs of private power—but there’s essentially nothing beyond those “acceptable” positions.

So what the media do, in effect, is to take the set of assumptions which express the basic ideas of the propaganda system, whether about the Cold War or the economic system or the “national interest” and so on, and then present a range of debate within that framework—so the debate only enhances the strength of the assumptions, ingraining them in people’s minds as the entire possible spectrum of opinion that there is. So you see, in our system what you might call "state propaganda"" isn't expressed as such, as it would be in a totalitarian society--rather it's implicit, it'sframework for debate among the people whodiscussion.

In fact, the nature of Western systems of indoctrination is typically not understood by dictators, they don’t understand the utility for propaganda purposes of having “critical debate” that incorporates the basic assumptions of the official doctrines, and thereby marginalizes and eliminates authentic and rational critical discussion. Under what’s sometimes been called “brainwashing under freedom,” the critics, or at least, the “responsible critics” make a major contribution to the cause by bounding the debate within certain acceptable limits—that’s why they’re tolerated, and in fact even honored.

But if you want to talk about presentation of news and information, the basic structure is that there are what are sometimes called “agenda-setting” media: there are a number of major media outlets that end up setting a basic framework that other smaller media units more or less have to adapt to. The larger media have the essential resources, and other smaller media scattered around the country pretty much have to take the framework which the major outlets present and adapt to it—because if the newspapers in Pittsburgh or Salt Lake City want to know about Angola, say, very few of them are going to be able to send their own correspondents and have their own analysts and so on

The alternative conception is that the media will present a picture of the world which defends and inculcates the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged

domestic economy, and who therefore also largely control the government. According to this "Propaganda Model," the media serve their societal purpose by things like the way they select topics, distribute their concerns, frame issues, filter information, focus their analyses, through emphasis, tone, and a whole range of other techniques like that. 

Now, I should point out that none of this should suggest that the media always will agree with state policy at any given moment. Because control over the government shifts back and forth between various elite groupings in our society, whichever segment of the business community happens to control the government at

a particular time reflects only part of an elite political spectrum, within which there are sometimes tactical disagreements. What the “Propaganda Model" in fact predicts is this entire range of elite perspectives will be reflected in the media-it's just there will be essentially nothing that goes beyond it.

Back in the 1920s, the major manual of the public relations industry actually was titled Propaganda (in those days, people were a little bit more  honest). It opens saying something like this: the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is a central feature of a democratic system—the wording is virtually like that. Then it says: it is the job of the “intelligent minorities” to carry out this manipulation of the attitudes and opinions of the masses.40 And really that’s the leading doctrine of modern liberal-democratic intellectual thought: that if you lose the power to control people by force, you need better indoctrination

So we’ve studied a great number of cases, from every methodological point of view that we’ve been able to think of—and they all support the “Propaganda Model.” And by now there are thousands of pages of similar material confirming the thesis in books and articles by other people too—in fact, I would hazard a guess that the “Propaganda Model” is one of the best-confirmed theses in the social sciences. There has been no serious counter-discussion of it at all, actually, that I’m aware of.44 But that’s all irrelevant within the mainstream culture—and the point is, it will all stay irrelevant, even if the level of proof were to reach way beyond what could ever be achieved in the social sciences. In fact, even if you could prove it at the level of physics, it would always remain irrelevant within the mainstream institutions. And the reason for that is that the “Propaganda Model” is in fact valid, and it predicts that it will be irrelevant—and in fact, not even be understandable within the elite culture no - matter how well it’s proven. And that’s because what it reveals undermines very effective and useful ideological institutions, so it’s dysfunctional to them, and will be excluded.

on major issues there is a very noticeable split between elite and popular opinion, and the media consistently reflect  elite opinion. So for example, on things like, say, dismantling welfare state programs, or on a nuclear weapons freeze, or on U.S. policies in Central America in the 1980s, or on the nature of the Vietnam War, the views expressed in the media have always been very different from public opinion, and in line with elite opinion.

MAN: Take a look at the word “media,” it is “us talking to us.”

 OTHERS: No, no.

 WOMAN: You’re wrong.

 There I really disagree. I mean, I think it’s a good question to examine, but I don’t agree. After all, what are the media? Who are they? Are they “us”? Take C.B.S., or the New York Times—who are they? They’re among the major corporations in the country, they’re not “us.” They are no more “us” than General Motors is “us.”

The question is: are the media like a sample of public opinion? Is it that the public has a certain range of beliefs and the media are just a sample of it? If that were the case, the media would be very democratic in fact

I once asked another editor I know at the Boston Globe why their coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is so awful—and it is. He just laughed and said, “How many Arab advertisers do you think we have?” That was the end of that conversation.

there is no such thing as a “volunteer army”: a “volunteer army” is a mercenary army of the poor.

People in power learn, you know. They’re sophisticated, and they’re organized, and they have continuity

The terminology we use is heavily ideologically laden, always. Pick your term: if it’s a term that has any significance whatsoever—like, not “and” or “or”—it typically has two meanings, a dictionary meaning and a meaning that’s used for ideological warfare. [...]. So, “terrorism” is only what other people do. Or take “defense”: I have never heard of a state that admits it’s carrying out an aggressive act, they’re always engaged in “defense,” no matter what they’re doing—maybe “preemptive defense” or something.

Or look at the major theme of modern American history, “containment”—as in, “the United States is containing Soviet expansionism.” Unless you accept that framework of discussion when talking about international affairs in the modern period, you are just not a part of accepted discourse here: everybody has to begin by assuming that for the last half-century the United States has been “containing” the Soviet Union

Well, the rhetoric of “containment” begs all questions—once you’ve accepted the rhetoric of “containment,” it really doesn’t matter what you say, you’ve already given up everything. Because the fundamental question is, is it true? Has the United States been “containing” the Soviet Union? Well, you know, on the surface it looks a little odd. I mean, maybe you think the Soviet Union is the worst place in history, but they’re conservative—whatever rotten things they’ve done, they’ve been inside the Soviet Union and right around its borders, in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan and so on. They never do anything anywhere else. They don’t have troops stationed anywhere else. They don’t have intervention forces positioned all over the world like we do.1 So what does it mean to say we’re “containing” them?

military spending is our method of industrial management—it’s our way of keeping the economy profitable for business. So just take a look at the major declassified documents on military spending, they’re pretty frank about it. For example, N.S.C. 68 [National Security Council Memorandum 68] is the major Cold War document, as everybody agrees, and one of the things it says very clearly is that without military spending, there’s going to be an economic decline both in the United States and world-wide—so consequently it calls for a vast increase in military spending in the U.S.

WOMAN: What’s been the point of the arms race, Dr. Chomsky?

 Well, there are a lot of things, it’s served a number of crucial functions. Remember, any state, any state, has a primary enemy: its own population. If politics begins to break out inside your own country and the population starts getting active, all kinds of horrible things can happen—so you have to keep the population quiescent and obedient and passive. And international conflict is one of the best ways of doing it: if there’s a big enemy around, people will abandon their rights, because you’ve got to survive. So the arms race is functional in that respect—it creates global tension and a mood of fear

You look at any other term of political discourse, and you’re going to find the same thing: the terms of political discourse are designed so as to prevent thought. One of the main ones is this notion of “defense.” So look at the diplomatic record of any country you want—Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Libya, pick your favorite horror-story—you’ll find that everything they ever did was “defensive”; I’m sure if we had records from Genghis Khan we would find that what he was doing was “defensive” too. And here in the United States you cannot challenge that—no matter how absurd it gets

You can’t have the United States opposing the peace process, because the peace process is what the United States is  doing, by definition. And if anybody is opposing the United States, then  they’re opposing the peace process. That’s the way it works, and it’s very convenient, you get nice conclusions

[About the media

 “moderate” is a word that means “follows U.S. orders”—as opposed to what’s called “radical,” which means “doesn’t follow U.S. orders.” “Radical” has nothing to do with left or right; you can be an ultra-right-winger, but you’re a “radical” if you don’t follow U.S. orders. 

Remember, any state, any state, has a primary enemy: its own population

I’ll never forget one article about this in the New York Times Magazine,  by their U.N. correspondent, Richard Bernstein. He went through this whole business about how the entire world votes against the United States all the time. He wasn’t asking, “How do they raise American children?” What he asked was, “Why is the world out of step?” Literally: “What’s the matter with the world, it’s all out of step, it doesn’t understand—what is it with the world?” Then he began looking for defects in the world. I’m not  exaggerating, that’s exactly what it was like—and all of this stuff is done without any self-consciousness, it’s just said straight

It’s the same with the World Court [the popular name for the International Court of Justice, the judicial organ of the U.N.]. When the World Court issued an explicit decision against the United States in June 1986 ordering—ordering—the United States to terminate what it called “unlawful use of force” and illegal economic warfare against Nicaragua, we just said to heck with it, we ignored them. The week after, Congress increased U.S. aid to the contras by another hundred million dollars Again, the commentary across the board in the U.S.—the New York Times, the Washington Post, big international law experts—was unanimous: the World Court has discredited itself by passing this judgment, so obviously we don’t have to pay any attention to it.44 It just discredits the World Court to criticize the United States—that’s like a truism here. Then right after that, when the U.N. Security Council called on all states to observe international law—not referring to the United States, but obliquely referring to this World Court decision—and it was vetoed by the United States (11 to 1, with 3 abstentions); and when the General Assembly also passed the same resolution, the first time 94 to 3 (Israel, El Salvador, and the United States), the next time 94 to 2 (Israel and the United States)—the press wouldn’t even report it.45  Well, that’s what it means to be a great power: you do whatever you feel like.

WOMAN: But why is it that the press won’t report any of these things?

 Well, it’s because the press has a job: its job is to keep people from understanding the world, and to keep them indoctrinated

Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs

MAN: Noam, I have to say, I’m getting a little depressed by all of this negative information—we need it, there’s no question about it, but we also need a certain degree of empowerment. So let me just ask you, who are your heroes

Well, let me first just make a remark about the “empowerment” point, which comes up again and again. I never know exactly how to respond to it—because it’s just the wrong question. The point is, there are lots of opportunities to do things, and if people do something with them, changes will happen. No matter how you look at it, it seems to me that’s always what it comes down to

MAN: Well, I guess I’m asking about your heroes so that you’ll be a little bit more specific about some of these “opportunities.” For example, who do you really admire when it comes to activism? Well, my heroes are people who were working with S.N.C.C. [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a Civil Rights Movement organization] in the South—people who day after day faced very harsh conditions and suffered badly, some of them were even killed. They’ll never enter into history, but I knew some of them, I saw some of them—they’re heroes. Draft resisters during the Vietnam War I think are heroes. Plenty of people in the Third World are heroes: if you ever have the chance to go to a place where people are really struggling—like the West Bank, Nicaragua, Laos—there’s an awful lot of heroism, just an awful lot of heroism. Among sort of middle-class organizers, there are three or four people I know who would get the Nobel Peace Prize if it meant anything, which of course it doesn’t, in fact it’s kind of an insult to get it—take a look at who it goes to.66 If you look around, there are people like that: if you want heroes, you can find them. You’re not going to find them among anybody whose name is mentioned in the newspapers—if they’re there, you know probably they’re not heroes, they’re anti-heroes

After you get shot, after you’re killed, like Martin Luther King, then you can become a hero -but not while you're alive

This was actually discussed years ago in an interesting essay by George Orwell, which happens to be the introduction to Animal Farm. Animal Farm is a satire on Soviet totalitarianism, obviously, and it’s a very famous book, everybody reads it. But what people don’t usually read is its introduction, which talks about censorship in England—and the main reason people don’t read it is because it was censored, nicely; it simply wasn’t published with the book. It was finally rediscovered about thirty years later and somebody somewhere published it, and now it’s available in some modern editions. But in this essay Orwell said, look, this book is obviously about Stalinist Russia, however it’s not all that different in England. And then he described how things work in England. He said: in England there isn’t any commissar around who beats you over the head if you say the wrong thing, but nevertheless the results are not all that different. And then he had a two-line description of how the press works in England, which is pretty accurate,  in fact. One of the reasons why the results are similar, he said, is because the press is owned by wealthy men who have strong interests in not having certain things said. The other, which he said is equally pertinent, is that if you’re a well-educated person in England—you went to the right prep schools, then to Oxford, and now you’re a bigshot somewhere—you have simply learned that there are certain things that it is not proper to say.

And that’s a large part of education, in fact: just internalizing the understanding that there are certain things it is not proper to say, and it is not proper to think. And if you don’t learn that, typically you’ll be weeded out of the institutions somewhere along the line. Well, those two factors are very important ones, and there are others, but they go a long way towards explaining the uniformity of ideology in the intellectual culture here

But even in the Soviet Union, chances are very strong that if you actually bothered to look, you’d find that most of the journalists actually believed the things they wrote. And that’s because people who  didn’t believe that kind of thing would never have made it onto Pravda in the first place. It’s very hard to live with cognitive dissonance: only a real cynic can believe one thing and say another. So whether it’s a totalitarian system or a free system, the people who are most useful to the system of power are the ones who actually believe what they say, and they’re the ones who will typically make it through.

So take Tom Wicker at the New York Times: when you talk to him about this kind of stuff, he gets very irate and says, “Nobody tells me what to write.” And that’s perfectly true, nobody tells him what to write—but if he didn’t already know what to write, he wouldn’t be a columnist for the New York Times. Like, nobody tells Alex Cockburn what to write, and therefore he’s not a columnist for the New York Times, because he thinks different things. You think the wrong thoughts, you’re not in the system

MAN: Couldn’t an editorialist say it, though, even if a reporter can’t?

 Have any of them done it, in thirty years?

 MAN: I don’t know.

 Well, I’ll tell you, nobody has; I’ve checked, actually

MAN: But do you think things are ever going to change? Aren’t we always going to have people entrenched in power, left or right, who want to preserve that power, and will use all of the means at their disposal to do it—and all we can really do is just sit back and complain about it?

 That’s the attitude of people who thought that there was nothing you could do about feudalism and slavery. And there was something you could do about feudalism and slavery, but not by sitting and complaining about it. John Brown didn’t sit and complain about it.

 MAN: He didn’t get very far.

 He did. They overthrew slavery, and the Abolitionists played a big role in that.

[Brown’s 1859 attempt to set off a slave revolt by seizing a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, electrified the country and intensified the Abolitionist movement

MAN: So as long as we criticize, try to offer constructive criticism, there’s hope of changing the system? If the constructive criticism leads to the point where mass popular movements form that do something to change the system, sure, then there’s hope. I mean, there wouldn’t have been an American Revolution if people had been writing pamphlets but not doing anything more than that.

WOMAN: Then what’s the trick to holding on and not giving up—because it seems like a lot of people need it. The trick is not to be isolated—if you’re isolated, like Winston Smith in  1984, then sooner or later you’re going to break, as he finally broke. That was the point of Orwell’s story. In fact, the whole tradition of popular control has been exactly that: to keep people isolated, because if you can keep them isolated enough, you can get them to believe anything. But when people get together, all sorts of things are possible.

Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. In fact, typically the elites are the most indoctrinated segment of a society, because they are the ones who are exposed to the most propaganda and actually take part in the decision-making process. For them you have the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and so on. But there’s also a mass media, whose main function is just to get rid of the rest of the population—to marginalize and eliminate them, so they don’t interfere with decision-making. And the press that’s designed for that purpose isn’t the New York Times and the Washington Post,  it’s sitcoms on television, and the National Enquirer, and sex and violence, and babies with three heads, and football, all that kind of stuff. But the approximately 85 percent of the population that is the main target of that media, they don’t have it in their genes that they’re not interested in the way the world works. And if they can escape from the effects of the de-education  and indoctrination system, and the whole class system it’s a part of—it’s after all not just indoctrination that keeps people from getting involved in political life, by any means—if they can do that, then yeah, they’re a big audience for an alternative, and there’s some hope.

[1990] So the brutality you see occasionally now on television has in fact been going on for the last twenty years, and it’s just the nature of a military occupation: military occupations are harsh and brutal, there is no other kind [Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria during the Six Day War in 1967, and has controlled them ever since]. There’s been home-destruction, collective punishments, expulsion, plenty of humiliation, censorship—I mean, you’d have to go back to the worst days of the American South to know what it’s been like for the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. They are not supposed to raise their heads—that’s what they say in Israel, “They’re raising their heads, we’ve got to do something about it.” And that’s the way the Palestinians have been living

Basically the United States doesn’t give a damn about Israel: if it goes down the drain, U.S. planners don’t care one way or another, there’s no moral obligation or anything else. But what they do care about is control of the enormous oil resources of the Middle East. I mean, a big part of the way you run the planet is by controlling Middle East oil, and in the late 1950s, the United States began to recognize that Israel would be a very useful ally in this respect. So for example, there’s a National Security Council Memorandum in 1958 which points out that the main enemy of the United States in the Middle East (as everywhere) is nationalism, what they call “radical Arab nationalism”—which means independence, countries pursuing a course other than submission to the needs of American power. Well, that’s always the enemy: the people there don’t always see why the enormous wealth and resources of the region have to be in the control of American and British investors while they starve, they’ve never really gotten that into their heads—and sometimes they try to do something about it. Alright,  that’s unacceptable to the United States, and one of the things they pointed out is that a useful weapon against that sort of “radical Arab nationalism” would be a highly militarized Israel, which would then be a reliable base for U.S. power in the region.

Now, that insight was not really acted upon extensively until the Six Day War in 1967, when, with U.S. support, Israel essentially destroyed Nasser [the Egyptian President]—who was regarded as the main Arab nationalist force in the Middle East—and virtually all the other Arab armies in the region too. That won Israel a lot of points, it established them as what’s called a “strategic asset”—that is, a military force that can be used as an outlet for U.S. power. In fact, at the time, Israel and Iran under the Shah (which were allies, tacit allies) came to be regarded by American planners as two parts of a tripartite U.S. system for controlling the Middle East. This consisted first of all of Saudi Arabia, which is where most of the oil is, and then its two gendarmes, pre-revolutionary Iran and Israel—the “Guardians of the Gulf,” as they were called, who were supposed to protect Saudi Arabia from indigenous nationalist forces in the area. Of course, when the Shah fell in the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Israel’s role became even more important to the United States, it was the last “Guardian.” 

Meanwhile, Israel began to pick up secondary functions: it started to serve as a mercenary state for the United States around the world. So in the 1960s, Israel started to be used as a conduit for intervening in the affairs of black African countries, under a big C.I.A. subsidy. And in the 1970s and Eighties, the United States increasingly turned to Israel as kind of a weapon against other parts of the Third World—Israel would provide armaments and training and computers and all sorts of other things to Third World dictatorships at times when it was hard for the U.S. government to give that support directly. For instance, Israel acted as the main U.S. contact with the South African military for years, right through the embargo [the U.N. Security Council imposed a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa in 1977 after the U.S. and Britain had vetoed even stronger resolutions].44  Well, that’s a very useful alliance, and that’s another reason why Israel gets such extraordinary amounts of U.S. aid.

And that reasoning has held right up to the present. I mean, it’s easy to show that the United States has blocked every move towards a political settlement that has come along in the Middle East—often we’ve just vetoed them at the U.N. Security Council.46 In fact, up until very recently, it’s been impossible in the United States even to talk about a political settlement. The official line in the United States has been, “The Arabs want to kill all the Jews and throw them into the sea”—with only two exceptions. One is King Hussein of Jordan, who’s a “moderate,” because he’s on our side. And the other was President Sadat of Egypt, who in 1977 realized the error of his ways, so he flew to Jerusalem and became a man of peace—and that’s why the Arabs killed him, because the Arabs’ll kill anybody who’s for peace [Sadat was assassinated in 1981]. That has been the official line in the United States, and you simply cannot deviate from it in the press or scholarship.

It’s total lies from beginning to end. Take Sadat: Sadat made a peace offer to Israel in February 1971, a better offer from Israel’s point of view than the one he later initiated in 1977 [which led to the Camp David peace talks]. It was a full peace treaty exactly in accord with U.N. Resolution 242 [which had called for a return to pre-June 1967 borders in the region with security guarantees, but made no mention of Palestinian rights]—the United States and Israel turned it down, therefore it’s out of history. 47 In January 1976, Syria, Jordan and Egypt proposed a two-state peace settlement at the U.N. Security Council on the basis of U.N. 242, and the P.L.O. supported the proposal—it called for territorial guarantees, the whole business: the United States vetoed it, so it’s out of history, it didn’t happen. 48  And it just goes on from there: the United States was unwilling to support any of these peace offers, so they’re out of history, they’re down Orwell’s memory hole.

In fact, it’s even at the point where journals in the United States will not permit letters referring to these proposals; the degree of control on this is startling, actually. For example, a few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called “Mideast Truth and Falsehood,” about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: he said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977.50 So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek—you know, four lines—in which I said, “Will has one statement of fact, it’s false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down.” Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek “Letters” column. She said: “We’re kind of interested in your letter, where did you get those facts?” So I told her, “Well, they’re published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971”—which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United  States because it was the wrong story.51 So she looked it up and called me back, and said, “Yeah, you’re right, we found it there; okay, we’ll run your letter.” An hour later she called again and said, “Gee, I’m sorry, but we can’t run the letter.” I said, “What’s the problem?” She said, “Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he’s having a tantrum; they decided they can’t run it.” Well, okay.

But the point is, in Newsweek and the New York Times and the Washington Post and so on, you simply cannot state these facts—it’s like belief in divinity or something, the lies have become immutable truth.

case, the United States had been content to let them be a Russian ally—if the Russians want to sink money into this morass, that’s fine, we don’t mind, we just laugh at them. But in the 1973 war, it suddenly became clear that Egypt wasn’t just a basket-case,  they knew how to shoot and do all these other things that matter, so Kissinger decided to accept what had in fact been long-standing Egyptian offers to become an American client-state. Well, that’s what Egypt had wanted all along, so they immediately kicked out the Russians and got on the American gravy-train. And now they’re the second-biggest recipient of U.S. aid, though still way behind Israel—and at that point Sadat became a “moderate,” because he had switched to our side. And since Egypt was considered the major Arab deterrent to hawkish Israeli policies, the obvious back-up position was just to remove them from the conflict, so Israel would be free to solidify its control in the region—as it has done, in fact. See, before the 1973 war, U.S. planners thought that Israel didn’t have to worry about any Arab forces at all. Now they saw that that was wrong—so they moved to extract Egypt from the conflict. And that was the great achievement of the Camp David peace process: it enabled Israel to integrate the Occupied Territories and attack Lebanon without any Egyptian deterrent. Alright, try to say that in the U.S. media.Incidentally, by now you are beginning to be able to say it in the strategic analysis literature. So if you read articles by strategic analysts, they’re starting to say, yeah, that’s the way it worked.55 Of course that’s the way it worked, that’s the way it was designed. That’s the way it was obviously going to work right at the time of Camp David—I mean, I was writing about this in 1977.56 If you eliminate the major Arab deterrent force and increase U.S. aid to Israel to the level of 50 percent of total U.S. aid worldwide, and Israel is committed to integrating the Occupied Territories and attacking and disrupting Lebanon, if you get that configuration of events, what do you think is going to happen? It’s transparent, a child could figure it out. But you can’t say it, because to say it would imply that the United States is not the leader of the world peace forces, and is not interested in justice and freedom and human rights around the world. Therefore you can’t say any of these things here, and by now you probably can’t even see them.

WOMAN: In a best-case scenario for the future, how do you envision an economic system that works?

Well, our economic system “works,” it just works in the interests of the masters, and I’d like to see one that works in the interests of the general population. And that will only happen when they are the “principal architects” of policy, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase.1 I mean, as long as power is narrowly concentrated, whether in the economic or the political system,  you know who’s going to benefit from the policies—you don’t have to be a genius to figure that out. That’s why democracy would be a good thing for the general public. But of course, achieving real democracy will require that the whole system of corporate capitalism be completely dismantled—because it’s radically anti-democratic. And that can’t be done by a stroke of the pen, you know: you have to build up alternative popular institutions, which could allow control over society’s investment decisions to be moved into the hands of working people and communities. That’s a long job, it requires building up an entire cultural and institutional basis for the changes, it’s not something that’s just going to happen on its own. There are people who have written about what such a system might look like—kind of a “participatory economy,” it’s sometimes called.2 But sure, that’s the way to go, I think

there is in fact a very high correlation between U.S. foreign aid and human rights abuses. For example, Lars Schoultz at the University of North Carolina—who’s the major academic specialist on human rights in Latin America and a highly respected mainstream scholar—published a study on U.S. aid to Latin America almost fifteen years ago, in which he identified an extremely close correlation between U.S. aid and torture: as he put it, the more a country tortures its citizens and the more egregious are the violations of human rights, the higher is U.S. aid

there’s a whole series of things which have to happen, and they begin with awareness; you don’t do anything without awareness, obviously—you don’t do anything unless you’re aware that there’s something that ought to be done, so that’s the beginning almost by definition. But real awareness in fact comes about through practice and experience with the world. It’s not, first you become aware and then you start doing things; you become aware through doing things.

Violence usually comes from the powerful—people may talk about it coming from the revolutionaries, but that’s typically because they’re attacked and they then defend themselves with violence.

The same question also arises with another thing that I think has to go on now—the building up of alternative media, and of networks of activist organizations which could help bring people together to fight the effects of indoctrination, like we’ve been talking about. Again, that’s non-violent—but only up to the point where it starts to have the effect of undermining corporate power, when then you may discover that it’s not going to be nonviolent anymore, because the rich may find ways of defending themselves with violence. So talking about non-violence is easy, but personally I can’t really see taking it as an absolute principle

Unless you think that human history is over, it’s not an argument to say “it’s not around.” You go back two hundred years, it was hard to imagine slavery being abolished.

The idea that people could be free is extremely frightening to anybody with power

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, “they rent themselves freely, it’s a free contract”—but that’s a joke. If your choice is, “do what I tell you or starve,” that’s not a choice—it’s in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

In fact, just take a look at the history of “trucking and bartering” itself: look at the history of modern capitalism, about which we know a lot. The first thing you’ll notice is, peasants had to be driven by force and violence into a wage-labor system they did not want; then major efforts were undertaken—conscious efforts—to create wants. In fact, if you look back, there’s a whole interesting literature of conscious discussion of the need to manufacture wants in the general population. It’s happened over the whole long stretch of capitalism of course, but one place where you can see it very nicely encapsulated is around the time when slavery was terminated. It’s very dramatic to look at cases like these.For example, in 1831 there was a big slave revolt in Jamaica—which was one of the things that led the British to decide to give up slavery in their colonies: after some slave revolts, they basically said, “It’s not paying anymore.” So within a couple years the British wanted to move from a slave economy to a so-called “free” economy, but they still wanted the basic structure to remain exactly the same—and if you take a look back at the parliamentary debates in England at the time, they were talking very consciously about all this. They were saying: look, we’ve got to keep it the way it is, the masters have to become the owners, the slaves have to become the happy workers—somehow we’ve got to work it all out.Well, there was a little problem in Jamaica: since there was a lot of open land there, when the British let the slaves go free they just wanted to move out onto the land and be perfectly happy, they didn’t want to work for the British sugar plantations anymore. So what everyone was asking in Parliament in London was, “How can we force them to keep working for us, even when they’re no longer enslaved into it?” Alright, two things were decided upon: first, they would use state force to close off the open land and prevent people from going and surviving on their own. And secondly, they realized that since all these workers didn’t really want a lot of things—they just wanted to satisfy their basic needs, which they could easily do in that tropical climate—the British capitalists would have to start creating a whole set of wants for them, and make them start desiring things they didn’t then desire, so then the only way they’d be able to satisfy their new material desires would be by working for wages in the British sugar plantations.

MAN: Noam, aren’t you at all afraid of being silenced by the establishment for being so prominent and vocal in speaking out against U.S. power and its abuses?No, not really—and for a very simple reason, actually: if you look at me, you’ll see what it is. I’m white, I’m privileged, and that means I’m basically immune from punishment by power. I mean, I don’t want to say that it’s a hundred percent immunity—but the fact of the matter is that these two things mean that you can buy a lot of freedom. Look, there isn’t any true capitalist society in the world, it couldn’t survive for ten minutes, but there are variations on capitalism, and the U.S. is towards the capitalist end of the world spectrum—not very far towards it, I should say, but towards it at least in values. And if you had a truly capitalist society, everything would be a commodity, including freedom: there would be as much of it as you can buy. Well, since the U.S. is towards that end of the spectrum, it means there’s an awful lot of freedom around if you can afford it. So if you’re a black organizer in the ghetto, you don’t have much of it, and you’re in trouble—they can send the Chicago police in to murder you, like they did with Fred Hampton [a Black Panther assassinated by the F.B.I. in 1969]. But if you’re a white professional like me, you can buy a lot of freedom.

MAN: But what I’m wondering is, what else do you think would go into teaching people about resistance, and activism in general?

First of all I don’t think you should mislead people: you should get them to understand that if they’re going to be independent thinkers, they are probably going to pay a cost. I mean, one has to begin with an understanding of the way the world works: the world does not reward honesty and independence, it rewards obedience and service. It’s a world of concentrated power, and those who have power are not going to reward people who question that power

Alexis de Tocqueville [French politician and writer] pointed out that you can have systems in which “the art advances and the artisan recedes,” but that’s inhuman—because what you’re really interested in is the artisan, you’re interested in people, and for people to have the opportunity to live full and rewarding lives they have to be in control of what they do, even if that happens to be economically less efficient.

any kind of drastic intervention in a human being, or a human society, is very dubious. Like, suppose you’ve got a personal computer and it isn’t working—it’s a bad idea to hit it with a crowbar. Maybe hitting it with a crowbar will by accident fix it, but it’s by and large not a good tactic—and human societies are much more complex than computers, as are human beings. So you really never understand what you’re doing. People have to carry out changes for themselves: they can’t be imposed upon them from above.Take the Spanish Revolution again. I mean, that was just one year in a rather undeveloped country (though it had industry and so on), so it’s not like a model for the future. But a lot of interesting things happened in the course of it, and they didn’t just happen out of the blue—they happened out of maybe fifty years of serious organizing and experimentation, and attempts to try it, and failures, and being smashed up by the army, and then trying again. So when people say it was spontaneous, that’s just not true: it came from a lot of experience, and thinking, and working, and so on, and then when the revolutionary moment came and the existing system sort of collapsed, people had in their heads a picture of what to do, and had even tried it, and they then tried to implement it on a mass scale. And it was implemented in many different ways—there wasn’t any single pattern that was followed, the various collectives were experimenting on their own under different conditions, and finding out for themselves what worked.40 And that’s a good example of how I think constructive change has to happen.

On the other hand, if an economist from, say, Harvard, goes to some Eastern European country today and tells them, “Here’s the way to develop,” that’s worse than hitting a computer with a crowbar: there are a million different social and cultural and economic factors they don’t understand, and any big change that’s pressed on people is very likely to be disastrous, no matter what it is—and of course, it always is disastrous. Incidentally, it’s disastrous for the victims—it’s usually very good for the people who are carrying out the experiments, which is why these experiments have been carried out for the last couple hundred years, since the British started them in India. I mean, every one of them is a disaster for the victims and they’re invariably good for the guys carrying out the experiments.

I think people should be extremely skeptical when intellectual life constructs structures which aren’t transparent—because the fact of the matter is that in most areas of life, we just don’t understand anything very much. There are some areas, like say, quantum physics, where they’re not faking. But most of the time it’s just fakery, I think: anything that’s at all understood can probably be described pretty simply. And when words like “dialectics” come along, or “hermeneutics,” and all this kind of stuff that’s supposed to be very profound, like Goering, “I reach for my revolver.”

So take the universities, which in many respects are not very different from the media in the way they function—though they’re a much more complex system, so they’re harder to study systematically. Universities do not generate nearly enough funds to support themselves from tuition money alone: they’re parasitic institutions that need to be supported from the outside, and that means they’re dependent on wealthy alumni, on corporations, and on the government, which are groups with the same basic interests. Well, as long as the universities serve those interests, they’ll be funded. If they ever stop serving those interests, they’ll start to get in trouble. So for example, in the late 1960s it began to appear that the universities were not adequately performing that service—students were asking questions, they were thinking independently, they were rejecting a lot of the Establishment value-system, challenging all sorts of things—and the corporations began to react to that, they began to react in a number of ways. For one thing, they began to develop alternative programs, like I.B.M. began to set up kind of a vocational training program to produce engineers on their own: if M.I.T. wasn’t going to do it for them the way they wanted, they’d do it themselves—and that would have meant they’d stop funding M.I.T. Well, of course things never really got out of hand in the Sixties, so the moves in that direction were very limited. But those are the kinds of pressures there are.

Let me just tell you a personal story. My oldest, closest friend is a guy who came to the United States from Latvia when he was fifteen, fleeing from Hitler. He escaped to New York with his parents and went to George Washington High School, which in those days at least was the school for bright Jewish kids in New York City. And he once told me that the first thing that struck him about American schools was the fact that if he got a “C” in a course, nobody cared, but if he came to school three minutes late he was sent to the principal’s office—and that generalized. He realized that what it meant is, what’s valued here is the ability to work on an assembly line, even if it’s an intellectual assembly line. The important thing is to be able to obey orders, and to do what you’re told, and to be where you’re supposed to be. The values are, you’re going to be a factory worker somewhere—maybe they’ll call it a university—but you’re going to be following somebody else’s orders, and just doing your work in some prescribed way. And what matters is discipline, not figuring things out for yourself, or understanding things that interest you—those are kind of marginal: just make sure you meet the requirements of a factory

And what I discovered is that a large part of education at the really elite institutions is simply refinement, teaching the social graces: what kind of clothes you should wear, how to drink port the right way, how to have polite conversation without talking about serious topics, but of course indicating that you could talk about serious topics if you were so vulgar as to actually do it, all kinds of things which an intellectual is supposed to know how to do. And that was really the main point of the program, I think

Actually, the most dramatic example of these “market distortions” that I can think of—which I suspect is never even taught in economics courses—concerns the reason why the United States had an industrial revolution in the first place. Remember, the industrial revolution was fueled by textiles, meaning one commodity: cotton. And cotton was cheap, that was crucially important. Well, why was cotton cheap? Was it because of market forces? No. Cotton was cheap because they exterminated the native population here and brought in slaves—that’s why cotton was cheap. Genocide and slavery: try to imagine a more severe market distortion than that.Other countries who had their own cotton resources also tried to start on industrial revolutions—but they didn’t get very far, because England had more guns, and stopped them by force. Egypt, for example, had its own cotton resources, and started on an industrial revolution at about the same time as the United States did, around 1820—but the British weren’t going to tolerate an economic competitor in the Eastern Mediterranean, so they just stopped it by force. Okay, no industrial revolution in Egypt.45

I don’t think the failure of revolutions reflects so much the psychology of human beings as it reflects the realities of power. Now, in general I think it’s true that popular revolutions fail, and one or another elite grouping takes over afterwards. But popular revolutions also succeed—we’re no longer living in the Middle Ages, after all.

Take something like freedom of speech. That’s a very important right, but it has only very recently been achieved. Freedom of speech is an interesting case, actually, where popular struggles over hundreds of years have finally managed to expand a domain of freedom to the point where it’s pretty good, in fact—in the United States, the best in the world. But it didn’t just happen: it happened through the struggles of the labor movement, and the Civil Rights Movement, and the women’s movement, and everything else. It’s the popular movements which expanded the domain of freedom of speech until it began to be meaningful—if those popular movements hadn’t taken place, we’d still be where we were, say, in 1920, when there wasn’t even a theoretical right of freedom of speech. The history of this is remarkable; it’s not very well known

 I focus my efforts against the terror and violence of my own state for really two main reasons. First of all, in my case the actions of my state happen to make up the main component of international violence in the world. But much more importantly than that, it’s because American actions are the things that I can do something about. So even if the United States were causing only a tiny fraction of the repression and violence in the world—which obviously is very far from the truth—that tiny fraction would still be what I’m responsible for, and what I should focus my efforts against. And that’s based on a very simple ethical principle —namely, that the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated consequences for human beings: I think that’s kind of like a fundamental moral truism

International law is the same story. International law is a method by which you might regulate the aggressive and destructive tendencies of the nation-state

MAN: what I’m wondering is, anyway, in any event, what gets you up each morning to do the things you do? Is it that you think in terms of winning a little way down the road, or is it something else?

Well, it’s hard to introspect, but to the extent that I introspect about it, it’s because you basically have two choices. One choice is to assume the worst, and then you can be guaranteed that it’ll happen. The other is to assume that there’s some hope for change, in which case it’s possible that you can help to effect change. So you’ve got two choices, one guarantees the worst will happen, the other leaves open the possibility that things might get better. Given those choices, a decent person doesn’t hesitate