Neocolonial Invitation to a Tribal War

"What we feared has come true," Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling writes in Israel's leading newspaper. Jews and Palestinians are "regressing to superstitious tribalism.... War appears an unavoidable fate," an "evil colonial" war. This prospect is likely if the U.S. grants tacit authorization, with grim consequences that may reverberate far beyond.
There is, of course, no symmetry between the "ethno-national groups" regressing to tribalism. The conflict is centered in territories that have been under harsh military occupation since 1967. The conqueror is a major armed power, acting with massive military, economic and diplomatic support from the global superpower. Its subjects are alone and defenseless, many barely surviving in miserable camps.
The cruelty of the occupation has been sharply condemned by international and Israeli human rights groups for many years. The purpose of the terror, economic strangulation and daily humiliation is not obscure. It was articulated in the early years of the occupation by Moshe Dayan, one of the Israeli leaders most sympathetic to the Palestinian plight, who advised his Labor Party associates to tell the Palestinians that "you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave."
The Oslo "peace process" changed the modalities, but not the basic concept. Shortly before joining the Ehud Barak government, historian Shlomo Ben-Ami, a dove in the U.S.-Israeli spectrum, wrote that "the Oslo agreements were founded on a neocolonialist basis." The intent was to impose on the Palestinians "almost total dependence on Israel" in a "colonial situation" that was to be "permanent." He soon became the architect of the latest Barak government proposals, virtually identical to Bill Clinton's final plan.
These proposals were highly praised in U.S. commentary; the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat were blamed for their failure and the subsequent violence.
That presentation "was a fraud perpetrated on Israeli ... and international ... public opinion," Kimmerling writes accurately. He continues that, a look at a map suffices to show that the Clinton-Barak plans "presented to the Palestinians impossible terms." Crucially, Israel retained "two settlement blocs that in effect cut the West Bank into pieces." The Palestinian enclaves also are effectively separated from the center of Palestinian life in Jerusalem; the Gaza Strip remains isolated, its population virtually imprisoned.
Israeli settlement in the territories doubled during the years of the "peace process," increasing under Barak, who bequeathed the new government of Ariel Sharon "a surprising legacy," the Israeli press reported as the transition took place early this year: "The highest number of housing starts in the territories" since the time when Sharon supervised settlements in 1992, before Oslo. The facts on the ground are the living reality for the desperate population.
The nature of permanent neo-colonial dependency was underscored by Israel's High Court of Justice in November 1999 when it rejected yet another Palestinian petition opposing further expansion of the [Jewish] city of Maale Adumim established to the east of Jerusalem, virtually partitioning the West Bank.
The court suggested that "some good for the residents of neighboring [Palestinian villages] might spring from the economic and cultural development" of the all-Jewish city. While they try to survive without water to drink or fields to cultivate, the people whose lands have been taken can enjoy the sight of the ample housing, green lawns, swimming pools and other amenities of the heavily subsidized Israeli settlements.
Immediately after World War II, the Geneva Conventions were adopted to bar repetition of Nazi crimes, including transfer of population to occupied territories or actions that harm civilians. As a so-called high contracting party, the U.S. is obligated "to ensure respect" for the conventions.
With Israel alone opposed, the United Nations has repeatedly declared the conventions applicable to the occupied territories; the U.S. abstains from these votes, unwilling to take a public stand in violation of fundamental principles of international law, which require it to act to prevent settlement and expropriation, attacks on civilians with U.S.-supplied helicopters, collective punishment and all other repressive measures used by the occupying forces. Washington has continued to provide the means to implement these practices, refusing even to allow observers who might reduce violence and protect the victims.
For 25 years, there has been a near-unanimous international consensus on the terms of political settlement: a full peace treaty with establishment of a Palestinian state after Israeli withdrawal, an outcome that enjoys wide support even within Israel. It has been blocked by Washington ever since its veto of a Security Council resolution to that effect in 1976.
It is far from an ideal solution. But the likely current alternatives are far more ugly.

Market Democracy in a Neoliberal Order

Profit Over People by Noam Chomsky

Haiti
... The announcement of the Clinton Doctrine was accompanied by a prize example to illustrate the victorious principles the administration's achievement in Haiti. Since this is again offered as the strongest case, it is appropriate to look at it.
True, Haiti's elected president was allowed to return, but only after the popular organizations had been subjected to three years of terror by forces that retained close connections to Washington throughout; the Clinton Administration still refuses to turn over to Haiti 160,000 pages of documents on state terror seized by U.S. military forces-"to avoid embarrassing revelations" about U.S. government involvement with the coup regime, according to Human Rights Watch. It was also necessary to put President Aristide through "a crash course in democracy and capitalism," as his leading supporter in Washington described the process of civilizing the troublesome priest.
The device is not unknown elsewhere, as an unwelcome transition to formal democracy is contemplated.
As a condition on his return, Aristide was compelled to accept an economic program that directs the policies of the Haitian government to the needs of "Civil Society, especially the private sector, both national and foreign" U.S. investors are designated to be the core of Haitian civil society, along with wealthy Haitians who backed the military coup, but not the Haitian peasants and slum dwellers who organized a civil society so lively and vibrant that they were even able to elect their own president against overwhelming odds, eliciting instant U.S. hostility and efforts to subvert Haiti's first democratic regime.
The unacceptable acts of the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" in Haiti were reversed by violence, with direct U.S. complicity, not only through contacts with the state terrorists in charge The Organization of American States declared an embargo. The Bush and Clinton Administrations undermined it from the start by exempting U.S. firms, and also by secretly authorizing the Texaco Oil Company to supply the coup regime and its wealthy supporters in violation of the official sanctions, a crucial fact that was prominently revealed the day before U.S. troops landed to "restore democracy"' but has yet to reach the public, and is another unlikely candidate for the historical record.
Now democracy has been restored. The new government has been forced to abandon the democratic and reformist programs that scandalized Washington, and to follow the policies of Washington's candidate in the 1990 election, in which he received 14 percent of the vote.
The background of this triumph provides no little insight into the "political and economic principles" that are to lead us to a glorious future. Haiti was one of the world's richest colonial prizes (along with Bengal) and the source of a good part of France's wealth. It has been largely under U.S. control and tutelage since Wilson's Marines invaded eighty years ago. By now the country is such a catastrophe that it may scarcely be habitable in the not-too-distant future. In 1981 a USAID-World Bank development strategy was initiated, based on assembly plants and agro-export, shifting land from food for local consumption. USAID forecast "a historic change toward deeper market interdependence with the United States" in what would become "the Taiwan of the Caribbean." The World Bank concurred, offering the usual prescriptions for "expansion of private enterprises" and minimization of "social objectives," thus increasing inequality and poverty and reducing health and educational levels. It may be noted, for what it is worth, that these standard prescriptions are offered side by side with sermons on the need to reduce inequality and poverty and improve health and educational levels. In the Haitian case, the consequences were the usual ones profits for U.S. manufacturers and the Haitian super-rich, and a decline of 56 percent in Haitian wages through the 1980s- in short, an "economic miracle." Haiti remained Haiti, not Taiwan, which had followed a radically different course, as advisers must surely know.
It was the effort of Haiti's first democratic government to alleviate the growing disaster that called forth Washington's hostility and the military coup and terror that followed. With "democracy restored," USAID is withholding aid to ensure that cement and flour mills are privatized for the benefit of wealthy Haitians and foreign investors (Haitian "Civil Society," according to the orders that accompanied the restoration of democracy), while barring expenditures for health and education. Agribusiness receives ample funding, but no resources are made available for peasant agriculture and handicrafts, which provide the income of the overwhelming majority of the population. Foreign-owned assembly plants that employ workers (mostly women) at well below subsistence pay under horrendous working conditions benefit from cheap electricity, subsidized by the generous supervisor. But for the Haitian poor-the general population-there can be no subsidies for electricity, fuel, water, or food; these are prohibited by IMF rules on the principled grounds that they constitute "price control."
Before the "reforms" were instituted, local rice production supplied virtually all domestic needs, with important linkages to the domestic economy. Thanks to one-sided" liberalization," it now provides only 50 percent, with the predictable effects on the economy. Haiti must "reform," eliminating tariffs in accord with the stern principles of economic science-which, by some miracle of logic, exempt U.S. agribusiness; it continues to receive huge public subsidies, increased by the Reagan Administration to the point where they provided 40 percent of growers' gross incomes by 1987. The natural consequences are understood a 1995 USAID report observes that the "export-driven trade and investment policy" that Washington mandates will "relentlessly squeeze the domestic rice farmer," who will be forced to turn to the more rational pursuit of agro-export for the benefit of U.S. investors, in accord with the principles of rational expectations theory.
By such methods, the most impoverished country in the hemisphere has been turned into a leading purchaser of U.S.-produced rice, enriching publicly subsidized U.S. enterprises. Those lucky enough to have received a good Western education can doubtless explain that the benefits will trickle down to Haitian peasants and slum dwellers-ultimately.
The prize example tells us more about the meaning and implications of the victory for "democracy and open markets."
Haitians seem to understand the lessons, even if doctrinal managers in the West prefer a different picture. Parliamentary elections in April 1997 brought forth "a dismal 5 percent" of voters, the press reported, thus raising the question, "Did Haiti Fail U.S. Hope?" We have sacrificed so much to bring them democracy, but they are ungrateful and unworthy. One can see why "realists" urge that we stay aloof from crusades of "global meliorism."

Manufacturing Consent Conclusions

Defending the media against the charge that they have become too independent and too powerful for the public good, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times writes that
The press is protected [by the First Amendment] not for its own sake but to enable a free political system to operate. In the end, the concern is not for the reporter or the editor but for the citizen-critic of government.
What is at stake when we speak about freedom of the press "is the freedom to perform a function on behalf of the polity.'' Lewis cites Supreme Court Justice Powell, who observed: "no individual can obtain for himself the information needed for the intelligent discharge of his political responsibilities.... By enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process, the press performs a crucial function in effecting the societal purpose of the First Amendment." Therefore, as Judge Gurfein ruled in supporting the right of the New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers after the government had failed to show any threat of a breach of security but only the possibility of embarrassment: "a cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know."
We do not accept the view that freedom of expression must be defended in instrumental terms, by virtue of its contribution to some higher good; rather, it is a value in itself. But that apart, these ringing declarations express valid aspirations, and beyond that, they surely express the self-image of the American media. Our concern in this book has been to inquire into the relation between this image and the reality. In contrast to the standard conception of the media as cantankerous obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and their independence of authority, we have spelled out and applied a propaganda model that indeed sees the media as serving a societal purpose, not that of enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process by providing them with the information needed for the intelligent discharge of political responsibilities. On the contrary, a propaganda model suggests that the "societal purpose" of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state. The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises. We have sought to show that the expectations of this model are realized, and often considerably surpassed, in the actual practice of the media in a range of crucial cases. We quite agree with Chief Justice Hughes, whom Lewis also cites, on "the primary need of a vigilant and courageous press" if democratic processes are to function in a meaningful way. But the evidence we have reviewed indicates that this need is not met or even weakly approximated in actual practice.
It is frequently asserted that the media were not always as independent, vigilant, and defiant of authority as they allegedly are today; rather, the experiences of the past generation are held to have taught the media to exercise "the power to root about in our national life, exposing what they deem right for exposure," without regard to external pressures or the dictates of authority (Lewis). It is this period, then, that poses a challenge to a propaganda model, and we have therefore taken it as the focus of our inquiry. Many of the examples we discuss are from the past decade, when the liberal media were allegedly in confrontation with a "conservative" administration that they would have been expected to oppose vigorously. In a further effort to ensure that we are not selecting exceptional cases, we have cast the net widely. We have selected for close examination cases that pose the most severe challenge to our model, namely, those put forth by critics as demonstrating that the media have gone too far in their exuberant independence and challenge to authority, so far that they must be curbed if democracy is to survive: for example, the coverage of the Tet offensive, the prime illustration of alleged excesses of the media offered in the I970s and I980s. Even these cases demonstrate the subordination of the media to the requirements of the state propaganda system. At the peak of alleged media independence, as the Vietnam War entered its final period and the media were threatening Nixon's presidency, the subordination to these demands never flagged, as illustrated by the media coverage of the Paris peace treaty of I973, one of the most flagrant examples of media misrepresentation based on an uncritical reiteration of official claims and adherence to the political agenda of the state.
We may illustrate the point in yet another case, chosen by those who defend the standard version of the media as their strongest ground: the Watergate affair. To many critics of the media, this incident illustrates their irresponsible excesses; to those who proudly defend the media, it illustrates their independence of higher authority and commitment to the values of professional journalism. What, then, are the lessons of Watergate?
The major scandal of Watergate as portrayed in the mainstream press was that the Nixon administration sent a collection of petty criminals to break into the Democratic party headquarters, for reasons that remain obscure. The Democratic party represents powerful domestic interests, solidly based in the business community. Nixon's actions were therefore a scandal. The Socialist Workers party, a legal political party, represents no powerful interests. Therefore, there was no scandal when it was revealed, just as passions over Watergate reached their zenith, that the FBI had been disrupting its activities by illegal break-ins and other measures for a decade, a violation of democratic principle far more extensive and serious than anything charged during the Watergate hearings. What is more, these actions of the national political police were only one element of government programs extending over many administrations to deter independent political action, stir up violence in the ghettos, and undermine the popular movements that were beginning to engage sectors of the generally marginalized public in the arena of decision-making. These covert and illegal programs were revealed in court cases and elsewhere during the Watergate period, but they never entered the congressional proceedings and received only limited media attention. Even the complicity of the FBI in the police assassination of a Black Panther organizer in Chicago was not a scandal, in marked contrast to Nixon's "enemies list," which identified powerful people who were denigrated in private but suffered no consequences. As we have noted, the U.S. role in initiating and carrying out the first phase of "the decade of the genocide" in Cambodia entered the Watergate proceedings only marginally: not because hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were slaughtered in the course of a major war crime,-but because Congress was not properly notified, so that its privileges were infringed, and even this was considered too slight an infraction to enter the final charges. What was true of Congress was also true of the media and their investigative reporting that "helped force a President from office" (Lewis) in what is held to be a most remarkable display of media independence, or arrogance, depending on one's point of view.
History has been kind enough to contrive for us a "controlled experiment" to determine just what was at stake during the Watergate period, when the confrontational stance of the media reached its peak. The answer is clear and precise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves; not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened. By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or distant victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted or absent altogether. This is why Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the privileged.
Exactly the same lessons were taught by the Iran-contra scandals and the media reaction to them. It was a scandal when the Reagan administration was found to have violated congressional prerogatives during the Iran-contra affair, but not when it dismissed with contempt the judgment of the International Court of Justice that the United States was engaged in the "unlawful use of force" and violation of treaties-that is, violation of the supreme law of the land and customary international law-in its attack against Nicaragua. The sponsorship and support of state terror that cost some 200,000 lives in Central America in the preceding decade was not the subject of congressional inquiries or media concern. These actions were conducted in accord with an elite consensus, and they received steady media support...
In the case of the Vietnam War as well ... even those who condemn the media for their alleged adversarial stance acknowledge that they were almost universally supportive of U.S. policy until after large numbers of U.S. troops had been engaged in the "intervention" in South Vietnam, heavy casualties had been taken, huge dollar sums had been spent, and elite protest had surfaced on grounds of threats to elite interests. Only then did elements of the media undertake qualified reassessments of the "cost-benefit" trade-off. But during the period of growing involvement that eventually made extrication difficult, the watchdog actually encouraged the burglar to make himself at home in a distant land, and to bomb and destroy it with abandon.
In short, the very examples offered in praise of the media for their independence, or criticism of their excessive zeal, illustrate exactly the opposite. Contrary to the usual image of an "adversary press" boldly attacking a pitiful executive giant, the media's lack of interest, investigative zeal, and basic news reporting on the accumulating illegalities of the executive branch have regularly permitted and even encouraged ever larger violations of law, whose ultimate exposure when elite interests were threatened is offered as a demonstration of media service "on behalf of the polity." These observations reinforce the conclusions that we have documented throughout.
The existing level of media subordination to state authority is often deemed unsatisfactory by critics. We have discussed several examples. Thus, Freedom House and others who are concerned to protect state authority from an intrusive public condemn the media for lack of sufficient enthusiasm in supporting official crusades, and even the limited challenge to established authority during the Vietnam War and the Watergate period aroused concerns over the excessive power of the media. Quite commonly, the slight opening occasionally granted to dissent is considered far too dangerous to permit. This perception sometimes even takes the form of a paranoid vision of left-wing power that sweeps all in its path: for example, the plea of Claire Sterling and others who dominated media coverage of the Bulgarian Connection that they could barely be heard above the din of Soviet propaganda. A still more striking case is the Aikman-Shawcross fantasy, eagerly echoed by many others, about the "silencing" of the international media and governments by the left during the Pol Pot era. In reality, there was a huge chorus of protest over Khmer Rouge atrocities, which reached an extraordinary level of fabrication and deceit. The significance of these facts, and of the pretense of left-imposed "silence," is highlighted by the contrast with the real silence over comparable atrocities in Timor at the same time, and the evasions and suppressions during the first phase of "the decade of the genocide," to mention two cases where the United States was the responsible agent and protest could have been effective in diminishing or terminating large-scale atrocities.
A propaganda model provides a ready explanation for this quite typical dichotomous treatment. Atrocities by the Khmer Rouge could be attributed to the Communist enemy and valuable propaganda points could be scored, although nothing useful could be done, or was even proposed, for the Cambodian victims. The image of Communist monsters would also be useful for subsequent U.S. participation in terror and violence, as in its crusades in Central America shortly after. In E1 Salvador, the United States backed the murderous junta in its struggle against what was depicted as "the Pol Pot left," while Jeane Kirkpatrick mused darkly about the threat to E1 Salvador of "well-armed guerrillas whose fanaticism and violence remind some observers of Pol Pot"- shortly after the archbishop had denounced her junta friends for conducting a "war of extermination and genocide against a defenseless civilian population." Some are more circumspect-for example, William Buckley, who observes that "the Sandinistas have given their people genocide" and are clearly heading in the direction of Pol Pot, although they have not quite reached that level yet. The utility of the show of outrage over Pol Pot atrocities is evident from the way the fate of these worthy victims was immediately exploited to justify U.S. organization of atrocities that, in fact, do merit comparison to Pol Pot.
Atrocities in East Timor, however, have no such utilitarian function; quite the opposite. These atrocities were carried out by our Indonesian client, so that the United States could readily have acted to reduce or terminate them. But attention to the Indonesian invasion would have embarrassed a loyal ally and quickly disclosed the crucial role of the United States in providing military aid and diplomatic support for aggression and slaughter. Plainly, news about East Timor would not have been useful, and would, in fact, have discomfited important domestic power groups. The mass media-and the intellectual community generally-therefore channeled their benevolent impulses elsewhere: to Cambodia, not Timor.
... the U.S. media do not function in the manner of the propaganda system of a totalitarian state. Rather, they permit-indeed, encourage spirited debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness. No one instructed the media to focus on Cambodia and ignore East Timor. They gravitated naturally to the Khmer Rouge and discussed them freely-just as they naturally suppressed information on Indonesian atrocities in East Timor and U.S. responsibility for the aggression and massacres. In the process, the media provided neither facts nor analyses that would have enabled the public to understand the issues or the bases of government policies toward Cambodia and Timor, and they thereby assured that the public could not exert any meaningful influence on the decisions that were made. This is quite typical of the actual "societal purpose" of the media on matters that are of significance for established power; not "enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process," but rather averting any such danger. In these cases, as in numerous others, the public was managed and mobilized from above, by means of the media's highly selective messages and evasions. As noted by media analyst W. Lance Bennett,
The public is exposed to powerful persuasive messages from above and is unable to communicate meaningfully through the media in response to these messages.... Leaders have usurped enormous amounts of political power and reduced popular control over the political system by using the media to generate support, compliance, and just plain confusion among the public.
More significantly for our particular concerns here, the media typically provide their own independent contribution even without being "used," in the manner and for the reasons that we have discussed. Another media analyst, Ben Bagdikian, observes that the institutional bias of the private mass media "does not merely protect the corporate system. It robs the public of a chance to understand the real world.
That conclusion is well supported by the evidence we have reviewed. A propaganda model has a certain initial plausibility on guided freemarket assumptions that are not particularly controversial. In essence, the private media are major corporations selling a product (readers and audiences) to other businesses (advertisers). The national media typically target and serve elite opinion, groups that, on the one hand, provide an optimal "profile" for advertising purposes, and, on the other, play a role in decision-making in the private and public spheres. The national media would be failing to meet their elite audience's needs if they did not present a tolerably realistic portrayal of the world. But their "societal purpose" also requires that the media's interpretation of the world reflect the interests and concerns of the sellers, the buyers, and the governmental and private institutions dominated by these groups.
A propaganda model also helps us to understand how media personnel adapt, and are adapted, to systemic demands. Given the imperatives of corporate organization and the workings of the various filters, conformity to the needs and interests of privileged sectors is essential to success. In the media, as in other major institutions, those who do not display the requisite values and perspectives will be regarded as "irresponsible," "ideological, or otherwise abberant, and will tend to fall by the wayside. While there may be a small number of exceptions, the pattern is pervasive, and expected. Those who adapt, perhaps quite honestly, will then be free to express themselves with little managerial control, and they will be able to assert, accurately, that they perceive no pressures to conform. The media are indeed free - for those who adopt the principles required for their "societal purpose." There may be some who are simply corrupt, and who serve as "errand boys" for state and other authority, but this is not the norm. We know from personal experience that many journalists are quite aware of the way the system operates, and utilize the occasional openings it affords to provide information and analysis that departs in some measure from the elite consensus, carefully shaping it so as to accommodate to required norms in a general way. But this degree of insight is surely not common. Rather, the norm is a belief that freedom prevails, which is true for those who have internalized the required values and perspectives.
These matters are of some importance. We can readily understand why Guatemalan reporters do not report the atrocities of the I980s; some fifty corpses dramatically illustrate the costs of deviance from authority on the part of independent journalists. To explain why American reporters avoid such topics, and even go so far as to describe Guatemala as a model for Nicaragua requires further explanation, and the same is true in innumerable other similar cases, some of which we have analyzed in detail. A propaganda model provides a basis for understanding this pervasive phenomenon.
No simple model will suffice, however, to account for every detail of such a complex matter as the working of the national mass media. A propaganda model, we believe, captures essential features of the process, but it leaves many nuances and secondary effects unanalyzed There are other factors that should be recognized. Some of these conflict with the "societal purpose" of the media as described by the propaganda model; some support it. In the former category, the humanity and professional integrity of journalists often leads them in directions that are unacceptable in the ideological institutions, and one should not underestimate the psychological burden of suppressing obvious truths and maintaining the required doctrines of benevolence (possibly gone awry), inexplicable error, good intentions, injured innocence, and so on, in the face of overwhelming evidence incompatible with these patriotic premises. The resulting tensions sometimes find limited expression, but more often they are suppressed either consciously or unconsciously, with the help of belief systems that permit the pursuit of narrow interest, whatever the facts.
In the category of supportive factors, we find, first of all, elemental patriotism, the overwhelming wish to think well of ourselves, our institutions, and our leaders. We see ourselves as basically good and decent in personal life, so it must be that our institutions function in accordance with the same benevolent intent, an argument that is often persuasive even though it is a transparent non sequitur. The patriotic premise is reinforced by the belief that "we the people" rule, a central principle of the system of indoctrination from early childhood, but also one with little merit, as an analysis of the social and political system will quickly reveal. There are also real advantages in conformity beyond the rewards and privilege that it yields. If one chooses to denounce Qaddafi, or the Sandinistas, or the PLO, or the Soviet Union, no credible evidence is required. The same is true if one repeats conventional doctrines about our own society and its behavior-say, that the U.S. government is dedicated to our traditional noble commitment to democracy and human rights. But a critical analysis of American institutions, the way they function domestically and their international operations, must meet far higher standards; in fact, standards are often imposed that can barely be met in the natural sciences. One has to work hard, to produce evidence that is credible, to construct serious arguments, to present extensive documentation-all tasks that are superfluous as long as one remains within the presuppositional framework of the doctrinal consensus. It is small wonder that few are willing to undertake the effort, quite apart from the rewards that accrue to conformity and the costs of honest dissidence.
There are other considerations that tend to induce obedience. A journalist or commentator who does not want to have to work too hard can survive, even gain respectability, by publishing information (official or leaks) from standard sources; these opportunities may well be denied to those who are not content to relay the constructlons of state propaganda as fact. The technical structure of the media virtually compels adherence to conventional thoughts, nothing else can be expressed between two commercials, or in seven hundred words. without the appearance of absurdity that is difficult to avoid when one is challenging familiar doctrine with no opportunity to develop facts or argument. In this respect, the U.S. media are rather different from those in most other industrial democracies. and the consequences are noticeable in the narrowness of articulated opinion and analysis. The critic must also be prepared to face a defamation apparatus against which there is little recourse an inhibiting factor that is not insubstantial. Many such factors exist, related to the essential structural features brought to light by a propaganda model but nevertheless worthy of detailed examination in themselves. The result is a powerful system of induced conformity to the needs of privilege and power.
In sum, the mass media of the United States are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions and self-censorship, and without significant overt coercion. This propaganda system has become even more efficient in recent decades with the rise of the national television networks, greater mass-media concentration right-wing pressures on public radio and television, and the growth in scope and sophistication of public relations and news management.
This system is not all-powerful, however. Government and elite domination of the media have not succeeded in overcoming the Vietnam syndrome and public hostility to direct U.S. involvement in the destabilization and overthrow of foreign governments. A massive Reagan-era disinformation and propaganda effort, reflecting in large measure an elite consensus, did succeed in its major aims of mobilizing support for the U.S. terror states (the "fledgling democracies"), while demonizing the Sandinistas and eliminating from Congress and the mass media all controversy beyond tactical debate over the means that should be employed to return Nicaragua to the "Central American mode" and "contain" its "aggressiveness" in attempting to defend itself from a murderous and destructive U.S. assault on all fronts. But it failed to win public support even for proxy army warfare against Nicaragua, and as the costs to the U.S. mounted, and the proxy war accompanied by embargo and other pressures succeeded in restoring the "Central American mode" of misery and suffering in Nicaragua and aborting the highly successful reforms and prospects for development of the early years after the overthrow of Washington's ally Somoza, elite opinion too shifted-quite dramatically, in fact-toward resort to other, more cost-effective means to attain shared ends. The partial failures of the very well organized and extensive state propaganda effort, and the simultaneous rise of an active grass-roots oppositional movement with very limited media access, was crucial in making an outright U.S. invasion of Nicaragua unfeasible and driving the state underground, to illegal clandestine operations that could be better concealed from the domestic population-with, in fact, considerable media complicity.
Furthermore, while there have been important structural changes centralizing and strengthening the propaganda system, there have been counterforces at work with a potential for broader access. The rise of cable and satellite communications, while initially captured and dominated by commercial interests, has weakened the power of the network oligopoly and retains a potential for enhanced local-group access. There are already some 3,000 public-access channels in use in the United States, offering 20,000 hours of locally produced programs per week, and there are even national producers and distributors of programs for access channels through satellites (e.g., Deep-Dish Television), as well as hundreds of local suppliers, although all of them must struggle for funding. Grass-roots and public-interest organizations need to recognize and try to avail themselves of these media (and organizational) opportunities.' Local nonprofit radio and television stations also provide an opportunity for direct media access that has been underutilized in the United States. ln France, many local groups have their own radio stations. In a notable case, the progressive cooperative Longo Mai, in Upper Provence, has its own 24-hours-a-day Radio Zinzine, which has become an important community institution that has helped inform and activate many previously isolated farmers. The potential value of non-commercial radio can be perceived in sections of the country where stations such as Pacifica Radio offer a view of the world, depth of coverage, and scope of discussion and debate that is generally excluded from the major media. Public radio and television, despite having suffered serious damage during the Reagan years, also represent an alternative media channel whose resuscitation and improvement should be of serious concern to those interested in contesting the propaganda system. The steady commercialization of the publicly owned air waves should be vigorously opposed. In the long run, a democratic political order requires far wider control of and access to the media. Serious discussion of how this can be done, and the incorporation of fundamental media reform into political programs, should be high on progressive agendas.
The organization and self-education of groups in the community and workplace, and their networking and activism, continue to be the fundamental elements in steps toward the democratization of our social life and any meaningful social change. Only to the extent that such developments succeed can we hope to see media that are free and independent.

Making Guatemala a Killing Field By Noam Chomsky

There was one place in Central America that did get some US media coverage before the Sandinista revolution, and that was Guatemala. In 1944, a revolution there overthrew a vicious tyrant, leading to the establishment of a democratic government that basically modeled itself on Roosevelt's New Deal. In the ten-year democratic interlude that followed, there were the beginnings of successful independent economic development.

That caused virtual hysteria in Washington. Eisenhower and Dulles warned that the "self defense and self-preservation" of the United States was at stake unless the virus was exterminated. US intelligence reports were very candid about the dangers posed by capitalist democracy in Guatemala.

A CIA memorandum of 1952 described the situation in Guatemala as "adverse to US interests" because of the "Communist influence... based on militant advocacy of social reforms and nationalistic policies." The memo warned that Guatemala "has recently stepped-up substantially its support of Communist and anti-American activities in other Central American countries." One prime example cited was an alleged gift of $300,000 to Jose Figueres.

As mentioned above, Jose Figueres was the founder of Costa Rican democracy and a leading democratic figure in Central America. Although he cooperated enthusiastically with the CIA, had called the United States "the standard-bearer of our cause" and was regarded by the US ambassador to Costa Rica as "the best advertising agency that the United Fruit Company could find in Latin America," Figueres had an independent streak and was therefore not considered as reliable as Somoza or other gangsters in our employ.

In the political rhetoric of the United States, this made him possibly a "Communist." So if Guatemala gave him money to help him win an election, that showed Guatemala supported Communists.


Worse yet, the same CIA memorandum continued, the "radical and nationalist policies" of the democratic capitalist government, including the "persecution of foreign economic interests, especially the United Fruit Company," had gained "the support or acquiescence of almost all Guatemalans." The government was proceeding "to mobilize the hitherto politically inert peasantry" while undermining the power of large landholders.

Furthermore, the 1944 revolution had aroused "a strong national movement to free Guatemala from the military dictatorship, social backwardness, and 'economic colonialism' which had been the pattern of the past," and "inspired the loyalty and conformed to the self interest of most politically conscious Guatemalans." Things became still worse after a successful land reform began to threaten "stability" in neighboring countries where suffering people did not fail to take notice.

In short, the situation was pretty awful. So the CIA carried out a successful coup. Guatemala was turned into the slaughterhouse it remains today, with regular US intervention whenever things threaten to get out of line.

By the late 1970s, atrocities were again mounting beyond the terrible norm, eliciting verbal protests. And yet, contrary to what many people believe, military aid to Guatemala continued at virtually the same level under the Carter "human rights" administration. Our allies have been enlisted in the cause as well- notably Israel, which is regarded as a "strategic asset" in part because of its success in guiding state terrorism.

Under Reagan, support for near-genocide in Guatemala became positively ecstatic. The most extreme of the Guatemalan Hitlers we've backed there, Rios Montt, was lauded by Reagan as a man totally dedicated to democracy. In the early 1980s, Washington's friends slaughtered tens of thousands of Guatemalans, mostly Indians in the highlands, with countless others tortured and raped. Large regions were decimated.

In 1988, a newly opened Guatemalan newspaper called La Epoca was blown up by government terrorists. At the time, the media here were very much exercised over the fact that the US-funded journal in Nicaragua, La Prensa, which was openly calling for the overthrow of the government and supporting the US-run terrorist army, had been forced to miss a couple of issues due to a shortage of newsprint. That led to a torrent of outrage and abuse, in the Washington Post and elsewhere, about Sandinista totalitarianism.

On the other hand, the destruction of La Epoca aroused no interest whatsoever and was not reported here, although it was well-known to US journalists. Naturally the US media couldn't be expected to notice that US-funded security forces had silenced the one, tiny independent voice that had tried, a few weeks earlier, to speak up in Guatemala.

A year later, a journalist from La Epoca, Julio Codoy, who had fled after the bombing, went back to Guatemala for a brief visit. When he returned to the US, he contrasted the situation in Central America with that in Eastern Europe. Eastern Europeans are "luckier than Central Americans," Godoy wrote, because while the Moscow-imposed government in Prague would degrade and humiliate reformers, the Washington-made government in Guatemala would kill them. It still does, in a virtual genocide that has taken more than 150,000 victims [in what Amnesty International calls] "a government program of political murder."

The press either conforms or, as in the case of La Epoca, disappears.

"One is tempted to believe," Godoy continued, "that some people in the White House worship Aztec gods-with the offering of Central American blood." And he quoted a Western European diplomat who said: "As long as the Americans don't change their attitude towards the region, there's no space here for the truth or for hope."

Liberating the Mind from Orthodoxies - An interview

By David Barsamian
Noam Chomsky, long-time political activist, writer, and professor of linguistics at MIT, is the author of numerous books and articles on U.S. foreign policy, international affairs, and human rights. Among his many books are World Orders Old and New, Class Warfare, and Powers and Prospects. Among his latest books are The Common Good and The New Military Humanism.
BARSAMIAN: Let’s talk about propaganda and indoctrination. As a teacher, how do you get people to think for themselves? Can you impart tools that will enable that?
CHOMSKY: I think you learn by doing—I’m a Deweyite from way back. You learn by doing, and you figure out how to do things by watching other people do them. That’s the way you learn to be a good carpenter, for example, and the way you learn to be a good physicist. Nobody can train you on how to do physics. You don’t teach methodology courses in the natural sciences. You may in the social sciences. In any field that has significant intellectual content, you don’t teach methodology. You just watch people doing it and participate with them in doing it. So a typical, say, graduate seminar in a science course would be people working together, not all that different from an artisan picking up a craft and working with someone who’s supposedly good at it. I don’t try to persuade people, at least not consciously. The way you do it is by trying to do it yourself, and in particular trying to show, although it’s not all that difficult, the chasm that separates standard versions of what goes on in the world from what the evidence and people’s inquiries will show them. A common response that I get, even on things like chat networks, is, I can’t believe anything you’re saying. It’s totally in conflict with what I’ve learned and always believed and I don’t have time to look up all those footnotes. How do I know what you’re saying is true? That’s a plausible reaction. I tell people it’s the right reaction. You shouldn’t believe what I say is true. Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It’s something you have to find out for yourself.
Talk about liberating the mind from orthodoxies. Take for example, humanitarian intervention.
Humanitarian intervention is an orthodoxy and it’s taken for granted that if we [the U.S.] do it, it’s humanitarian. The reason is because our leaders say so. But you can check. For one thing, there’s a history of humanitarian intervention. You can look at it. And when you do, you discover that virtually every use of military force is described as humanitarian intervention. The major recent academic study of humanitarian intervention is by Sean Murphy, Humanitarian Intervention: The UN in an Evolving World Order. He’s now an editor of the American Journal of International Law. He points out, correctly, that before the Second World War, there was the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928 that outlawed war. Between the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the UN Charter in 1945, there were three major examples of humanitarian intervention. One was the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and north China. Another was Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and a third was Hitler’s takeover of the Sudetenland. They were accompanied by exalted and impressive humanitarian rhetoric, which as usual was not entirely false. Even the most vulgar propaganda has elements of truth. What you have to do is look at the U.S. reaction. So in the case of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and north China, the official U.S. reaction was, “We don’t like it, but we don’t care, really, as long as American interests in China, meaning primarily economic interests, are guaranteed.”
Same with Mussolini. The State Department hailed Mussolini for his magnificent achievements in Ethiopia and also, incidentally, for his astonishing accomplishments in raising the level of the masses in Italy. This is the late 1930s, several years after the invasion. Roosevelt described Mussolini as “that admirable Italian gentleman.” In 1939 he praised the fascist experiment in Italy—as did almost everyone, it’s not a particular criticism of Roosevelt—and said it had been “corrupted” by Hitler, but other than that it was a good experiment.
How about Hitler’s taking over the Sudetenland in 1938? One of Roosevelt’s major advisors was A.A. Berle. He said that there’s nothing alarming about the takeover. It was probably necessary for the Austrian Empire to be reconstituted under German rule, so it’s all right. That’s a typical remark. That’s the way every monster is described, a moderate standing between the extremes of right and left, and we have to support him, or too bad. That’s a famous remark of John F. Kennedy’s about Trujillo reported by Arthur Schlesinger, the liberal historian and Kennedy aide. Kennedy said something like, We don’t like Trujillo. He’s a murderous gangster. But unless we can be assured that there won’t be a Castro, we’ll have to support Trujillo. The threat of a good example or it’s sometimes called the virus effect. The virus of independent nationalism might succeed and inspire others. Actually, the war in Vietnam started the same way.
When you ask whether a certain action is or is not a case of humanitarian intervention, you should at least approach it with a sense of history and an understanding of what’s happened in the past. Then you have to evaluate the case on its own terms. You have to ask, for example, whether the bombing of Yugoslavia was a case of humanitarian intervention? When you ask that question, in this case, I think you find quite the opposite. The bombing was undertaken with the expectation that it would lead to a very sharp escalation of atrocities and had nothing to do with humanitarian goals. The opposite is very passionately claimed, but with no credible evidence or argument, to my knowledge.
We can ask the same question about the other main atrocity that was being carried out at the time, namely East Timor. The standard line is, even if you were opposed to the war in Yugoslavia, there’s one good thing about it, namely that it served as a precedent for the intervention in East Timor, and we all agreed that that was good. So that was one favorable thing. The only trouble with that is the facts, which are totally different. There never was any intervention in East Timor in any serious sense of the term, hence it couldn’t have been a humanitarian one. The U.S. and Britain withheld any interference with Indonesian atrocities until after the worst had taken place, continuing to support the Indonesian army. It was not until after the Indonesian army withdrew (having been informed by Clinton that the time had come) that they were willing to allow a peacekeeping force to enter. That’s not intervention.
There are some important similarities between the East Timor and Kosovo cases, the two prominent examples of humanitarian intervention at the end of the 20th century. Both in Kosovo and East Timor the U.S. is refusing to undertake constructive efforts, with marginal exceptions. In Kosovo, for example, they won’t clear the unexploded cluster bombs that are all over the place. That’s a war crime. Serbs are being tried at the international tribunal for using missiles with cluster bombs. People have been tried and convicted for that. Not NATO, of course. And the U.S. won’t clear them. It’s giving very little assistance to Kosovo. It’s somebody else’s responsibility. We bomb, but we don’t help. The same is true in East Timor. The U.S. has refused to provide aid. Trivial sums, virtually nothing. Clinton called for a reduction of the small UN peacekeeping force that might be helping to overcome our crimes. All of this passes without comment and this is supposed to be the era of humanitarian intervention, the era in which our principles and values are opening up a new world.
Or look at what’s happening not far from Kosovo. On April 1 of last year, the Turkish army initiated new ground sweeps in southeastern Turkey, in one of the regions that has been most devastated by U.S.-backed ethnic cleansing and other atrocities in the Clinton period, huge atrocities, a couple of million refugees, 3,500 villages destroyed. They also invaded northern Iraq to kill more Kurds. Almost to the minute, practically, that the Turkish offensive was beginning within Turkey, Defense Secretary Cohen was giving a talk to the American Turkish Council with a lot of laughter and applause, praising Turkey for its contributions to preventing ethnic cleansing by bombing Yugoslavia with F-16s that were either sent them by the U.S. or co-produced with the U.S. in Turkey and were, incidentally, used to carry out massive ethnic cleansing inside NATO. Cohen praised Turkey for its contributions to preventing terror and stopping ethnic cleansing by participating in the humanitarian bombing of Yugoslavia.
So, when you look at the historical record, it’s extremely hard to find any examples of use of military force undertaken for genuine humanitarian aims. States are not moral agents. They do not engage in the use of force for humanitarian ends, although that’s always claimed. There are interventions that have had humanitarian consequences. That’s a different story. So getting rid of Hitler was a humanitarian consequence, although incidentally it wasn’t an intervention. The U.S. got into the war when it was attacked. Germany declared war on the U.S., not the other way around. In the post-World War II period there were a few cases, two that I know of, that are genuine, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, which got rid of Pol Pot, and the Indian invasion of what is now Bangladesh, which stopped a huge atrocity. They were not undertaken with humanitarian intent, so they’re not humanitarian interventions, but they did have humanitarian consequences. For those who are interested in our principles and values and humanitarian intervention, it’s worth looking at the reaction.
In both cases, and these are the only genuine cases that I know of in the postwar period, the U.S. reaction was total fury. Vietnam had to be punished severely for getting rid of Pol Pot, and it was. The U.S. imposed extremely harsh sanctions. The U.S. supported a Chinese invasion to teach them a lesson. The U.S. turned to open support of Pol Pot, diplomatic support, insisted that the Khmer Rouge-based coalition have Cambodia’s seat at the UN and direct military support. They called it support for the non-Khmer Rouge elements of the coalition, but everybody knew that the Khmer Rouge were the fighting elements.
In the case of India the U.S. practically went to war. The Seventh Fleet was mobilized. India had to be punished. Again there was a China connection. Kissinger at that time was planning a secret trip to China that was going to open up Chinese-American relations and he was going to go through Pakistan. That was apparently the main reason for the hysteria about the India action. It might spoil some surprising and exciting photo-ops in Peking. So a couple million more Bangladeshis have to be murdered. That’s what it amounts to.
Let’s talk about what individuals can do in overcoming orthodoxies. Steve Biko, the South African activist who was murdered by the apartheid regime while he was in custody, once said, “The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
He’s quite accurate. Most oppression succeeds because its legitimacy is internalized. That’s true of the most extreme cases. Take, say, slavery. It wasn’t easy to revolt if you were a slave, by any means. But if you look over the history of slavery, it was in some sense recognized as just the way things are. We’ll do the best we can under this regime. Another example, also contemporary (it’s estimated that there are some 26 million slaves in the world), is women’s rights. There the oppression is extensively internalized and accepted as legitimate and proper. It’s still true today, but it’s been true throughout history. Take working people. At one time in the U.S., in the mid-19th century, working for wage labor was considered not very different from chattel slavery. That was the slogan of the Republican Party, the banner under which northern workers went to fight in the Civil War. We’re against chattel slavery and wage slavery. Free people do not rent themselves to others. Maybe you’re forced to do it temporarily, but that’s only on the way to becoming a free person, a free man, to put it in the rhetoric of the day. You become a free man when you’re not compelled to take orders from others. That’s an Enlightenment ideal. Incidentally, this was not coming from European radicalism. There were workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, a couple of miles from where we are. You could even read editorials in the New York Times saying this around that time. It took a long time to drive into people’s heads the idea that it is legitimate to rent yourself. Now that’s unfortunately pretty much accepted. So that’s internalizing oppression. Anyone who thinks it’s legitimate to be a wage laborer is internalizing oppression in a way which would have seemed intolerable to people in the mills 150 years ago.
Take the Seattle and Washington anti-WTO demonstrations, which were good ones, about canceling the debt. Yes, they should cancel the debt. But it’s also worth recognizing that—a lot of people know this—the form of the protests and the objections on the part of the poor countries are internalizing a form of oppression. They are saying that the debt exists. You can’t cancel it unless it exists. Does it exist? Well, it doesn’t exist as an economic fact. It exists as an ideological construction. That’s internalizing oppression. To liberate yourselves from those preconceptions and perspectives is to take a long step towards overcoming oppression.
Let’s talk about the situation in South Asia. When Clinton was there in March 2000, he called it “the most dangerous place in the world.”
The nuclear testing in India and Pakistan significantly increases the threat of a nuclear war. There’s a big conflict over Kashmir that has been going on for a long time, and India and Pakistan have had several wars in which both of them were armed by the West, primarily the U.S. And there could be another one. For Clinton to have said that took a slight touch of hypocrisy. Part of the reason why India developed nuclear weapons is as a deterrent against the U.S. John Mearsheimer, a very mainstream political scientist at the University of Chicago, had an op-ed in the New York Times last spring in which he mentions that part of the reason India felt impelled to develop nuclear weapons was a result of the U.S. war in the Gulf and in the Balkans.
You mean, India tested again in the late 1990s.
They had developed nuclear weapons, but carrying out the tests, which is a big step, was apparently in part because like many other countries, they feel that they need a deterrent against the U.S., a rogue state that is unconstrained. That was a very broad reaction to the Balkans war. Even in client states like Israel, leading military analysts pointed out that the U.S. is becoming a danger to the world and other countries are going to have to develop weapons of mass destruction to defend themselves. They pointed out that if Serbia had had nuclear or chemical and biological weapons, the West wouldn’t have been so quick to bomb them.
Clinton criticized India for violating the Nonproliferation Treaty. But the U.S. violates it. The Nonproliferation Treaty calls for good-faith efforts to reduce nuclear weapons on the part of the nuclear states. The U.S. and other nuclear powers succeeded in keeping out of the treaty a call for eliminating nuclear weapons. They didn’t want to do that. It’s only other people who shouldn’t have them.
The National Missile Defense system that was being advocated by the Clinton administration, Star Wars-Lite, is recognized throughout the world, and by most military analysts here, to be a step towards increasing the threat of nuclear war. A national missile defense system is in effect a first-strike weapon. It means that you can protect yourself against a retaliatory strike by a country with limited nuclear power, not against Russia, but against China. Or India. It neutralizes the deterrent and therefore compels China or India to move to higher levels of destructive capacity. Furthermore, even if China alone reacts, as it presumably would, that would lead to Indian moves to deter China, and Pakistani moves in response, and Israeli moves. And on and on. It’s no big secret.
Pakistan is routinely described as bankrupt and corrupt. In October 1999 there was a military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power, overthrowing Nawaz Sharif. Pakistan was very useful to the U.S. during the Cold War in the Middle East, as well as South Asia.
That’s true, and in fact the Taliban were trained in Pakistani religious schools and turned into real maniacs. With Pakistani army support they’ve taken over Afghanistan and turned it into a horror chamber and are now aiming to do the same in Pakistan, and may. It’s not clear. It was not just Afghanistan. Pakistan was part of the system by which the U.S. controlled the Middle East. The Saudi Royal Guard protecting the Saudi royal family from its own population, not from anybody else, was Pakistani for a long time. Pakistan was part of the system of peripheral states, like Israel and Turkey, Iran under the Shah, that were used to protect the monarchies in the oil-producing regions against threats from their own populations. Pakistan was part of that. Now it’s not so pliable, and the U.S. is unhappy with the way it’s going. It’s sort of out of control.
India is the locus of tremendous resistance to globalization. There’s Narmada Bachao Andolan, the Movement to Save the Narmada, to stop some of these IMF/World Bank big dam projects. There are some very prominent activists involved, like Vandana Shiva, Arundhati Roy, Mehda Patkar, and others. Why is there this level of resistance in India? Does it have anything to do with the legacy of Gandhi?
First of all, India has a very rich and complex history. If you go back to the 18th century, India was the commercial and industrial center of the world. In the early 19th century, book publication in Bengal was probably higher per capita than in England. It’s not coming out of nowhere. But India was severely harmed by the British occupation. It was de-industrialized and turned into an impoverished rural society, but maintained a rich cultural tradition and a rich tradition of resistance. The Gandhian legacy is there, but remember, there was a revolution that threw out the British. This included the Congress Party. There was a national movement and it’s remained a vibrant, complex society. After the British were thrown out, economic development resumed. Also, in a very mixed fashion. India developed heavy industry, advanced technology. On the other hand, the poverty is perhaps beyond anywhere in the world. Take a look at the quality of life measures published by the UN development report. South Asia is among the worst by most measures. There’s some very interesting work on this by Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in economics. Part of the major work that he did for which he got the prize was comparisons of India and China.
One comparison is quite famous. It’s been all over the New York Times and elsewhere. A book came out called The Black Book of Communism, which tells about the huge crimes of communism. We have to have the courage at last to face these crimes, previously ignored, as the new millennium opens; that’s the general drift, with only slight exaggeration. The Black Book gives the shocking figure of 100 million deaths attributable to communism. Let’s say it’s right. Let’s not argue about the numbers. That shows how utterly awful they were.
The biggest component, and the one that’s prominently discussed in the first issue of the New York Times Review of Books for the millennium, of this alleged 100 million is the Chinese famine around 1958-1960. Maybe 30 million died. Sen points out that, although India used to have plenty of famines under the British, since independence it hasn’t had famines like that. So there was never a famine in India since, say, the early 1950s, in which huge numbers of people died, as they did in China. He says this is related to specific forms of socio-economic and political and ideological development. India is more or less democratic. It has a free press. Information comes back from the bottom to the top, and if there are signs of a famine, the central authorities will know about it and there will be protest about it. In China, a totalitarian state, no information gets back to the center and any protest will be smashed, so they probably never knew about it until after it was over. Crimes of communism, traceable to the nature of the system.
That’s half of what he says. The other half of his inquiry, which somehow escapes notice, has to do with another difference. He says China in the late 1940s began to institute rural public health and educational programs, as well as other programs oriented towards the mass of the population. India played the game by our rules. It didn’t do any of this and there are consequences, for example, in mortality rates. These started to decline sharply in China from around 1950 until 1979. Then they stopped declining and started going up slightly. That was the period of the reforms. During the totalitarian period, from 1950 to about 1979, mortality rates declined. They declined in India, too, but much more slowly than in China up to 1979. Sen then says, suppose you measure the number of extra deaths in India resulting annually from not carrying out these Maoist-style programs or others for the benefit of the population, what you would call reforms if the term wasn’t so ideological. He estimates close to four million extra deaths every year in India, which means that, as he puts it, every eight years in India the number of skeletons in the closet is the same as in China’s moment of shame, the famine. If you look at the whole period, it’s about 100 million extra deaths in India alone after the democratic capitalist period enters.
Suppose you were to undertake the same calculations that are used quite correctly to count up the crimes of communism? It turns out that in the leading democratic capitalist country of the South, in fact of the world, if you count population, that country alone up until about 1980 has produced about 100 million dead, the same number that’s attributed to all the communist countries of the 20th century in the world. That’s of course only the beginning. Suppose we carry out the same calculation on the same grounds elsewhere in the domains that are dominated by Western power. You’re going to get astronomical figures. But this is not an acceptable topic. There can be no Black Book detailing such facts, just as there can be no realistic comparison of the utterly hideous Soviet record with the record of comparable countries that remained under Western domination, for example, Brazil, taken over as a “testing area for scientific methods of development based solidly on capitalism,” according to celebratory and respected scholarship, with consequences for the vast majority of the population that are hardly much to celebrate.
Talk about U.S. policy in Colombia. The Inter- hemispheric Resource Center in Albuquerque wrote a paper entitled “U.S. Policy in Colombia: Towards a Vietnam Quagmire.” Do you think that’s an appropriate analogy? The New York Times in an editorial was very critical of Clinton’s proposal for a $1 billion plus package, calling it “dangerous plans for Colombia” that “risks dragging the U.S. into a costly counterinsurgency war.”
Because of the perspective of the New York Times editors, they don’t like the phrase “Vietnam quagmire.” I don’t like it for Vietnam either. Were the Russians caught in a quagmire in Afghanistan? They shouldn’t have invaded. The problem with the Afghan war is not that the Russians got caught in a quagmire. It’s that they shouldn’t have invaded the country. The same is true of the U.S. and Vietnam. The fact that it became costly to the U.S., which is what a quagmire means, is irrelevant. They invaded the country and destroyed it, invaded South Vietnam, in fact, destroyed it and destroyed much of the rest. So I think we ought to keep away from the phrase. Accepting the phrase is already buying a massive propaganda system, which we shouldn’t do.
Interestingly, the Interhemispheric Resource Center is an alternative organization.
They do wonderful work. But that phrase I don’t like. The problem in Colombia is not whether the U.S. will get dragged into a war. That’s a minor issue. The major issue is what it’s all about. This past spring, the farmers in Bolivia were staging a protest. The U.S. had come in with crop destruction programs and counterinsurgency operations that had destroyed their coca crops, and now they’re starving. Bolivia is one of the poorest countries of the world. So first they are driven to coca production by the “Washington consensus” and IMF/World Bank programs which say, You’ve got to open your country up to agriculture and other imports and you have to be a rational peasant producing for the agro-export market trying to maximize profit. You put those conditions together and it spells c-o-c-a. A rational peasant producing for the agro-export market when the country is being flooded by subsidized Western agricultural production is going to be producing coca. Then the West comes in and violently wipes it out, and they end up with peasants protesting in the streets. That’s Bolivia.
The Boston Globe had a good article on Colombia by a reporter in one of the areas that’s targeted for the new program where the U.S. is planning to come in to destroy the crops. That’s actually a cover for eliminating the guerrillas. These are areas that are under guerrilla control and have been for a long time.
This is the FARC, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas.
It’s the FARC mostly. There’s another guerilla organization, the ELN, Ejército de Liberación Nacional, but it’s mainly the FARC. So the military program happens to be concentrated in the areas of guerrilla control and not the areas of military and paramilitary control, although it’s well known that they’re deep into narco-trafficking in pretty much the same way the guerrillas are. In fact, the involvement of the guerrillas in coca production is just that they tax everything. So they tax coca production, too, there may be some other involvement that nobody knows about, but that’s basically it. What’s the Globe article on Colombia about? These peasants are terrified because there are rumors going around that the U.S.-Colombian program is going to start fumigating. If they fumigate it’s going to be like Bolivia. That will destroy their crops. In fact, they’ll destroy not only the coca crops but maybe all their other crops. The chemical and biological warfare that the U.S. carries out, and that’s what it is, may say it’s going after coca, but it has unknown consequences for the rest of the ecology.
Here we’re getting to the issues, not the quagmire. Whether the U.S. manages to keep troops out of it and let the Colombian army do the dirty work or not is not the issue. The policies are not nicer if the Colombian military and its paramilitary associates carry out the policies under U.S. direction, funding, and pressure. Farming out atrocities to paramilitaries is standard operating procedure. Serbia in Kosovo and Indonesia in East Timor are two recent examples. Israel in southern Lebanon is another.
Almost paralleling Central America, would you say?
In many ways. There are different mixtures in different countries. So the U.S. war against Nicaragua had to use U.S.-run paramilitaries, the contras, because the usual repressive force, the army, wasn’t available, and the U.S. public wouldn’t tolerate direct invasion, like the Kennedy-Johnson attack against South Vietnam. But in El Salvador, they just used the army.
Colombia was once a big wheat producer. That was terminated in the 1950s by Food for Peace aid. Food for Peace sounds nice, but if you look at its consequences, it’s something else. Food for Peace is a gift from the U.S. taxpayer to U.S. agribusiness. It’s not a gift from agribusiness. So U.S. taxpayers are paying agribusiness to send essentially free food to other countries. What happens when you pour U.S. wheat into Colombia, essentially free? It wiped out wheat production. It’s no longer a major wheat producer. It was a coffee producer, still is. Coffee is one of the major commodities in international exchange, second to oil. Coffee, like most commodities, fluctuates pretty radically in price. They’ll be high one year and low the next. If you’re a big agribusiness corporation, that doesn’t bother you. You take a loss here, make a gain there. Suppose you’re a peasant with a couple of acres of coca plant. You can’t tell your children, Don’t bother eating this year. Maybe we’ll have some food next year. If commodities fluctuate in price, small producers are essentially wiped out. That’s understood in Western society.
After socio-economic programs are imposed with plenty of force behind them to create a situation where peasants are driven to producing coca for the American market, then we come in with $1.7 billion for a military attack and chemical and biological warfare, which is what we ought to be calling it. That’s what it means to use massive pesticides and fungicides and new experimental techniques. That’s the background, and that’s what ought to be discussed, not a Vietnam quagmire, not whether it will be too costly to us.
There’s another question that ought to be raised: What right do we have to do anything in Colombia? There happens to be a lethal drug produced in the U.S., which is killing far more people than cocaine. Tobacco. We force that on other countries of the world. Countries in, say, East Asia not only have to accept our lethal drugs but they have to accept advertising for them, advertising aimed at vulnerable populations, like women and children. These issues came up at the same time that Bush was announcing the latest phase of the drug war with great fanfare. With virtually no media coverage in this case, the U.S. Trade Representative was conducting hearings on the refusal of Thailand to accept advertising for U.S. lethal drugs. They were threatened with trade sanctions, which are murderous for them, if they don’t accept U.S.-produced drugs, which means advertising too—in reality, whatever the words may be. In effect, it’s as if the Colombian cartel could insist that we import cocaine and allow them to post billboards in Times Square showing how cool it is for kids to use it. But suppose China, say, where millions of people are being killed by our lethal drug, would say, okay, we’re going to go into North Carolina and carry out counterinsurgency operations and chemical and biological warfare to destroy the drugs that you are forcing on us. You’re even forcing advertising on us. Do they have a right to do that? If they don’t have a right to do that, how do we have a right to do anything in Colombia?
In one of your talks on the U.S. mideast policy in the post-Madrid 1991 period you concluded with the following, “These are not laws of nature. They can be changed. The most important changes will have to take place right here. Unless they take place within the U.S., it’s not going to matter much what happens elsewhere.” That’s what I want to ask you about. It seems that you’re taking agency and autonomy away from groups and movements outside the U.S. Is that your intention?
It’s not my intention. There’s an interplay between what happens elsewhere and what happens here. But say, Arundhati Roy’s protest against the dam in India is likely to have only limited effect unless it sparks protests here, because here is where the policies of the World Bank and the international agencies are going to be determined. It’s not that what goes on in India is irrelevant. Of course it’s not irrelevant. Even a totalitarian state is affected by what people do. But the primary agency is going to be here, just because of the reasons of distribution of power. Things get stimulated here by what happens abroad. Take, say, genetically modified organisms. The protest has been very strong abroad, in India, Europe. It began to have a big effect when it flew over the Atlantic. It came over the Atlantic as a result of protests elsewhere, which have something like the feared “virus effect” of independent development.
It wasn’t that it had been absent here, but it was significantly stimulated by protests elsewhere. Then it happens here, and pretty soon you had Monsanto backing off publicly. We should not disregard the facts about the way power is distributed. That means the primary responsibility is here on most issues, not on everything, but on most issues, just because this is the richest and by far the most powerful country in the world.

Interview with Noam Chomsky September 14, 1993

by David Cogswell
Q: What would be your thoughts about how to make your ideas accessible to a broad cross section of the public?
A: The main problem of reaching people, and there's a close interaction, there always has been, between what is roughly called education or discussion or discourse on the one hand and organization on the other. They stimulate each other. Almost by definition people who are critical of established institutions and what they do will not have resources and will not have access through the established institutions except very marginally. They're not suicidal after all. Since that's the case you have to establish alternative institutions and that means organizations. Take, say, that film. I didn't see it, but I presume it was filming talks and those talks were possible because there are popular organizations. There's a whole complex proliferation of groups around the country and around the world in fact working on all sorts of topics and bringing people together on them, and they both have a need for speakers and they provide an opportunity for them and then these occasions, if properly done, stimulate more interest and broader audiences. Small newspapers grow up. Community-supported radio develops. Out of the activities and the organization come opportunities for interaction among people including talks and writing and so on and that stimulates more of it. That's the way every movement in history ever developed, whether it was the background for the American Revolution, abolitionism, the Civil Rights movement, you pick it, that's the way it developed.
Q: Did you say you haven't seen the movie, ``Manufacturing Consent?''
A: No actually. I've looked at the transcript but I haven't actually seen the film.
Q: Unfortunately it doesn't get shown very much.
A: Well, outside of the United States it's being shown quite a lot, I mean I discovered, I didn't know it, but traveling around the world... I do a lot of traveling, I happened last year to do quite a bit of traveling, foreign traveling, and in many countries I went to people told me they'd seen it on national television.
Q:
The point is if people are reached individually and in an isolated fashion, it really doesn't amount to a lot. There are a lot of interesting things about American society, even unusual things. On the one hand it's a very free society so there's very little government control, in fact by comparative standards remarkably little. On the other hand it's a very isolated society. People are really alone to an unusual extent. That's a technique of control. I mean if you're sitting alone in front of the tube, it doesn't matter a whole lot what you think.
Q: You have said that there has been a great deal of progress in the last 30 years in the knowledge that people have about the nature of our governing institutions and, for example, the mass slaughter of the Native Americans. Do you still think its going well?
A: I don't think it is at the moment. I think in a very short term focus, the last year or two, things look pretty depressing in my opinion. But over the longer term, say 30 years, I think they're encouraging. There are ups and downs.
Q: What do you see as the significance of the last election? Is there a significant difference between a Clinton administration and a Bush administration?
A: I don't think so. I think the last election was a vote against. Clinton was one of the most unpopular candidates in recent American history. Clinton's vote, not only the percentage, but even the socioeconomic distribution of voters was very similar to Hubert Humphrey in 1968 it turns out. There was no reason for any illusions, he was quite honest about it. He put himself forward as a conservative. He was going to be what they called a new Democrat, some one who was not going to be caught up in the liberal delusions about entitlements and rights and welfare and social issues and so on, but he was going to be a business candidate, a candidate of the business community. He was pretty straightforward about that.
Q: I thought of him in terms of what you had called ``feigned dissent'' because he represented a supposed alternative, but in fact did not threaten any of the important powerholders.
A: You can't accuse him of dishonesty, he presented himself as a business-oriented conservative and that's what he is. And I think that the reason for the lack of popular support, which was quite low, was because.... I mean you know a lot of people didn't like Bush, so there was a lot of negative vote. But I think people are looking for anything. In this respect the Perot candidacy was kind of interesting. When Perot appeared on the scene, it was spring '92 I think, he had no platform at all. He just said look at me I'm a rich guy with big ears -- vote for me. And within a week or two he was running even with the major candidates. I think they would have voted for Mickey Mouse.
Even those who voted for Clinton were not very enthusiastic according to public opinion studies.
Q: What do you think of Gore, his backing by military groups and his stated support of environmental protection?
A: Gore is another neo-liberal, much beloved by people around the New Republic for example. I mean he has some words to say, I don't know if there's anything behind the words about the environment but that's about it. The Clinton military budget is a natural extension of the Bush one. It hasn't changed a lot.
Q: Is the Clinton foreign policy significantly different from the Bush one?
A: About the same. I mean there are changes taking place, but that's because of changes in the world and changes in the economy. The domestic population is much less willing to support military intervention than it was in the past. The Bush administration was well aware of that.
Q: I think many people were profoundly shocked by the Gulf War and the degree to which information was controlled in the United States. It seemed to create a sort of unconscious backlash that expressed itself in the anti-Bush vote.
A: Well, you know the Gulf War aroused a wave of jingoism and also extraordinary fear. This is a very frightened country. It was quite interesting. I traveled around a lot during that period and I went in fact to the most jingoist and reactionary parts of the country where I could get an invitation and it was remarkable to see how frightened people were. But this is a very frightened country. It's been noticed for a long time in Europe. Every couple of years the tourist industry in Europe collapses because Americans are afraid to go to European cities where they are about 100 times as safe as in any American city and there's a lot of joking and laughter about it there, and ridicule. But you could see it during the Gulf War, people were really scared that Saddam was going to come and get 'em. But after the war, actually it's hard to work out, but a number of economists think the war was probably profitable for the United States, that is the amount of money that was ripped off of Germany and Japan and the Gulf States probably more than paid for the US costs. But I think what was tricky was that the aftermath of the Gulf War was pretty hard to deal with, if you looked at what was left. There was a tremendous amount of devastation. The Gulf monarchies or dictatorships were firmly in power, not a move towards democratization or anything else. Saddam Hussein was back in power firmly. He was slaughtering his own population and the US was standing back and applauding silently. There's a human rights disaster developing in Iraq primarily after the war. Probably 100,000 children or so have died after the war from the sanctions and so on. That's not a pretty picture and it had to be suppressed pretty quickly. That's one of the reasons why they took off all at once into this fanfare about a Middle East peace process, to try turn people's attention away from it. The Gulf War left a bad taste. For one thing people could see that the fear and hysteria were manufactured. They had to be able to understand after this that we were fighting a defenseless third world country. It was pretty hard to suppress that after February.
Q: You have written and spoken about Carter's move to send arms to Indonesia to help them slaughter the natives of East Timor. This runs counter to the prevailing image of Carter as a decent peace-seeking man. Was he just a hypocrite? Was this something that happened without his full awareness of the consequences of what he was doing? Was it tacked onto other legislation?
A: This was a Carter initiative. Not only did they radically increase the flow of aid to Indonesia, but Walter Mondale, who was then vice president, flew to Jakarta in 1978. That was the period of the worst atrocities, which were well known incidentally, I mean the press wasn't reporting them, but there were plenty of other sources. Surely US intelligence knew all about it. Mondale went to Jakarta. He was terribly impressed by how wonderful it was. He telegraphed back to Washington that they ought to send them more jet planes. Carter couldn't do that because of congressional legislation that prevented direct military aid to human rights violators, so they arranged with Israel to ship American jets to Indonesia. That was all White House initiatives.
Q: What could have been his motivations?
A: His motivations were ``stability'' and the usual things. When you ask whether Carter was a hypocrite or not, I haven't the slightest idea. You'd have to get into his head and find out. Maybe he believed he was doing the right thing, who knows? In my opinion, these are not very interesting questions. Most people, we all know from our own personal experiences, if not from reading history, that it's very easy to construct a pattern of justification for just about anything you choose to do. I mean none of us are so saintly that we haven't done ugly and unpleasant things in our lives, like maybe you took a toy from your five-year-old brother when you were a kid or something. Just ask yourself, anybody can ask themselves, how often did I say to myself, ``Boy I'm really rotten, but this is what I feel like doing.'' Very rarely. Usually you set up a pattern of justification that makes it exactly the right thing to do. That's the way beliefs are formed.
Motivations are kind of hidden. If you're honest maybe you could dig out and find them, but it's awfully easy and a common experience to construct a pattern of justification for things you do out of some kind of self interest. And that's done in statecraft all the time. So the question whether someone's being hypocritical or not is almost meaningless.
His motivations are straightforward. Indonesia's a very rich country, huge resources which were open to exploitation by foreign corporations. Suharto, the head, was keeping the country under control. If you want to know the motivation, I suggest if you're interested you might have a look at, I have a book that came out about a year ago called ``Year 501'' and one of the chapters in it reviews the western reaction to the military coup that brought Suharto to office in 1965. He immediately launched the biggest slaughter since the holocaust. Nobody knows how many, but maybe seven- or eight-hundred thousand people were slaughtered in four months. Huge bloodbath, Time magazine called it ``a boiling bloodbath.'' Most of the people killed were landless peasants. It destroyed the only popular organization in the country, namely the Indonesian Communist Party, mostly the peasant party. What's interesting about it was the reaction of the west, which was total euphoria. The New York Times described it as ``a gleam of light in Asia.'' News magazines were writing about ``hope where there once was none.'' New York Times editorials, which I run through closely in this, thought it was just magnificent. The more the boiling bloodbath boiled the more they loved it. It wasn't even hidden. It was quite open. It was a very interesting episode. It's a lot of detail about it there and the point was very straightforward: this vindicated the US war in Vietnam. In fact American liberals were writing that this proves that we were right to be in Vietnam because in Vietnam we were providing a shield which encouraged the Indonesian generals to get on with the necessary work of cleansing their own society and throwing it open to western robbers. It was remarkably open. Take a look at the quotes. I went through a very comprehensive review then, complete euphoria. A lot of the reason why the Vietnam war was fought was to protect the surrounding regions from the infection of popular uprisings. The most brutal dictatorship we supported was in Indonesia, but at the same time we also supported very bloody dictatorships and coups in other surrounding countries in Thailand, the Marcos coup in the Philippines and so on, all for the same reasons. So sure, that's the motivation.
Q: In what ways do you perceive that our progress is slowed in terms of the general awareness of these things at the moment?
A: For one thing there's an incredible degree of conformism setting in even more than usual. To a remarkable extent people say the same thing and think the same thoughts, you hear the same fabrications and so on with less and less in the way of critical voices. And as far as the popular movements are concerned, I think that they're dissipating a lot of energy on inside issues, many of them. There's a lot of self-destruction in my opinion.
Take for example all this frenzy about the JFK assassination. I mean I don't know who assassinated him and I don't care, but what difference does it make? It's not an issue of any general political interest. And there's a huge amount energy and effort going into that.
If somebody could show that there was some general significance to the assassination, that it changed policy, or that there was some high-level involvement or whatever, then it would be an important historical event. Other than that it's just like the killing of anyone else. Naturally you're upset when somebody gets killed, but why is it an issue for the popular movements anymore than the latest killing on the streets of Hoboken?
The Left (I use the term loosely), the whole array of popular movements and dissident groups and so on have spent huge energy and effort in this. That's one example. There are others.
Q: The book ``Rethinking Camelot'' powerful indictment of the theory that JFK was intending to pull out of Vietnam.
A: Really the book is not about the Kennedy assassination. What it's about is the buildup to the war in Vietnam, which we now know a lot about because of recent documentation, and it shows very clearly what was going on. Kennedy just launched an attack against South Vietnam and hadn't the slightest intent of ending it short of victory. Also interesting, at least I thought it was interesting, in the last chapter I went through the accounts that have been given of that period, and it's very striking to see. There were a lot of memoirs written at the time by people like Arthur Schlesinger and others and all of these memoirists completely revised their account after the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive in January of 1968, that made the war unpopular. American corporate elites decided at that point that it just wasn't worth it, it was too costly let's pull out. So at that time everybody became an opponent of the war because the orders from on high were that you were supposed to be opposed to it. And after that every single memoirist radically changed their story about what had happened. They all concocted this story that their hero, John F. Kennedy, was really planning to pull out of this unpopular war before he was killed and then Johnson changed it. If you look at the earlier memoirs, not a hint, I mean literally. Like Schlesinger in his 940 page book has less about the withdrawal than the New York Times did. And it's not that any new information came along, it didn't. The new information that came along just showed more that he had no intention of withdrawing. But the war became unpopular, therefore people had to rewrite the story. And they did it in the most amazing way. I mean this is the kind of thing you might have found in Stalinist Russia and it happened right here in a free country.
Q: What kinds of political activities are meaningful? What can people do that would really make a difference?
A: There are things. I mean I don't think there are any real formulas. Some participation in electoral politics is sometimes very important. I personally myself almost always vote at least in local elections where things often make a difference. National politics, in my opinion, often doesn't make much of a difference. There are groups, take say the New Party, the political organization. I mean I think they have a pretty sane program, they're not ... they're looking forward to trying to ultimately be a force in electoral politics, their shorter term concern is to influence local politics and support a lot more progressive candidates elsewhere and to use their electoral participation as an organization technique. I mean after all a lot of attention is focused on elections, whether they're meaningful or not is sort of beside the point in this respect, and that attention can be used to bring up issues to create more lasting organizations that bring people together to work systematically right after the election. The important thing is to keep the work up after the election. If elections are just something where you go in, then you push a button and then you go home, then it doesn't make much difference which button you push.
Q:
A: Whether a person feels positive or not is kind of a comment on their personality and of no great interest. You can find positive signs you can find negative signs. How you evaluate them depends on what happened in your life recently or something like that. There's no objective way to do it. The important thing is to try to commit yourself to making the positive signs more real. Suppose that you felt that there's 99 percent of a probability that human civilization is going to be destroyed in the next hundred years, but one percent chance that it won't be, and that one percent offers some opportunities to do something. Well you commit yourself to that one percent.
Q: How do you get from discussion groups to, say, anarcho-syndicalism?
A: Just a more democratic society, let's not give it any fancy words. A world that's under the thumb of huge transnational corporations and the institutions that cater to them, that is not a democratic world, even if you have elections.
Q: Do you see new technologies helping to increase the flow of information or to facilitate democracy in the world?
A: Certainly not the rich countries. Take, say, the United States, which is not unusual; we're like other rich countries. The United States developed its own economy behind very high protectionist walls with enormous state intervention and it maintains it that way. The Pentagon system, for example, is itself a huge government program arranged for a taxpayer subsidy to advanced industry. I can't imagine anything more radically opposed to the free market. In fact even the things that are called free trade agreements, like say NAFTA, are not free trade agreements. For one thing, they don't deal particularly with trade, and for another, they're not free. NAFTA has enormous protectionist elements built into it which is one of the main reasons why a lot of American industry supports it .
Q:
A: That's the beginning. Very important things are happening in the United States and other countries. It's not a big secret that the economy is moving very fast, in fact, from what used to be mainly national economies to an increasingly internationalized economy. So take say the United States, 30 years ago the question of international trade was not a big issue because the national economy was so huge in comparison with trade that it didn't matter all that much. You didn't have big debates about trade policy. Now that's changed. The international economy is enormous. In fact it's not really trade, so about 40 percent of US trade, as it's called, is actually internal to big transnational corporations. It means like one branch of the Ford Motor Company moving things to another branch which happens to be across a border. Forty percent is not a small amount, and it's the same worldwide. But, in any event, the economy's becoming much more internationalized, it's much easier to move capital abroad. The effect of that is that production can be shifted much more easily to low-wage/high-repression areas elsewhere. And the effect of that is to bring the third world model home to the United States and other rich countries. It means that these countries themselves are drifting toward a kind of a third world model in which there's a sector of great wealth and privilege and a growing mass of people who are basically superfluous. They're not necessary for a profit either as producers or consumers. You can produce more cheaply elsewhere and the market can easily become the international wealthy sectors. You end up with south-central Los Angeles and that's happening more and more. That's going to create very big changes and what's more that's going to continue as long as decisions over investment are in private hands. It's not a law of nature that says that....the private enterprise system, which is of course a state-subsidized, publicly subsidized private enterprise system, that is deeply anti-democratic by its very nature. It means that the basic decisions of human life are out of the framework of popular influence and control, and that's not a law of nature. In fact (tape runs out)
Q: I had invoked Jefferson's name recently in a positive comparison to George Bush and then read in your book ``Rethinking Camelot'' about his sending people out to destroy the villages of the Cherokees. It seems like there's no one that can be used for a positive example.
A: We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas. They are mixed. Jefferson's attitudes towards democracy were generally good, his attitudes towards freedom of religion were quite good. His attitudes toward freedom of speech, on the other hand, was not good at all. Let alone extermination of the native population. These are human beings after all. Like each of us is. If we look into ourselves honestly we'll find an odd mixture.