Chomsky Liberating the Mind from Orthodoxies.pdf

Liberating the Mind from Orthodoxies

An interview with Noam Chomsky - By David Barsamian

N oam 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

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