The Dominion - chomsky

Privilege and Responsibility

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 23:55:56 +0000

[The following is an excerpt from an interview with Noam Chomsky that aired on Radio Havana.]

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Bernie Dwyer: It’s really a pleasure to welcome you to Cuba on your first visit here. Our telephone interview last August swept rapidly across the Internet which is indicative of the interest people have in what you have to say even after so many years of critical political commentary. What motivates you to continue keeping in touch with what is going on in the world and offer analysis, commentary and possible solutions to world problems?

Noam Chomsky: It seems to me the opposite question is the one that ought to be asked. There is a moral truism about this that is as elementary as anything can be: privilege confers responsibility and the people who are called intellectuals, for no particularly good reason, happen to be privileged.

We have education, training, resources, opportunities and in a country like the United States, virtually no repression, it's an unusually free country by comparative standards, so we just have that much more responsibility than people who lack those opportunities, like most people in other countries including those under the boot of the United States, and most people in our own country. After that it's just a matter of choice. Do you observe moral truisms or don't you?

If you do, these are the kind of things that you naturally and automatically do and it doesn't merit any credit or applause or anything else, it's just being a human being and using the opportunities that you have.

Bernie Dwyer: The slogan from the World Social Forum which you attended at Porto Alegre in Brazil earlier this year was that a better world is possible. Is that part of what motivates you? Do you honestly think that a better world is possible?

Noam Chomsky: Possible, certainly. Attainable, that's another question. And that goes back to the first question: if people are willing to undertake their responsibilities seriously, then a better world is very possible. Unfortunately, there is probably an almost inverse correlation between opportunity and dedication and commitment.

So rather typically, it's the people that live under repression and deprivation and face serious penalties and lack privilege who are working hard to build a better world. Those who have the opportunity and every opportunity in front of them, every kind of privilege, quite typically throughout history tend to be subordinate to power.

Actually, it's not a particular observation of mine. The founder and leading figure in modern international relations theory, Hans Morganthau - a much respected scholar - once harshly condemned what he called our conformist subservience to those in power. He was referring to the intellectual classes in the United States and the West generally. And it's a comment that is reasonably accurate and goes back through recorded history: the respected intellectuals in virtually every society are those who are distinguished by their conformist subservience to those in power. Others who take elementary human responsibilities seriously tend to suffer overwhelmingly in one form of repression or another.

So if you were in Czechoslovakia under the Soviet Union, you might end up in jail. If you were in El Salvador in the same years, you would get your brains blown out. Well, those are just the different kinds of repression that appear in different kinds of societies. And in a country like the United States, or Western industrial societies, the punishment - such as it is - is marginalization or vitriolic attacks or something like that, but nothing that even merits comment when compared with most of the rest of the world.

And this is pretty close to a cultural universal. There are some exceptions but it's commonly true.

In fact one of the reasons that we believe that a better world is possible is because we have a better world. The world is a lot better than it was not very long ago. Maybe not in every respect - there is more aggression - but in many respects. We know how it got better. It didn't get better by some gift from the gods or the powerful or some benevolent dictator, it got better because people struggled to make it better and typically, those who were suffering most.

"Privilege confers responsibility and the people who are called intellectuals, for no particularly good reason, happen to be privileged."

The "Virtual Senate"

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 08:54:32 +0000

CHOMSKY: The term is not mine. I am borrowing it from the professional literature on international economics. The "virtual senate" consists of investors and lenders. They can effectively decide social and economic policy by capital flight, attacks on currency that undermine the economy, and other means that have been provided by the neoliberal framework of the past thirty years. You can see it in Brazil right now. The "virtual senate" wants assurances that the neoliberal policies of the Cardoso government, from which foreign investors and domestic elites greatly benefit, will not be changed. As soon as international investors, lenders, banks, the IMF, domestic wealth, and so on, recognized that Lula might win the elections, they reacted with attacks on the currency, capital flight, and other means to place the country in a stranglehold and prevent the will of the majority from being implemented. When they regained confidence that Lula would not be able to depart fundamentally from the international neoliberal regime, they relaxed and welcomed him. As they put it, Lula reassured people that he would keep Brazil safe. That specific use of language has two faces: if he keeps it safe for the financial investors, will he keep it safe for the Brazilians? Governments face what economists call a "dual constituency": voters, and the "virtual senate." Lula promised his country that he will keep Brazil safe for the population, but the IMF wants to keep it safe for its own constituency: the "virtual senate." They will act so that the money comes right after the elections and only if Lula keeps up with creditors. This is the effect of financial liberalization and other measures that have established the "virtual senate" as the dominant force in determining social and economic policy within a country. It means the population doesn't have control of the decisions taken by his own country. One consequence of liberalization of capital is rather clear: it undercuts democracy.

QUESTION: This is a big win for the left in the world; Brazil is such a big country ...

CHOMSKY: I have a lot of respect for Lula but the problem is that he has very little space to maneuver. Actually, he has some choices: he can become some sort of figurehead in the hand of the IMF or he can do some good for Brazil. If he doesn't get killed first...

QUESTION: We hope not...

CHOMSKY: Lula could direct resources for internal development but unregulated capital flow can be used very effectively to undermine attempts by individual governments to introduce progressive measures. Any country trying to stimulate its economy or increase its health spending is likely to find this deviant behavior instantly punished by a flight of capital.

QUESTION: It seems to me, with a certain degree of difference, that the concept of a virtual senate is similar to Negri's and Hardt's concept of Empire. [Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000)]

CHOMSKY: Empire, yes, but I have to say I found it hard to read. I understood only parts, and what I understood seemed to me pretty well known and expressible much more simply. However, maybe I missed something important.

QUESTION: Yes, and the book arrives to the same conclusion as yours but through a more complicated, less readable way...

CHOMSKY: If people get something out of it, it's okay. What I understand seems to be pretty simple, and this is not a criticism. I don't see any need to say in a complicated way what you can say in an easier way. You can make things look complicated, that's part of the game that intellectuals play; things must look complicated. You might not be conscious about that, but it's a way of gaining prestige, power and influence.

On the "international senate" of investors and lenders, the IMF and Brazil's Lula, and Negri, Hardt, and Foucault.

US Terrorism Against Cuba

Sat, 23 Aug 2003 19:30:08 +0000

An excerpt from International Terrorism: Image and Reality

Anti-Cuban terrorism was directed by a secret Special Group established in November 1961 under the code name "Mongoose," involving 400 Americans, 2,000 Cubans, a private navy of fast boats, and a $50 million annual budget, run in part by a Miami CIA station functioning in violation of the Neutrality Act and, presumably, the law banning CIA operations in the United States. These operations included bombing of hotels and industrial installations, sinking of fishing boats, poisoning of crops and livestock, contamination of sugar exports, etc. Not all of these actions were specifically authorized by the CIA, but no such considerations absolve official enemies.

Several of these terrorist operations took place at the time of the Cuban missile crisis of October-November 1962. In the weeks before, Raymond Garthoff reports, a Cuban terrorist group operating from Florida with US government authorization carried out "a daring speedboat strafing attack on a Cuban seaside hotel near Havana where Soviet military technicians were known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans;" and shortly after, attacked British and Cuban cargo ships and again raided Cuba, among other actions that were stepped up in early October. At one of the tensest moments of the missile crisis, on November 8, a terrorist team dispatched from the United States blew up a Cuban industrial facility after the Mongoose operations had been officially suspended. Fidel Castro alleged that 400 workers had been killed in this operation, guided by "photographs taken by spying planes." This terrorist act, which might have set off a global nuclear war, evoked little comment when it was revealed. Attempts to assassinate Castro and other terror continued immediately after the crisis terminated, and were escalated by Nixon in 1969.

Such operations continued after the Nixon years. In 1976, for example, two Cuban fishing vessels were attacked in April by boats from Miami, the main center of anti-Cuban terrorism worldwide. A few weeks later, the Cuban embassy in Portugal was bombed with two killed. In July, the Cuban mission to the UN in New York was bombed and there were bombings aimed at Cuban targets in the Caribbean and Colombia, along with the attempted bombing of a pro-Cuban meeting at the Academy of Music in New York. In August, two officials of the Cuban embassy in Argentina were kidnapped and Cubana airlines offices in Panama were bombed. The Cuban embassy in Venezuela was fired upon in October and the embassy in Madrid was bombed in November. In October, CIA-trained Cuban exiles bombed a Cubana civilian airliner, killing all 73 aboard, including Cuba's gold-medal-winning international fencing team. One of the agents of this terrorist operation, Bay of Pigs veteran Luis Posada Carriles, was sprung from the Venezuelan jail where he was held for the bombing; he mysteriously escaped and found his way to El Salvador, where he was put to work at the Ilopango military airbase to help organize the US terrorist operations in Nicaragua. The CIA attributed 89 terrorist operations in the US and the Caribbean area for 1969-79 to Cuban exile groups, and the major one, OMEGA 7, was identified by the FBI as the most dangerous terrorist group operating in the US during much of the 1970s.

"CIA-sponsored operations included bombing of hotels and industrial installations, sinking of fishing boats, poisoning of crops and livestock, contamination of sugar exports..."

The Explicit Policy of World Domination

Sun, 27 Jul 2003 04:24:36 +0000

ANDY CLARK
This email is from Don Rhodes, from Melbourne, in Australia, and he says: "I do not believe that the US wants to dominate the world. The Americans have been attacked on several fronts, 9/11 being only one of them. Someone has to bring into line rogue states and it is the USA alone that has the capability to do this. Without such a 'world policeman' the world would just disintegrate into warring factions. Look at history for examples of this." What do you make of that sort of statement?

NOAM CHOMSKY
The first sentence is simply factually incorrect. The National Security Strategy states fairly explicitly that the US intends to dominate the world by force, which is the dimension in which it rules supreme, and to ensure that there is never any potential challenge to this domination. That was not only stated explicitly, it has also been commented on repeatedly, right away in the main establishment - the Foreign Affairs journal in its next issue is pointing out that the United States is declaring the right to be what it calls a "revisionist state", which will use force to control the world in its own interests. The person who sent the email may believe that the US has some unique right to run the world by force. I don't believe that, and contrary to what was stated I don't think history supports that at all. In fact the US record, incidentally with the support of Australia, since the period of its global dominance in the 1940s, is one of instigating war and violence and terror on a very substantial scale. The Indochina War, just to take one example in which Australia participated, was basically a war of aggression. The United States attacked South Vietnam in 1962. The war then spread to the rest of Indochina. The end result was several million people killed, the countries devastated, and that's only one example. So history does not support the conclusion and the principle that one state should have a unique right to rule the world by force. That's an extremely hazardous principle, no matter who the country is.

"The National Security Strategy states fairly explicitly that the US intends to dominate the world by force, which is the dimension in which it rules supreme, and to ensure that there is never any potential challenge to this domination."

Weekly Chomsky #2

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 22:39:14 +0000

talk on Mid-East governments given in Berkeley in March 2002.

In a situation of conflict and threat, the state authorities will resort to any means that they can get away with; that includes serious war crimes, crimes against humanity, and they will do so, as long as their crimes are tolerated and supported and sometimes encouraged by the overlord. If the master says that's enough, they stop. Therefore, it follows that our criticisms should be directed primarily to ourselves. Indignation about the crimes of others is easy and cheap and not particularly attractive, sometimes even shameful. Looking in the mirror is far more important, much more difficult. And in these, and many other cases, our participation in crimes is quite real, and it proceeds at several different levels.

In the first place, it's a matter of government policy, decisive military, economic, diplomatic support for crimes, all with full awareness, over many decades. At the second level, it goes on at the level of doctrinal institutions--media, schools, universities, intellectual journals, often scholarship. That includes evasion or suppression of crucial facts, plenty of outright falsification, sometimes even unconstrained enthusiasm for atrocities.

And at the third, and most important, level, it's a matter of our own choices. None of this is graven in stone. There are many examples rather similar to this, where things have been changed by public action. We may remember that this month, March, 2002, happens to be the 40th anniversary of the first public announcement of the U.S. attack against South Vietnam. In March, 1962, the Kennedy administration announced that the U.S. Air Force would be flying missions against the South Vietnamese. Use of chemical warfare was instituted to destroy food crops. Hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions of people were driven into concentration camps, urban slums. Napalm was authorized.

All of this proceeded with no protest. That's why there's no commemoration, today, of the 40th anniversary. Nobody even remembers. There was no protest, virtually none, here in Berkeley or in anyplace, for a long time. It took years before substantial public opposition developed. It did finally develop, as somebody, Barbara, somebody pointed out, and it made a big differences.

One of the differences it made is that it contributed, along with the civil rights movement and other activism of the time, to making this a much more civilized country, in many ways. I'm not talking about the leadership, I'm not talking about the intellectual classes, but the general population has changed. No American president could dream of anything remotely like that today. And the same is true in many other areas. And it didn't happen by magic or "gifts from angels" or anything like that. It came from committed, dedicated public activism on the part of millions and millions of people. And it did make a much better country. There's plenty wrong, but, as compared with 40 years ago, the improvement is enormous.

"There's plenty wrong, but, as compared with 40 years ago, the improvement is enormous."

Weekly Chomsky

Sun, 18 May 2003 03:38:42 +0000

Chomsky's essay "Confronting the Empire," originally published by Z Magazine.

Evidently, the likely increase of terror and proliferation of WMD is of limited concern to planners in Washington, in the context of their real priorities. Without too much difficulty, one can think of reasons why this might be the case, not very attractive ones.

The nature of the threats was dramatically underscored last October, at the summit meeting in Havana on the 40th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, attended by key participants from Russia, the US, and Cuba. Planners knew at the time that they had the fate of the world in their hands, but new information released at the Havana summit was truly startling. We learned that the world was saved from nuclear devastation by one Russian submarine captain, Vasily Arkhipov, who blocked an order to fire nuclear missiles when Russian submarines were attacked by US destroyers near Kennedy's "quarantine" line. Had Arkhipov agreed, the nuclear launch would have almost certainly set off an interchange that could have "destroyed the Northern hemisphere," as Eisenhower had warned.

"The world was saved from nuclear devastation by one Russian submarine captain."

The dreadful revelation is particularly timely because of the circumstances: the roots of the missile crisis lay in international terrorism aimed at "regime change," two concepts very much in the news today. US terrorist attacks against Cuba began shortly after Castro took power, and were sharply escalated by Kennedy, leading to a very plausible fear of invasion, as Robert McNamara has acknowledged. Kennedy resumed the terrorist war immediately after the crisis was over; terrorist actions against Cuba, based in the US, peaked in the late 1970s continued 20 years later. Putting aside any judgment about the behavior of the participants in the missile crisis, the new discoveries demonstrate with brilliant clarity the terrible and unanticipated risks of attacks on a "much weaker enemy" aimed at "regime change" - risks to survival, it is no exaggeration to say.

Did a Russian sub captain save the world from nuclear holocaust? A short excerpt from "Confronting the Empire".