[MUSIC PLAYING]
JANE GOULD: You
patient souls who've
been here for a long time
holding your seats, welcome.
I'm Jane Gould, the coordinator
of the Technology and Culture
Forum.
And I'd like to welcome
you to tonight's program,
"Noam Chomsky on the
Foundations of World Order--
50 Years of the UN, the World
Bank, the IMF, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights."
Before we turn to
tonight's program,
I call your attention to the
Technology and Culture Forum's
next program,
"Reinventing Universities
for the 21st Century."
There is a sign with all the
information above my head.
And do come.
Wednesday, March 3,
at 5:30 PM in 6120.
The Technology and Culture
Forum will be hosting four more
programs this spring.
If you'd like to be
on our mailing list,
you can either sign on
one of the sheets of paper
on the table in the hall as
you leave, or go to our website
and just put yourself
onto the list.
Now to tonight's program.
We're all here because we
want to hear Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky is honored by MIT
as an institute professor.
His doctoral thesis on
transformational analysis
began his radical transformation
of the field of linguistics.
Honorary degrees, learned
in professional societies,
significant awards--
his list is luminous.
Few have escaped his notice.
And yet, as a
public intellectual,
Professor Chomsky has
always taken seriously
his responsibility to stimulate
and lead public debate.
In addition to
speaking and writing
on linguistics and
philosophy, he's
taken on intellectual
history, contemporary issues,
international affairs,
US foreign policy,
to name a few of his key topics.
Late this last year,
I received an email
encouraging me to participate
in a 70th birthday
card for Noam Chomsky.
Online, global--
hundreds, thousands--
the list went on,
and people couldn't
resist saying how they'd
been challenged and inspired
by Chomsky.
Tonight, he's here to
look at the last 50 years,
what we created, what we
have, and where we are to go.
Noam Chomsky.
[APPLAUSE]
NOAM CHOMSKY: I just realized
while listening to Jane
announce the title
that it's also
just about 50 years since
I walked into this building
for the first time.
But I won't talk about that.
We've just passed the 50th
anniversary of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.
That was a few weeks ago.
The Human Rights
Regime, which was
encoded in that
declaration, is one
of the pillars of the
system of world order
that was constructed on the
wreckage of World War II.
There were two other
major foundation stones.
One was the International
Political Order,
which is articulated in
the United Nations Charter.
And the third is the
International Economic System,
sometimes called the Bretton
Woods System, designed
primarily by the United
States and Britain
right at the end of the war.
These three systems
were closely integrated,
conceptually and in fact.
The thinking behind
them illustrates
that, as does their
interactions over the years.
And to a degree, that's quite
unusual in world affairs.
The three foundations reflected
public attitudes and concerns
over quite a wide range.
For that very reason,
the principles that were
articulated and, to some
extent, instituted--
those principles were quite
distasteful to elite elements,
namely those who were
actually in a position
to construct and shape and
guide the actual world order.
And they very quickly
took steps to dismantle,
or at least attenuate,
the lofty principles.
The conflicts over these
matters constitute a large part
of modern history--
post Cold War history.
That's not the usual framework
of analysis for discussing it.
But in my opinion,
it ought to be.
Well, large issues.
There's a lot in print.
There's many treatises yet to be
written even to be researched.
I don't think the topics have
been addressed with anything
like enough seriousness.
But I'll try to give
some indication of why
I think that's an appropriate
and instructive way to view
the contemporary world system.
It's our origins at the time
of the Second World War.
And maybe it's likely future.
So the main question
that I want to get to
is, what has been the fate of
the three basic and integrated
pillars of world order that were
established half a century ago?
And specifically, what has been
the role of the United States,
which has been the primary actor
on the world scene throughout--
remains so--
and the one that's
most important for us,
for obvious reasons,
independently
of the significance and
scale of its contributions,
which are usually quite great
for equally obvious reasons.
Well, that's the main question
that I want to get to.
But I'd like to
approach it by a detour
just to make life
more complicated.
And the detour has
two tracks that I'd
like to explore a little
bit, and then, from them,
get back to the questions.
The first track is
simply to remind everyone
of what you already know.
We have to bear in mind that
the questions are not abstract
and they're not about
some distant planet.
So it's not like an academic
topic for an academic seminar.
We're dealing with
questions of life and death,
of suffering and
pain and despair.
The voices that are heard--
not that one.
[LAUGHTER]
The voices that
are heard [LAUGHS]
are those of the rich and
the powerful, naturally.
There are also those
who have sought to be
a voice for the voiceless.
Their fate hasn't
been too happy.
Some were simply
assassinated by our hands,
or those working for us--
a chapter of modern history
the one doesn't
read about too much.
In fact, they were assassinated.
And there's quite
a number of them,
doubly in that they were first
killed and then silenced.
So you can do a check and
see how many of your friends
can tell you the names of
Eastern European dissidents
and murdered.
There are murdered counterparts
in Central America.
And how many books you've
read by one and by the other
and so on.
It's an instructive lesson.
But the voices that we
hear, the ones that remain,
are typically the powerful.
And that's important because
that's not the only voice.
That's the voice of
a small minority here
and a tiny minority worldwide.
Well, let me illustrate
from right now.
There are major stories in
the press these last few days
on the G7 meetings-- the
meetings of the seven richest
industrial countries--
and on the interchanges
between their leaders.
So for example, president
Chirac's, of France,
his interchanges with
Robert Rubin, who I guess
might be called co-president
of the United States.
[SOFT LAUGHTER]
We have to give Alan Greenspan
at least half the presidency.
[LAUGHTER]
So that's been all
over the front pages.
And those discussions
are interesting
and tell you a lot if you
look at them closely--
even not so closely.
The outcome of
these discussions--
G7 and the other
interchanges-- reveal the power
of the United States in
a rather dramatic form,
and also its extreme isolation,
even among the richest
countries.
And if you look a
little more closely,
and you'll learn a lot about
the true nature of the actually
functioning international
economic system,
of the difference between
the doctrines that
apply to the rich and the
powerful by their insistence,
and the opposite
doctrines, which
are imposed on everyone else.
That comes out with great
starkness in the articles
discussing these issues.
I'll come back to
that in connection
with the third pillar of
world order, the International
Economic System.
Well, there are no stories--
and I mean none--
on the G15 meetings, which
have taken place at same time
in Jamaica in the
last couple of weeks.
In the national press,
it's literally zero.
I rely on a database
search done by a friend who
has access to that monster.
The New York Times,
The Washington Post,
and The Wall Street Journal
have no word on them.
There is no shortage
of information.
The Associated
Press had stories,
except they weren't run.
And the BBC World Services
had extensive coverage.
And if you look around
the peripheral press,
particularly in Florida,
there was coverage--
Florida, I presume, because of
the Latin American connection.
But the national
press blanked it out.
Now, these aren't
minor countries.
These are major.
These are not what are
dismissed as "basket
cases" like sub-Saharan Africa.
This is Argentina, Brazil,
Chile, Mexico, India,
Indonesia, and Nigeria--
quite substantial
countries in which people
expect to make a lot
of money if they can.
17 of them, even though
it's called G15--
a good part of the world.
And they do have something
to say, believe it or not.
And you can even read it.
For example, you read
it on the front page
if you happen to subscribe to
the leading journal in Egypt.
[LAUGHTER]
--The Al-Ahram, which
has an English edition
so you can read it in English.
What they say at the G15 meeting
is that the United States
and Britain-- this
is mostly quotes--
are unwilling to enter into
a dialogue with the South.
"The South" is what
is euphemistically
called the developing world.
Which direction
they're developing,
you can argue about.
The US and Britain are unwilling
to enter into a dialogue
with the South, which is always
forced to make concessions
in the World Trade Organization
to the benefit of the rich.
The true story of
globalization, they continue,
is that the North--
that's G7-- has to
make maximum benefits,
and the South is only
entitled to a limited margin
of development.
And if this margin is crossed,
the Western speculators
are there to take you down
as quickly as they can.
That's not false.
But it's a considerable
understatement
than the writers surely know it.
US power and violence
has also been there
to take you down as quickly
as it can if countries tried
to pursue the path of
dependent development, what's
called in US planning
circles "radical nationalism"
or "economic nationalism"
or sometimes even
"excessive development."
That's not to be permitted
in the current period
of globalization, for
reasons I'll get back to.
You don't have to send
the Marines that often.
The speculators can do the job.
The G15 meeting goes on to issue
a plea to Western investors.
It says, we don't
want to stifle you,
but we want to know who you are.
And we want you to come and
go in an orderly fashion.
That's precisely what the
North will not accept.
The demand that not be
accepted is a core part
of the Multilateral
Agreement on Investment,
which has been deflected
thanks to activist pressure,
which succeeded in escaping
media controls, but deflected--
not stopped--
coming back in other ways.
And the point is to prevent the
G15 plea from being realized.
This, then, is accompanied
by grim accounts
of the effects of the
specific form of globalization
that's been instituted
in the past 25 years.
It has two major aspects
that are relevant here.
One is that it's been
an economic failure,
from the point of view
of statistics at least--
not from the point of
view of rich people.
So economic growth has slowed
over most of the world.
And as a fraction of
gross domestic product,
as a fraction of
economic product,
the proportion that goes to
working people has declined.
So working people are
getting a declining part
of a slowing economy.
That's essentially the story.
The long-term tendency of this
is a form of globalization.
It's kind of a globalization
of the structural model
of the third world.
And that's a very
clear structural model.
You find it just about anywhere,
which is a relic of European--
and I include here,
US-- imperialism.
So you find societies
with a very small sector
of extremely, extremely
wealthy people, usually linked
to the foreign masters, and
a large number of people
who are somewhere between
survival and suffering,
and a category of
superfluous people.
In our dependencies,
they're often
called the "disposable
people," as in Colombia,
where you dispose of
them-- send out the death
squads or the paramilitaries.
We're a more civilized society.
We throw them in jail instead on
various fraudulent crime words.
But that model is spreading.
It takes a different
form in a rich country,
like the United States, than a
poor country like, say, Haiti.
But the structure
is quite similar.
And the United States
and Britain, it's
pretty, very explicit.
And the rest, in the other rich
countries, it's partially true.
And it's devastatingly
true in most of the world,
including now
Eastern Europe, now
that the end of the Cold
War has led to it's more
or less predictable outcome.
And the countries
of Eastern Europe
are returning to what they
were before that attempt
at independent nationalism.
So the ones that were deep,
third-world poverty like Russia
are returning to that status.
The ones that were part of the
West, like the Czech Republic,
are returning to that
status, about as one
should have expected.
In my opinion,
that's pretty much
what the Cold War was about.
But so that model
is a familiar one.
And it's now being
kind of globalized.
That's the
globalization process.
Well, that's the G15 view of it.
You get a much more
pained and anguished view
when you get to the
poorer countries.
Those are the richer countries
outside the really rich world.
Well, so they are silenced.
I'll take a second example.
A year ago, the World
Trade Organization
celebrated the 50th anniversary
of the global trading system.
It was originally GATT, now
the World Trade Organization.
And that one got plenty
of media coverage.
There was lots of coverage of
the inspired rhetoric by Bill
Clinton and world
leaders, talked
about the marvels that had been
achieved through global trade
and so on.
There was also a spokesperson
for the United Nations there.
It was the Secretary General
of UNCTAD, the UN Conference
on Trade and Development--
the main United Nations
economic research and
analysis organization, which
is, according to its
charter, committed
to an international
trading system that
promotes economic and
social development.
And he gave a talk
too, representing
the rest of the world,
the United Nations,
as an economist.
And he closed his
speech by saying,
"No one should be fooled
by the festive atmosphere
of these celebrations.
Outside there is anguish and
fear, insecurity about jobs,
and a life of
quiet desperation."
Well, there was ample
media coverage, as I said.
But it much preferred--
in fact, kept to--
the festive atmosphere within.
Although, again,
you can read this
if you happen to subscribe to
a very good Third World journal
that's published in
Penang, Malaysia.
There's a name for that.
It's called free press, I think.
[LAUGHTER]
The Secretary General of UNCTAD
presented the same message--
the same message, pretty
much-- at the recent G15
meeting a couple days ago.
He predicted a bleak future
for the vast majority
of the people of the South,
although a small sector
is and will continue
to be quite wealthy.
Well, the story
that he describes
is also similar here, including
the part about insecurity.
And that's not exactly a secret.
So Alan Greenspan,
when he was testifying
before the Congress Senate
Banking Committee, taking pride
in the fairy tale
economy, as it's known,
over which he presided,
attributed it in large measure
to what he called greater
worker insecurity,
meaning workers are
just intimidated.
And they're
frightened they're not
going to have a job tomorrow.
And they're afraid ask for
a raise or for benefits
and so on.
And that contributes
substantially
to what's called the
health of the economy.
It's a concept
that's uncorrelated
with the health of the
people in the economy,
but it's a concept.
It's good.
It keeps inflation
down, keeps profits up--
all sorts of good things.
And it's real.
If you look at polls taken,
say, by Business Week,
you find that like around
90% of working people
are insecure about their job--
some very insecure.
About 70% are
afraid that if they
tried to get involved in union
organizing, they'll be fired.
The reasons for
this intimidation
are several, some of them
pretty straightforward.
Some of it is just
straight corporate crime,
which is very easy when it's
backed by a criminal state.
The Reagan administration
made it clear
and open to the business
world that it was simply
not going to enforce the laws.
As a result, the firing
of union organizers
went way up--
approximately tripled.
And other measures could be
used to ensure that workers
would stay intimidated.
That continues under the
Clinton administration.
Another measure
of intimidation is
what are mislabeled
"free trade agreements."
They're not about free trade.
And they're surely
not agreements--
at least, if the
population matters.
The fact that they're
called "agreements"
is interesting, because it's
recognized that, at least
in any country that's
democratic enough
to take polls like Canada
and the United States,
that the population
is against them.
But they're agreements,
nevertheless,
which tells you something about
the conception of democracy.
If they were about free trade,
say, cutting back tariffs,
NAFTA could have taken 2 pages.
It's 2,200 pages because
it's not about free trade.
But what are called
"free trade agreements"
have the property that they are
a way of threatening workers.
So there are even some
studies on it, one
by a very good labor
historian at Cornell, Kate
Bronfenbrenner, showing
that in about half
of organizing
efforts since NAFTA,
there's been an effort to
disrupt by threat of transfer.
And it's not an unreal threat.
Where organizing has
nevertheless succeeded,
the number of
transfers has tripled.
And if you look
where it's tripled,
it's in the mobile industries,
like not construction,
but manufacturing.
So it's a real threat, and
it helps intimidate people.
And it contributes to the
health of the economy.
And of course, in
a poorer country,
it's a much greater threat.
So that's part of the
fairy tale economy,
which is, indeed, a fairy
tale economy for some people,
including people in the sector
that most of us come from--
me, in particular.
For that sector of the
population, it's a fairy tale.
When you look at the reports
of the fairy tale economy,
you find two things mentioned--
return on capital and the stock
market.
And for those who
have stock, say
the rapid asset inflation
of the past years
has made them very rich.
What it means for the
economy is debated.
But it certainly
made them very rich.
So it's a fairy tale for
the 1% of the economy who
own about half the stock--
similar figures
for other assets.
And for the 10% who own
most of the rest, about 85%
of the benefits have gone to
about 10% of the population.
If you go to the next
10%, the second decile,
they've actually lost net worth
during the Clinton recovery.
You go down further, it looks
uglier over the past years.
In fact, this recovery
is unusual and, I think,
unprecedented.
First of all, it's
quite slow, even
by the standards of the
postwar period, certainly--
not very different from
the sluggish recoveries
of the '70s and '80s--
much below the earlier ones.
But it's also unusual in
that most of the population
has been left out.
Just now, after the peak of the
business cycle, it was 1989--
so it's almost 10 years--
just now, the median is getting
back to where it was in 1989.
There's never been such a slow
recovery for the majority--
it's probably 70%,
80% of the population.
Never been anything
like that before.
Wages-- or, about real
wages-- are about 15%
below what they were in 1973.
In fact, they're back at the
level of around 1964 or so.
Depends a little
how you measure.
Incomes, to the extent
that they stay up,
are staying up because people
are just working a lot more.
So the typical
American family is
putting in about 15
weeks a year more of work
than it did 20 years
ago to try to keep it
at a stagnating or
a declining level.
If you're interested
in data about this,
the best general database
about this kind of stuff--
also written quite clearly--
comes out every two years.
It's called The State
of Working America.
The Economic Policy
Institute just
came out with their 1998, '99
edition just a couple of weeks
ago, which can fill
you in on details
up to the current evidence.
Well, let me put
off for a moment
how this return relates to
the fate of the three pillars.
But the point that
I'm trying to stress
is that all of this stuff has
to do with real human beings
and their fate.
It's not a pleasant story.
And when we bring in the
fate of future generations
who don't have a vote, as
it's called in the market,
in the very restricted
market systems that exist--
if we bring them in, then
the story is even uglier.
Well, that's the first detour.
The second one-- and I will
get back to the topic--
has to do with the norms
and the conventions
for discussing all of this,
for discussing world order.
And there are some
norms and conventions.
And if you depart
from them, you're
kind of not part
of the discussion.
The norms and the conventions
are that the goals,
the intentions, the purposes,
as they're sometimes called,
of the United States and
its leaders are high-minded,
sincere, or benign--
other good things.
And that, crucially, is
true independently a fact.
And it is understood to be
true independently of fact.
So for example, the very same
books and scholarly articles
and so on that pronounce
that as a truth often
also are dedicated to showing
that it's refuted by the facts.
And that's called an
irony or a departure
of some exogenous factor
or something or other.
That's pretty standard.
So indeed, the thesis is
refuted overwhelmingly
by the internal
documentary record--
the doc record of planning--
and even more dramatically
by the historical
record of practice.
But it doesn't matter.
The principle remains true.
And it provides the
framework of discussion.
And one part of a good education
is to understand that--
to get that
internalized enough so
you can then take
part in the debate,
which proceeds in this fashion.
It's reminiscent of medieval and
early modern theological dogma.
And interestingly, it's
sometimes even presented
in those terms, especially
in what's called
realist international theory.
However, although the
comparison comes to mind,
I think it's unfair.
It's kind of an insult to
me to medieval theology.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean that quite seriously.
And I'll explain why
if you're interested.
But let me put it aside.
Anyway, it has
something of the flavor
of a theological principle.
Notice that these principles
don't apply to anyone else.
So for example, nobody pays any
attention to the high-minded
rhetoric of Stalin's
constitution or the exalted
rhetoric that accompanies what
those who carry it out call
humanitarian interventions, of
which the most obvious case is
in this century, I suppose--
at least if you judge
by the rhetoric--
are Mussolini's
invasion of Ethiopia,
the Japanese invasion of
Manchuria and North China,
and Hitler's invasion
of Czechoslovakia.
The rhetoric was very impressive
and full of humanitarian ideals
and noble purposes and so on.
And like most propaganda,
it wasn't totally false.
Like you'll find
fragments of truth in it.
So for example, Hitler was
invited in by the president
of Slovakia.
And the Japanese
actually had one
of the leading Chinese
nationalists as a puppet
and so on.
But we don't pay any
attention to that stuff.
We don't regard that as
evidence of benign intentions
in those and other cases.
The principles hold only
at home, not anywhere else.
And here they hold,
irrespective of the facts,
and often in the
very same documents,
say, scholarly
articles, which present
the facts to refute them.
That's kind of misleading
to give examples
because that would
understate the uniformity
and the extremism.
And it would be misleading,
quote, "the press."
So I won't because
that's too easy.
Let me just give
one example which
happens to be the last one
that I looked at last night
in a current Journal of
International Affairs.
And it's kind of an interesting
case and a very good scholar.
Highly critical of US
government policies, which
makes it more interesting--
this article, too.
It's worth examining, not
only because it illustrates
the conventions, but because
of what we discover when
we look a little more closely--
not only about
contemporary history
but also about ourselves--
what we do, how we deal with it.
The record is particularly
instructive in this case,
because the Cold War is
almost totally irrelevant.
This goes back a long
way and never has
been any Cold War relevant.
And it's been recognized.
The institutions of
power and decision making
remain unchanged.
From that we conclude,
if we were rational,
that it's likely to be a
pretty good predictor of where
things are going to
go, at least if we
allow them to go that way.
The article is by a well-known
Middle East scholar.
He's also a leading policy
analyst at the Council
on Foreign Relations
and elsewhere.
He's been highly
critical of US policy
toward the Middle East,
which is his specialty.
The article is, too.
And he gives a
recommendation, which in fact
is highlighted by the journal.
So it's like the most important
part of the recommendation.
It says, "The United
States should more
energetically promote
central US foreign policy
themes, especially freedom,
democracy, and human rights."
Notice these are central
US foreign policy themes.
No argument or
evidence is presented
to establish that fact
because none is needed.
That is a theological dogma.
It's like "God is
great" or something.
[LAUGHTER]
You don't have to present
evidence for that.
It's just a truth.
Then the article proceeds, after
having established the truth.
And it goes on--
and this is quite typical--
to describe how the United
States has consistently
acted contrary to its
central foreign policy themes
in the Middle East.
The author then goes on
to say, I'm quoting now,
"There is no doubt."
Not only is this true,
but, "There is no doubt
that American foreign policy
does adopt a separate standard
for the Middle East when
it comes to such values
as democracy and human rights."
Well, to show that
there's a double standard,
you do need evidence.
So he presents some evidence.
The evidence is
that, as he shows,
the United States does
not uphold such values
in the Middle East, which
is the area of his expertise
and attention.
But it does uphold
them elsewhere,
strikingly, he points out, for
major Muslim states if they're
not in the Middle East.
So that makes the
point very clear.
And the most important case,
of course, as he notes,
is Indonesia, the
largest Muslim state,
which he cites, to establish
the certainty of the judgment
that the United States
has a separate standard
for the Middle East.
Well, breaking with
the convention,
let's look at the dogma
keeping to the single and most
important example cited, namely,
Indonesia, where the United
States upholds its values of
democracy and human rights.
Well, very much like Hitler,
Mussolini, and Japan,
this doctrine isn't
totally false.
So on May 20, 1998,
so that's last May,
the United States did
make its first statement
in favor of democracy
in Indonesia.
Secretary of State
Albright on last May 20,
called upon President
Suharto to resign and provide
for a democratic transition.
A few hours later, he resigned--
maybe coincidence,
maybe it tells you
something about power relations.
[LAUGHTER]
You can figure that
out for yourself.
So last May, we
called for democracy.
From the time that Suharto
took power in October, 1965,
until May, 1998, this
gentleman was "our kind
of guy," as the Clinton
administration called him,
while he was massacring
and torturing
and robbing in a quite
impressive fashion--
kind of one of the world
records of the modern period.
The Clinton administration
even went so far as
to suspend its
congressionally-mandated review
of Indonesia's appalling
labor practices,
while at the same time praising
Indonesia for bringing them
into closer conformity with
international standards.
And the Clinton
administration also
avoided congressional
restrictions
on military support
for "our kind of guy"--
found various ways to pay
for it out of other pockets
and that sort of thing.
But it is true that last May,
the United States underwent
a religious conversion, and
for the first time called
for a democracy in Indonesia.
The force of the comparison
with the Middle East,
however, is somewhat
weakened by the fact
that the same conversion
occurred there at pretty much
the same time.
In December, 1998, Secretary
of State Albright announced,
I'm quoting, "We have
come to the determination
that the Iraqi
people would benefit
if they had a government that
really represented them."
So in both the Middle
East and Indonesia,
contrary to the thesis,
the United States
underwent a religious conversion
in favor of the central themes
of its foreign policy--
at least on paper, you can
evaluate the accuracy--
about at the same
time last year.
In the case of Iraq,
before that, the US policy
was to support what was
called an iron fist.
The iron fist was
Saddam Hussein.
For a long time,
he was "our kind
of guy," right through
his most murderous crimes
and most monstrous crimes.
After he committed his
first true offense,
the thesis shifted.
We still wanted an iron fist.
But it had to be
a clone, someone
who would rule with an iron
fist just as Saddam Hussein had
done during the period when
he was "our kind of guy."
That was pretty much
official policy.
But on paper, at least,
it's now changed.
Because as of last
December, we discovered
that they would benefit
from a government that
represented them.
So in 1998 then,
the United States
did announce support
for democracy,
but both in the Middle
East and Indonesia.
Well, what does this tell
us about the central themes
of US foreign policy?
Answer-- it tells us
nothing whatsoever,
because these are
doctrinal truths.
And therefore, facts
are simply irrelevant--
like, you know, God
is great and merciful.
You don't look at
factual truths.
In fact, if you look
more-- well, put it aside.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't want to take
too many detours.
[CHUCKLES] Let's look a little
more closely at Indonesia,
where there is no doubt that
these themes of democracy
and human rights were
put into practice.
There's a lot of concern right
now about the possibility
that Indonesia may break up into
either a federation or maybe
separate territories.
And that prospect is
very much deplored.
However, the objection to
it, wherever it may be,
is certainly not an
objection of principle.
And we can find that
out quite easily
if we bother to look at
the irrelevant facts.
So in 1958, that happened
to be official US policy--
secret, but we now
know it was official US
policy to break up Indonesia.
And the United States,
in fact, carried out
a major counterinsurgency--
well, insurgency operation--
subversive operation--
probably the major one
of the post Second
World War period
to try to break up Indonesia.
It supported a rebellion
in the outer islands.
Those are the islands
where the oil is
and where most US
investments were.
And that was the goal,
to separate them off.
And the reason was that
the national government was
neutralist and
independent and, in fact,
was far too democratic,
which was extremely
worrisome to Washington.
The government was--
I'm not suggesting it
was a model democracy,
but it was allowing parties
of the poor to function.
There was a major party which
represented poor peasants.
And it was allowed to function.
And it was doing better and
better in each election.
And that was appalling
news in Washington.
If we look at the
internal record--
most of which has been
suppressed, incidentally.
But bits and pieces have leaked.
And there's some good
scholarly studies of it--
one, in fact, by
the leading founder
of US/Southeast Asian studies,
George Kahin at Cornell.
But there's also some
documents that have come out
in the official channels.
The fear was that the
government was, let's say,
far too democratic.
And it would be
impossible, as they put it,
to suppress the
parties of the Left
by ordinary democratic means.
And therefore, they
would have to be--
the word is "eliminated."
That's the joint chiefs.
Meanwhile, the outer islands
would be separated off.
So inside, what's left--
bad guys have to be eliminated.
The outer islands
will be separated,
and the US will take them over.
Well, the rebellion failed.
But not before destroying
whatever fabric
of a parliamentary democracy
existed in Indonesia.
And now, after four years, we're
calling for it to be restored.
After the failure
of the rebellion,
the United States turned to
what is standard operating
procedure when you
want to overthrow
a civilian government--
try to undermine the
civilian government,
but support the military.
Because they're the ones
who are going to overthrow
the government for you.
That's absolutely
standard, case after case.
Pinochet is one example.
The real story about what lies
behind Iran-Contra is the same.
And we know it had nothing
to do with hostages
because it was started when
there were no hostages.
And it's just standard
operating procedure.
In Indonesia, it worked.
The US tried to undermine
the civilian government.
It supported the military.
It worked.
By 1965, there was,
indeed, a military coup.
Suharto took over.
An army-inspired
massacre then took place.
The CIA described it
as one of the worst
massacres of the 20th century,
comparable to Hitler, Stalin,
and Mao.
It was fairly actively
reported in the United States.
It was a staggering bloodbath.
The New York Times called it
a "staggering mass slaughter."
That was the Times' phrase.
Time Magazine devoted
a whole section too,
to what they called
the "boiling blood
bath," in which hundreds
of thousands of people
were massacred,
mostly poor peasants.
And the leadership of
the poor peasant party
was, indeed, eliminated.
It was reported accurately
and with complete euphoria.
There was such joy over it, that
it couldn't even be suppressed.
It's kind had been
written out of history.
But to go back and read
the journals of the time,
the euphoria is total, across
the intellectual spectrum.
Freedom House was
applauding and so on.
The US government applauded.
Secretary of Defense McNamara
testified before Congress
that the military aid that
we'd given to the Indonesian
military had paid dividends.
In a private letter
to President Johnson,
he was particularly
proud of the training
that Indonesian military
officers received
at American universities, where
they had gotten the right ideas
about how to carry out a mass
slaughter comparable to Hitler,
Stalin, and Mao.
The country became a
paradise for investors.
Suharto became the darling
of the United States--
"our kind of guy."
Remained so when he invaded East
Timor, wiped out maybe a third
or a quarter of the population.
And that continues
right into 1997.
Then something went wrong.
He apparently committed a crime.
What crime is it?
Well, in fact, the crime,
if you look closely,
which led to the
religious conversion
in favor of a democratic
transition here--
there were actually two
crimes, two standard ones.
One crime is, he start dragging
his feet about IMF orders.
The IMF rules were imposing
extremely serious hardships
on the people of Indonesia.
And Suharto was kind of
slow about following orders.
Crime number one.
The second crime is
he just lost control.
There was a democratic uprising.
And the army wasn't
backing him anymore.
And at that point, he's useless.
So therefore, he got
the advice to permit
a democratic transition, in
which he handed power over
to his handpicked
vice president.
Well, that's the moment at
which the United States,
after 40 years, began,
at least on paper,
to implement its central
theme of its policy
in the area where there is
no doubt that it has always
implemented it, remember, as
distinct from the Middle East.
By committing those
two crimes, Suharto
followed a very classic path.
Another recent example is
Mobutu, Saddam Hussein,
Duvalier, Marcos,
Somoza, Trujillo.
It's kind of a long list.
The same two crimes are
the ones that matter.
You stop following
orders, you lose control--
you're out, and we're in favor
of a democratic transition.
This happens
routinely, regularly.
But it doesn't
teach you anything.
You don't learn
anything about policy
from that, because the nature of
policy is a theological dogma.
And therefore, no evidence
tells you anything.
Well, look a little
more closely at 1958.
I still promise to get back
to the theme, if you're
willing to hold out.
[LAUGHTER]
It's very revealing.
In 1958, the National Security
Council remained planning--
the body had then secret
meetings, now publicized,
in which John Foster
Dulles, secretary of state,
described the crises
on the world scene.
He said there's
three major crises
in the world scene in 1958.
One was Indonesia.
The second was Algeria.
The third was the Middle East.
Notice that they're all
Muslim countries, but there
was no clash of
civilizations at that point.
Those of you who are
respectable intellectuals
will know that now we
have to soberly debate
the clash of civilizations
because the Cold War pretext
for intervention has collapsed.
And we need what's
called a new paradigm.
But then, we still
have that pretext.
So we didn't need
a new paradigm.
So the three major crises
were Indonesia, Algeria,
and the Middle East.
The fact that they were
Muslims is irrelevant.
But something isn't irrelevant--
namely, they all had oil.
In fact, they were
all oil centers.
And in fact, the effort to
cut off the outer islands
was related to US concerns
over Middle East oil.
There were some concerns that
it was getting out of control
and they needed some temporary
supplements-- temporary,
because Indonesia is nowhere
near the scale of the Middle
East, but significant.
Well, you look back
at what happened--
and bear in mind that the
United States is a global power.
So its policies are usually
carried out consistently
in many different places.
And a lot of other things
were happening in 1958.
The subversion in Indonesia,
the rebellion in Indonesia,
was the largest of the
clandestine operations-- maybe
the largest ever.
But there were others.
In Burma, the United
States was moving
to overthrow the
regime supporting
a Chinese nationalist army
that had partially taken refuge
there, and that the United
States was supporting there.
I won't go into the details, but
that led Burma-- at that time,
had an elected government--
that led to a military
coup, the installation
of the current military regime
in Burma-- one of the most
brutal in the world.
It also was instrumental in
making Burma the leading heroin
producer in the world, a
position it now holds--
and a real horror story.
The state of Massachusetts
now has a kind of boycott.
We can trace that
right back to 1958--
right parallel to when
we were carrying out
the central themes of our
foreign policy in Indonesia.
Another case right
next door was Cambodia.
Also had a neutralist
government, which
the United States didn't like.
The US was supporting
an attack on it.
That attack didn't work in 1958.
But it did work in 1970--
the same forces overthrowing
Prince Sihanouk's government.
That led to the huge US
bombing, the Khmer Rouge,
everything that followed--
need not talk about that.
A third place where something
was going on in 1958
was, again, right
nearby in Laos.
Laos had its first and
last free election in 1958,
came out the wrong way,
party to the Left won.
The US wouldn't accept that.
Military coup took place.
The US installed what was called
a "pro-Western neutralist."
And he wasn't good enough.
So an ultra-Right
general was put in.
That led to a total disaster.
It sort of paved the
way and actually came
pretty close to a world war.
It ended up with the US carrying
out the heaviest bombing
in history against a
defenseless peasant
society in northern Laos.
And the effects of
that are still with us.
But you wouldn't read it.
You can't even read it
in the US newspaper.
That's a very good article on
it in The Wall Street Journal
by their veteran Asia
correspondent about a year
and a half ago.
Unfortunately, it's
the Asian edition
of The Wall Street Journal.
They didn't have it
in the US edition.
[SOFT LAUGHTER]
But it's quite a good article.
He gives an estimate of--
there's unknown numbers of
unexploded bomblets just
littering the Plain of Jars.
Hundreds of millions
of them were dropped.
They are much worse
than landmines.
These are not aimed at property.
They do nothing against a truck.
They're aimed to kill people.
They're murder weapons.
They're little, colorful
things that a kid can pick up
or a farmer can
hit or something.
They had a failure-to-explode
rate of about 20% to 30%,
according to their
manufacturer, Honeywell.
And crummy as
technology may be, it's
hard to believe that
that wasn't built in.
But maybe.
The technologists among you
can assess that likelihood.
Anyway, they're supposed
to have a 20% to 30%
failure to explode
rate, which means
they're around all the time
as anti-personnel weapons.
And they're still there--
huge numbers of them.
According The Wall
Street Journal report,
the casualties may range
up to 20,000 a year,
of which more than
half are deaths.
Other numbers are less.
But since nobody is counting,
nobody really knows.
But numbers of that
kind are considered
not unreasonable by
The Wall Street Journal
in its Asia edition.
There is a mine-clearing group--
British-based mine
advisory group-- civilian--
but based, ultimately,
in the British army.
And other countries
have come in.
As the British press
reports, the United States
is conspicuous by its absence
in the mine-clearing operation.
And furthermore, the right-wing
British press is bitterly
complaining over the fact
that the United States,
the Pentagon, refuses to provide
what are called render-harmless
procedures--
procedures that would
defuse the mines
so they wouldn't kill the people
who are trying to clear them.
That's a military secret.
And in fact, the whole thing is
a secret in the United States.
You have to work pretty hard
to find out anything about it.
That's a fact.
So that's Laos.
Another case, in
1958 was Vietnam.
I won't even talk about that.
In each case,
including all of these,
including Indonesia,
the US interventions,
which were significant,
led to hideous atrocities
and, in fact, destroyed
the basis of democracy
and, in fact, were, to a large
extent, driven by that purpose,
as in several of the
cases I've mentioned.
However, that doesn't
influence the dogma.
It's still correct.
There is still no doubt
that, in the Middle East
only, the United States doesn't
live up to its high ideals,
but does in these places.
Well, if you take a little
more closer look at 1958,
I won't go into this--
bring it up later if you like--
but the other major
case was, in fact, Iraq.
Iraq had a nationalist
revolution,
and it was pulling out
of the US Anglo-American
[? condominium ?] over oil.
That was going on right in 1958,
and it was a major phenomenon.
If you look at the
documentary record then,
you get a pretty good
explanation of everything
that's going out until today.
OK, let me drop that.
One of the things that's
going on today, which
is quite striking and
leads me to the topic,
finally, is a kind of a
minor aspect of the bombing
last December--
the US-UK bombing.
One interesting aspect
of it was that it
is in blatant and flat
violation of the UN
Charter and international law.
International law--
that's one of the three
pillars of world order.
The basic principle
of the UN Charter
is that the threat or use of
force in international affairs
is banned, except under highly
restricted circumstances, which
don't apply, or if specifically
authorized by the Security
Council.
Otherwise, banned--
threat or use of force.
There is no serious doubt
that the US and UK just flatly
ignored that.
They didn't try to get UN
Security Council authorization
for the simple reason they
knew they'd never get it.
So therefore, they just bombed.
Now in the United States,
there is essentially
no discussion of this.
I've done a fairly
extensive review.
And where it's discussed,
as it occasionally is,
it's considered a kind of a
technicality, the reason being,
if a reason is ever given, that
we cannot allow others to veto
our policy decisions, as
required by the UN charter
and international law.
Others must stand by
that, but we can't.
That is unchallenged, as
far as I can discover.
Interesting exercise--
try to find some challenge
to that doctrine.
I haven't found it.
There is some in England.
And there's a lot elsewhere.
So for example, in India,
the Association of Jurists
has a case before the world
court condemning the US
and Britain for war crimes.
You won't read
about that either.
But here it's not discussed,
because it's taken for granted
that that's correct.
We cannot submit ourselves to
international law or the UN
Charter because we are a
violent, lawless, criminal,
rogue state, and that
is right and just.
That's what it means.
And there is near universal
endorsement of that principle,
among educated sectors
at least, which
should be taken as a
warning by the world,
and indeed is taken as a
warning by the world, which
doesn't like it, but
can't do much about it.
We're the ones who can
do something about it.
And at least, judging
articulate sectors,
educated sectors support it.
So they're not going to
do anything about it.
The official stand during
the bombing in December
was, quoted, "that we prefer
to act through our allies,
but will resort to force
alone if we have to."
Notice that we
don't even "prefer"
to act through the
United Nations,
as required by international
law in the Charter.
We join our allies if they're
willing to, but UN is out.
In fact, the timing
of the bombing
was presumably intended
as a slap in the face
to the Security Council.
The bombing was timed just as
the Security Council was being
called to an emergency
session to deal
with the question of Iraq.
And it hadn't been notified.
And if that didn't
make headlines here,
people understood it elsewhere.
Things like that don't
happen by accident.
And they were understood.
Well, that's accepted
across the spectrum.
And it's accepted
in other cases, too.
So take a look at the
Rambouillet meetings in Kosovo.
There was a debate there
about just what to do.
The debate was between the
United States and its allies
and the NATO powers.
Nobody else was around.
And the debate was
over the wording--
should the wording of
the NATO decision to bomb
be stated as being "authorized"
by the United Nations
or only being "endorsed"
by the United Nations?
The US insisted on "endorse."
As The New York Times
put it, it wanted
to avoid the neuralgic
word "authorized,"
which would entail that
international law has
some significance.
And the US won't accept that,
even at the rhetorical level.
And as usual, the US won.
So the most they get
to do is "endorse,"
not "authorize,"
let alone "order,"
which is what the law requires.
And it's not just in this case.
It's in every case.
So take, say, the bombing
in the Sudan last August.
I mean, it's now conceded.
Very few even try to
deny that the US just
bombed a pharmaceutical
plant in Sudan
and destroyed half of Sudan's
pharmaceutical industry.
Well, you know, sometimes
things go wrong.
There's no talk
about war crimes,
no talk about reparations, not
even any talk about an apology.
I mean, why should
we apologize if we
destroy half of the
pharmaceuticals in a poor East
African country?
Let's be serious.
Furthermore, that's accepted
across the spectrum.
OK.
There's a further
history for this.
10 years ago, the United
States took the same stand,
explicitly, with regard
to the world court
dared to follow a case
against the United States
and, indeed, to
condemn the United
States for the
unlawful use of force
in its war against Nicaragua.
The United States' position
was clear and explicit.
The State Department, Legal
Department said that we cannot
accept world court jurisdiction.
They explained why.
The reason is that other
states do not agree with us.
They do not accept our policies.
[LAUGHTER]
And they said we
must, therefore,
"reserve to ourselves
the right to decide
when court rulings apply.
And we must reject court
rulings," I'm quoting now,
"for any dispute involving
matters essentially
within the domestic jurisdiction
of the United States,
as determined by
the United States."
[LAUGHTER]
The example in question was
the US war against Nicaragua.
And the United States
determined that that
was within its
domestic jurisdiction.
So the world court
could get lost.
And that was done
with virtually 100%
support of educated
intellectuals, including
leading advocates of world
order who write articles and law
journals and so on and so forth.
The New York Times dismissed
the court as a hostile forum.
And so it went.
The court judgment was
never even reported.
And it was radically violated.
OK, that's the world court.
This goes back much further.
Back in 1962, Dean Acheson,
a highly respected statesman,
senior advisor to the
Kennedy administration,
informed the American Society
for International Law that
a situation in which our
country's power position
and prestige are involved cannot
be treated as a legal issue.
OK.
He was referring
to the US embargo
against Cuba, which, of course,
he recognized was illegal.
But nothing in which our
power position and prestige
are involved can be
treated as a legal issue.
And accordingly,
at that time, you
heard Adlai Stevenson
at the United Nations
defending the US attack against
South Vietnam as defense
against internal aggression.
The South Vietnamese
were carrying out
internal aggression
in South Vietnam,
and we were defending
South Vietnam against them.
We were defending South
Vietnam against what
John F. Kennedy called
the "assault from within."
That was when he launched
the assault from without.
[LAUGHTER]
This goes way back.
In earlier years, it
had been in secret.
So in earlier years, the
flat rejection of the Charter
is explicit--
very explicit-- but in secret.
It goes back to 1947--
first memorandum of the
National Security Council,
in which it called for national
mobilization and the United
States' support for military
action, paramilitary action,
other such things in Italy,
if the communists took power
by legal means in an election.
In other words, if a
democratic election
came out the wrong way, we
would use force to overthrow it.
That's 1947, NSC 1.
The story goes on from there.
The innovation in
the Reagan years
was that the contempt
for international law
became completely overt.
It wasn't even secret anymore.
Under Clinton, it's
lost any pretense.
So the conclusion is--
the only reasonable
conclusion is
that the first pillar
of world order,
the international political
order, has totally disappeared.
It's available as a
weapon against enemies,
but nothing else remains,
except the theological dogma
that we uphold world order
and international law.
That remains,
independently of the facts.
So nothing else remains.
Well, let's proceed.
Let's turn to the
Universal Declaration,
second pillar of world order.
This is a tightly
integrated document.
It has conventionally
divided in three parts--
civil and political rights,
socioeconomic rights, and what
are called "solidarity rights."
The integration of
all of those was
stressed from the beginning.
You look at the
background, that's clear.
Repeatedly been stressed since.
Time's short, so I won't
run through the history.
The major Law
Review article that
just appeared on
the 50th anniversary
by Harvard Law Professor
Mary Ann Glendon
stresses that the Universal
Declaration elevates
social, economic, and cultural
rights to fundamental rights
status and that that
is a crucial part
of the universalization
of rights carried out
in the Universal Declaration.
In short, there is no place for
any sort of relativist demand
that certain rights must be
relegated to secondary status,
in accord with, say, Asian
values or some other pretext.
Glendon also points
out, quite accurately,
that the support for that was
very broad-based at the time.
You have to remember the time.
This is right at the end
of the Second World War.
There were values of that kind--
the kind expressed in the UD
were deeply entrenched in the
anti-fascist, popular forces
in Europe.
And in the colonial world and
even in the United States,
that was deeply
disturbing to US elites
who intended to create a very
different kind of world order
and, indeed, were quite
explicit about it.
But the dogma remains.
And it proclaims a more
self-congratulatory version.
Well, there were some who
did dismiss the Universal
Declaration as meaningless.
So there's an
often quoted phrase
of Andrey Vyshinsky's,
the Russian delegate
whose record doesn't
have to detain us.
He dismissed the
Universal Declaration
as a "collection
of pious phrases."
And it was dismissed as,
I'm quoting, "a letter
to Santa Claus" by Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Reagan's UN
ambassador, who was deriding
the socioeconomic provisions
of the Universal Declaration.
Moving on a couple
of years, it is
an "empty vessel," a "dangerous
incitement," "preposterous."
That's Morris Abram,
UN ambassador to the UN
Commission on Human Rights.
He's explaining
Washington's rejection
of what was called the
right to development, which
if you look at it, is
a very close paraphrase
of the socioeconomic provisions
of the Universal Declaration.
That was vetoed by
the United States,
alone, essentially vetoing
the socioeconomic provisions
of the UD.
The US also radically violates
the civil and political
provisions.
I won't go through the
details, but quite clear
and not surprising.
One of the latest major
Amnesty International reports
is about this.
In brief, two pillars
of world order
have been effectively demolished
except as ideological weapons.
That doesn't mean that
the people of the world
shouldn't defend them.
They do remain
ideals that people
should try to defend,
they should fight for,
and that they should
also transcend,
because they're not the end
of the road by any means.
But to take that stand
in the United States,
you have to first carry out an
act of intellectual liberation.
You have to free yourselves
from the doctrines of the faith.
You don't do that, you can't
even enter into the fray.
First have to free yourselves
from the doctrines of the faith
and at least be
willing to subject them
to empirical verification.
If they're not even subject
to empirical verification,
there's no point discussing
these matters, clearly.
If they are, you can ask
whether this analysis is correct
or some different
analysis is correct.
Well, just the willingness
to subject them
to examination, the
doctrines, that's
a radical departure from
prevailing norms, including
everything in the educational
system and academic scholarship
and the media and
everywhere else.
So it's not small.
Well, couple of words about the
third pillar, the Bretton Woods
System, which, again, was
totally tightly integrated
with the others.
And that's worth understanding.
A central component of
the Bretton Woods System
was regulation of finance.
And there were several
reasons for this.
One reason was that
it was understood
that deregulation of finance
would harm the global economy.
There are good reasons for that.
And they've been
illustrated in recent years.
The trouble is that financial
markets, as was understood,
are quite volatile
and unpredictable.
To quote a couple
of MIT economists,
specialists on this, "Financial
markets are governed by panics,
manias, and crashes.
They swing far above
and below any kind
of sensible, fundamental
values, creating
bubbles that will burst."
Paul Samuelson, who says
the evidence for that
is overwhelming.
And this was understood
back in the '40s.
So you deregulate
financial markets,
you're going to have a disaster.
And it'll harm the
general economy.
That was one reason.
A second reason
was closely related
to world order and human rights.
One reason for both capital
controls and keeping currencies
within a narrow band was
that it was understood
that deregulation of capital
is a tremendous weapon
against democracy and
socioeconomic rights.
If we're mentioning
that, let me just
say that the current
debate between the United
States and its G7 partners
is over keeping currencies
within a narrow band.
If you read the
articles on this,
you'll notice that
the G7 position--
Germany, Japan,
France, and so on--
maybe not Britain, but
the other G7 countries--
is that the major
currencies should
be kept sort of closely
interconnected, [? not ?]
too volatile.
And that was rejected as crazy
by US Secretary of the Treasury
Robert Rubin, because if
we were to agree to that,
it would mean that some other
authority might determine
that we're not allowed
to lower interest rates
to stimulate the
economy if we want to.
So if the economy's
sinking into recession,
we won't be able to allow
interest rates because that'll
affect currency values.
And we'd be crazy to
allow any other country,
any international organization
to prevent us from carrying out
those fiscal policies--
exactly the fiscal
policies that we
force on every other country,
as the very same articles
point out, without any
sense of contradiction.
Take a look, and think about it.
Why is deregulation of finance
a weapon against democracy
and human rights?
Well, very obviously,
and it was understood.
The reason is that if
capital flow is unregulated,
it will quickly create what
some internationalist economists
call a virtual senate--
a senate consisting of
concentrated international
financial capital,
which will simply
impose decisions on governments
by the threat of capital
flight.
So if some government
pursues irrational policies,
so policies that are aimed
at helping the population,
let's say, instead of raising
profits for investors and are
therefore irrational--
like education or health
or environmental policies
or whatever it may be--
you can force them
to stop, simply
by pulling all the capital
out of the country, which
forces interest rates up, sends
the country to a depression,
and all the usual consequences.
So therefore, unless
capital is controlled,
you've very sharply restricted
a democracy and human rights.
Well, that was understood
then, and it is understood now.
The Bretton Woods System,
with financial regulation,
persisted through roughly 1970.
That's a period that's
commonly called the Golden
Age of Post-War Capitalism,
a period of high growth,
high growth of
productivity, expansion
of the social contract, and
the so-called welfare state,
which turned the Universal
Declaration into something
a little more than a
"letter to Santa Claus."
From the early 1970s, that
system was dismantled--
first at the initiative
of the United States,
Britain came along,
later, others--
and other major economies,
not until the '80s.
And the results wouldn't
have surprised the founders
of the Bretton Woods System.
The results have transferred--
well, some economists call it
a transfer from a golden age
to a leaden age.
In the period since, there has
been a slowdown of the economy,
globally.
And the social contract has
been dissolved dramatically
in the US and Britain,
to some extent elsewhere.
Inequality has gone way up.
The consequences, I have
already described briefly.
One region of the world
temporarily escaped from this.
That's East Asia, which is quite
different from Southeast Asia.
There, there was--
I'll quote the chief
economist of the World Bank,
there was "an unprecedented
economic miracle,"
which was based on
the fact that they
disregarded "the
religion," as he calls it--
"the religion that
markets know best."
And they disregarded
the prescriptions
of the international
financial institutions,
the so-called
Washington Consensus.
And they carried out an
unprecedented economic miracle.
In the early 1990s, South
Korea liberalized capital flow
under very heavy US
pressure, I should
say-- one of several factors.
That's a large factor in
the subsequent collapse.
That's generally agreed.
Up till 1997 or 1998, the
global economic system
was considered really great.
It was, in fact, what's called
an economic miracle, fairy
tale, very much
the way Mexico was
an economic miracle
during the period when
the number of billionaires
was rising about as
fast as the poverty level.
There was no crisis
until 1997, '98.
All there was anguish
and fear, insecurity
about jobs, and a life
of quiet desperation,
to quote the head of UNCTAD.
But that's not a crisis.
That's a miracle.
Because that was only
outside the doors, remember.
Inside, the festive
atmosphere was exuberant.
So but by 1998, the
festive atmosphere
inside was becoming
a little disturbed.
The interests of rich
people were being affected.
So we moved from economic
miracle to crisis.
Those are technical terms.
Again, it doesn't have
much to do with what's
happening of the people.
It has to do a lot with what's
happening to rich people--
rich, powerful people.
And their interests were
starting to be disturbed.
So all of a sudden,
we had a crisis.
And that's distinct from
anguish and fear and so on.
Well, that crisis is now
all over the front pages.
So I won't waste any time on
it, though it's interesting.
One side effect of the crisis
is that all of the certainties
have dissolved.
So the Bank for
International Settlements
in Basel, which is the most
conservative and respectable
institution that exists.
It's called the "central
bank of central bankers."
On their latest
report last summer,
they said nobody had a
clue as to what's going on.
And they urged that
we have humility.
Instead of issuing
confident pronouncements,
let's at least have
enough humility
to admit that we haven't got
a clue as to what is happening
or what to do about it.
Leading economists from
around here, Cambridge,
have been recently publishing
articles in which they say that
the international economy
is dimly understood,
that we may be heading
into a third-world-style,
'30s-style depression and we
don't know what to do about it.
Actually, the real crisis
is much more fundamental.
And I'll finish by just giving
two quotes that I think capture
it rather well, both recent.
One is from an event
that was organized
by Jesse Jackson over Martin
Luther King weekend in January.
This was an event in
Manhattan to support
Bill Clinton in the moment
of his terrible trials.
There were lots of celebrities
who came and sort of admired
one another and so on.
[LAUGHTER]
Among them was the president
of the New York Stock Exchange.
I'm quoting from the press now.
New York Times, "He
told Mr. Clinton
that Dr. King is surely
smiling down on the gathering,
recognizing how
Clinton had benefited
my little corner of
southern Manhattan," which
is quite accurate.
Other little corners
of southern Manhattan
fared rather differently, but
the stock exchange, on that,
Mr. Clinton doubtless
showered many benefits.
So no doubt, Martin Luther
King is smiling down on him.
[LAUGHTER]
That's an appropriate comment
reflecting the realities
of a political system in
which, in the last election,
November, 1998--
data have just
come in recently--
95% percent of
winning candidates
outspent their
opponents, meaning
you could predict up
to 95% accuracy who's
going to win just looking
at how much money they had.
So it's not like
Russia, where you
could predict 100%
that it was going
to be the Communist Party.
[LAUGHTER]
It's only 95%.
Furthermore, if you look
at the contributions--
same data-- business
contributions
outspent labor contributions
by about 12 to 1,
which is highly
misleading, remember,
because labor represents
way more people.
And individual contributions,
though they're not measured,
undoubtedly are skewed
at least as much.
So what that translates
into, to put it into English,
is that a little corner
of southern Manhattan
and a couple of
other little corners
like it, essentially purchased
candidates and put them
in office and then set
conditions that they're
going to have to meet or else.
And also set the general
framework for policy, just
by virtue of their power--
becoming the virtual
senate, as I mentioned,
once these instruments
are in their hands.
Of course, they also
require a powerful state.
They're very insistent on that.
There has to be a
powerful state, which
will socialize risks
and costs and we'll
make sure that there's no
unpleasant noises in servants'
quarters.
So that's still got to be there,
but not with its old functions.
Second quote, last one, is from
David Rockefeller, reflecting
on the current scene.
Recall that David Rockefeller
is at the liberal end
of the spectrum.
He's part of the "Establishment
Left," it's called--
without irony, I should say.
He's commenting on the reduction
of the role of government
in public affairs, something
that business has always
favored, he says.
Side comment-- the
role of government
means the role of the
population, right?
Of all institutions that are
around, with all its flaws,
whatever they may be,
government is the only one
in which, at least
in principle, there's
some possibility
of participation--
often in practice, too.
In the operations
of General Electric,
there are no possibilities
in principle.
So government is
the one institution
of the general institutional
framework in which people
may have a role, sometimes do.
And that role is declining.
Business is happy about that.
But he says, "While
that reduction
of democratic participation
is, of course, welcome,
there is another
side to that coin.
Somebody has to take
government's place.
And business seems to be the
logical entity to do it."
OK, that's Rockefeller.
He goes on to say it's the
responsibility of business
to fill this gap made
by the disappearance
of democratic government.
It's certainly not the
role of the public.
That's for sure.
That's the Establishment Left.
When you move over to the Right,
the message gets a lot harsher.
Well, that's a
pretty fair picture
of the current drift of policy.
It's true, you know corporations
gained the right of persons
through judicial activism
early in this century.
They're not ordinary
persons, like you and me.
They are immortal persons.
They have extraordinary power,
unlike flesh and blood persons.
They also demand the rights
of states, and they get them.
Under NAFTA, they've
partially gained them.
Under the MAI, they'd gain
them still more fully.
In fact, they would
gain additional rights,
which are described as
if they're innocuous.
But they surely aren't
if you think about them.
Under MAI, these "persons"--
fictitious, legal persons--
are demanding what
they call national treatment.
That's a right that no flesh
and blood person can claim.
So under national
treatment, General Electric
can function freely in Mexico.
But suppose that
some flesh and blood
Mexican tries to get national
treatment in New York.
No, that's not going to work.
So this is only for fictitious,
collectivist, legal entities.
Those kind of persons
get the rights
of states, the rights
of national treatment.
And furthermore, they have
a right and a responsibility
to take over the
functions of government.
Now, they must do that.
That would, therefore, reduce
democratic form still further.
Internally, they're
basically tyrannies.
I mean, I don't think
that's in question.
And they try to run the
global society, including
the sort of minimal
market system,
in an integrated fashion.
They do rely on
the powerful states
to make sure that they
can get what they want.
They also demand
and, in large part,
gain the right to shape opinions
and attitudes and beliefs.
That's the role of
the corporate media--
and in fact, the educational
system to a large extent--
that is, if the right to
define what a human being is,
what constitutes a
human life, and do so.
Well, quite apart from
the continuing assault
against the proclaimed values
of democracy and human rights
and freedom and all good
things, these tendencies,
if they are
tolerated, could lead
to quite serious and possibly
even terminal catastrophes.
That's only a
speculation, of course.
Your speculations are
as good as anybody's.
What is not a speculation
is that the tendencies
don't have to be tolerated.
That's a choice.
You can make it and not make it.
It's not a necessity.
The ability to make
that choice is roughly
measured by your
share in privilege.
The more access to privilege
you have, the more of a choice
you can make.
It's also measured by the
freedom of the society.
That means that for people like
us, the options are wide open.
And one thing we can be
reasonably confident of,
I think, is that neither
conscience nor history
is going to look favorably
upon an unwillingness
to face those decisions
with care and dedication.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
Are there any mics?
Are there any mics?
JANE GOULD: Probably
not in the house.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Not in the house.
OK, if people want
to say something,
maybe stand up so as to
maximize the chance somebody
will hear you.
Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, OK.
AUDIENCE: Sorry.
NOAM CHOMSKY: You guys fight.
Good.
AUDIENCE: Some of us--
part of the educational
system as you've
described, not so
much in detail,
right here in
Massachusetts, John Silber,
someone with whom I believe
you may have crossed swords,
is leading the war
against public education.
And he and his colleagues are
using a variety of tactics.
There is a [? laying ?] bill
before the Massachusetts
Congress, which will take
away collective bargaining
rights for teachers-- in effect,
completely gut the unions.
The point is that some of
us in the teachers unions
are going to confront Silber.
And it occurred to me
that, if I'm not mistaken,
he was sending a
Kissinger commission
that purported to investigate
American policy in Latin
America.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Could be.
I don't remember.
AUDIENCE: Oh, OK.
Let me put it another way, then.
It was my recollection
that [? were ?] [? at ?]
[? crossed ?] swords with
him at one time or another.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Oh, yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
NOAM CHOMSKY: I'm not one
of his favorite characters.
AUDIENCE: [? Quite. ?] And
of course, Professor Zinn.
I know some of the
history between them.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I was wondering
if you had anything to say
about a person who would--
NOAM CHOMSKY: About him,
you make your own decisions.
I don't-- excuse me.
AUDIENCE: All right.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Should
I repeat-- yeah.
Let me repeat the question.
I mean, the core of the
question-- the comment,
really-- is that
John Silber, who's--
what is he?
Chancellor of something or the
state system or something--
is leading a campaign now to
try to undermine the Teachers
Union, which is part
of a general attack
on the public education system.
Is that right?
Then come some questions about
our personal relations, which--
put to the side, because
this is a general.
There's I think a serious
issue-- very serious.
One of the areas of government,
meaning public participation
that still exists
is the schools.
And at the left end
of the spectrum,
people like David Rockefeller
would very much like
to get rid of this government
intervention in the economy,
or as I'm told that the latest
edition of Paul Samuelson's
Economics changes the
phrase to government
"interference" in the economy.
Tell me me if I'm right.
That would then introduce an
important doctrinal assumption
into the description.
So we want to get rid of
government interference
in the economy like
public schools, which
have all sorts of bad
features-- like they cultivate
a sense of solidarity or
of care for other people.
Like if there's a public
school system, that's
an expression of the fact that
you care whether the kid down
the street gets an education.
And that's a very bad thing
because you're supposed to be--
you get this
message from infancy
on through the television
set and everything else
that the only value
of a human life
is to maximize what the
advertising industry calls
"invented wants."
So they're supposed to
invent wants for you.
And you're supposed
to maximize them.
And that's the only thing
you're supposed to care about--
not care about anybody else,
not care about control your life
and work.
That's out of the door.
But maximize your
own fabricated wants.
And the existence of
the public school system
is inconsistent with
that, because it's
an expression of solidarity and
care for others and compassion
and all sorts of
ideals that are not
supposed to exist in the
system that is being created--
the ideological system
it's being created.
It's not only John Silber.
There's a major assault across
the boards on public schools.
I got an inkling of this
a couple of years ago when
[? Alain ?] [? Renard, ?]
who some of you know,
sent me an investment
brochure from Lehman Brothers,
which was being sent out to
their prime investors or people
who put a lot of
money in and so on.
And it was about new
investment opportunities.
And this one was about
what they called EMOs.
I'll give you a second to
figure out what that means.
But the point is, the prison
system's being privatized.
The health system,
such as there was,
is being given to insurance
companies with HMOs.
There is still this residue--
the educational system.
So the next target
is going to be EMOs--
educational management
organizations--
which will be privately run--
publicly funded, of course.
All this stuff gets publicly
funded in one way or another.
But the profits are privatized.
And that will
achieve great gains,
for example, by hiring
teachers who are non-union,
staff that's non-union, doesn't
have to be paid decent wages,
doesn't require any security,
temps, and so on and so forth.
So it's very efficient
by some measure.
And also, it'll be a way of
breaking down this lingering
sense of solidarity
and mutual support
that the public school
system provides, just
by its very existence.
So I think you can expect
a lot of such attacks--
not just on that, but on every
other residue of human life
that reflects any value other
than individual maximization
of invented wants.
Anything beyond that is
fundamentally unacceptable.
AUDIENCE: Just for
your information,
this talk has apparently
filled three overflow rooms.
So congratulations.
[LAUGHTER]
NOAM CHOMSKY: It's a
reflection of the fact
that a lot of people are
worried about these issues
and have a right to be.
AUDIENCE: Exactly.
I think so.
NOAM CHOMSKY: The
only thing to do
is to go beyond being worried
about them to doing something
about them.
Because it doesn't
have to happen.
AUDIENCE: Very good.
[APPLAUSE]
And that's part of what
I'd like to ask about.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I'd like
to ask you to turn
your attention, in the
light of your comments
tonight, to Latin
America, and specifically
to the country of
Colombia and what's
going on there and the
purported rationale
for the ratcheting up
of US military support--
the purported rationale
being the supposed war
against drugs--
and a neighboring
country to Colombia,
which is the nation of Peru.
And I have a particular
reason for wanting
to ask you about Peru,
which is that there
is an American woman
who was a student here
at MIT whose name is
Lori Berenson, who's
been in prison in Peru
for over three years
now without a trial.
And perhaps in your comments
about Colombia and Peru,
you might also have something
to say about her situation.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, there's
really two questions.
One is about Lori
Berenson, who was
a student here a
couple of years ago
and is now in a prison
in Peru without trial.
And that's something we really
could do something about.
I mean, pressure by
the US government--
meaning pressure from the
population on the US government
on Peru--
would deal with that case.
No question about that.
So that's a simple choice.
You can do things
about it or not.
The choice is open.
The more general question
about the whole Andean region--
Colombia, Peru, Bolivia-- has
to do with several things.
Colombia, which the point is
that the US is now increasing
its military aid to Colombia.
Actually, Colombia has been
one of the leading recipients
of US military aid,
right through the '90s,
going up under Clinton.
It's also the most violent
country in the hemisphere.
There are State
Department reports
that would suggest that about
10 people a day are victims
of political violence,
has well over a million
internal refugees.
Most of the violence is
attributed to paramilitaries,
including by the
State Department.
Paramilitaries are
essentially a front
for the military
and the landowners.
Other atrocities of
the military directly.
There are also
guerrilla atrocities.
But the large majority are
government and paramilitary.
They're all connected
in complicated and not
so complicated ways to land
ownership, resource control,
now, in the last years,
narco trafficking and so on.
And the US is fighting what it
calls a "drug war," including,
incidentally,
biological warfare.
So new fungicides
are being introduced.
Nobody knows what
effect they'll have.
They're supposed to kill coca.
But if something else
happens, not our business.
Crop spraying, just government
and paramilitary violence.
Everyone knows that the
paramilitaries and the military
are tied up with
the drug traffic.
Just a couple of months ago,
a Colombian Air Force plane
was picked up, one of the Air
Force commanders full of drugs.
This is happening all through
the region, incidentally.
The presidential jet of
the president of Nicaragua
was recently the subject of
a major scandal in Nicaragua,
kept out of the press
here because he's our boy.
And it was found
that the jet was
being used for drug transport
from Miami to wherever, going
through Nicaragua, which has
become a major drug transit
area ever since the US
took it over in 1990.
But Colombia is a
much bigger one.
The whole drug war-- you can't
really talk about the tactics,
in my opinion, because the whole
thing is conceived in a way
which--
it has a kind of irrationality
from the point of view of those
who are executing the war.
But it has no rationality
from a human point of view.
So from a human point of
view, the drug problem
is in the United States.
In fact, the US is maybe
the major producer or one
of the major producers
of the drug--
the substances, it's called--
that's most rapidly increasing,
namely synthetics.
They're made right here.
Even the drugs that are
produced in the Andes
are produced with US chemicals.
The money mostly goes
through US banks.
The "drug problem,"
as it's called,
is largely a
manufactured problem.
And so if you want to
figure out what it's like,
take, say, marijuana.
There has never been any medical
evidence presented that--
it's probably not
good for you, just
like meat isn't good for
you or coffee or something.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm sure it's not good for you.
But the evidence about
it is extremely slim.
Certainly no
medical evidence was
presented to justify
its being criminalized.
And in fact, the American
Medical Association
never favored it.
The criminalization
was a different thing.
It has an interesting history.
Forgetting the criminalization,
the peak use of marijuana,
as I'm remembering figures-- so
they may not be exactly right,
but something like this--
was around 1980.
And the criminalization
level was very low.
The reason was quite
straightforward.
It was people like
you, you know.
And they don't get sent to jail,
or their parents make a fuss
and do things
about it and so on.
So those guys don't go to jail.
Through the 1980s, two
things were happening.
Use of substances over
a very broad range
was declining among
educated people.
And that's very broad--
marijuana, hard drugs,
coffee, tobacco, red meat,
big spectrum of stuff.
[LAUGHTER]
It was declining.
I mean, all sorts of
changes in lifestyle.
But it was remaining steady
or maybe even increasing
among poor people.
The United States is almost
alone in the industrial world
in that, though it has
statistics on everything,
it does not have
statistics on class.
That's an ideological decision.
So you can't get figures on a
class out of the Census Bureau.
You have to reconstruct
them in some fashion,
unlike other countries.
But there is a close
class/race correlation.
And among the poor and hence,
heavily among minorities,
there was an either
steady or increasing use
of the substances.
Well, you take a look
at the trend lines
and ask yourself when
the drug war was called.
And it was approximately
when they crossed.
So you could predict
victory in the drug
war among educated
people because the trend
lines were already going down.
So they'll continue going down.
And you could also predict
what was pointed out
by Senator Moynihan-- not
my favorite character,
but he does happen to be
one of the few senators who
paid attention to
social statistics
and a social scientist.
And he pointed out
that we are determining
to declare a rise in
crime or something
like that among minorities.
We're determining to declare
a crime wave among minorities.
That's exactly what we're doing
by declaring the drug war.
And it was done.
And I think it was done for
reasons of social policy.
This is a superfluous
population.
They are the counterpart of the
Colombian disposable people.
And you want to crime war
among them for two reasons.
For one thing, because
you get rid of them--
toss them into jail.
And for another thing, because
you can frighten everybody
else, and that's important.
Crime in general, in
the United States,
it's kind of a
political construct.
Crime in the United
States is not
very different from other
industrial countries,
with the single
exception of killings
with guns, which is a
special thing about the gun
laws and the gun culture.
But apart from that, it's
kind of at the high end
of other industrial societies.
Fear of crime, on
the other hand,
is way beyond other societies.
And it's manufactured.
It's manufactured
by politicians.
It's one of the very few
countries in which politicians
stand up and debate about who's
going to be tougher on crime.
Elsewhere, crime is
considered a problem.
It's like cancer or something.
You try to deal with it.
But you don't decide who's
going to be tougher on it.
In the United States,
you argue about who's
going to be tougher on it.
Back around 1980,
the United States
was pretty much like other
industrial societies,
again, sort of at high end
in incarceration rates.
Since then, it's gone way up.
By the end of the Reagan years,
it was like 5 to 10 times
as high, still going
up, mostly a reflection
of the war on drugs, of
mostly victimless crimes--
possession of some
sort or another--
which is given
extraordinary sentences.
That's one of the
human rights violations
for which the United
States is regularly
condemned by the human
rights organizations--
the outrageous sentencing
for victimless crimes,
which is just targeting poor
and the disposable people,
and frightening the rest.
So, instrument of
social control.
You go over to the
Andes, the places
where coke is being
produced-- well,
there you find another story.
So Colombia, for example,
was once a wheat exporter.
Now, why isn't it a
wheat exporter anymore?
Well, the US flooded it with
subsidized US agro exports.
It was called Food for
Peace back in the '50s.
And it undermined the
Colombian wheat industry.
They're not exporting anymore.
Same thing happened elsewhere.
Colombia is a coffee exporter.
But coffee is not very
good for small peasants,
for a very simple reason.
The US refused to
permit arrangements
among the producers
to keep prices stable.
Now if prices fluctuate
all over the place,
it doesn't hurt agribusiness.
I mean, they own enough
other things and so on,
so they can make out if
coffee prices go down.
If you're a small peasant,
you can't do that.
You've got to feed
your kids tomorrow.
Price goes down too
low, you're dead.
So that drove people out
of coffee production,
out of wheat production,
out of other production.
Well, where'd they go?
Well, you know, they were
being taught a lesson.
It's called
structural adjustment.
All throughout neoliberalism,
all throughout this region,
the lesson is, stop producing
things for local consumption,
like, say, food.
We can do that cheaper with
subsidized agro-business.
You be a rational peasant.
Produce for agro export.
And produce what's going to make
the most money in agro export.
That's a rational peasant
that's following the rules.
Well, they did.
You're a rational peasant.
You produce coca.
Grows well, makes a ton
of money, and so on.
So one part of US
policy is trying
to drive the population
towards producing drugs.
And the other part
of US policy is
to murder them if they do it.
That's the support
for the military
and the counterinsurgency
and so on.
And those two policies
are going on side by side.
And they don't have anything
to do with drugs in the United
States.
I mean, do that
stuff as much as you
want, the drug price remains
stable, the quantity of drugs
remains stable, and so on.
This is an internal
US problem having
to do with serious social
problems inside US society.
And furthermore, it is
well-known and agreed
by criminologists and other
specialists across the board
that the best way to deal
with serious drug problems
is education.
But you don't spend
money on that,
because that has no
use for social control
or for eliminating
disposable people.
So I don't think talking about
the tactics of the drug war
makes a lot of sense.
The whole thing is
constructed in a way which
is totally insane,
except for rich people,
like New York banks, where most
of the money flows through.
Incidentally, what's
happening to the money?
It's an interesting question.
Of course, it's illegal.
So nobody tracks it.
Actually, you could track
it, especially with computers
and so on.
The Federal Reserve System,
which is well-regulated,
requires notification
of large deposits.
Last time I looked,
it was over $10,000.
So if a lot of money
is suddenly coming in,
they could tell right away.
And in fact, there was an
effort by federal prosecutors
back in the early '80s to carry
out some entrapment exercise
against banks in
southern Florida,
which were suddenly piling
up a huge amount of money
for reasons that nobody doubted.
It was called off, however.
It was called
Operation Greenback.
It was called off by the
Reagan administration's drug
czar, George Bush.
[LAUGHTER]
That was called off.
So the money's supposed
to come into US banks.
Where does it go?
Well, take a look sometime--
this is a guess.
Nobody's ever studied it.
But the US Department
of Commerce
does publish regularly--
I think quarterly-- tons
of details about everything
you can imagine.
And one of them is foreign
direct investment--
FDI.
Take a look at the record.
I haven't done this
for a year or two,
but I was doing it for a
couple of years in mid '90s.
You take a look at the
FDI for Latin America,
for the hemisphere.
Canada's a separate category.
It's like Europe.
But take the rest of the
hemisphere minus Canada,
look at foreign
direct investment.
It turns out that
regularly, about 25% of it
was going to Bermuda.
About 15% was going to
the British Islands.
About 10% to Panama.
So that's roughly
50% of what's called
foreign direct investment.
And this is the period
of the emerging markets.
Everybody's excited about
the emerging markets.
So about half of it was
going to these places.
Well, what was it for?
Certainly, it wasn't building
steel mills and automobile
plants.
There aren't many
of them in Bermuda.
There is a kind of
benign interpretation.
It's just a way of ripping off
the public by evading taxes.
So that just harms poor people.
There's a less benign
interpretation,
which is possible and might be
discovered if anybody bothered
to look at it.
But I haven't been able
find one technical paper
in the whole literature that
even looks at the topic.
Some of you may know, if
there are some economists
in the audience.
But I can't find one.
And no friends can find one.
And it's not a minor phenomenon.
It's 50% of US FDI and
the big emerging markets--
big numbers.
Well, make your own guesses.
Anyhow, the whole
system is so corrupt
and rotten from the bottom, that
to talk about tactical changes
is just beside the point.
The current policies,
exactly as you say,
are to increase the military
and biological warfare
component of these
policies abroad
and to continue
the criminalization
of the disposable
people it home.
Those are the current policies.
Lori Berenson is a very
unfortunate victim of this.
I should say, the
violence in Colombia--
you want to take a look at
it-- it goes back very deep.
It goes back to a
socioeconomic system
in which a tiny sector
of the population
has most of the wealth in
a pretty wealthy country,
and has extraordinarily high
poverty rates, starvation,
and so on.
That's where the
violence is coming from.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Professor,
you've taken us back
to Indonesia's history.
I find that very interesting.
Issues in Indonesia
[? are ?] [? the ?] general
[? election, ?] the
future of East Timor
and the disintegration,
as you mentioned earlier.
Can you elaborate on that, sir?
And also, a couple of weeks ago,
the IMF apologized to Indonesia
[? on ?] [? their ?]
[? mistakes ?] [? and ?]
[? the ?] approach of getting
Indonesia of the current
crisis.
Can you also comment
[? on that? ?]
NOAM CHOMSKY: I think
it was the World Bank.
AUDIENCE: The World Bank, yeah.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.
The World Bank
published a report
saying they had made
all sorts of mistakes.
They were overenthusiastic
in their commitment
to all these
wonderful things that
were happening in Indonesia.
And being a little
overenthusiastic,
they kind of played down
the corruption and so on.
And that's not quite the story,
but yeah, kind of interesting.
The fact is that the
World Bank and the IMF
were praising
Indonesia to the skies,
along with Thailand,
Malaysia, South
Korea, for their solid
economic fundamentals
and the way they'd been
following all the rules and all
the magnificent things
they've been doing.
And to their dismay,
the major publications
appeared exactly as the
whole system was crashing.
It's not the first time
that's happened, incidentally.
But it was a pretty
dramatic case.
So they've been kind of
running backwards ever since.
And yes, they did say they've
made a lot of mistakes.
That's mild.
They knew what was going on
and decided they liked it.
Because rich people in Indonesia
were profiting and rich people
abroad were profiting.
So what's the fuss?
No crisis.
Now there's a crisis.
So they're, yeah,
looking back, and so on.
And they want to sort of
reconstruct the situation.
And they don't know how,
because it may be that Indonesia
will simply come apart.
There's two issues
that you raised.
One is the possible
disintegration of Indonesia.
The other is the specific
case of East Timor.
The East Timor case is
difficult to figure out.
I mean, Indonesia--
let's take that one.
Indonesia has
agreed to grant what
they call "autonomy" within
the Indonesian federation
or something.
Beyond that, there's
a policy split,
which may reflect two different
tracks of Indonesian policy,
or it may be two sides of
the same cynical policy.
Nobody knows.
In fact, I suspect the people
making the policy probably
don't know.
They're waiting to see
how things turn out.
One policy track would
lead towards independence.
The other policy track leads
towards increasing violence.
So while Indonesia
is talking about,
OK, you guys can be
independent if you want,
it's also at the same time
organizing paramilitaries,
arming them.
They're carrying out violence.
In fact, they're killing
people, driving people out
by the thousands.
And the place is exploding.
The same-- going back
to the question--
is happening in Colombia.
It's not an unusual pattern--
a move towards
peace negotiations
and at the same time
unleashing the paramilitaries
with the military
right in the background
to tear the place apart.
If there's going to be
negotiations of some kind,
you want to make sure that your
thugs have it under control.
Those two paths quite
commonly go side by side.
You find it elsewhere, too.
In this case, I think
it's hard to say.
I mean, it could be two
sides of the same policy.
It could be
conflicting policies.
It could be just
uncertainty that they don't
know what's going to happen.
I don't think there's
much point speculating
about this, frankly.
As I said, I doubt that the
Indonesian generals know.
They're waiting to
see what happens.
What is significant
here, as always,
is that what we do about
it can make a difference--
a big difference.
So one of the factors and
undoubtedly a major, if not
decisive, factor will
be how the United
States responds to all of this.
And that's the one factor
we can do something about.
So there's no point
speculating about the others.
We should ask, what
we do about these?
As for Indonesia breaking
up, it could happen.
There's a strong independence
movement in Aceh.
The, what they call
Irian Jaya, West Papua,
was given to Indonesia over the
objections of its population.
That has an
independence movement.
There's an independence
movement in the Malaccas.
It could go all sorts of ways.
Don't forget, that whole
thing, like most of the world,
that was just patched together
by European imperialism.
They put it the other
for their reasons,
not for the reasons
of the countries.
So if you sort of randomly
broke up the United States
and put them under different
flags and so on and so forth,
yeah, you'd have plenty
of violence after a while.
Because these breakdowns don't
have anything to do with what's
happening on the ground.
Like for the Middle
East, probably the only
semi-rational structure
that's been around
in the last couple
of thousand years
was the Ottoman Empire,
which allowed local autonomy,
to a large extent, within
a rather loose and corrupt
imperial framework.
OK.
People were freer under
the Ottoman Empire
than they've been since.
They could go from one place
to another, for example.
But they had national treatment,
like General Electric wants.
And that's probably right
for most of the world.
Actually, it's probably
right for Europe, too.
I mean, the borders
in Europe are simply
the result of hundreds of
years of mutual massacre
and the most violent
and barbaric corner
of the world, which is
exactly what Europe was.
For hundreds of years, the
highest goal of Europeans
was to slaughter one another.
And the only reason that
came to an end in 1945
is because they all
understood that they
had reached a level of violence
such that the next time they
tried, that's the
end for everybody.
That's why you have political
scientists writing books
on how there aren't wars among
democratic societies and so on.
Yeah, they're smart
enough to know
that they try once
more what they've
been doing for the last 500
years, and everybody's dead.
So right now they're
not fighting wars.
But the borders that
are left from these wars
are pretty irrational.
And in fact, along with
European unification,
you're also finding
devolution, so pressures
towards regional autonomy, which
probably makes a lot of sense
because the borders
didn't make any sense.
And see, it's different
in the United States.
I mean, here it was easy.
You just wipe out the
indigenous population
and then settle it with a
fairly homogeneous population.
OK, don't have big problems.
But Europe didn't
develop that way,
and nor did the
rest of the world.
It was all imposed on them
by competing imperialisms.
The Dutch East Indies
are what the Dutch
were able to hold onto.
And what form it takes,
I don't think anybody can
[? prescribe. ?] That's for
them to work out somehow,
and not easy.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] free
trade has widened the gap
between North and South?
NOAM CHOMSKY: I
haven't said that.
I don't think there
is much free trade.
In fact, a standard figure
among international economists
is that maybe 15%
of world trade could
be called "free" in some sense.
AUDIENCE: But net
gains from free trade
are being appropriated by--
NOAM CHOMSKY: Trade,
not free trade.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
From trade are being
appropriated by the North.
[? Do you ?] [? think that ?]
could be counterbalanced
by [? freer ?]
movement of labor?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Oh, yeah.
In fact, if anybody believed--
I mean everybody is supposed
to admire Adam Smith.
But you're not
supposed to read him.
That's very crucial.
[LAUGHTER]
If you read Adam Smith, one
bad thing that you discover
is that his argument
for the market
was based on the assumption
that under conditions of liberty
a market will lead to
equality, which is obviously
a desideratum.
So therefore, he argued,
markets are good.
If it doesn't lead
to equality, out.
You'll also found out he was
against division of labor
and all sorts of other things
you're not supposed to know.
But one thing you're
not supposed to know
is that free trade is
based on what he called
"free circulation of labor."
OK.
Well, he wasn't thinking so
much about crossing borders
in those days, because
nobody was even
thinking of capital crossing
border much in those days.
But the principle is there.
So surely you don't have
anything like free trade
unless you have free circulation
of labor around the world.
Otherwise, you just
don't have labor markets.
I mean, we're not
supposed to think
about that, along with
a lot of other things.
But yeah, that's true.
Should you have free
circulation of labor?
Well, that raises all
kind of questions--
questions about how
people want to preserve
their own communities,
let's say.
But then of course,
those very same questions
show up with
movement of capital.
It's just that
you're not allowed
to raise them in the case
of movement of capital.
OK.
So they're hard questions.
I don't think they
have trivial answers.
But you can't seriously
talk about free trade,
unless you have free
movement of people.
That's one of the many reasons
why the talk about free trade
is mostly a fraud.
It's an ideological weapon.
It's not a descriptive fact.
And there are many
reasons, not just that one.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I just
wondered what's, in your view,
the reason for the West and
US involvement in Kosovo?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Kosovo is what's
called a "crisis," unlike, say,
Angola.
[LAUGHTER]
And it's bad.
It's not a joke.
Like, there have been a lot
of atrocities in Kosovo.
Current estimates are that
about 2,000 people were killed.
It's about a one night
bombing by Jonas Savimbi.
The reason Kosovo's a crisis
and Angola, which is way worse,
is not a crisis, is because
Kosovo threatens the interests
of rich and powerful people.
I mean, Europe is
disturbed by conflicts
that are essentially within it.
And they don't want
them to spread.
For one thing, there would
be a big flow refugees.
And for another, if that whole
region starts to fall apart,
you could end up with wars
between Greece and Turkey
and maybe a world war.
Russia might get involved.
So it matters.
In Angola, it's just a lot of
those guys killing each other.
Who cares.
Besides, it's not a
nice one to talk about,
since the main killer happens
to be the person who was highly
praised and lauded as a great
freedom fighter in the United
States back in the
days of what was called
"constructive engagement," which
was a nice name for supporting
South African marauders who
were tearing the place to shreds
and killing over
a million people.
Well, one part of it was our
freedom fighter in Angola
who is now still
tearing the place apart,
not that the opposition
is so great, either.
That's another story.
Anyhow, it's a huge massacre
that doesn't harm Europeans,
at least as long as
the resources flow out.
And they are flowing out.
So then these forces,
UNITA, is being supported
by mostly diamond flow,
which is monopolized
by a couple of companies.
And they can trace--
technically, there's an embargo
against diamonds from Angola.
And all the specialists
in the field
say that it's not hard to
identify the diamonds that
come from there.
But what's the name
of that company?
[SNAPS]
AUDIENCE: De Beers.
NOAM CHOMSKY: De Beers, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
The De Beers company
claims they can't do it.
Only all the other experts
can, but they can't.
So there's a free flow
of diamonds out of there
and all sorts of--
Belgium, Israel,
places like that.
And that's supporting one side.
And the other side,
they've got oil,
which is going right
to Western companies.
So who cares?
And meanwhile, they're
killing each other
or starving or whatever.
But not bothering rich people.
So it's not a crisis.
AUDIENCE: I just
had a [? quick-- ?]
we've talked about a
lot of things here.
And a question
was, how do you go
about keeping track
of these things
and learning these things
when you acknowledge
that a lot of them
aren't in the press
and definitely aren't
in our education?
How would you suggest
[? that us, ?] [? as ?]
[? students-- ?]
NOAM CHOMSKY: Look, I mean,
you can read the journals
from Penang and Cairo
the same way I do.
I mean, it takes a lot of work.
But it can be done.
And in fact, nowadays,
for those of you
who do use the internet--
I don't-- it's a lot easier.
But the real answer is
nobody can do it alone
unless they're crazy.
[LAUGHTER]
Because you have
to be a fanatic.
On the other hand, if
people do it in common,
it's not that hard.
I mean, you travel through
Midwest churches in the 1980s--
I mean, I've done it.
And you come to a church in
Lawrence, Kansas, or someplace,
they knew more about Central
America than the CIA did.
Way more.
Because there was a
lot of people, and they
cared about it.
And there were people
who went up and back,
and they circulated
information, and they
were in contact with
others, and so on.
That way, you can
find out about things.
And in fact, sometimes
remarkably well.
I mentioned the Multilateral
Agreement on Investments
a few times.
If you don't know
that story, you ought
to, because it's an amazing
story about how activist groups
around the world, without
any access to the press--
because the press was keeping
a lid on it for years--
how much can an
individual scientist do?
Like, suppose you're
alone in Tahiti,
and you decide to work
on quantum physics.
How much are you
going to achieve?
If you are in a lab at MIT,
where everybody else is
interested too, and you can
talk to each other and you
interchange-- and
somebody read something,
and somebody else comes
in and gives a paper,
and so on and so forth--
yeah, you find out
all of a sudden
it's magnified quite a lot.
It's not different in this case.
That's part of the reason
for the enormous efforts that
are made to separate
people from one another.
I mean, that's why there's a
barrage literally from infancy
to separate people
from one another.
And it's conscious--
quite self-conscious.
You read the literature of
the public relations industry.
They explain it.
And it, in fact, goes way back.
If people get together,
they're dangerous.
You keep them isolated
from one another,
there isn't a lot they can do.
Oh, you can be
angry about things.
And that's really the answer.
JANE GOULD: Clearly
our turnout tonight
suggests that these are
issues of huge importance
to this community, that your
voice, Noam Chomsky, is one
we want and need to hear.
We could go with
questions forever.
But we mustn't.
Thank you, Noam.
Thank you, audience.
[APPLAUSE]
