(bright music)
- Welcome to A Conversation With History,
I'm Harry Kreisler
of the Institute of International Studies.
Our guest today is Noam Chomsky.
Noam, welcome to Berkley.
Where were you born and raised?
- I was born in Philadelphia, 1928.
Stayed there til I went
through undergraduate school,
University of Pennsylvania,
then went off to Harvard
for a couple of years
in a research fellowship,
and then graduate school.
When I was done with
that, went over to MIT,
and I've been in Boston ever since.
Around Boston since about 1950.
- Your parents both
were Hebrew grammarians
and taught Hebrew school?
- My father was professionally
a Hebrew scholar,
and his main work was Hebrew grammar,
and my mother was a Hebrew teacher.
My father sort of ran
the Hebrew school system
in the city of Philadelphia.
My mother taught in it.
He taught in Hebrew college later.
There's a university of Jewish studies,
graduate university of Jewish studies,
that's the college which he taught in.
But they were all part of what amounted
to a kind of Hebrew ghetto, Jewish ghetto,
in Philadelphia.
Not physical ghetto, it was
scattered around the city,
but cultural ghetto.
- And was Hebrew the
language spoken at home?
- No.
- No?
- Second.
It was in the background.
So for example, by the
time I was eight or nine,
say Friday evening, my
father and I would read
Hebrew literature together.
- [Harry] And looking back,
how do you think your parents
shaped your perspectives on the world?
- Well, those are always very
hard questions to answer,
because it's a combination
of influence and resistance,
which is difficult to sort out.
I mean, undoubtedly, the background
has shaped the kinds of interests
and tendencies and
directions that I've pursued,
but it was...
It was independent.
I mean I think more direct influences
actually came from other
parts of the family.
- [Harry] Mhm, please, go ahead.
- Well, my parents were immigrants
and they happened to
end up in Philadelphia,
but my mother from New York,
and my father from Baltimore.
When he came over in
1913 for whatever reason,
his family went to Baltimore
and my mother's family,
from another part of
the Pale of Settlement,
came to New York.
And there were two different families,
there was the New York family
and the Baltimore family,
and we were in the middle in Philadelphia.
So we naturally went out
the back, but close by.
The families were totally different.
Now, the Baltimore family
were ultra-Orthodox.
In fact, my father told me
that they had become more
Orthodox when they got here
than they even were in the shtetl,
the little town in Ukraine
where they came from.
In general there was a tendency
among some sectors of immigrants
to intensify the cultural tradition,
probably as a way of
identifying themselves
in a strange environment, I suppose.
So that was that family.
The other part of the family, my mother's,
was mainly Jewish working class.
Very radical, the Jewish
element had disappeared.
This was the 1930s, so they
were part of the ferment
of radical activism that
was going on in the 30s
in all sorts of ways.
And of all of them,
the one who actually did
influence me a great deal
was an uncle by marriage,
who was an extremely interesting person.
He came into the family when
I was about seven or eight,
and became a big influence.
Married my aunt.
He was brought up in New York,
also from an immigrant family,
but he'd grown up in a
poor area of New York.
In fact, he himself never
went past fourth grade.
It was, you're on the streets, you know?
This criminal background,
all sorts of stuff.
What's going on in the under
class ghettos in New York.
He happened to have a physical deformity,
so he was able to get a newsstand
under a compensation program
that was run in the 1930s
for people with disabilities.
He had a newsstand on
72nd street in New York.
Lived nearby in a little apartment.
And I spent a lot of time there.
That newsstand became
an intellectual center
for emigres from Europe,
lots of German and other
emigres who were coming,
and he was a very educated person.
Like I said, never went past fourth grade,
but maybe the most educated
person I've ever met,
self-educated.
Without going through the whole story,
he ended up being a lay analyst
on a riverside apartment in New York,
but the newsstand itself was a very lively
intellectual center with
professors of this and that
arguing all night,
and working at the
newsstand was a lot of fun.
- So newspapers and events of the world
were mixed up with ideas,
almost like a coffee
house without the coffee?
- Yeah, the newspapers were
kind of like an artifact,
so for example I went for years
thinking that there was a
newspaper called Newsinmira.
The reason is that as people
came out of the subway station
and raced past the newsstand, they'd say,
"Newsinmira."
Well, I heard it that way,
and I gave them two tabloids,
which I later discovered
are the News and the Mirror.
(laughs)
I noticed that as they
picked up the Newsinmira
the first thing they opened
to was the sports page.
- I see, I see. (laughs)
This is an eight year
old picture of the world.
But yeah, there were newspapers there,
but that was kind of like the background
of the discussions that were going on.
And then through him and
through other influences,
I kind of got myself involved
in the ongoing 30s radicalism.
And that was very much
part of the Hebrew based,
Zionist oriented, this
is Palestine, pre-Israel,
Palestine-oriented life.
And that was a good part of my life.
I became a Hebrew teacher, myself,
for Zionist youth, later,
combining it with the radical
activism in various ways.
Actually, that's the way
I got into linguistics.
- One of the formative influences,
as I understand it, in
this period for you,
was reading George Orwell.
And also in terms of events,
really in addition to the Depression,
the Spanish Civil War.
Tell us a little about that mix.
- It came the other way.
Orwell's great book, in my
opinion, his greatest book,
Homage to Catalonia,
I think it was first published 1937,
but it was suppressed.
A couple hundred copies published.
Both in England and the United States,
it was essentially suppressed.
The reason was it was very anti-communist,
and in those days that didn't sell.
During the second World War
it was totally suppressed,
because you couldn't be, you
know, there was Uncle Joe.
So it didn't sell, what he was doing.
I think his book finally
reached the public,
this is from memory so
maybe the dates are wrong,
but I think it was around 1947 or '48,
with an introduction by Lionel Trilling,
and it was presented as a Cold
War document at that time.
I mean Orwell, who had died
already, would have hated it.
And that's when I found
Homage to Catalonia,
but I'd been interested
in the Spanish Civil War
long before.
- And you actually wrote,
your first essay was as a ten year old
on the Spanish Civil War.
What did you say then,
and what do you think now
about how that event and your
response to it influenced you?
- Well, the article, like you
said, I was ten years old.
(laughs)
I'm sure I would not
want to read it today.
But I remember what it was about,
because I remember what struck me.
This was right after
the fall of Barcelona.
The fascist forces had
conquered Barcelona,
that was essentially the end
of the Spanish Civil War.
The article was about the
spread of fascism around Europe.
So it started off by talking about Munich,
and Barcelona and the spread
of the Nazi fascist power,
which was extremely frightening.
And then just to add a little
word of personal background,
we happened to be, for
most of my childhood,
the only Jewish family in
a mostly Irish and German
Catholic neighborhood.
Sort of a lower middle class neighborhood,
which was very anti-Semitic,
and quite pro-Nazi.
I mean it's obvious
why the Irish would be,
you know, they hated the British,
not surprising the Germans were.
But I can remember beer
parties when Paris fell,
and the sense of the
threat of this black cloud
spreading over Europe
was very frightening.
I could pick up my mother's
attitudes, particularly,
she was terrified by it.
And it was also in my personal life,
'cause I saw the streets.
Interesting, for some reason,
which I do not understand to this day,
my brother and I never talked
to our parents about it.
I don't think they knew
that we were living in an
anti-Semitic neighborhood.
But on the streets, you know,
you go out and play ball with the kids
or try to walk to the bus or something,
it was a constant threat.
And it was just the kind of thing
you didn't talk to your parents about.
You knew, for some reason,
you didn't talk to them.
To the day of their death,
they didn't know.
But there was this
combination of the knowing
that this cloud was
spreading over the world,
and picking up, particularly,
my mother's attitudes,
very upset about it,
my father too, but more constrained,
and knowing from the uncles and aunts,
some of the background,
and living it in the streets
in my own daily life,
that made it very real.
Anyhow, by the late 30s I
did become quite interested
in Spanish anarchism and
the Spanish Civil War
where all this was being
fought out at the time.
It was right before the
World War broke out,
but a kind of microcosm,
what was going on in Spain.
By the time I was old enough
to get on a train by myself,
around 10 or 11, I would go
to New York for a weekend,
stay with my aunts and uncles
and hang around at anarchist bookstores
down around Union Square
and Fourth Avenue.
There were little bookstores from emigres.
Really interesting people,
to my mind they looked about 90,
they were maybe in the 40s or something.
(laughs)
These people who were very
interested in young people,
they wanted young people to come along.
I spent a lot of attention
talking to these people,
this real education.
And then out of that,
when I wrote the article,
it was with that background.
It was long before I heard of Orwell.
- These experiences we've described,
you were saying that it
led you into linguistics
but it also led you into
your view of politics
and of the world,
and you know, you're a
libertarian anarchist,
and when one hears that
in the way issues are
framed in this country,
and you know why there's
often so many misperceptions,
because of things that you've written.
Help us understand what that means,
in other words, it doesn't
mean that you favor chaos
or no government, necessarily.
- Well remember, the United States
is sort of out of the
world, on this topic.
Britain is to a limited extent,
but the United States is like, on Mars.
So here, the term libertarian
means the opposite
of what it always meant in history.
Libertarian, throughout
modern European history,
meant socialist anarchist.
It meant the socialist
movement, the worker's movement,
and the socialist movement
sort of broke into two branches, roughly.
One statist, one anti-statist.
The statist branch led to Bolshevism
and Lenin and Trotsky, and so on.
The anti-statist branch,
which included Marxists,
left Marxists, Pannekoek,
Rosa Luxemburg, others,
to kind of merge, more or less,
into an amalgam with a
big strain of anarchism,
into what was called
libertarian socialism.
So libertarian in Europe,
always meant socialist.
Here it means ultra, you know, Ayn Rand,
or Cato Institute or something like that.
But that's a special US usage,
having to do with a lot of things
quite special about the way
the United States developed,
and this is part of it.
There it meant, and always meant, to me,
socialist, and the anti-state
branch of socialism,
which meant highly organized society,
completely organized,
nothing to do with chaos.
But based on a democracy
all the way through.
That means democratic
control of communities,
of workplaces, of federal structures,
built on systems of voluntary association
spreading internationally.
That's traditional anarchism.
At least, anybody can have
the word if they like,
but it's a mainstream,
probably the mainstream
of traditional anarchism,
and it has roots, you know,
coming back to the United States,
it has very strong roots
in the American working class movement.
So if you go back to, say, the 1850s,
the beginnings of the
Industrial Revolution,
this was right around
the area where I live,
in eastern Massachusetts
textile plants and so on,
the people working in those plants
were in part, young women
coming off the farms.
They were called factory girls.
So the women come to the farms,
work in the textile plant.
Some of them were Irish
immigrants in Boston
and that group of people.
They had an extremely rich
and interesting culture.
So kind of like my uncle who
never went past fourth grade,
very educated, reading modern literature.
They didn't bother with
European radicalism,
that had no effect on them,
but the general literary culture
they were very much a part of,
and they developed their own conceptions
of how the world ought to be organized.
They had their own newspapers.
In fact, the period of the
freest press in the United States
was probably around the 1850s.
In the 1850s the scale
of the popular press,
meaning run by factory
girls in Lowell and so on,
was scale of the commercial
press or even greater.
And these were independent newspapers,
a lot of interesting scholarship on them,
you can read 'em now.
Just spontaneously,
without any background,
never heard of Marx or
Bakunin or anyone else.
Now, they developed the same ideas.
They thought that, from
their point of view,
what they called wage-slavery,
renting yourself to an owner,
was not very different
from chattel slavery,
that they were fighting
the Civil War about,
and you have to recall that
in the mid-19th century,
that was a common view
in the United States.
For example, it was the position
of the Republican party.
It was Abraham Lincoln's position.
It was not an odd view,
that there isn't much difference
between selling yourself
and renting yourself.
So the idea of renting yourself,
meaning working for wages, was degrading.
It was just an attack on
your personal integrity.
And they despised the industrial
system that was developing,
that was destroying their culture,
destroying their independence,
their individuality,
constraining them to be
subordinate to masters.
There was a tradition of
what was called Republicanism
in the United States, we're free people.
The first free people in the world.
This was destroying and
undermining that freedom.
This was the core of the
labor movement all over,
and included in it was the assumption,
just taken for granted, I'm quoting,
"Those who work in the
mills should run them."
In fact, one of their main
slogans, I'll just quote it, was,
they condemned what they called
the new spirit of the age.
"Gain wealth, forgetting all but self."
(laughs)
That idea, the new spirit,
that you should only be interested
in gaining wealth and
forgetting about your relations
to other people.
They regarded it as just a violation
of fundamental human nature,
and a degrading idea.
Well that grew into,
that was a strong, rich, American culture,
which was crushed by violence.
The United States has a
very violent labor history.
Much more so than Europe.
Now, it was wiped out over a long period,
but with extreme violence.
By the time it picked
up again in the 1930s
that's when I sort of personally
came into the tail end of it.
Right after the second World
War it was just crushed.
So by now it's forgotten.
But it's very real, and see,
I don't really think it's forgotten,
I think it's just below the surface
in people's consciousness.
- And this is a continuing problem,
and it's something that emerges
your scientific work also,
mainly the extent to which histories
and traditions are forgotten,
and actually to really
define a new position
often means going back and
finding those older traditions.
- Things like this, they're forgotten
in the intellectual culture,
but my feeling is they're probably alive
in the popular culture,
in people's sentiments and attitudes
and understanding and so on.
I mean, I know when I talk to, say,
working classes audiences today,
and I talk about these ideas,
they seem very natural to them.
I mean, it's true,
nobody talks about them,
but when you bring it up, I mean,
the idea that you have to
rent yourself to somebody
and follow their orders
and that they own, and you work there,
and you built it but you don't own it,
it's a highly unnatural notion,
and you don't have to study
any complicated theories
to see that this is just
an attack on human dignity.
- So coming out of this tradition,
being influenced by it, and
continue to believe in it,
what is your notion of legitimate power?
Under what circumstances
is power legitimate?
- Well, the core of the
anarchist tradition,
as I understand it,
is that power is always illegitimate
unless it proves itself to be legitimate.
So the burden of proof is always on those
who claim that some authoritarian,
hierarchic relation is legitimate.
If they can't prove it, then
it should be dismantled.
Can you ever prove it?
Well, it's a heavy
burden of proof to bear,
but I think sometimes you can bear it.
So to take a homely example,
if I'm walking down the street
with my four year old granddaughter,
and she starts to run into the street
and I grab her arm and pull her back
that's an exercise of power and authority
but I think I can give
a justification for it.
Obvious what the justification would be.
And maybe there are other cases
where you can justify it,
but the question that
always should be asked,
for most, in our mind, is
"Why should I accept it?"
It's the responsibility of
those who exercise power
to show that somehow it's legitimate.
It's not the responsibility of anyone else
to show that it's illegitimate.
It's illegitimate by assumption.
If it's a relation of
authority among human beings
which places some above others,
then that's illegitimate by assumption.
Unless you can give a strong argument
to show that it's right, you've lost.
It's kind of like the use of violence,
say, in international affairs.
There's a very heavy
burden of proof to be borne
by anyone who calls for violence.
Maybe it can be sometimes justified,
personally I'm not a committed pacifist,
so I think that yes, it
can sometimes be justified.
So I thought, in fact
in that article I wrote,
in fourth grade,
I thought the West should be using force
to try to stop fascism,
and I still think so.
But now I know a lot more about it,
I know that the West was
actually supporting fascism,
supporting Franco, supporting
Mussolini and so on,
and even Hitler.
I didn't know that at the time,
but I thought then, and I think now,
that the use of force to stop that plague
would have been legitimate,
and finally, was legitimate.
But an argument has to be given for it.
- Is there less of a burden of proof
when you're looking at
weaker power entities,
looking at the powerless, basically,
is the burden of proof less for them?
- No, same.
- Same.
- I mean, take, say, people living
under a military occupation,
or under racist regimes and so on.
Now, they have a right to resist,
actually everyone in the world
except the United States and Israel
believes they have a right to exist.
If you look at the UN resolutions.
- Talking about Palestine now, yeah.
- Palestine or South Africa,
I mean, if you take a
look at the major UN,
there are major UN
resolutions on terrorism.
One in 1987 denouncing the plague
of international terrorism,
calling on everyone to
do something to stop it,
it passed with two negative votes,
the United States and Israel.
The reason was exactly
this, they explained it.
It said said "Nothing in this resolution
"will prejudice the right of people
"to struggle for
independence against racist
"and colonialist regimes and
foreign military occupation."
That referred to South Africa and Israel.
So therefore the United States objected,
because it opposed, it
does not grant the right
of people to struggle against
racist and colonialist regimes
and foreign occupation.
The US and Israel are alone in that.
When the US votes against a resolution,
it's out of history, so
you don't read about it,
but it's there.
The war against terrorism,
isn't new, it's old,
the US is alone in opposing it.
Now, grant, I believe that
the world right on this
and that the US is wrong.
There is a right to resist
racist and colonialist regimes
and foreign military occupation,
but then comes your question.
Is there a right to use
violence to do that?
Well, no, I think the burden of proof
is on those who say there
is a right to use violence
and that's a hard burden to meet,
both morally and tactically,
and frankly I think it
can very rarely be met.
- I'm curious, I think
I've read interviews
where you have tried to separate
your approach in science to
your approach in politics,
but I'm curious as to whether,
I'll ask the question again,
let me ask you this,
how does your approach to
the world as a scientist
affect and influence the
way you approach politics?
- See, I think studying science
is a good way to get
into fields like history.
- Okay.
- The reason is you learn
what an argument means.
You learn what evidence is.
You learn what makes sense
to postulate and when.
What's going to be convincing.
You sort of internalize the
modes of rational inquiry,
which happen to be much more advanced
in the sciences than anywhere else.
On the other hand, you know,
applying relativity theory to history
isn't going to get you anywhere.
- No, no, yeah. (laughs)
- It's a mode of thinking,
and I try at least,
with what success others have to judge,
to use the mode of thinking
that you would use in the
sciences to human affairs,
and I think it's a good idea to do so.
As to other connections,
there may be some but
they're pretty remote.
If you think about the core notions
of what I was calling anarchism,
which as I say, is just deeply rooted
in popular traditions everywhere,
for good reasons, I think,
it's based on a certain conception of,
if you sort of try to take it apart,
it's based on some kind of conception
of what Bakunin once called
an instinct for freedom.
That people have an instinctive drive
for freedom from domination and control,
and I think that's, you can't prove it,
but it's probably true.
The core of the work
that I've been interested in in language,
is also interested in a
kind of human freedom.
The cognitive capacity
to create indefinitely
and its roots in our nature.
Now, historically, people
have drawn a connection
between this.
So if you look at the, say,
18th century Enlightenment
and the Romantic period,
this connection was explicitly drawn.
So if you read Rousseau, or
Wilhelm von Humboldt and others,
the connection between human freedom
as in the social and political realm,
and human freedom in the creative use
of cognitive capacities,
particularly language,
they did try to establish a connection.
Now if you ask,
"Can this be connected
at the level of science?"
The answer is no.
It's just a sort of a parallel intuition
which doesn't link up empirically,
but maybe could someday if we knew enough.
- You said somewhere, I
think in this new book,
on power, "You can lie
or distort the story
"of the French Revolution
as long as you like,
"and nothing will happen.
"Propose a false theory in chemistry,
"and it will be refuted tomorrow."
- Yeah, that's the kind of thing I mean.
Nature's tough.
You can't fiddle with mother Nature,
she's a hard task mistress.
So you're forced to be honest
in the natural sciences.
In the soft fields, you're
not forced to be honest.
Nobody's gonna undermine, I mean,
there are standards, of course.
On the other hand, they're very weak,
and if what you propose is
ideologically acceptable,
that is, supportive of power systems,
you can get away with a huge amount.
In fact the difference
between the conditions
that are imposed on dissident opinion
and on mainstream opinion
are radically different.
I might give you concrete
examples, if you like.
- [Harry] Yeah, do.
- Okay, so for example, if
I write about terrorism,
say I've written about terrorism
and I think you can show
without much difficulty
that terrorism pretty
much corresponds to power.
I don't think that's very surprising.
But the more powerful states
are involved in more
terrorism by and large,
and the United States
is the most powerful,
so it's involved in massive terrorism
by its own definition of terrorism.
Well, if I want to establish that,
I'm required to give a
huge amount of evidence
and I think that's a good thing,
I don't object to that.
I think anyone who makes that claim
should be held to very high standards,
through extensive documentation
from the internal secret record,
from historical record, and so on,
and if you ever find a comma misplaced,
somebody ought to criticize you for it.
So I think those standards are fine.
Now, let's suppose that you
play the mainstream game.
So, for example, Yale University Press
just came out with a volume
called the Age of Terror.
The contributors are leading historians,
many of them Yale, the
top people in the field.
You read the book the Age of Terror,
the first thing you notice is
there isn't a single footnote.
There isn't a single reference.
They're just off the top
of your head statements.
Some of the statements are
tenable, some are untenable,
but there are no criteria,
there are no intellectual
criteria imposed.
The reviews of the book are very favorable
and laudatory, and maybe
it's right, maybe it's wrong,
I mean, I think a lot of it's wrong,
and demonstrably wrong,
but it doesn't really matter.
You can say anything you want,
because you're supporting power
and nobody expects you
to justify anything.
For example, if I was, say,
in the unimaginable circumstance
that I was on, say, Nightline,
and I was asked, say, "Do you
think Gaddafi is a terrorist?"
I could say, "Yeah,
Gaddafi's a terrorist."
I don't need any evidence.
Suppose I said George Bush is a terrorist.
Well then I would be
expected to provide evidence.
"No, you can't say that."
- So you aren't cut off, right then.
- See, and in fact the structure
of the news production system
is you can't produce evidence.
In fact, there's even a name for it.
I learned it from the
producer of Nightline,
Jeff Greenfield, it's called concision.
He was asked in an interview somewhere
why they didn't have me on Nightline,
and his answer was, two answers,
first of all, he says,
"Well he talks Turkish,
nobody understands it."
But the other answer was,
"He lacks concision."
Which is correct, I agree with him.
Now, the kinds of things that
I would say on Nightline,
you can't say in one sentence,
because they depart
from standard religion.
If you want to repeat the religion
you can get away with it
between two commercials.
If you wanna say something
that questions the religion,
you're expected to give evidence,
and that you can't do
between two commercials,
so therefore you lack concision
so therefore you can't talk.
I think that's a terrific
technique of propaganda.
To impose concision is a way
of virtually guaranteeing
that the party line gets
repeated over and over again
and that nothing else is heard.
- And this is why so much of your work
in the area of politics
has really been focused
on what you call the
manufacturing of consent.
Mainly, the framing of issues,
the way topics are put off
the table for discussion,
and so in the end what your work suggests
is that in focusing on that
and coming to understand that
then there's hope for really understanding
the problems we confront.
- Oh yeah, actually, I should say,
the term manufacturing
of consent is not mine,
I took it from Walter Lippmann,
the leading public
intellectual and leading media
figure of the 20th century,
who thought it was a great idea.
He said, "We should manufacture consent.
"That's the way democracy should work.
"There should be a small
group of powerful people,
"and the rest of the
population should be spectators
"and you should force them to consent
"by regimenting their minds."
That's the leading idea
of democratic theorists,
and the public relations
industry, and so on.
So I'm not making it up, I'm
just borrowing their conception
and telling other people what they think.
But yeah, that's very important,
and yes, there is hope.
I think ordinary common sense suffices,
no special training, like my uncle,
to unravel this and see
what's really happening.
I don't think it's hard to discover
that the US is a leading terrorist state,
I think it's obvious.
- And when one reads your arguments,
really, what you're laying
out is fairly simple.
Namely, if I can paraphrase,
that if you're suddenly calling Iraq
a rogue state in the 90s,
well, what were you calling it in the 80s?
And were they doing the same thing?
And at that time, were
you helping them do it?
And this is your critique
of US foreign policy.
- Well, you know, I think,
I mean, if George Bush tells
us, like he did last week,
and Tony Blair tells us, in this case,
that we can't let Saddam Hussein survive
because he's the most evil man in history,
he even used chemical weapons
against his own people,
I agree that far.
But it gives hypocrisy a
bad name to stop there.
You have to add, "Yes,
he used chemical weapons
"against his own people,
"with the support of Daddy Bush,
"who continued to support
him right past that,
"knowing what he was doing,
"helped him develop weapons
of mass destruction,
"welcomed him as a friend and ally,
"gave him lavish aid
after all these crimes."
Unless you add that, it's just,
like I said, giving hypocrisy a bad name.
Well, nobody does that.
You can read the commentary
and the learned opinion,
and leading figures,
and they just stop,
"used chemical weapons
against his own people."
Now, this is not difficult to understand.
I think you can explain this
to children in school, you know?
And it takes major effort
for the educated classes
to prevent people from
knowing these things,
and that takes dedication.
It would be a lot easier
to tell the truth.
Now, this is one example,
it's a characteristic example.
So, take, say, by the late 1990s,
the last few years,
there was a huge chorus of
self-adulation in the West,
about how we're entering
a new age of history
in which the enlightened states
bring humanitarian ideals to the world
for the first time in history,
following principles and values,
and the proof of it is
we're bombing Serbia.
Well, at the very same moment,
the same people were actively supporting
terrorist atrocities which went way beyond
anything charged to Milosevic in Kosovo.
In fact, I just happened to come back
from the site of one of
them, southeastern Turkey,
where massive atrocities were going on.
- Where the Turkish government
is committing atrocities
against the Kurdish people.
- Yes, that's true, but
the way I would put it
is the US government is
committing atrocities.
- [Harry] By providing aide.
- By providing virtually 80% of the arms,
and in an increasing flow
as the atrocities increased,
providing support, blocking criticism.
The press is helping by not reporting it,
and in fact, even more amazingly,
Turkey is praised here, as a
model for opposing terrorism,
namely by carrying out
some of the worst terrorist atrocities
of the late 1990s with our assistance.
Well, you know, that's an
impressive contribution
of the educated culture.
It wouldn't be easy.
It takes effort to do this sort of thing,
and it's not hard to explain.
I can explain it in two minutes.
I can even give you the
documentation, if you want.
- Now, if we were at the
Council on Foreign Relations,
which we're not,
the argument would be made,
"Well, Turkey has to fit
into a larger strategic...
"view of the world,
"in which they are a modernizing
secular Islamic state."
Or not an Islamic state,
they are a state that has
Islam within its population.
What would your answer be to that?
- So therefore we should help them
drive two to three million
people out of their homes,
destroy thousands of villages.
- No, don't go there.
- Well, that's the question.
In fact, I think we're
harming Turkey by doing this.
We're supporting the most
reactionary strains in Turkey.
Like I said, I was just there.
I was there talking about these things,
and popular support for
opposing the military run regime
is overwhelming.
We're supporting the military run regime,
we're supporting, we're
preventing its modernization
and development.
In fact, that's happening
throughout much of the world.
But even if it were true
that we were helping modernization,
that in no sense justifies
participation in some of
the worst acts of terror,
or worse, I don't know
if it's worse, parallel,
praising them as a model
for countering terror
by carrying out massive terror.
And you can generalize this.
You know, take, say, let's
go somewhere else, Indonesia.
When Indonesia was following
an independent path
in the 1950s and early 60s,
US was strongly opposed,
actually tried to break
up Indonesia in 1958.
Finally, a military coup took place
with the assistance of
the United States in 1965.
The coup massacred maybe a
million people, nobody noticed.
Mostly landless peasants.
It was greeted here with
complete, unconstrained euphoria.
It was described accurately.
So, New York Times, it was
a staggering bloodbath,
Time magazine, you
know, boiling bloodbath,
and praise.
It was praised because,
what they called the Indonesian moderates,
namely the ones who
carried out the massacre,
were turning the country
into a US client state.
Well, from then, 65 til 98,
in that the Indonesian
leader, one of the worst,
kind of like Saddam Hussein,
one of the worst criminals
of the modern age,
was lavishly praised and supported
as a wonderful person,
the Clinton administration
called him our kind of guy,
because he was serving US interests
while carrying out huge massacres
and compiling one of the worst records
of atrocities in the world.
What happened to that in history?
Well, you know, it's history,
but it's not what you teach
people in high school,
as you should in a free country.
That's the task of the intellectuals.
Be careful to be sure
that nobody understands what's going on.
It's a major task.
- You actually believe
that there are two kinds of intellectuals.
One, the kind that serves,
say, power, and are rewarded,
and the other, those who stand outside,
who basically call a spade a spade.
- I mean, we all agree with that
when we're talking about enemies.
So when we're talking
about the Soviet Union,
we all agree that there was a difference
between the commissars and the dissidents.
Now the commissars were the guys inside
who were propagating state propaganda,
and the dissidents are a very
small group on the fringe
who were trying to call a spade a spade.
And we honor the dissidents,
and we condemn the commissars.
- Because they were doing
that in our adversaries.
- And when we turn around
at home, it's the opposite.
We honor the commissars and
we condemn the dissidents,
and furthermore, this goes right through
back through history.
You know, go back to classical
Greece, and the Bible.
So who drank the hemlock
in classical Greece?
Was it a commissar or a dissident?
(laughs)
When you go to, say, the Bible,
you know, you read the Biblical record,
there are people called prophets,
prophets just means intellectuals,
they were people giving
geo-political analysis,
moral lessons, that sort of thing.
We call them intellectuals today.
There were the people
we honor as prophets,
there were the people we
condemn as false prophets.
But if you look at the Biblical record,
at the time it was the other way around.
The flatterers at the court of King Ahab
were the ones who were honored,
and the ones we call prophets
were driven into the
desert and imprisoned.
You know, that's the way
it's been throughout history,
and understandably.
Power does not like to be undermined.
- There's an important point here
that I want to bring out,
which is if you're comparing
our acting against Serbia
at a time when we're not doing anything
about East Timor or Indonesia,
or a number of other places.
- It's not that we're not doing it--
- Well, no that we're
doing the wrong thing.
- We're intensifying the atrocity.
- But I guess the really
interesting thing,
is that as part of the self deception
that is created by the media,
we forget we're doing in one place
and set it where it would be very easy
to do something about it,
namely, stopping the military aide.
Whereas in other areas,
for example Serbia,
well, if you start bombing,
you know, what are the
consequences for innocent people?
- That's another question.
To which it is independent
of what we should have done in Kosovo.
Maybe we can guess at on its own,
but what it does show
is that whatever we did
it's not humanitarian.
Just take a look at everything
else that's going on,
you see that.
So what should we have done in Kosovo?
Well, here you have to look at the record,
and the record is interesting,
and it's suppressed by the intellectuals.
So there's a massive literature about it,
and if you look through that literature
you'll notice that something
is systematically omitted,
namely the actual record
of what was happening.
And we have a voluminous record,
from the state department, from
the British defense system,
from NATO, from the UN.
As far as I'm aware, there's
only one book in print
that reviews that record, mine.
And of course the book is condemned,
because it reviews the record.
What the record shows is unequivocal.
Right up to shortly before the bombing
the British were the most hawkish element
of the coalition.
Internally, now it's released,
then it was internal,
regarded the guerrillas as
the main source of atrocities.
This is after the Racak Massacre.
- This would be the Albanian guerrillas.
- Yes, they said they are the
main source of the atrocities.
What they're trying to do is to elicit
a disproportionate Serbian response,
which they did, which would
then bring in the West.
Now, I don't personally believe that,
but that's the British.
We know that right up until the bombing,
nothing much changed.
It was an ugly place, I mean, you know,
these are not nice guys.
The Serbian occupiers
were doing vicious things,
and not on the level of what we were doing
in other places, but bad enough.
But nothing changed up until the bombing.
When the bombing was undertaken,
it was on the expectation that
it would elicit atrocities.
Not surprising, you start
bombing people, they react.
And it did, I mean, you
look at the Milosevic trial,
it's for crimes committed
after the bombing,
given one exception, but--
- The bombing made by NATO.
- After the bombing,
with an invasion threat,
exactly as anticipated.
Atrocities mounted, and they started
expelling the population.
Now, those are crimes, undoubtedly,
this guy's a major criminal,
but the crimes happened to be provoked
by the NATO bombing.
Now, what you read is,
well, we had to bomb to return
the Albanians to their homes.
Yeah, except that they were
driven out of their homes
after the bombing.
Now, there were some displaced before,
but the huge expulsion
was after the bombing.
Before that, the West saw it as kind of,
guerrillas trying to elicit
atrocities and responses,
and responses.
That's the description.
Well, if you don't tell the truth,
well, you may still decide
it was the right thing
or the wrong thing,
but unless you at least look at the facts,
you're not even in the real world.
I mean, for example, it's a fact,
which we should look at,
we can ask, was there an alternative?
It was a bad place, no doubt.
Was there an alternative to violence?
Were there diplomatic alternatives?
Well, you can look back, and you see,
in fact, I wrote at the time,
it looks like there are
diplomatic alternatives.
I mean, Serbia had a
position, NATO had a position,
if you actually look at the result
after 78 days of bombing
it's a compromise between
those two positions.
NATO gave up its most extreme demands,
Serbs gave up their most extreme demands,
and there was a kind of compromise.
Could that have been
reached without the bombing
and the atrocities?
Well, there's a good case that can be made
that it was.
But remember, the burden
of proof is on those
who say you have to bomb.
They try to put the
burden of proof on others.
They can't.
It's the ones who use violence
that have the burden of proof.
- Not everyone is Noam Chomsky,
and can't produce the extraordinary opus
of works on these issues.
So what is your advice for people
who have the same concerns,
who identify with the tradition
that you come out of,
and who want to be active
in opposing these policies?
What is it they need to be doing
that would be productive?
- The same as the factory girls
in the Lowell textile plant 150 years ago.
They joined with others.
To do these things
alone is extremely hard,
especially when you're
working 50 hours a week
to put put food on the table.
Join with others, you
can do a lot of things.
It's got a big multiplier effect.
I mean, that's why unions have always been
in the lead of development of
social and economic progress.
They bring together poor
people, working people,
enable them to learn from one another,
to have their own sources of information
and to act collectively.
That's how everything has changed.
Civil rights movement,
the feminist movement,
the solidarity movement,
the workers' movements.
The reason we don't live in a dungeon
is because people have joined
together to change things,
and there's nothing
different now from before.
In fact, just the last 40 years
have seen remarkable
changes in this respect.
- And in that sense,
in addition to ending the war in Vietnam,
the protest movement of the 60s
really did change our consciousness.
- Totally changed the country.
- And it changed the
behavior of governments,
what they had to do to
get what they wanted.
- Yeah, I mean, this is a
good time to talk about it.
This month, March 2002, happens
to be the 40th anniversary
of the public announcement
by the Kennedy administration
that they were sending US
pilots to bomb South Vietnam.
That's a US bombing of South Vietnam.
That was the initiation
of chemical warfare
to destroy food crops,
driving huge numbers of people
into concentration camps.
Nobody was there except the US
and the south Vietnamese,
and that was a US war
against South Vietnam,
publicly announced, not a peep of protest.
Now, the war went on for years
before protest developed,
but by the time it did,
not just the anti-war movement,
the civil rights movement
and other rising movements,
it changed the popular consciousness.
The country just became
a lot more civilized.
No American president could possibly dream
of doing that today.
And the same is true in many other areas.
Go back to 62, there was
no feminist movement,
there was a very limited
human rights movement,
extremely limited,
there was no environmental movement,
meaning rights of our grandchildren,
there were no third-world
solidarity movements,
there was no anti-apartheid movement,
there was no anti-sweatshop movement,
I mean, all of the things that
we kind of take for granted
just weren't there.
How'd they get there?
Was it a gift from an angel?
No, they got there by struggle,
common struggle by people
who dedicated themselves,
with others, 'cause you can't do it alone,
and made it a much more civilized country.
There's a long way to go,
and that's not the first time it happened,
and it'll continue.
- I gather it's your belief
that when we focus on heroes
in the movement, that's a mistake,
'cause it's really the unsung heroes
the unsung seamstresses or
whatever in this movement
who actually make a difference.
- They're the ones that do things.
I mean, take, say, the
civil rights movement.
You think of the civil rights movement,
the first thing you think
of is Martin Luther King.
King was an important figure,
but he would have been
the first to tell you,
I'm sure, that he was
riding the wave of activism.
The people who were doing the work,
who were in the lead in
the civil rights movement,
were young SNCC workers, freedom riders,
you know, people out there
in the streets every day,
getting beaten, sometimes killed,
working constantly.
And they created the circumstances
in which Martin Luther King could come in
and be a leader.
And his role was extremely important,
and I'm not denigrating it,
it's very important to have done that,
but the people who were really important
are the ones whose names are forgotten,
and that's true of every movement
that ever existed.
- If students were to watch this tape,
how would you advise them
to prepare for the future
if they identify with the goals
that you're putting on the table?
- Be honest, critical, accept
elementary moral principles.
For example, the principle
that if something is wrong
for others, it's wrong for us.
Things like that.
Understand the importance
of the fundamental anarchist principle,
namely, prior illegitimacy
of power and violence,
unless you can justify it,
which is not easy.
It's their burden of proof, not yours.
That's true whether
it's personal relations
between a family or whether
it's international affairs,
and beyond that, try to join with others
who share your interests
to learn more and to act responsibly
to improve the many very
serious problems in the world,
which can be done.
- There's an important element of courage
in this kind of work, is there not?
And what is involved in that courage?
- Oh, you know, in a country
like the United States,
the level of courage that's involved
is extremely low.
I mean, if you're a poor,
black organizer in the slums,
yeah, that takes courage,
because you could get killed.
If you're a relatively well
off, educated white person,
the level of courage is minuscule.
Just see what other people face elsewhere.
Like I say, I just came back from Turkey.
I mean, the people in the southeast,
living a dungeon, millions of them.
They show real courage when
they wear Kurdish colors,
let's say, or speak openly, let's say,
Kurdish as a language.
They can end up in a
Turkish prison or worse,
and that's not fun.
But let's even go to Istanbul,
you know, sort of more Western.
I actually went there
for a political trial.
The government was putting
on trial a publisher
who had published a couple
of sentences of mine
on the repression of the Kurds.
Well, in Istanbul, the
writers, leading writers,
journalists, artists,
intellectuals, and others,
they are constantly carrying
out civil disobedience.
Like when I was there,
they purposely co-published
The Book of Banned Writings,
writings of people in
jail, which are banned,
co-published it, went to the prosecutor,
I went with them,
demanding to be prosecuted.
That's no joke.
Some of them have been in jail,
some will go back to jail,
they face repression.
But they're not making
a big fuss about it,
they just do it in their normal behavior,
not waving flags and saying,
"Look how courageous I am."
That's just life.
That takes courage.
As compared with what they face every day,
what we face is so pathetically small
that we shouldn't even
be talking about it.
Yes, unpleasant things can happen,
but not in comparison with
what goes on in the world.
- Coming out of science,
and the level of complexity in that field
that you can comprehend
the field of linguistics,
I'm curious as to whether this accounts
for what I think I detect is a moderate
or almost conservative view, on your part,
of how much things can
change in the short term.
I don't know if that's
a fair comment on you,
but is that the case, that in some sense,
by seeing so much, you understand
that very little sometimes
can be accomplished
but that may be very important?
- Very important, and what's more,
I don't think we should
give up long term visions.
So I agree with the factory
girls in Lowell in 1850.
I think wage slavery is an attack
on fundamental human rights.
I think those who work in
the plants should own them.
I think we should struggle against
what was then the new spirit of the age.
"Gain wealth, forgetting
everybody but yourself."
Yeah, that's all
degrading and destructive,
and in the long term,
I don't know how long,
it should be dismantled.
But the way you proceed,
right now there are serious
problems to deal with,
like three million Americans
who don't have enough to eat,
or people elsewhere in the
world who are far worse off,
and who are, in fact, under our boot.
You know, we're grinding
them into the dust.
Those are short term things
that can be dealt with.
Now, there's nothing wrong
with making small gains.
Like the gains that I
was talking about before,
from the 60s til today,
they're extremely
important for human lives.
Doesn't mean that there are not a lot
of mountain peaks to climb, there are,
but you do what's within range.
Same in the sciences.
You might like to solve the problems
of what causes human action or something,
but the problems you work on
are the ones that are right at the edge
of your understanding.
Actually, there's a famous joke
about a drunk under a lamppost,
and somebody comes up and asks him,
he's looking at the ground,
"What are you looking for?"
He goes, "I'm looking for
a pencil that I dropped."
They say, "Well, where did you drop it?"
He said, "Oh, I dropped
it across the street."
"So, why are you looking here?"
"Well, this is where the light is."
You know, that's the
way the sciences work.
I mean, maybe the problem
you'd like to solve
is across the street,
but you have to work where the light is,
then you try to move it a little further,
and maybe ultimately you'll
get across the street.
And the same is true in human affairs.
I mean, I think the same is
true in personal relations,
when you have a problem with your kids,
that's the way you have to deal with it.
- One final question, and I understand
your unwillingness to focus on heroes
or to be made into a hero,
but if an activist is
watching this interview
what lesson might they draw from your life
about what they can do in their life,
with regard to the issues
that are of concern to them?
- Last night, for example,
I gave a talk in Berkeley
to a big mob of people
about the US and the Middle East
and Israel and Palestine,
Turkey, these things.
Who is responsible for that talk?
Not me, you know, I flew in from Boston,
came over, and gave a talk.
The people responsible for that
are the people working on it.
The people working day after day
to create the organizational structures,
the support systems,
to go up and back to work with
oppressed people over there,
and maybe their names
won't enter some record,
but they are the ones who
are leading everything.
I come in and it's a privilege for me
to be able to join 'em for an hour,
but that's easy.
Get up and give a talk, it's no big deal.
But working on it day
after day, all the time,
that's hard, and that's important,
and that's what changes the world.
Not somebody coming in and giving a talk.
- Noam, thank you very
much for joining us today
for this fascinating discussion
of at least some aspects
of your life and your work.
Thank you.
- Thank you.
- And thank you very much
for joining us for this
conversation with history.
(bright music)
