CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS (DECEMBER 4, 2015)
Alexander Cockburn used to quip that the two greatest disasters to befall the United States in the twentieth century both happened to occur on December 7th: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and your birth in Philadelphia.
I can’t deny it. It’s right there in the hospital records, so it must have happened.
Well, happy birthday. Eighty-seven years young.
Did I ever tell you, my name is actually wrong on my birth certificate? I once had to look up my birth certificate for some reason, so they sent me a copy from city hall. At the time, apparently, the clerk didn’t believe that my name was Avram Noam. He thought Noam must be Naomi, and wrote that in. Then Avram had to be a girl’s name, so he made a handwritten correction there too: “Avrane.” So my birth certificate reads, “Avrane Naomi Chomsky.”
In 1966, you gave a talk at Harvard that was published the following year in the New York Review of Books. It was your famous talk “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” which put you in the public spotlight in terms of your political work.1 You were already well established in linguistics.
I had written political articles before, but that was the first one to appear in a major journal and be read by more than a few activists.
Regarding the responsibility of intellectuals, what can you say about the current generation? Are they any different?
I don’t think it’s been different for all of recorded history. The phrase “the responsibility of intellectuals” is actually ambiguous—and intended to be ambiguous. There’s a responsibility that they’re expected to fulfill, essentially to be flatterers at the court. Then there’s the moral responsibility of being truthful, accurate, critical, focusing on crimes for which we share responsibility as part of our state, our society, whatever it may be.
About U.S. motives globally, you say “a useful way to approach the question … is to read the professional literature on international relations” in order to understand “what policy is not.”2
Well, there are basically two theories of international relations. One of them is called Wilsonian idealism; the other is called realism. If you look at them closely, “realism” is not particularly realistic. In fact, it tends to ignore such crucial factors as the determinants of power and decision-making in the domestic system. Wilsonian idealism, meanwhile, simply repeats the basic illusions of every imperial power: that we are exceptional, that we may make mistakes but we always have good intentions, and so on. That’s precisely what policy is not.
You said in a recent interview that U.S. policies have “succeeded in spreading jihadi terror from a small tribal area in Afghanistan to virtually the whole world, from West Africa through the Levant and on to Southeast Asia.”3 How did they do that?
When the only method you have is to use your comparative advantage in violence, you will always make the situation worse. The military analyst Andrew Cockburn points out that every time you kill a leader, you think it’s a big triumph.4 But what you’re doing, almost invariably, is replacing him with a younger, more competent, more violent leader. It happens over and over.
In fact, we’re doing jihadis a favor. ISIS and Al Qaeda, for example, fairly openly said, “Please come attack us. Send the crusader armies to fight us. It will be a recruiting tool. Pretty soon you will be at war with the whole Muslim world.” That’s just what they want.
Let’s say ISIS is bombed to smithereens. What then? Do the troops come home? Does the U.S. close down its overseas bases?
No, because ISIS would be replaced by something worse. I don’t know exactly what, but there are other groups. Like it or not, in much of the Sunni world, ISIS is regarded as providing a kind of protection and security. And apparently they run, by some standards, a fairly efficient totalitarian system. It’s kind of like Iraq under Saddam Hussein. He was a brutal dictator, but people had security, they had education. As long as you shut up and didn’t talk about politics, you could have a pretty decent life—in fact, more so than almost anywhere else in the Arab world. Now they have nothing, just war. If we don’t deal with the roots of the problem, then something worse will arise from the same causes.
Do the policy makers and managers of the U.S. state system consciously promote conflict and turmoil?
No. Take, say, Libya. Muammar Qaddafi was a brutal, ugly guy. But he managed to build some kind of functional country out of a tribal society. There was an uprising, and he put it down quite harshly. I think about a thousand people were killed. Then three imperial powers—France, the United States, and Britain—rammed through a Security Council resolution that called for a cease-fire, protection of civilians, negotiations, and diplomacy.5 Okay, what did the outside powers do?
They violated it.
Qaddafi accepted the cease-fire, but the imperial powers instantly violated it and became the air force of the rebels. The result was to destroy the country, to radically magnify the number of casualties, and, incidentally, to spur the flow of refugees from Africa to Europe. Did they plan that? No. It’s just the famous adage: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” We have a hammer. We’re really good at smashing things.
Some people say, “Well, look at the benefits that accrue to the weapons manufacturers here. Isn’t that the rationale for more bases, more intervention?”
That’s a factor, but I don’t think it’s the driving factor. The driving factor is that the traditional role of any great power is to expand its power. England, France, and the United States each have a long history of imperial domination. So they do what comes naturally. They use their comparative advantage, which happens to be not diplomacy, development, freedom, or anything like that. That’s what they talk about, but what they’re really good at is force. So we have the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Special Forces, drones, armies that can go in and smash places up.
In case after case there have been diplomatic alternatives. Whether they would have worked, we can’t say.
What about alternatives for alleviating the misery and suffering in Syria?
The situation in Syria is terrible. There’s one region in Syria that is doing all right, the Kurdish region of Rojava. The Kurds have succeeded in defending it with very limited weapons, and have apparently managed to create a pretty decent, functioning, interesting society under horrible conditions. Aside from that, the place is just a wreck, nothing but gangsters murdering each other. The Assad regime is brutal and destructive, and its atrocities have caused most of the deaths.6 Then there’s ISIS. There’s also a major jihadi group, an offshoot of Al Qaeda, the Al Nusra Front, and another one that’s not very different, Ahrar al-Sham. The two of them sort of merge.
Did you hear Prime Minister David Cameron calling for the bombing of Syria in the British Parliament? He said, We have to support seventy thousand democratic freedom fighters over there. Robert Fisk asked in an article the next day, did he mean seventy thousand or just seventy?7 Every correspondent who knows anything about Syria has ridiculed Cameron’s claim. Nobody can find these people.
What’s the answer? There’s just one option, even if it’s only got a slim chance of working, and that is some kind of negotiations involving every warring group in Syria—apart from ISIS, which has no interest in negotiations. This means arranging negotiations among real monsters. You don’t like any of them, but that’s the only choice. If you want to reduce the killing and the destruction, that’s what you do. Maybe they can work out local cease-fire agreements that would reduce the violence, make plans for some sort of transitional government, ultimately maybe elections. Again, this is separate from the question of the Kurdish areas, which should simply be protected in whatever way we can.
The U.S. has been blocking this strategy until recently on the grounds that we can’t allow a monster like Bashar al-Assad to participate. But that’s tantamount to saying, “Let’s let them murder each other.” Whatever you think about Assad, he’s not going to commit suicide. So if you want the problem to be solved without total destruction, he will have to be part of the negotiations.
But what is being done? None of the above. Syria is in danger of being finished off as a viable country. The idea that you can find a military solution is ludicrous.
What prompted Putin’s intervention in Syria?
We don’t know in detail, but it appears that what prompted it in large part was the CIA supplying heavy weapons, including wire-guided anti-tank missiles, to the jihadi elements. These were taking a huge toll on the Syrian army. Russia supports Assad, so apparently they moved in substantially in response to that. We can’t prove this, but that’s what the limited information we have appears to suggest.
You recently spoke via Skype to, I believe, an Israeli university, and you managed to upset some people. What was their objection?
Actually, it was the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, which is a research institute near the Hebrew University. The talk was a memorial for an old friend of mine, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, an Israeli philosopher and logician who died some decades ago. I had known him for years. His daughter Maya, who teaches at the university, organized a memorial for the hundredth anniversary of his birth. I was quite close to him, and knew his wife and the children when they were younger.
A number of Palestinian intellectuals, some of them friends, called on me to cancel the talk, because they believe that we should boycott all Israeli universities on principle. I don’t agree with this, just as I didn’t agree with such a policy in the case of South Africa. If you have a targeted boycott—say, against racist hiring practices, in the case of South Africa—it makes sense. But when Howard Zinn went to talk at Cape Town University, for instance, I didn’t see anything wrong with that. I thought it was good for the South Africans, and they thought so, too. In any event, I decided I would go ahead and give the talk (by videoconference) for the Van Leer memorial. So, yes, that outraged some people.
It’s kind of ironic. The last time I went to Palestine to talk at a Palestinian university, I was blocked by Israel. This time I was protested by Palestinian intellectuals.
What’s the current state of U.S. imperialism? In scholarship and in the corporate media, one can rarely use that term. Where do you see the empire today?
First of all, we should say that with respect to scholarship, the situation is changing. The main scholarly journal of diplomacy, Diplomatic History, had a very interesting article tracing U.S. imperialism back to the first colonists, pointing out that the conquest of the continent was in fact imperial conquest.8 That’s the way it was viewed by the Founding Fathers. Later, that view disappeared. The article castigates historians for treating U.S. history as if imperialism began in 1898.
So scholarship is beginning to come to terms with the history of imperialism, and even drawing self-critical attention to the fact that we practically exterminated the indigenous population of the continent. We violated every imaginable treaty with them, and so on. This is what the historian Richard Van Alstyne called the “rising American empire,” and it began with the colonists.9
Imperialism basically means domination of others, and it takes many different forms. It can take the form of overt rule over the natives. It can take the form of settler colonialism, the worst kind, where you drive out the natives and replace them. There are other forms, too, such as economic domination. Take the so-called free-trade agreements, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Uruguay Round of the World Trade Organization, the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. These have nothing much to do with trade, despite the name; they are largely investor-rights agreements. They give multinational corporations and investors substantial control over the resources, policies, and actions of other countries. You can call that imperial domination, if you like, or you can call it something else. These are not well-defined terms.
Do you see the U.S. position today as stronger or weaker than it used to be?
It’s weaker.
Why do you say that?
For one thing, U.S. power has been declining for seventy years. At the end of World War II, that power was phenomenal. The United States had perhaps half the world’s wealth and total security. Every other industrial society was devastated. That couldn’t last, obviously. As the other industrial societies rebuilt, and decolonization pursued its anguished course, gradually power in the world was to some extent distributed. But though it has declined, the United States remains overwhelmingly more powerful than other countries.
Particularly in the military sector. Less so in the economic sphere.
The military sector is unmatched. Economically, the situation is more complicated, but the United States is still in a dominant position. Europe, the other major economy, is powerful, but it has decided to undermine itself through self-destructive economic policies. Austerity during recession has been very harmful.
China is the biggest economy in the world, in terms of purchasing power. On the other hand, it’s still a weak society, and its per capita income is quite low. If you look at the United Nations Human Development Index, which measures various properties of a society, China ranks ninetieth.10 And the country has huge internal problems, which are going to increase in the coming years.
Labor issues, income inequality, environmental problems.
Yes. There’s a lot of labor militancy, thousands of labor actions every year. There is also the demographic problem. There was a demographic peak of people in the roughly twenty-five to forty age range, which gives you a huge workforce—but that’s declining. Not as much as in Europe, but significantly.
China is basically a poor country with a big export economy, a lot of which is owned by outsiders. If Apple produces iPhones at Foxconn and exports them, those are called Chinese exports, but China doesn’t get all that much from it.
Nevertheless, the International Monetary Fund has designated the Chinese renminbi as a global currency, joining the U.S. dollar, euro, British pound, and Japanese yen.11
China has plenty of capital. They’ve accumulated a lot of it from their exports. So in financial terms, they’re quite well off, and they spend money at a level well beyond other countries. The Chinese have many investments in central Asia. They’re slowly rebuilding something like the old Silk Roads, several of them, that run through central Asia, including to a big port in Pakistan they’ve developed.
Gwadar.
Yes. Chinese trade with the Middle East, if it goes by sea, has to go through areas which are largely controlled by the United States and its allies. So they’ve been quietly building alternatives. The port in Gwadar, if it works, will be connected to transport systems and pipelines that go straight to eastern China. That will be a way for, say, oil to flow to China.
China is also investing very heavily in Africa and other places. But while they are a huge power financially, I don’t think they compete with the United States economically.
China’s high-speed rail network, however, is a model.
Yes, though the United States is unique in how badly it handles rail. There’s an ideological resistance here to effective public transportation, to the point that some Republican-run states even refuse free money from the federal government to build high-speed rail. It’s ridiculous, and it harms the economy enormously. But it’s very important to some people to ensure that we don’t have public services that are efficient and effective. You want to maintain domination by private capital. It’s the same reason we don’t have a good health care system.
Japan is moving to amend its constitution to allow for the use of military force.12 What’s the significance of that?
It’s very significant. Japan has a so-called peace constitution. Article 9, imposed under U.S. occupation, explicitly states that Japan has to abandon its imperial pretensions and to commit whatever military forces it has solely to self-defense, with no participation in foreign military actions. If you look at the 1930s and 1940s, you understand the reasons. But there has been conflict over Article 9 in nationalist circles for some years. The government of Prime Minister Shinzō Abe has moved pretty vigorously to try to modify the constitution. They haven’t rescinded Article 9, but they’re reinterpreting it so that it permits Japan greater action in non-defensive extraterritorial actions.
Japan hosts a huge number of U.S. military bases, mostly in Okinawa, which, though part of Japan, is virtually a colony. The Okinawans don’t want the bases, but the Japanese government has overruled the Okinawan population, even their elected officials. The United States is now planning to build yet another base, which has provoked protests as well.13
From the Chinese point of view, of course, this is all aimed at China. Okinawa is no small thing. There is a history, which maybe we don’t want to know about but the Chinese are quite aware of. In 1962, for example, six months before Nikita Khrushchev sent missiles to Cuba, Kennedy sent intercontinental missiles aimed at China to Okinawa. At the time, there was a small war going on between India and China. And China was also in conflict with Russia. It was a very tense moment. So Kennedy sent these missiles to Okinawa.14 Of course, we don’t talk about that. We only talk about Russian missiles in Cuba—not U.S. missiles in Okinawa, Turkey, and elsewhere.
China is ringed by offensive missiles in hostile states under U.S. domination. And there are more and more of them, including on Jeju Island, South Korea, which has an effective U.S. military base. It’s part of the whole confrontation with China over the South China Sea. China itself is also taking aggressive measures, including building artificial islands, which interfere with the sovereignty claims of other countries.
Is the U.S. government re-creating the “containment” policy?
It’s not re-creating it, because it never ended.
You project an image of tranquillity and serenity, but you once told me that your stomach is often churning when you’re speaking. Where do you get your apparent equanimity from?
Maybe from my father, who was kind of a stoic. He always managed to keep a calm exterior. Maybe from him. Who knows?
Your mother, Elsie, was a teacher. And I read somewhere that she was politically active. Is that right?
She was active in Zionist, Hebraic, Jewish cultural circles. She was one of the leading intellectual figures in the Hadassah women’s organization. That’s where her political activity took place. Her family was also very active politically. They were working-class New Yorkers, mostly unemployed, involved in political factions, the Communist Party and others.
And that would be your mother’s sister Sophie’s husband, Milton Kraus?
Yes. Actually, Sophie and her husband met at a demonstration, I think. Sophie may have been close to the Communist Party—I’m not sure—but Milton wasn’t. He had broken free from the factions and was way off to the left by himself.
He was legally blind, I believe?
He was. But he could get around and he could read, with effort. He read a lot, in fact.
And he ran that now legendary newsstand on Seventy-second and Broadway.
He was also physically deformed. He was hunchbacked and small. It was how he got the newsstand, under a New Deal disability provision.
As you got older and as your criticisms of Israel became more and more pronounced, did you have any constraints or feel any difficulty in talking about this with your parents?
They weren’t happy about it. I had correspondence with my father about it, and we had discussions about it. Not so much with my mother, who didn’t object, but my father. It’s not that he disagreed. He said that he more or less agreed, but he didn’t like the way I was talking about it. He didn’t say it exactly, but there’s an old Jewish custom—you don’t talk about certain topics in front of the goyim.
Your book Peace in the Middle East? was published in 1974, after your mother had passed away, but your father was still alive.15 Did he read the book before it came out?
I had sent him chapters. Some of the chapters were first written in the 1960s, so he had seen them.
In many families, the mother is more affectionate and the father is the austere figure. Did that play out in your family as well?
Not really. My father was mostly engaged in his work, but I had more personal relations with him than with my mother. When I was nine or ten, we would spend a couple of hours on Friday evenings reading Hebrew articles, essays, poetry, and so on together.
Bob Teeters was a close childhood friend of yours. There’s an interesting story about his mother and your father.
I went to school from about age two. My parents were both Hebrew teachers, so they worked in the afternoon. When I was a baby, there was somebody, a maid, who would pick me up. But by the time I was maybe five or six, so probably by first grade, I would start going over to Bob’s house in the afternoon, and his mother would take care of us. Bob was in the same class, and he lived right across the street from the school. My parents would show up around six-thirty or so, after Hebrew school, and pick me up. That went on until we were in eighth grade. Then he went his way to high school, I went mine. We barely saw each other after that.
Our parents were friendly but not socially friendly. They didn’t have dinner together or anything. But many years later, Bob’s father died, my mother died, and somehow his mother and my father got together, and they finally got married. She was a midwestern Christian, and fairly anti-Semitic. She made an exception for my family, but in general she didn’t like Jews. She did convert to Judaism, which she didn’t like either, but my father insisted. It was complicated. But they were happy together.
Do you have any birthday celebrations planned?
That’s personal. I don’t talk about it.
People are interested in the man Chomsky.
They might be, but I’ve always kept that very separate from my public life.