4

Colloquy

Based primarily on discussions at Fort Collins, Colorado, April 10, 1990.

The Totalitarian Strain

MAN: There’s been a plethora of books recently by dissidents critiquing the media—yours and Ed Herman’s, and Ben Bagdikian’s, Michael Parenti’s, Mark Hertsgaard’s—but as I heard Alexander Cockburn say a couple days ago, “It’s still one nation under Time/Warner”: there’s all of this literature that’s available, but there really hasn’t been much of a dent in the structure.¹

 

Where would there be a dent? Suppose you had a thousand books: would that change the fact that Time and Warner Communications can form a conglomerate? All of this literature is not tied up with any form—any form, I mean, not five people—of social organization that is trying to undermine the corporate structure of the media. This work all is just an effort to educate people so they’re better able to protect themselves from the propaganda system. And there I think there has been an effect: a lot of people are attuned to propaganda in a way they weren’t before. But none of this can be conceived of as an attempt to change the corporate structure directly—there isn’t even a proposal about that in any one of these books. Take Ben Bagdikian’s book, or the first chapter of Ed’s and my book: they don’t suggest how we might change corporate capitalism, that’s a completely different topic. They just say, as long as you have corporate capitalism, here’s what the media are going to look like.

 

WOMAN: Are you going to do an article on what happened in Central America recently—the Nicaraguan elections [of 1990, in which the Sandinista Party lost to the U.S.-supported candidate, Violeta Chamorro]?

 

I am—not on the elections themselves, on the U.S. reaction to the elections. ² Nicaragua’s for them to write about, I write about the United States.

But the reaction of the media here was pretty astonishing. The most remarkable feature was the unanimity. I mean, there was an absolutely unanimous reaction across the entire mainstream spectrum, from Anthony Lewis and Mary McGrory over to George Will and whatever other right-wing lunatic there is. In fact, about the only difference between the so-called “liberals” and “conservatives” was that the liberals pointed to the fact that the Nicaraguan people essentially voted with a gun to their heads and then said, “The election was free and fair, uncoerced, a miracle of democracy,” whereas the conservatives didn’t bother saying the people voted with a gun to their heads, they just said it was a miracle of democracy.³

Some of it was comical. For instance, the New York Times had a column by David Shipler, a liberal journalist, which said, yeah, the embargo’s killing them, the contras are killing them, they know we’re going to continue the embargo unless they vote for our candidate. Headline: “Victory For U.S. Fair Play.” ⁴ The Boston Globe, which is a very liberal newspaper—it’s the outer limit in the mainstream—had a headline: “Rallying to Chamorro.” The theme was, okay, now all the people who love Nicaraguans, like we’ve all done all these years, must rally to Chamorro.⁵ Well, say it was 1964, after Goldwater lost the Presidential race here two to one—can you imagine anybody saying, “Okay, now every Goldwater voter must ‘rally to Johnson’ ”? That’s straight out of Stalinist Russia. You don’t “rally to the leader” in a democracy—you do whatever you feel like doing. But the idea that you’ve got to rally behind der Führer is quite acceptable in the American liberal press.

In fact, it’s interesting that the media themselves even recognized the unanimity. So for example, the New York Times had an article by Elaine Sciolino surveying the U.S. reaction, and the headline was, “Americans United in Joy, But Divided Over Policy.”⁶ And the division over policy turns out to be the question: who gets credit for having achieved this magnificent result? See, that’s where you get a liberal/conservative split: “did the contras help or hurt?” Is it better to do it the way it’s done in El Salvador—leave women hanging from trees with their skin flayed off and bleeding to death, leave thousands of corpses beheaded by the roadside so that everybody else will get the point—or should you do what Senator Alan Cranston suggested in 1986, to pick a dove: let them “fester in their own juices,” through economic strangulation and other means?⁷ Well, the fact is, the right wing wins on that one: the contras obviously helped. But the idea that everyone was “United in Joy” over the result, that was considered perfectly legitimate. In other words, we’re straight totalitarians: everyone is united, we all march on command, there isn’t one word of dissidence tolerated. Phrases like “United in Joy” are the kinds of things you might see in the North Korean press, maybe. But it’s interesting, American elites pride themselves on being dedicated totalitarians, they think that’s the way we ought to be—we ought to be the worst totalitarian culture in the world, in which everyone agrees.

Look, anyone can see, a ten-year-old could see, that an election carried out under conditions where a monstrous superpower is saying, “Vote for our candidate or starve to death,” is obviously not free. I mean, if some unimaginable superpower were to threaten us, saying, “We’re going to reduce you to the level of Ethiopia unless you vote for our candidate,” and then people here voted for their candidate, you’d have to be some kind of crazy Nazi or something to say that it was a free election. But in the United States, everyone says it—we’re all “United in Joy.” That’s an interesting fact about the United States, actually—what it shows is how deeply totalitarian the culture really is. In fact, it would be very hard to mimic this even in a well-run totalitarian state, but here it passes without anybody even noticing it, because it’s all so deeply ingrained. In any country that had even a memory of what democracy means, if you saw that everyone was “United in Joy,” the article would say, “There’s something really wrong with this country.” Nobody can be “United in Joy” over anything. Pick the topic, it just can’t be that people are “United in Joy” about it—unless it’s Albania, then yeah, sure, you’ve got the guns pointed at you, you’re “United in Joy.” But in the United States, nobody even sees that there’s anything odd about it.

 

WOMAN: There was a breakthrough, though—the Wall Street Journal on its front page ran an article written by a man from The Nation [a left-leaning magazine] saying that we ought to be ashamed of what happened in Nicaragua.

 

That wasn’t on the front page, that was on the Op-Ed page—and that was Alex Cockburn, who’s the Wall Street Journal’s once-a-month gesture to “some other voice.” Sure, I mean, when I say the unity was a hundred percent, I know of precisely two exceptions in the mainstream press in the United States. Obviously I haven’t read everything in the mainstream press, but I’ve looked at quite a lot, and I’ve been in touch with people all around the country who’ve been looking, and I found only two exceptions: one was Alex Cockburn in the Wall Street Journal, and the other was an editor I know at the Boston Globe, Randolph Ryan, who managed to put something about this in an editorial.⁸ So the two of them were able to say what any eight-year-old would see right off—and as far as I know, that’s it for the American press.

As a matter of fact, it was the same in the coverage before the elections. I, and probably you, and a lot of other people were following the media very closely just to see if there would be one phrase, just a phrase, anywhere in the mainstream media, that said that a Sandinista Party victory might be the best thing for Nicaragua—I haven’t found a phrase. I mean, even journalists who believe it couldn’t say it. Now, obviously the issue is contentious—it was contentious in Nicaragua—but here it’s not, here you have to have 100 percent unanimity.

Furthermore, it was also assumed automatically, across the board, that Chamorro was the democratic candidate—and nobody ever gave you a reason why she was the democratic candidate. I mean, what are her democratic credentials? That’s not anything you even have to argue in the United States: Washington says she’s the democratic candidate, and American business says she’s the democratic candidate, so that settles it—for American intellectuals, there are no further questions to ask. And the interesting thing is, again, nobody even sees that there’s anything odd about this. Like, nobody writes an Op-Ed saying, “Isn’t it strange? Just because Washington and the business community tell us she’s the democratic candidate, does that mean that we have to repeat it and not look for some reason, find out what her democratic credentials are?” It wouldn’t occur to anybody: the intellectual community in the United States is so disciplined they simply don’t ask those questions.

A Lithuania Hypothetical

MAN: Dr. Chomsky, I just want to ask a question on this topic: Daniel Ortega [Nicaraguan President, Sandinista Party] was in power for how long, a decade?

 

Yes.

 

MAN: And yet he lost the election.

 

Why “And yet”?

 

MAN: Well, he had control of that country for ten years.

 

What does it mean, “He had control of it”?

 

MAN: He controlled the press.

 

He did not. In fact, Nicaragua is the only country I know of in history that allowed a major opposition press [La Prensa] to operate while it was being attacked—a press which was calling for the overthrow of the government by violence, which was identifying with the foreign-run mercenary army attacking the country, and which was funded, partly openly and partly covertly (though everybody knew), by the foreign power attacking the country [i.e. the U.S.]. That’s never happened before in history—the United States would never tolerate anything like that for one second. Furthermore, and quite apart from that, large parts of Nicaragua were flooded, and in fact dominated, by U.S. propaganda. Remember, there are large areas of Nicaragua where what people know is what they hear over the radio, and the United States ran major radio and television stations in Honduras and Costa Rica which dominated the information flow in large sectors of the Nicaraguan countryside.⁹

In fact, the level of freedom of the press in Nicaragua in the last ten years just broke new libertarian standards: there’s never been anything even remotely comparable to it in history. Try to find a case.

 

MAN: But given ten years in power, it seemed rather remarkable that Ortega wasn’t able to hold on to that mandate.

 

Really? Well let me ask you how remarkable it is. Suppose the Soviet Union were to play the game the way we do. Lithuania just declared independence, right [in March 1990]? Let’s suppose that the Soviet Union were capable of doing what we did in Nicaragua. So: it would organize a terrorist army to attack Lithuania; it would train it to attack “soft targets,” civilian targets; it would try to kill large numbers of health workers, teachers, farmers, and so on.¹⁰ Meanwhile, it would impose an embargo—suppose it were able to do this—and block trade, block export and import, it would pressure international institutions to stop providing any assistance.¹¹ Of course, to make the analogy accurate, we’d have to assume that Lithuania begins at a level much lower than what it actually is.

Okay, now suppose that after ten years of this, Lithuania has been reduced to the level of Ethiopia, alright? And suppose that then there’s an election, and Moscow says: “Look, we’re going to continue this, all of it, unless you vote for the Communist Party.” And now suppose that the Lithuanians do vote for the Communist Party. Would you find that remarkable?

 

MAN: I don’t think Nicaragua was reduced to the level of Ethiopia.

 

Oh yeah, they were. They were reduced to the level of—well, maybe Haiti. ¹² But just answer my question: would you find that remarkable?

 

MAN: Under those circumstances, I guess I wouldn’t.

 

Okay, but then why do you find it remarkable when it happened in Nicaragua?

 

MAN: Well, I don’t have access to all the facts you do.

 

You have every fact I told you—every fact I told you, you knew. Every fact I told you you can find on the front pages of the New York Times. It’s just that when you hear the White House announce, “We’re going to continue with the embargo unless Chamorro wins,” you have to be able to think enough so you conclude, well, these people are voting with a gun to their heads.¹³ If you can’t think that far, it doesn’t matter what the newspapers say. And the beauty of a really well-indoctrinated intellectual class is they can’t think that far. They can think that far easily in the case of Lithuania, but they can’t think that far in the case of the United States, even though the actual situation is the hypothetical one that I described. So often the information is there, in a sense—it’s just that it’s not there, because people are so indoctrinated that they simply don’t see it.

Perpetuating Brainwashing Under Freedom

MAN: Why is it that across the board in the media you can’t find examples of people using their brains?

 

You can find them, but typically they’re not in the mainstream press.

 

MAN: Why is that?

 

Because if they have the capacity to think freely and understand these types of things, they’re going to be kept out by a very complicated filtering system—which actually starts in kindergarten, I think. In fact, the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on—because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions. I mean, it would be highly dysfunctional to have people in the media who could ask questions like this. So by the time you’ve made it to Bureau Chief or Editor, or you’ve become a bigshot at C.B.S. or something, the chances are that you’ve just got all this stuff in your bones—you’ve internalized values that make it clear to you that there are certain things you just don’t say, and in fact, you don’t even think about them anymore.

This was actually discussed years ago in an interesting essay by George Orwell, which happens to be the introduction to Animal Farm. Animal Farm is a satire on Soviet totalitarianism, obviously, and it’s a very famous book, everybody reads it. But what people don’t usually read is its introduction, which talks about censorship in England—and the main reason people don’t read it is because it was censored, nicely; it simply wasn’t published with the book. It was finally rediscovered about thirty years later and somebody somewhere published it, and now it’s available in some modern editions. But in this essay Orwell said, look, this book is obviously about Stalinist Russia, however it’s not all that different in England. And then he described how things work in England. He said: in England there isn’t any commissar around who beats you over the head if you say the wrong thing, but nevertheless the results are not all that different. And then he had a two-line description of how the press works in England, which is pretty accurate, in fact. One of the reasons why the results are similar, he said, is because the press is owned by wealthy men who have strong interests in not having certain things said. The other, which he said is equally pertinent, is that if you’re a well-educated person in England—you went to the right prep schools, then to Oxford, and now you’re a bigshot somewhere—you have simply learned that there are certain things that it is not proper to say.¹⁴

And that’s a large part of education, in fact: just internalizing the understanding that there are certain things it is not proper to say, and it is not proper to think. And if you don’t learn that, typically you’ll be weeded out of the institutions somewhere along the line. Well, those two factors are very important ones, and there are others, but they go a long way towards explaining the uniformity of ideology in the intellectual culture here. ¹⁵

Now, of course, it’s not a hundred percent—so you’ll get a few people filtering through who will do things differently. Like I say, in this “United in Joy” business, I was able to find two people in the United States who were not “United in Joy,” and were able to say so in the mainstream press. But if the system is really working well, it’s not going to do things which undermine itself. In fact, it’s a bit like asking, “How come Pravda under Stalin didn’t have journalists denouncing the Gulags [Soviet penal labor camps]?” Why not? Well, it would have been dysfunctional to the system. I suspect it’s not that the journalists in Pravda were lying—I mean, that was a different system, they used the threat of force to silence dissidents, which we don’t use much here. But even in the Soviet Union, chances are very strong that if you actually bothered to look, you’d find that most of the journalists actually believed the things they wrote. And that’s because people who didn’t believe that kind of thing would never have made it onto Pravda in the first place. It’s very hard to live with cognitive dissonance: only a real cynic can believe one thing and say another. So whether it’s a totalitarian system or a free system, the people who are most useful to the system of power are the ones who actually believe what they say, and they’re the ones who will typically make it through.

So take Tom Wicker at the New York Times: when you talk to him about this kind of stuff, he gets very irate and says, “Nobody tells me what to write.” And that’s perfectly true, nobody tells him what to write—but if he didn’t already know what to write, he wouldn’t be a columnist for the New York Times. Like, nobody tells Alex Cockburn what to write, and therefore he’s not a columnist for the New York Times, because he thinks different things. You think the wrong thoughts, you’re not in the system.

Now, it’s interesting that the Wall Street Journal allows this one opening, Alex Cockburn. I mean, the opening is so minuscule that it’s not even worth discussing—but it so happens that once a month, there is one mainstream journal in the United States which allows a real dissident to write a free and open column. So that means, like, .0001 percent of the coverage is free and independent. And it’s in the Wall Street Journal, which doesn’t care: for their audience the New York Times is Communist, so here’s a guy who’s even more Communist.

And the result of all of this is that it’s a very effective system of ideological control—much more effective than Soviet totalitarianism ever was. In fact, if you look at the entire range of media in the Soviet Union that people were actually exposed to, they had much more dissidence in the 1980s than we do, overtly, and people were in fact reading a much broader range of press, listening to foreign broadcasts, and so on—which is pretty much unheard of in the U.S.¹⁶ Or just to give one other example, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there was even a newscaster [Vladimir Danchev] who made broadcasts over Moscow radio for five successive nights back in 1983, denouncing the Russian invasion of Afghanistan—he actually called it an “invasion”—and calling on the Afghans to resist, before he was finally taken off the air.¹⁷ That’s unimaginable in the United States. I mean, can you imagine Dan Rather or anybody else getting on the radio and denouncing the U.S. “invasion” of South Vietnam, and calling on the Vietnamese to resist? That’s inconceivable. The United States couldn’t have that amount of intellectual freedom.

 

MAN: Well, I don’t know if that’s “intellectual freedom,” for a journalist to say that.

 

Sure it is. It’s intellectual freedom when a journalist can understand that 2 + 2 = 4; that’s what Orwell was writing about in 1984. Everybody here applauds that book, but nobody is willing to think about what it means. What Winston Smith [the main character] was saying is, if we can still understand that 2 + 2 = 4, they haven’t taken everything away. Okay? Well, in the United States, people can’t even understand that 2 + 2 = 4.

 

MAN: Couldn’t an editorialist say it, though, even if a reporter can’t?

 

Have any of them done it, in thirty years?

 

MAN: I don’t know.

 

Well, I’ll tell you, nobody has; I’ve checked, actually. ¹⁸

 

WOMAN: You make it sound so uniform, though—like there’s only one or two people in the entire U.S. media who aren’t dishonest or blindly serving power.

 

Well, that’s really not my point: obviously in any complex institution, there are going to be a fair number of people who want to do their work with integrity, and are good at it, and don’t just end up serving power—these systems aren’t totally monolithic, after all. A lot of people go into journalism with a real commitment to professional integrity—they like the field, and they want to do it honestly. And some of them continue to do an admirable job of it—in fact, some of them even manage to do it at journals like the New York Times.

In fact, to a large degree I think you can tell when the New York Times’s editors want a story covered accurately just by looking at who they send to the place. For instance, when they send John Kifner, that means they want the story told—because he’s an honest journalist, and he’s going to tell the story. I mean, I don’t know him personally, but you can just tell from his work that he’s a journalist of real integrity, and he’s going to dig, he’s going to find out the truth, and he’s going to write about it—and the editors must know that. So I don’t know anything about how they assign stories at the Times, but I’m willing to make a bet that when there’s a story the Times’s editors want told, they’ll send Kifner, and when his job is done they’ll probably send him back to the “Metro” desk or something.

On the other hand, most of the people at the Times who make it to be correspondent or editor or whatever tend to be either very obedient or very cynical. The obedient ones have adapted—they’ve internalized the values and believe what they’re saying, otherwise they probably wouldn’t have made it that far. But there are also some plain cynics. James LeMoyne at the Times is a perfect example: James LeMoyne is an absolute crook, he’s one of the most dishonest journalists I’ve ever seen. The dishonesty of his reporting is so extreme, in fact, that it can’t just be indoctrination in his case. Actually, LeMoyne’s tenure as a correspondent in Central America ended up with an exposure so bad that even the Times had to publish an admission about it. Did you follow that?

In 1988 LeMoyne had written a story which talked about two people in El Salvador who he claimed were tortured by left-wing guerrillas trying to undermine the elections; it was one part of a whole effort in the American press at the time to maintain support for the U.S. client regime in El Salvador despite its atrocities.¹⁹ Well, a freelance journalist in Central America, Chris Norton, saw LeMoyne’s article and was surprised by it, because the atrocities LeMoyne described were supposed to have taken place in an area of the country reporters couldn’t get to, because it was under military occupation. Norton wanted to figure out just how LeMoyne knew about these people being tortured, so he went up as close to that region as he could, and he talked to the mayor, and to the priest, and to people in the community—and he discovered that one of the alleged victims didn’t exist, and the other was perfectly fine. He then went back to San Salvador and did some more checking—and he discovered that LeMoyne had simply taken the story straight from a San Salvadoran newspaper, where it had been attributed to an army officer. It was in fact just straight army disinformation of a standard sort, which LeMoyne then reported in the New York Times as if he knew something about it. Then the State Department picked it up from the New York Times and distributed it to Congress to show that the Salvadoran guerrillas were undermining the election.

Well, Norton uncovered this, then another freelance journalist, Mark Cooper, picked up Norton’s story and published something about it in the L.A. Weekly, an alternative weekly in Los Angeles. The piece then appeared in the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting journal, Extra!—F.A.I.R. is a very good media analysis group in New York. Still no reaction from the Times. Finally, Alex Cockburn got ahold of it, and mentioned it in his column in The Nation.²⁰ Well, by that time word was sort of getting around about this, so the Times figured they had to react, and they published a correction—I think it’s the longest correction they’ve ever published, it’s several paragraphs long. It said, our usual high standards were not met in this case, one thing or another like that.²¹

Well, that’s kind of an extreme example—but it’s by no means the only case like that. In fact, just let me mention one other one, which was even more important—here LeMoyne really plied his trade.

Journalism LeMoyne-Style: A Sample of the Cynical Aspect

As you know, for years it was necessary for the U.S. government to maintain the pretense that the contras in Nicaragua were a guerrilla force, not a U.S. proxy army. Now, it’s perfectly obvious that they were not a guerrilla force—there are no guerrillas in history that have had anything remotely like the degree of support we gave the contras: there are no guerrillas in history that had three supply flights a day bringing them food and supplies and weapons, and who complained that they didn’t have enough airplanes, and that they needed more helicopters. I mean, the whole thing was completely ridiculous: these guys had armaments that some units of the American army didn’t have, they had computer centers, they had communications equipment. And they needed all of that, because Nicaragua was under constant surveillance by high-performance American reconnaissance aircraft to determine where Sandinista troops were being deployed, and the contras had to have some way of receiving that information. ²²

But the point is, it was necessary for the propaganda system to pretend that the contras were like the F.M.L.N. in El Salvador—just a regular indigenous guerrilla force opposing the government. And part of the method for claiming that these two forces were equivalent was to say that the F.M.L.N. guerrillas also had outside support from a foreign government—in other words, from the government of Nicaragua—and that was the only reason they could survive. Well, it’s conceivable that the F.M.L.N. was getting outside support, but if so, it would have been some kind of a miracle—because it was undetectable. I mean, it’s not that the United States is a primitive, stone-age society: there are technological means around to discover evidence of such things, but they never were able to detect any support coming from Nicaragua at all.

According to the State Department propaganda, the main arms flow from Nicaragua to the F.M.L.N. was across the Gulf of Fonseca.²³ Well, David MacMichael, who was the C.I.A. analyst in charge of analyzing this material in the early 1980s and then quit the Agency, testified at the World Court and pointed out what this meant. He described the situation: the Gulf of Fonseca is thirty kilometers wide; it’s completely patrolled by the U.S. Navy; there’s an island in the middle of it which had a super-sophisticated U.S. radar system that could pick up boats up and down the Pacific Coast; there were U.S. Navy S.E.A.L. teams running all around the place—yet they never even picked up a canoe. So if Nicaragua were sending arms across the Gulf of Fonseca, they had to have had some super-sophisticated methods.²⁴ I mean, the Nicaraguans had no problem whatsoever detecting the U.S. arms flow to the contras—they told reporters exactly where it was coming from; it was unreported in the United States, because the reporters chose not to report it, but the Nicaraguans had no problem detecting it.²⁵ Anyway, that was the propaganda line that had to be maintained in the American press, that was the official story. Now we come back to James LeMoyne.

The United States government opposed the Central American peace accords that were signed in 1987 [Esquipulas II, the so-called “Arias plan”], so it was therefore necessary to demolish them. And one of the ways of demolishing them was to increase aid to the contras. The press committed itself with great passion to helping this effort along; LeMoyne was right up front. Right after the accords were signed, LeMoyne published an article in which he wrote: there is “ample evidence” that the Salvadoran guerrillas are being supplied with arms by Nicaragua in violation of the peace accords, and without that support the guerrillas couldn’t survive.²⁶ Alright, that had always been the necessary story, but just then it was especially important to drive it home—because right then the United States was tripling its supply flights to the contras in response to the accords, and of course in violation of the accords. ²⁷ So the press wouldn’t report that we were escalating our support for the contras, but they kept reporting that the Nicaraguans were illegally arming the F.M.L.N. in El Salvador—and now James LeMoyne says that there is “ample evidence” of it.

Well, when that story appeared, F.A.I.R. wrote a letter to the New York Times, asking them to please have James LeMoyne enlighten their readers about the “ample evidence” of this arms flow to the F.M.L.N.—since the World Court couldn’t find it, and no independent investigator’s been able to find it, and the guys who worked on it in the C.I.A. didn’t know about it: could they please do that? Well, the Times didn’t publish their letter, but F.A.I.R. did get a personal response back from the Foreign Editor, Joseph Lelyveld, who said, yes, maybe LeMoyne’s report was a bit imprecise this time, it didn’t meet his usual high standards, and so on. ²⁸

Then followed a period in which the Times had plenty of time to correct the “imprecision”—but instead article after article appeared by LeMoyne, George Volsky, Steven Engelberg and others, repeating exactly the same falsehood: that there was ample evidence of an arms flow from Nicaragua.²⁹ But F.A.I.R. just kept after them, and finally they got another letter back from Lelyveld, the Foreign Editor—this was around March now, their first letter was in August. Lelyveld said he had recently assigned LeMoyne to do a major story on the arms flow to the F.M.L.N., to really nail the thing down once and for all, and that they should wait for that story. Okay, they waited. Nothing happened. Six months later, they figured nothing was going to happen, so they published this interchange of letters with Lelyveld in the F.A.I.R. newsletter, and said: we don’t see the story, what’s going on?³⁰

Two months after that, a story did finally appear in the Times—I think it was LeMoyne’s last story before he left the Times, or whatever he did, took a leave or something. This is now fifteen months after his original story about the “ample evidence,” nine months after he was assigned to do the follow-up. And if you take a look at the article the Times finally published, you’ll discover that the “ample evidence” had turned into no evidence. LeMoyne said: well, there really is no direct evidence of any supply of arms from Nicaragua; some people say this, some people say that, but there’s nothing concrete, there’s nothing to point to. So that’s the end of the story: it turns out the “ample evidence” is no evidence.³¹

Now, that’s no joke—this is fabrication in the service of the state that has led to tens of thousands of people being killed, because maintaining this pretense over the years has been one of the ways in which the U.S. government has supported the terror in El Salvador and extended the war against Nicaragua. It’s not a small point. This is serious lying, very serious. And it’s just one of thousands of cases demonstrating that the media in the United States serve the interests of state-corporate power, they are organs of propaganda, as in fact one would expect them to be.³²

Rethinking Watergate

MAN: But how do you explain Watergate, then? Those reporters weren’t very sympathetic to power—they toppled a President.

 

And just ask yourself why he was toppled—he was toppled because he had made a very bad mistake: he had antagonized people with power.

See, one of the serious illusions we live under in the United States, which is a major part of the whole system of indoctrination, is the idea that the government is the power—and the government’s not the power, the government is one segment of power. Real power is in the hands of the people who own the society; the state-managers are usually just servants. And Watergate is actually a perfect illustration of the point—because right at the time of Watergate, history actually ran a controlled experiment for us. The Watergate exposures, it turns out, came at exactly the same time as the COINTELPRO exposures—I don’t know if you know what I mean.

 

MAN: COINTELPRO?

 

See, you probably don’t—but that already makes my point, because the COINTELPRO exposures were a thousand times more significant than Watergate. Remember what Watergate was, after all: Watergate was a matter of a bunch of guys from the Republican National Committee breaking into a Democratic Party office for essentially unknown reasons and doing no damage. Okay, that’s petty burglary, it’s not a big deal. Well, at the exact same time that Watergate was discovered, there were exposures in the courts and through the Freedom of Information Act of massive F.B.I. operations to undermine political freedom in the United States, running through every administration back to Roosevelt, but really picking up under Kennedy. It was called “COINTELPRO” [short for “Counterintelligence Program”], and it included a vast range of things.

It included the straight Gestapo-style assassination of a Black Panther leader; it included organizing race riots in an effort to destroy the black movements; it included attacks on the American Indian Movement, on the women’s movement, you name it. It included fifteen years of F.B.I. disruption of the Socialist Workers Party—that meant regular F.B.I. burglaries, stealing membership lists and using them to threaten people, going to businesses and getting members fired from their jobs, and so on.³³ Well, that fact alone—the fact that for fifteen years the F.B.I. had been burglarizing and trying to undermine a legal political party—is already vastly more important than the fact that a bunch of Keystone Kops broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters one time. The Socialist Workers Party is a legal political party, after all—the fact that they’re a weak political party doesn’t mean they have less rights than the Democrats. And this wasn’t a bunch of gangsters, this was the national political police: that’s very serious. And it didn’t happen once in the Watergate office complex, it was going on for fifteen years, under every administration. And keep in mind, the Socialist Workers Party episode is just some tiny footnote to COINTELPRO. In comparison to this, Watergate is a tea party.

Well, look at the comparison in treatment—I mean, you’re aware of the comparison in treatment, that’s why you know about Watergate and you don’t know about COINTELPRO. So what does that tell you? What it tells you is, people in power will defend themselves. The Democratic Party represents about half of corporate power, and those people are able to defend themselves; the Socialist Workers Party represents no power, the Black Panthers don’t represent any power, the American Indian Movement doesn’t represent any power—so you can do anything you want to them.

Or take a look at the Nixon administration’s famous “Enemies List,” which came out in the course of Watergate [exposed in 1973, the document named 208 Americans from various professions under the title “Opponents list and political enemies project”]. You’ve heard of that, but did you hear about the assassination of Fred Hampton? No. Nothing ever happened to any of the people who were on the Enemies List, which I know perfectly well, because I was on it—and it wasn’t because I was on it that it made the front pages. But the F.B.I. and the Chicago police assassinated a Black Panther leader as he lay in his bed one night during the Nixon administration [on December 4, 1969]. Well, if the press had any integrity at all, if the Washington Post had any integrity, what they would have said is, “Watergate is totally insignificant and innocuous, who cares about any of that in comparison with these other things.” But that’s not what happened, obviously. And that just shows again, very dramatically, how the press is lined up with power.

The real lesson of Nixon’s fall is that the President shouldn’t call Thomas Watson [Chairman of I.B.M.] and McGeorge Bundy [former Democratic official] bad names—that means the Republic’s collapsing. And the press prides itself on having exposed this fact. On the other hand, if you want to send the F.B.I. to organize the assassination of a Black Panther leader, that’s fine by us; it’s fine by the Washington Post too.

Incidentally, I think there is another reason why a lot of powerful people were out to get Nixon at that time—and it had to do with something a lot more profound than the Enemies List and the Watergate burglary. I suspect it had to do with the events of the summer of 1971, when the Nixon administration basically broke up the international economic arrangement that had existed for the previous twenty-five years [i.e. the so-called “Bretton Woods” system, established in 1944 at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire]. See, by 1971 the Vietnam War had already badly weakened the United States economically relative to its industrial rivals, and one of the ways the Nixon administration reacted to that was by simply tearing apart the Bretton Woods system, which had been set up to organize the world economy after World War II. The Bretton Woods system had made the United States the world’s banker, basically—it had established the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency fixed to gold, and it imposed conditions about no import quotas, and so on. And Nixon just tore the whole thing to shreds: he went off the gold standard, he stopped the convertibility of the dollar, he raised import duties. No other country would have had the power to do that, but Nixon did it, and that made him a lot of powerful enemies—because multinational corporations and international banks relied on that system, and they did not like it being broken down. So if you look back, you’ll find that Nixon was being attacked in places like the Wall Street Journal at the time, and I suspect that from that point on there were plenty of powerful people out to get him. Watergate just offered an opportunity.

In fact, in this respect I think Nixon was treated extremely unfairly. I mean, there were real crimes of the Nixon administration, and he should have been tried—but not for any of the Watergate business. Take the bombing of Cambodia, for instance: the bombing of Cambodia was infinitely worse than anything that came up in the Watergate hearings—this thing they call the “secret bombing” of Cambodia, which was “secret” because the press didn’t talk about what they knew.³⁴ The U.S. killed maybe a couple hundred thousand people in Cambodia, they devastated a peasant society. ³⁵ The bombing of Cambodia did not even appear in Nixon’s Articles of Impeachment. It was raised in the Senate hearings, but only in one interesting respect—the question that was raised was, why hadn’t Nixon informed Congress? It wasn’t, why did you carry out one of the most intense bombings in history in densely populated areas of a peasant country, killing maybe 150,000 people? That never came up. The only question was, why didn’t you tell Congress? In other words, were people with power granted their prerogatives? And once again, notice that what it means is, infringing on the rights of powerful people is unacceptable: “We’re powerful, so you’ve got to tell us—then we’ll tell you, ‘Fine, go bomb Cambodia.’ ” In fact, that whole thing was a gag—because there was no reason for Congress not to have known about the bombing, just as there was no reason for the media not to have known: it was completely public.

So in terms of all the horrifying atrocities the Nixon government carried out, Watergate isn’t even worth laughing about. It was a triviality. Watergate is a very clear example of what happens to servants when they forget their role and go after the people who own the place: they are very quickly put back into their box, and somebody else takes over. You couldn’t ask for a better illustration of it than that—and it’s even more dramatic because this is the great exposure that’s supposed to demonstrate what a free and critical press we have. What Watergate really shows is what a submissive and obedient press we have, as the comparisons to COINTELPRO and Cambodia illustrate very clearly.

Escaping Indoctrination

MAN: But do you think things are ever going to change? Aren’t we always going to have people entrenched in power, left or right, who want to preserve that power, and will use all of the means at their disposal to do it—and all we can really do is just sit back and complain about it?

 

That’s the attitude of people who thought that there was nothing you could do about feudalism and slavery. And there was something you could do about feudalism and slavery, but not by sitting and complaining about it. John Brown didn’t sit and complain about it.

 

MAN: He didn’t get very far.

 

He did. They overthrew slavery, and the Abolitionists played a big role in that.

[Brown’s 1859 attempt to set off a slave revolt by seizing a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, electrified the country and intensified the Abolitionist movement.]

 

MAN: So as long as we criticize, try to offer constructive criticism, there’s hope of changing the system?

 

If the constructive criticism leads to the point where mass popular movements form that do something to change the system, sure, then there’s hope. I mean, there wouldn’t have been an American Revolution if people had been writing pamphlets but not doing anything more than that.

 

WOMAN: Then what’s the trick to holding on and not giving up—because it seems like a lot of people need it.

 

The trick is not to be isolated—if you’re isolated, like Winston Smith in 1984, then sooner or later you’re going to break, as he finally broke. That was the point of Orwell’s story. In fact, the whole tradition of popular control has been exactly that: to keep people isolated, because if you can keep them isolated enough, you can get them to believe anything. But when people get together, all sorts of things are possible.

 

MAN: It just seems so hopeless, though, because you make it sound like the entire press organization is locking dissidents out.

 

That’s largely true—but like I say, there’s a lot of flexibility possible. I mean, it’s true that the ideological barrier in the U.S. media is extreme—other countries have more openings for dissidence in the mainstream than we do, even though their economic systems are basically the same. But still there is quite a range of possibility for opening up the press here, even as it now stands: it doesn’t have to be .0001 percent open to dissident perspectives, it could be .1 percent or something. So I actually think there are plenty of changes possible in the United States, even from within the institutions.

Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. In fact, typically the elites are the most indoctrinated segment of a society, because they are the ones who are exposed to the most propaganda and actually take part in the decision-making process. For them you have the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and so on. But there’s also a mass media, whose main function is just to get rid of the rest of the population—to marginalize and eliminate them, so they don’t interfere with decision-making. And the press that’s designed for that purpose isn’t the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s sitcoms on television, and the National Enquirer, and sex and violence, and babies with three heads, and football, all that kind of stuff. But the approximately 85 percent of the population that is the main target of that media, they don’t have it in their genes that they’re not interested in the way the world works. And if they can escape from the effects of the de-education and indoctrination system, and the whole class system it’s a part of—it’s after all not just indoctrination that keeps people from getting involved in political life, by any means—if they can do that, then yeah, they’re a big audience for an alternative, and there’s some hope.

In fact, there’s a very interesting history about this in England. For a long time in England, there was a mass, popular, daily labor press of quite good newspapers, with a huge readership—a much bigger readership than all the elite press in England combined, actually. It was the Daily Herald and the News Chronicle and the Sunday Citizen. And this was not just Alex Cockburn once a month in the Wall Street Journal, but every day there were newspapers giving a picture of the world and expressing a set of values radically different from those of the business community. And not only did they have a big circulation, but their audience was also very much involved—for instance, there were surveys showing that people actually read those newspapers much more than subscribers to things like the Guardian and the London Times. But they disappeared in the 1960s, and they disappeared due to market pressures—it didn’t have anything to do with the number of readers they had, it had to do with the amount of capital they could attract. Could you get advertisers, could you get capital for investment? In short, could you appeal to the business community, which happens to hold the real power? And over time, they couldn’t.³⁶

It’s the same thing here: for instance, in the United States there isn’t even any such thing as a “labor reporter” anymore (except in the business press, actually)—but there are plenty of “business reporters.” And again, that doesn’t reflect people’s interests: a lot more people are interested in the problems of workers than are interested in the bond market, if you count their numbers—but if you multiply their numbers by their power in the society, then yeah, it’s true, the market for news about money and stocks is much greater than the market for news about issues which matter to working people.

But that’s just the fact about an inegalitarian system: when you have a serious disproportion of power, independent forces are likely to collapse—just because they can’t get access to enough capital in the end. Like in England, some media corporation didn’t come along and try to offer this huge mass audience another paper with a social-democratic line. Business doesn’t work that way—it’s not trying to educate people to overthrow it, even if you could make a profit off it. I mean, if you could convince Rupert Murdoch that he can make a ton of money by publishing a newspaper which has a social-democratic or even more radical line, something calling for workers’ management of corporations for instance, he wouldn’t do it—because there are some things that are more important than profits, like maintaining the entire system of power.

In fact, this is also pretty much the same reason why American elites want military spending instead of social spending: if it turned out, as is likely, that using taxpayers’ money for socially useful purposes was even more profitable than sending it through the military system, that still wouldn’t change the decision to prefer military spending—because social spending is going to interfere with the basic prerogatives of power, it’s going to organize popular constituencies, and have all these other negative side effects that you want to avoid.

 

WOMAN: So what you’re saying is, even if there were a major cultural change, with people at the grassroots level actually demanding a much more open press, there still wouldn’t be the capital to support that press?

 

No, people would have to take control of that capital. I mean, for one thing, if there really were a mass of people demanding that kind of press, they would have the capital—not at the level of big corporations, but like unions, say. When unions are a mass organization, they can accumulate strike funds, even though they can’t compete with management and ownership in terms of total resources. But for another thing, there’s no law of nature which says that control over capital has to be in a few hands—that’s like saying that political power has to be in a few hands. Why? There wasn’t a law that said that the king and the nobles had to run everything, and there isn’t a law that says that corporate owners and managers have to run everything either. These are social arrangements. They developed historically, they can be changed historically.

Understanding the Middle East Conflict

MAN: If I can just change the topic a little, Professor—I’d like you to talk a bit about the situation in the Middle East these days. People say the Palestinians are utilizing the media more than they ever have before to draw attention to Israeli repression [i.e. during the Palestinian uprising of the late 1980s]. I’m wondering whether you think that will have any effect on Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the future?

[Editors’ Note: The following discussion of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict forms the foundation of Chomsky’s analysis of the so-called “peace process” that began in the early 1990s, which is discussed in chapters 5 and 8.]

 

Well, this business about the Palestinians “using the media” is mostly racist garbage, in my view. The fact of the matter is that the Intifada is a big, mass, popular revolution in reaction to the absolutely brutal treatment the Palestinians have been living under—and it’s going on in places where there are no television cameras, and places where there are.

See, there’s a whole racist line which is very common in the United States. One of my favorite versions of it appeared in the journal Commentary, in an article written by some professor in Canada. It said: the Palestinians are “people who breed, and bleed, and advertise their misery.” ³⁷ Straight Nazi propaganda. I mean, imagine if somebody said that about Jews: “Jews are people who breed, and bleed, and advertise their misery.” But that’s the kind of thing you hear—it’s a particularly vulgar version of it, but the line is: look, the Palestinians are just doing it for the cameras because they’re trying to discredit the Jews.

They do exactly the same thing when there are no cameras.

The real point is, Israel is having a lot of trouble putting down this popular revolution. I mean, the repression of the Palestinians in the West Bank is not qualitatively different right now from what it’s been for the last twenty years—it’s just that it’s escalated in scale since the Palestinians started fighting back in the Intifada. So the brutality you see occasionally now on television has in fact been going on for the last twenty years, and it’s just the nature of a military occupation: military occupations are harsh and brutal, there is no other kind [Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria during the Six Day War in 1967, and has controlled them ever since]. There’s been home-destruction, collective punishments, expulsion, plenty of humiliation, censorship—I mean, you’d have to go back to the worst days of the American South to know what it’s been like for the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. They are not supposed to raise their heads—that’s what they say in Israel, “They’re raising their heads, we’ve got to do something about it.” And that’s the way the Palestinians have been living. ³⁸

Well, the United States has been quite happy supporting that—so long as it worked. But in the last few years, it hasn’t worked. See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence. If violence is effective, everything’s okay; but if violence loses its effectiveness, then they start worrying and have to try something else. So right now you can see U.S. planners reassessing their policies towards the Occupied Territories, just as you can see the Israeli leadership reassessing them—because violence isn’t working as well anymore. In fact, the occupation’s beginning to be rather harmful for Israel. So it’s entirely possible that there could be some tactical changes coming with respect to how Israel goes about controlling the Territories—but none of this has anything to do with “using the media.”

 

WOMAN: What do you think a solution might be for resolving the conflict in the region, then?

 

Well, outside of the United States, everybody would know the answer to that question. I mean, for years there’s been a very broad consensus in the world over the basic framework of a solution in the Middle East, with the exception of two countries: the United States and Israel.³⁹ It’s going to have to be some variety of two-state settlement.

Look, there are two groups claiming the right of national self-determination in the same territory; they both have a claim, they’re competing claims. There are various ways in which such competing claims could be reconciled—you could do it through a federation, one thing or another—but given the present state of conflict, it’s just going to have to be done through some form of two-state settlement.⁴⁰ Now, you could talk about the modalities—should it be a confederation, how do you deal with economic integration, and so on—but the principle’s quite clear: there has to be some settlement that recognizes the right of self-determination of Jews in something like the state of Israel, and the right of self-determination of Palestinians in something like a Palestinian state. And everybody knows where that Palestinian state would be—in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, along roughly the borders that existed before the Six Day War in 1967. And everybody knows who the representative of the Palestinians is: it’s the Palestine Liberation Organization [P.L.O.].

All of this has been obvious for years—why hasn’t it happened? Well, of course Israel’s opposed to it. But the main reason it hasn’t happened is because the United States has blocked it: the United States has been blocking the peace process in the Middle East for the last twenty years—we’re the leaders of the rejectionist camp, not the Arabs or anybody else. See, the United States supports a policy which Henry Kissinger called “stalemate”; that was his word for it back in 1970.⁴¹ At that time, there was kind of a split in the American government as to whether we should join the broad international consensus on a political settlement, or block a political settlement. And in that internal struggle, the hard-liners prevailed; Kissinger was the main spokesman. The policy that won out was what he called “stalemate”: keep things the way they are, maintain the system of Israeli oppression. And there was a good reason for that, it wasn’t just out of the blue: having an embattled, militaristic Israel is an important part of how we rule the world.

Basically the United States doesn’t give a damn about Israel: if it goes down the drain, U.S. planners don’t care one way or another, there’s no moral obligation or anything else. But what they do care about is control of the enormous oil resources of the Middle East. I mean, a big part of the way you run the planet is by controlling Middle East oil, and in the late 1950s, the United States began to recognize that Israel would be a very useful ally in this respect. So for example, there’s a National Security Council Memorandum in 1958 which points out that the main enemy of the United States in the Middle East (as everywhere) is nationalism, what they call “radical Arab nationalism”—which means independence, countries pursuing a course other than submission to the needs of American power. Well, that’s always the enemy: the people there don’t always see why the enormous wealth and resources of the region have to be in the control of American and British investors while they starve, they’ve never really gotten that into their heads—and sometimes they try to do something about it. Alright, that’s unacceptable to the United States, and one of the things they pointed out is that a useful weapon against that sort of “radical Arab nationalism” would be a highly militarized Israel, which would then be a reliable base for U.S. power in the region. ⁴²

Now, that insight was not really acted upon extensively until the Six Day War in 1967, when, with U.S. support, Israel essentially destroyed Nasser [the Egyptian President]—who was regarded as the main Arab nationalist force in the Middle East—and virtually all the other Arab armies in the region too. That won Israel a lot of points, it established them as what’s called a “strategic asset”—that is, a military force that can be used as an outlet for U.S. power. In fact, at the time, Israel and Iran under the Shah (which were allies, tacit allies) came to be regarded by American planners as two parts of a tripartite U.S. system for controlling the Middle East. This consisted first of all of Saudi Arabia, which is where most of the oil is, and then its two gendarmes, pre-revolutionary Iran and Israel—the “Guardians of the Gulf,” as they were called, who were supposed to protect Saudi Arabia from indigenous nationalist forces in the area. Of course, when the Shah fell in the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Israel’s role became even more important to the United States, it was the last “Guardian.” ⁴³

Meanwhile, Israel began to pick up secondary functions: it started to serve as a mercenary state for the United States around the world. So in the 1960s, Israel started to be used as a conduit for intervening in the affairs of black African countries, under a big C.I.A. subsidy. And in the 1970s and Eighties, the United States increasingly turned to Israel as kind of a weapon against other parts of the Third World—Israel would provide armaments and training and computers and all sorts of other things to Third World dictatorships at times when it was hard for the U.S. government to give that support directly. For instance, Israel acted as the main U.S. contact with the South African military for years, right through the embargo [the U.N. Security Council imposed a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa in 1977 after the U.S. and Britain had vetoed even stronger resolutions].⁴⁴ Well, that’s a very useful alliance, and that’s another reason why Israel gets such extraordinary amounts of U.S. aid.⁴⁵

The Threat of Peace

But notice that this whole system only works as long as Israel remains embattled. So suppose there was a real peace settlement in the Middle East, and Israel was just integrated into the region as its most technologically advanced country, kind of like Switzerland or Luxembourg or something. Well, at that point its value to the United States is essentially over—we already have Luxembourg, we don’t need another one. Israel’s value to the United States depends on the fact that it is threatened with destruction: that makes them completely dependent on the United States for survival, and therefore extremely reliable—because if the rug ever is pulled out from under them in a situation of real conflict, they will get destroyed.

And that reasoning has held right up to the present. I mean, it’s easy to show that the United States has blocked every move towards a political settlement that has come along in the Middle East—often we’ve just vetoed them at the U.N. Security Council.⁴⁶ In fact, up until very recently, it’s been impossible in the United States even to talk about a political settlement. The official line in the United States has been, “The Arabs want to kill all the Jews and throw them into the sea”—with only two exceptions. One is King Hussein of Jordan, who’s a “moderate,” because he’s on our side. And the other was President Sadat of Egypt, who in 1977 realized the error of his ways, so he flew to Jerusalem and became a man of peace—and that’s why the Arabs killed him, because the Arabs’ll kill anybody who’s for peace [Sadat was assassinated in 1981]. That has been the official line in the United States, and you simply cannot deviate from it in the press or scholarship.

It’s total lies from beginning to end. Take Sadat: Sadat made a peace offer to Israel in February 1971, a better offer from Israel’s point of view than the one he later initiated in 1977 [which led to the Camp David peace talks]. It was a full peace treaty exactly in accord with U.N. Resolution 242 [which had called for a return to pre-June 1967 borders in the region with security guarantees, but made no mention of Palestinian rights]—the United States and Israel turned it down, therefore it’s out of history. ⁴⁷ In January 1976, Syria, Jordan and Egypt proposed a two-state peace settlement at the U.N. Security Council on the basis of U.N. 242, and the P.L.O. supported the proposal—it called for territorial guarantees, the whole business: the United States vetoed it, so it’s out of history, it didn’t happen. ⁴⁸ And it just goes on from there: the United States was unwilling to support any of these peace offers, so they’re out of history, they’re down Orwell’s memory hole.⁴⁹

In fact, it’s even at the point where journals in the United States will not permit letters referring to these proposals; the degree of control on this is startling, actually. For example, a few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called “Mideast Truth and Falsehood,” about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: he said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977.⁵⁰ So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek—you know, four lines—in which I said, “Will has one statement of fact, it’s false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down.” Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek “Letters” column. She said: “We’re kind of interested in your letter, where did you get those facts?” So I told her, “Well, they’re published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971”—which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story.⁵¹ So she looked it up and called me back, and said, “Yeah, you’re right, we found it there; okay, we’ll run your letter.” An hour later she called again and said, “Gee, I’m sorry, but we can’t run the letter.” I said, “What’s the problem?” She said, “Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he’s having a tantrum; they decided they can’t run it.” Well, okay.

But the point is, in Newsweek and the New York Times and the Washington Post and so on, you simply cannot state these facts—it’s like belief in divinity or something, the lies have become immutable truth.

 

WOMAN: Then what happened with the Camp David Accords—why did the United States and Israel agree to deal with Egypt at that point?

 

Well, if you look back to around 1971 or so, you’ll find that all the American ambassadors in the Middle East were warning Kissinger that there was going to be a war if the United States kept blocking every diplomatic option for resolving the conflict.⁵² Even the big oil companies were in favor of a political settlement, they were telling the White House: “Look, if you block every diplomatic option, the Arabs are going to go to war, they’ve got no choice.” ⁵³ But in the White House they were just laughing, it was all a big joke—just like they were laughing in Israel. And on purely racist grounds.

See, intelligence systems are very flawed institutions: they’re highly ideological, they’re fanatic, they’re racist, and as a result the information that comes through them is usually grossly distorted. Well, in this case the intelligence information was, “Arabs don’t know how to fight.” The chief of Israeli military intelligence, Yehosifat Harkabi, his line was, “War is not the Arab’s game”—you know, these gooks don’t know which end of the gun to hold, you don’t have to worry about them. And the American military, the C.I.A., everyone obviously was producing the same information: if Sadat mobilizes an army in the Sinai, you kind of laugh, “What do these guys think they’re doing? We’ll leave seven hundred men on the Bar-Lev Line and that’ll stop them.”⁵⁴ So the United States refused to pursue a diplomatic settlement, and that refusal then brought on the 1973 war—where suddenly it turned out that war was the Arab’s game: the Egyptians won a major victory in the Sinai, it was quite a military operation, in fact. And it just shocked U.S. and Israeli intelligence, it really frightened them—because like I say, state planners usually understand violence, even if they can’t understand anything else. So in the ’73 war, it suddenly became clear that the assumption that “war is not the Arab’s game” was false: Egypt wasn’t a military basket-case.

Okay, as long as Egypt was a basket-case, the United States had been content to let them be a Russian ally—if the Russians want to sink money into this morass, that’s fine, we don’t mind, we just laugh at them. But in the 1973 war, it suddenly became clear that Egypt wasn’t just a basket-case, they knew how to shoot and do all these other things that matter, so Kissinger decided to accept what had in fact been long-standing Egyptian offers to become an American client-state. Well, that’s what Egypt had wanted all along, so they immediately kicked out the Russians and got on the American gravy-train. And now they’re the second-biggest recipient of U.S. aid, though still way behind Israel—and at that point Sadat became a “moderate,” because he had switched to our side. And since Egypt was considered the major Arab deterrent to hawkish Israeli policies, the obvious back-up position was just to remove them from the conflict, so Israel would be free to solidify its control in the region—as it has done, in fact. See, before the 1973 war, U.S. planners thought that Israel didn’t have to worry about any Arab forces at all. Now they saw that that was wrong—so they moved to extract Egypt from the conflict. And that was the great achievement of the Camp David peace process: it enabled Israel to integrate the Occupied Territories and attack Lebanon without any Egyptian deterrent. Alright, try to say that in the U.S. media.

Incidentally, by now you are beginning to be able to say it in the strategic analysis literature. So if you read articles by strategic analysts, they’re starting to say, yeah, that’s the way it worked.⁵⁵ Of course that’s the way it worked, that’s the way it was designed. That’s the way it was obviously going to work right at the time of Camp David—I mean, I was writing about this in 1977.⁵⁶ If you eliminate the major Arab deterrent force and increase U.S. aid to Israel to the level of 50 percent of total U.S. aid worldwide, and Israel is committed to integrating the Occupied Territories and attacking and disrupting Lebanon, if you get that configuration of events, what do you think is going to happen? It’s transparent, a child could figure it out. But you can’t say it, because to say it would imply that the United States is not the leader of the world peace forces, and is not interested in justice and freedom and human rights around the world. Therefore you can’t say any of these things here, and by now you probably can’t even see them.

Water and the Occupied Territories

MAN: But doesn’t Israel need the Occupied Territories for defense purposes, with respect to the other Arab states on its borders—isn’t that the main reason for holding on to them?

 

Well, there I can only talk about the way that they look at it—the way the top Israeli decision-makers look at it. So there’s a very interesting book published in Hebrew, called Mechiro shel lhud, which is a detailed documentary record of the period from 1967 to 1977, when the Labor Party was in power in Israel [the Occupied Territories were originally seized by Israel in 1967]. It’s by a guy named Yossi Beilin, who was the top advisor to Shimon Peres and is kind of a Labor Party dove, and he had access to all sorts of Labor Party documents. And the book is almost a daily record of cabinet meetings in Israel between 1967 and ’77—right in the period when they were trying to figure out just what to do with the Occupied Territories. ⁵⁷

Well, there’s virtually no mention of security, barely a mention of it. One thing that does get mentioned a lot is what they call the “demographic problem”—the problem of what do you do about too many Arabs in a Jewish state. Okay, that’s called the “demographic problem” in Israel, and in fact, people here refer to it that way too.⁵⁸ The purpose of that term, which sounds like kind of a neutral sociological term, is to disguise the fact that it’s a deeply racist notion—we would see that right off if we applied it here. Like, suppose some group in New York City started talking about the “demographic problem”—there are too many Jews and blacks. There are too many Jews and blacks in New York City, and we’ve got to do something about it, because they’re taking over—so we’ve got to deal with the “demographic problem.” It wouldn’t be very hard to decode this. But in Israel and in this book of cabinet records, there’s a lot of talk about the “demographic problem,” and it’s easy to see what that means.

Another thing they talk about a lot is water—and that’s a very crucial thing, which is not discussed very much in the United States but it’s probably the main reason why Israel is never going to give up the West Bank. See, this is a very arid region, so water is more important than oil, and there are very limited water resources in Israel. In fact, a lot of the wars in the Middle East have been about water—for instance, the wars involving Israel and Syria have usually been about the headwaters of the Jordan, which come from Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. And as a matter of fact, one of the main reasons why Israel is holding on to the so-called “Security Zone” it seized in southern Lebanon [in the 1982 invasion] is that that area includes a mountain, Mount Hermon, which is a big part of the watershed that brings water to the region. Actually, the invasion of Lebanon was probably an attempt, among other things, to get ahold of the Litani River, a little farther to the north—but they were driven back by Shiite resistance and couldn’t hold on to it, so they had to pull back.

Well, economic facts are classified in Israel, so you can’t be sure of the exact numbers, but most of the studies on this, including some American studies, indicate that Israel is getting about a third of its water from the West Bank. And there really is no alternative to that, short of some sort of technological innovation—like, maybe someday someone will invent a technique of desalination, so they could use seawater. But at the moment, there is no other alternative: there are no underground water sources except the West Bank sources, Israel didn’t get the Litani River, they obviously aren’t going to get the Nile—so there just is no other water source for them, except the West Bank sources.

And in fact, one of the occupation policies that the Arabs in the West Bank have found most onerous is that Israel forbids them to dig deep wells. Well, that’s very hard on Arab agriculture—I mean, an Arab farmer on the West Bank has the same water allotment for farming that a Jewish city-dweller in Tel Aviv has just for drinking. Think about that: the drinking-water for a Jewish city resident is the same as the total water for an Arab farmer, who’s got to do irrigation, and take care of livestock, and do everything else you do on a farm. And the Arabs are not allowed to sink deep wells, they’re only allowed to sink shallow wells that you do without equipment—the deep wells are Jewish wells, only for Jewish settlers, and they get something like twelve times as much water, or some huge amount more water.⁵⁹

Okay, so water’s a big issue that comes up in the documents, there’s the “demographic problem,” there are historical reasons, and some other things too—but the fact is, there is very little talk about security concerns.

Imperial Ambitions and the Arab Threat

MAN: Well, I don’t know about these cabinet records—but the fact is that when Israel was originally conceived in 1948, it was immediately lunged upon by virtually everybody on its borders: all of the Arab countries immediately tried to destroy it, and prevent its very existence. Wouldn’t you say the Israeli people are justified in remembering that history still, as they set national policies today?

 

Well, you’re right that that’s the standard line about what happened. But it’s not true. Keep in mind the background facts. In November 1947, the U.N. General Assembly made a recommendation for a three-way partition of Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a small internationally-administered zone that would have included Jerusalem [the area was under British imperial control] .⁶⁰ Now, I should stress that this was a General Assembly recommendation, and General Assembly recommendations have no force: they are only recommendations. Israel insists that they have no force, I should say—Israel is by far the greatest violator of General Assembly recommendations, beginning in December 1948, when Israel rejected the General Assembly call for allowing Palestinian refugees the right of return [they had fled violence that broke out in Palestine beginning in November 1947]. In fact, Israel was accepted into the United Nations on condition that it accept that requirement, and it claimed that it would accept it—but then it immediately refused to carry through on that promise. ⁶¹ And it goes on right until today: I don’t know how many, but probably hundreds of General Assembly recommendations have been rejected by Israel.

Anyway, such a recommendation was made by the General Assembly in November 1947, and at that point war broke out in Palestine among the Palestinians and the Zionists [Jewish nationalists]. The Zionists were by far the more powerful and better organized force, and by May 1948, when the state of Israel was formally established, about 300,000 Palestinians already had been expelled from their homes or had fled the fighting, and the Zionists controlled a region well beyond the area of the original Jewish state that had been proposed by the U.N.⁶² Now, it’s then that Israel was attacked by its neighbors—in May 1948; it’s then, after the Zionists had taken control of this much larger part of the region and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been forced out, not before.

And furthermore, there’s very good scholarship on this that’s come out in Israel now which shows, I think pretty conclusively, that the intervention of the Arab states was very reluctant, and that it was to a large extent directed not against Israel, but against King Abdullah of Transjordan (what’s now Jordan), who was basically a client ruler for the British. And the Arab states in fact did it because they felt that Abdullah was just a pawn of Britain, and they had good reason to believe that he was assisting the British in reconstructing their imperial system in the region in various ways [Britain had arranged to turn formal administration of Palestine over to the United Nations in May 1948]. It’ll be a hundred years before any of this material enters mainstream American scholarship, I should say—but it’s very good scholarship, and it’s important.⁶³

So anyway, the area that’s now Jordan was being ruled by a British client, and the other Arab states in the region regarded the Jordanian military, quite correctly, as just a British army with kind of a guy with Arab headgear leading them. And they were very much concerned about the fact (which they knew at some level, even if they didn’t know all of the details) that Abdullah and the Zionists were cooperating in a plan to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state—which in fact did happen, Abdullah and the Zionists did carry out that plan of partitioning the area that was to be the Palestinian state between them.⁶⁴ And furthermore, Abdullah also had much greater plans of his own: he wanted to take over Syria, and become the king of “Greater Syria.” And there was apparently a plan in which Israel was going to attack Syria, and then Abdullah was going to move into Syria to defend the Syrians and end up afterwards holding the whole pie, by pre-arrangement. Well, that plan never quite got worked out, as history shows—but the other Arab states had wind of it, so then they moved in against Israel to try to block Abdullah’s goals. ⁶⁵

And there were powerful reasons for that, remember: this was the period of decolonization, and the major concern of the people of the region at the time was to get the British out—and Abdullah was just a pawn of the British, and they didn’t want to see British imperialism reestablished. Of course, they didn’t want the state of Israel around either, and they opposed it—but that was probably a minor consideration in the attack; really a minor consideration, actually. In fact, in 1949 both Syria and Egypt made very explicit proposals for a peace treaty with Israel, and Israel rejected them—Israel didn’t want such a peace treaty.⁶⁶

Alright, the reason all of this material is only coming out recently is there are rules in Israel about not releasing archives until several decades later—so the history is usually written about thirty or forty years late (and then of course, it’s also very distorted for other reasons). But there’s really nothing in any of the things I’ve said that should be a great surprise to anyone who really knows the history—yes, now there are archival records and new scholarship to back it up, and I think it’s very convincing scholarship and will come to be recognized as the right story. But it’s really no great surprise: something like that was always understood. For example, the agreement between Ben-Gurion [first Israeli Prime Minister] and Abdullah to partition Palestine has been known for years—that’s come out in memoirs, everybody’s talked about it, and so on. ⁶⁷ But you’re right, it’s not part of the standard line in the United States—it just happens to be the correct story.

 

MAN: But just to challenge you on some of this—I thought that what Israel was trying to preserve in the agreement to partition Palestine was the idea that Jordan would not send troops into Israel. That’s why they were really cooperating with Abdullah—Ben-Gurion and the rest of the Israeli leadership at the time were very concerned about the fact that there were huge trained armies in Jordan, which were a big threat to them.

 

No, on the contrary—they weren’t much concerned about that. In fact, Ben-Gurion actually had to intervene to prevent his armies from taking over part of what’s now the West Bank [in October 1948], because the Jordanian Legion had already been essentially destroyed and was out of arms, and the Israeli military command thought they could easily take over more territory. See, Yigal Allon, who was the commander of the Israeli army, didn’t know about this agreement with Abdullah to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state—and there was a bitter battle between Ben-Gurion and the army, in which Ben-Gurion had to hold the army back in order to honor this secret agreement he had entered into.⁶⁸ So really there was no military threat from Jordan, not at all.

 

MAN: But the Israeli army held back at that point because Ben-Gurion still had some hope that perhaps peace would prevail if they held back.

 

No—in fact we know very well what Ben-Gurion wanted, because he left ample diaries and so on. And his position, which he was very clear and explicit about—and there’s a lot of documentation about this in my book The Fateful Triangle—was that Israel should not accept any boundaries, regardless of whether there was peace or not, because the limits of what he called “Zionist aspiration” are much broader: they include southern Syria, Transjordan, big areas which he laid out. And he said, we’ll kind of hold off now, but somehow we’ll ultimately get them all—in fact, with regard to Lebanon, Ben-Gurion was proposing that Israel take over Southern Lebanon on some pretext as late as the mid-1950s.⁶⁹ So we know all about what he wanted, and like the rest, it’s very different from the stories you always hear.

Prospects for the Palestinians

WOMAN: Then is there any hope at all for justice for the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been displaced from their homeland over the years—as well as for those who are still in Israel and the Territories?

 

Well, the objective reality is that most of the Palestinian refugees will never go back to Palestine—that’s just a fact of life, just like the American Indians will never get back what they had on the American continent. So in that respect, there’ll never be justice. And there’s just no way out of that: if there was ever any prospect of Palestinians in any large number going back to what was formerly Palestine, Israel would probably blow up the world, which they’re capable of doing.⁷⁰ And that’s never going to happen.

So the only question is, what kind of limited form of justice can be achieved? And that’s tricky. I mean, if Israel can’t suppress the Intifada at a reasonable cost, the United States and Israel might shift from their rejectionist stance and become willing to accept some variety of Palestinian self-determination. And if that happens, then you’ll have to look seriously at what you mean by a “two-state settlement”—and the reality is, it’s not very easy to envision, for some of the reasons I’ve mentioned: there are resource problems, there are problems of integration of the areas, there are border-setting issues. Remember that the U.N. resolution partitioning Palestine [in 1947] did not strictly speaking call for two states, it called for an economic confederation—and that was quite realistic.⁷¹ Anybody who’s been there knows that two states don’t make much sense—because the regions are just too closely integrated, and the borders are too crazy, and when you look even more seriously you see even further that it wouldn’t work. So the only thing that makes any sense is some sort of confederation. But you can pretty well predict what will happen: there will be two states, except only one of the states will really exist, the other one will just collect garbage.

In fact, I suspect that’ll be the next proposal, and it’ll all come under the banner of a “two state” settlement—and that’s going to be a lot harder to argue about, because then people will really have to think behind the headlines to see what’s going on. But achieving some kind of meaningful federation between the Israelis and the Palestinians, with really divided sovereignty—that’s going to be extremely hard, we just have to face that. And that’s about the only kind of solution that makes any sense, I think—it’s the only limited form of justice I can see.

 

MAN: There’s also the different mentality between the Arabs and Jews that figures into it too, don’t you think—isn’t that always going to get in the way of peace?

 

They’re the same kind of people, they have the same kind of mentality. They bleed when they’re cut, they mourn when their children are killed. I’m not aware of any difference between them.

Legitimacy in History

WOMAN: Do you think the passage of time can give legitimacy to Israel, even if maybe it was started out on the wrong sort of basis, displacing the indigenous population in a racist manner and so on?

 

Well, yeah—the general answer to your question just has to be yes. If not, we’d have to go back to the days of hunter-gatherer societies, because all of history has been illegitimate.

I mean, take a case close to the Palestinians, which we as Americans ought to think about—take the United States. Now, I think the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel has been bad, but in comparison to the treatment of the native population here by our forefathers, it’s been a paradise.

Here in the United States, we just committed genocide. Period. Pure genocide. And it wasn’t just in the United States, it was all up and down the Hemisphere. Current estimates are that north of the Rio Grande, there were about twelve to fifteen million Native Americans at the time Columbus landed, something like that. By the time Europeans reached the continental borders of the United States, there were about 200,000. Okay: mass genocide. Across the whole Western Hemisphere, the population decline was probably on the order of from a hundred million people to about five million. ⁷² That’s pretty serious stuff—it was horrifying right from the beginning in the early seventeenth century, then it got worse after the United States was established, and it just continued until finally the native populations were basically stuck away in little enclaves. The history of treaty violations by the United States is just grotesque: treaties with the Indian nations by law have a status the same as that of treaties among sovereign states, but throughout our history nobody ever paid the slightest attention to them—as soon as you wanted more land, you just forgot the treaty and robbed it; it’s a very ugly and vicious history.⁷³ Hitler in fact used the treatment of the Native Americans as a model, explicitly—he said, that’s what we’re going to do with the Jews. ⁷⁴

In fact, a book came out in Germany recently called, in German, The Five Hundred Year Reich—actually, it’s part of a big effort that’s beginning to develop around the world to try to turn 1992 into a year of memory of genocide, instead of a year of celebration of the 500th anniversary of what’s called Columbus’s “discovery” of America. And in Germany, people understand that title: Hitler was going to establish a “Thousand Year Reich,” and the point of the book is that the colonization of the Western Hemisphere was essentially Hitlerian—and it’s lasted for five hundred years.⁷⁵

I should add, actually, that throughout American history this genocide has been accepted as perfectly legitimate. So for example, there were people who spoke up for blacks and opposed slavery—there were the Abolitionists and there was the Civil Rights Movement. But you won’t find much support for the American Indians. And the same was true of scholarship: for instance, in Samuel Eliot Morison’s history of Columbus—you know, big Harvard historian—he talks about what a great man Columbus was, terrific person and so on, and then he has this little line saying, of course Columbus did set off a program of what he calls “complete genocide,” and he was a major mass-murderer himself. But then he says, that was only a minor flaw, he was really a terrific seaman, this and that and the other thing.⁷⁶

In fact, let me tell you a personal story to indicate just how far out of history all of this really is. A few Thanksgivings ago I took a walk with some friends and family in a National Park, and we came across a tombstone which had just been put in along the path. It said: “Here lies an Indian woman, a Wampanoag, whose family and tribe gave of themselves and their land that this great nation might be born and grow.” Okay, “gave of themselves and their land”—in fact, were murdered, scattered, dispersed, and we stole their land, that’s what we’re sitting on. You know, there can’t be anything more illegitimate: the whole history of this country is illegitimate. Our forefathers stole about a third of Mexico in a war in which they claimed that Mexico attacked us, but if you look back it turns out that that “attack” took place inside of Mexican territory [the U.S. acquired the area from Texas to California after the Mexican War in 1848 ].⁷⁷ And it goes on and on. So you know, what can be legitimate?

Take the development of the state system in Europe. The state system in Europe, which was finally sort of established in 1945, is the result of savage wars and murders and atrocities going back hundreds and hundreds of years. In fact, the main reason why the plague of European civilization was able to spread all over the world in the past five hundred years is that the Europeans were just a lot more vicious and savage than anyone else, because they’d had a lot more practice murdering one another—so when they came to other places, they knew how to do it, and were very good at it. Well, the European state system has continued to be an extremely bloody and brutal arrangement, right to today. I mean, there are wars all over the Third World just because the national boundaries the European invaders imposed on these places have nothing to do with anything, except where one European power could expand at the expense of other European powers.

Okay, if anything has no legitimacy, it’s this. But that’s our nation-state system, and we just have to begin with it. I mean, it’s there, and it has whatever legitimacy—I wouldn’t say that it’s “legitimate,” I’d just say that it exists, we have to recognize that it exists, and states have to be given whatever rights they are accorded in the international system. But the indigenous populations have to be given comparable rights too, I think—at least. So when I denounce apologetics for Israel’s oppression, remember, it’s not in any particular criticism of Israel. In fact, I think Israel is just as ugly a state as every other state. The only difference is that Israel has a fabricated image in the United States—it’s regarded as having some unique moral quality, and there’s all sorts of imagery about purity of arms, and high noble intent and so on. ⁷⁸ It’s complete mythology, just pure fabrication: Israel’s a country like every other country, and we should recognize that and stop the nonsense. To talk about legitimacy is ridiculous—the word doesn’t apply, to their history or anyone else’s.

Qualifications to Speak on World Affairs; A Presidential Campaign

MAN: Mr. Chomsky, I’m wondering what specific qualifications you have to be able to speak all around the country about world affairs?

 

None whatsoever. I mean, the qualifications that I have to speak on world affairs are exactly the same ones Henry Kissinger has, and Walt Rostow has, or anybody in the Political Science Department, professional historians—none, none that you don’t have. The only difference is, I don’t pretend to have qualifications, nor do I pretend that qualifications are needed. I mean, if somebody were to ask me to give a talk on quantum physics, I’d refuse—because I don’t understand enough. But world affairs are trivial: there’s nothing in the social sciences or history or whatever that is beyond the intellectual capacities of an ordinary fifteen-year-old. You have to do a little work, you have to do some reading, you have to be able to think, but there’s nothing deep—if there are any theories around that require some special kind of training to understand, then they’ve been kept a carefully guarded secret.

In fact, I think the idea that you’re supposed to have special qualifications to talk about world affairs is just another scam—it’s kind of like Leninism [position that socialist revolution should be led by a “vanguard” party]: it’s just another technique for making the population feel that they don’t know anything, and they’d better just stay out of it and let us smart guys run it. In order to do that, what you pretend is that there’s some esoteric discipline, and you’ve got to have some letters after your name before you can say anything about it. The fact is, that’s a joke.

 

MAN: But don’t you also use that system too, because of your name-recognition and the fact that you’re a famous linguist? I mean, would I be invited to go somewhere and give talks?

 

You think I was invited here because people know me as a linguist? Okay, if that was the reason, then it was a bad mistake. But there are plenty of other linguists around, and they aren’t getting invited to places like this—so I don’t really think that can be the reason. I assumed that the reason is that these are topics that I’ve written a lot about, and I’ve spoken a lot about, and I’ve demonstrated a lot about, and I’ve gone to jail about, and so on and so forth—I assumed that’s the reason. If it’s not, well, then it’s a bad mistake. If anybody thinks that you should listen to me because I’m a professor at M.I.T., that’s nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it. And the idea that you’re supposed to have special qualifications to talk about things that are common sense, that’s just another scam—it’s another way to try to marginalize people, and you shouldn’t fall for it.

 

WOMAN: Seeing as you’re such a big draw with audiences, though, and since you do have some name-recognition—I’m wondering, what would you think about running a Presidential campaign? I mean, huge crowds come out to listen to your talks all around the country, those people might support something like that and want to begin getting involved with it.

 

Well, it’s true about the audiences—but I don’t think that has to do with name-recognition or anything like that. See, there are only about ten people in the country, literally, who do this kind of thing—John Stockwell, Alex Cockburn, Dan Ellsberg, Howard Zinn, Holly Sklar, only a couple others—and we all get the same reaction. I think it’s just a matter of people all over the country being hungry to hear a different viewpoint. And what’s more, we all get the same reaction wherever we go—it’s the same in towns where nobody’s ever heard of me. Like, I was in central Michigan last week, they didn’t know who I was from Adam, but it was the same kind of crowd.

 

WOMAN: But seeing as you do get all this draw, why not run a Presidential campaign?

 

First of all, there’s nobody around to run for President, and if there were . . .

 

WOMAN: You, Stockwell . . .

 

Anybody who wants to be President, you should right away say, “I don’t want to hear that guy anymore.”

 

WOMAN: I’m sorry?

 

You should say, “I don’t want to listen to that person anymore.” Anybody who wants to become your leader, you should say, “I don’t want to follow.” That’s like a rule of thumb which almost never fails.

 

WOMAN: But what about just to create a forum where more of the population would hear this different point of view?

 

Well, if you want to use it kind of instrumentally, like jujitsu or something—use the properties of the system against it—okay. But I don’t really think that makes any sense, frankly.

 

WOMAN: The form of government we have just has to be overthrown, in your view? There’s no way of doing it through reform?

 

It’s not a relevant distinction: if you could ever get to the point where a reformist candidate had a chance, you’d already have won, you’d already have done the main thing. The main thing is to develop the kind of mass support which would make a revolution meaningful. At that point, some crook will come along and say, “I’m your leader, I’ll do it for you.”

 

MAN: What do you think could have that effect, though? Just like Noam Chomsky, say, going and talking to five hundred people here and there? Just keep plugging away?

 

Yeah, you keep plugging away—that’s the way social change takes place. That’s the way every social change in history has taken place: by a lot of people, who nobody ever heard of, doing work.

 

MAN: Did you go through a phase of hopelessness, or . . .

 

Yeah, every evening.

 

MAN: I feel like I’m kind of stuck in one.

 

Every evening. I mean, look: if you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what’s the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what’s the point?

 

MAN: You’ve just got to work at it.

 

Yeah, what’s the point? First of all, those predictions don’t mean anything—they’re more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you’re guaranteeing that that’ll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget the pessimism.