Laray Polk: In your office, among all the reference materials, you have a rather large black-and-white photograph of Bertrand Russell. Did you have the opportunity to meet him?
Noam Chomsky: We never met. Our only contact was in 1967, when we were about to issue the “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” advocating support for resistance, not just protest, to the Vietnam War. I was delegated to contact well-known figures to ask for their support. The first person I wrote to was Russell, who answered immediately, agreeing to sign the statement.
How much impact do you think Russell’s nonproliferation work has had?83
It did not have as much of an impact as it should have. Russell was vilified in the US; there’s a good account in the book Bertrand Russell’s America.84 Einstein, who often expressed similar views, was generally treated as a nice man who ought to go back to his study in Princeton. Nevertheless, it doubtless had some impact within those circles, then quite narrow, that were seeking to end the severe and immediate threat of nuclear weapons. In later years, that movement grew considerably, becoming a very powerful popular movement by the 1980s, probably a major factor in inducing Reagan to introduce his “Star Wars” fantasies so as to ward off protest. There’s good work on this by Lawrence Wittner.85
Another scientist comes to mind, Linus Pauling, also a signatory to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. I think you’ve mentioned having a great amount of respect for Pauling.
Pauling was a great scientist, but also a very dedicated and effective peace advocate. It was in the latter connection that I met him several times, on panels concerned with issues of war, aggression, and nuclear threats.
Also along these lines, you’ve mentioned Peggy Duff and her work with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.86
Peggy Duff was a remarkable woman. In the late 1940s, she was active in trying to end Britain’s shameful treatment of POWs after the war’s end. She then became a leading figure in the CND, and soon went on to become the driving force in organizing the international movement of opposition to the Vietnam War, and also other crucial matters, such as the brutal denial of elementary rights to Palestinians. She organized international conferences, and much else, and also published very valuable and informative studies of ongoing events, bringing out a great deal of material that was missing or distorted in the general media.87 By rights, she should have won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The statement you mentioned, “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” was at the heart of a legal case in which you were named a co-conspirator. Is this the same incident of potential imprisonment that prompted your wife Carol to go back to school in case she had to become the sole breadwinner?88
Well before the trials were announced it was likely that the government would prosecute those who they regarded—mostly wrongly—as leaders of the resistance. That’s why Carol went back to school after sixteen years (we had three kids to support). I was an unindicted co-conspirator in the first trial, but on the opening day the prosecuting attorney announced that I would be the primary defendant in the next trial—eliciting an objection from defense counsel. The reason why I was a co-conspirator and others were conspirators was comical, but in fact the entire government case was worthy of the Marx brothers, and provided some interesting insight into the incapacity of the political police to comprehend dissent and resistance.89
Pauling said of his nonproliferation work, “As scientists we have knowledge of the dangers involved and therefore a special responsibility to make these dangers known.”90 It seems that being honest with the science is not enough, that one has to also be engaged in international affairs and have a willingness to explore alternative definitions of what security means. Perhaps it could even be described as possessing a social direction that is different from the aspirations of politicians and others in the expert class.
It illustrates a basic moral principle. Privilege confers opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibility. Expert knowledge is one component of privilege. Politicians may sometimes have special knowledge, but that cannot be assumed.
Russell, Pauling, Duff, and others like them had integrity, and were willing to act in accord with decent values. In every society I know of since classical times there have been honest dissidents, usually a fringe, almost always punished in one or another way. The kind of punishment depends on the nature of the society. In contrast, obedience and subordination to power are typically honored within the society, even though often condemned by history (or in enemy states).91
In 1967 George Steiner wrote an open letter in reference to your essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” His letter and your response were published together in the New York Review of Books. Is there anything memorable or significant to you about that exchange?92
What is significant is that it took place. There was a good deal of soul-searching then, primarily among young people, about the course to follow as the Vietnam War moved on from major war crime to utter obscenity. And it reached to a certain extent to privileged intellectuals, the kind of people who read and wrote in the Review. One question—proper, and difficult—was whether to move on from protest to direct resistance, with all of its uncertainties and likely personal costs. Actually I’d been involved in it for several years before, in a tamer version: efforts to organize a national tax-resistance campaign in protest against the war. But by 1967, things were moving to a new stage.
What has changed and what has stayed the same since 1967?
One important change is that there have been a lot of victories, sometimes reaching to issues that were barely on the agenda not very long ago, like gay rights. And consciousness has greatly changed in many domains. Easy to list: rights of minorities, women, even rights of nature; opposition to aggression and terror; and much else.
It’s instructive to look back to see the horrendous atrocities that were easily tolerated then, but not today. It’s also instructive to look back at some of the dramatic moments of the ’60s, for example Paul Potter’s SDS speech at the first major mobilization in 1965, where he roused the crowd by declaring that the time had come to “name the system”; he couldn’t go on to name it, though now there would be no such hesitation. He opened by saying that “most of us grew up thinking that the United States was a strong but humble nation, that involved itself in world affairs only reluctantly, that respected the integrity of other nations and other systems, and that engaged in wars only as a last resort.”93 Few young activists would say that now.
The achievements of the activism of the ’60s and their aftermath leave a significant legacy: it is possible to go on to take up what was cut off then. The fate of the civil rights movement is worth remembering. In the standard version, it peaked in 1963 with the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That’s the usual focus of the rhetoric on MLK Day. But King didn’t go home then. He went on to confront the burning issues of the day: the Vietnam War and the plight of the poor, with organizing in urban Chicago and elsewhere.94 The luster quickly dimmed among Northern liberals. It’s fine to condemn racist Alabama sheriffs, but state crimes and class issues are off-limits. Few remember King’s speech in 1968, shortly before he was assassinated. He was in Memphis, Tennessee, supporting a strike of sanitation workers, and was intending to lead a March on Washington to found a movement of the poor and to call for meaningful legislation to address their plight.95 The march took place, led by his widow, Coretta King. It passed through the sites of bitter struggle in the South and reached Washington, where the marchers set up a tent encampment, Resurrection City.96 On orders of the most liberal administration since FDR, it was raided and destroyed by the police in the middle of the night, and the marchers were driven out of Washington.
The unfulfilled tasks remain, by now with new urgency after the disastrous economic policies of the past generation. And they can be undertaken from a higher plane.
Many of the old difficulties remain. Movements arise and grow and disappear leaving little organizational structure or memory. Most activism begins from almost zero. It also tends to be separated from other initiatives in a highly atomized society that is in some ways demoralized and frightened, despite its extraordinary wealth, privilege, and opportunities. And there are now questions of decent survival that cannot be shunted aside: the persistent danger of nuclear war, and the threat of environmental disaster, already approaching, and likely to become far more severe if we persist on our present course of denial.
Footnotes:
83 The Russell-Einstein Manifesto, issued in London on July 9, 1955, provided the impetus for the formation of the Pugwash Conferences which began two years later and continue into the present. The group derived its name from the location of the first conference held in Pugwash, Nova Scotia. Membership is worldwide and follows a basic tenet: “Participation is always by individuals in their private capacity (not as representatives of governments or organizations).” Contemporary concerns include nonproliferation, reduction of chemical and biological weapons, and the establishment of a NWFZ in the Middle East. Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (Pugwash.org). On Pugwash and Joseph Rotblat, see note 9, this chapter.
84 Barry Feinberg and Ronald Kasrils, Bertrand Russell’s America: His Transatlantic Travels and Writings: Volume Two, 1945–1970 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984).
85 Lawrence Wittner produced a trilogy of books chronicling the history of the world nuclear disarmament movement: One World or None (1945–1954), Resisting the Bomb (1954–1970), and Toward Nuclear Abolition (1971–present). His most recent book is Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
86 Established in London in 1958, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) advocates for Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament and much more. Early protests took the form of yearly marches to a nuclear weapons facility at Aldermaston. In 1960, some campaign supporters favored sit-ins and blockades, establishing a separate group led by Bertrand Russell, the Committee of 100. (Most Committee of 100 events resulted in arrest.) Contemporary concerns include opposition to the Trident nuclear weapon system, chemical and biological weapons, missile defense, a nuclear-armed NATO, and expansion of nuclear power.
87 Duff’s published works include Prisoners in Vietnam: The Whole Story (London: ICDP, 1970); Left, Left, Left: Personal Account of Six Protest Campaigns, 1945–65 (London: Allison & Busby, 1971); War or Peace in the Middle East (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1978).
88 Carol (née Schatz) Chomsky received her PhD in linguistics from Harvard and served on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education from 1972 until 1997. She has been described as a “pioneer in the field of child language acquisition,” introducing a technique still in use today for helping children learn the mechanics of reading. The technique, referred to as “repeated listening,” is discussed in “After Decoding: What?,” Language Arts 53 (March 1976): 288–96, 314. See also her work on language acquisition by the deaf-blind, Rich Languages from Poor Inputs, ed. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Robert C. Berwick (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2012).
89 “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority” appeared in the New Republic and the New York Review of Books prior to an antidraft demonstration in Washington, DC, in 1967. The organization, Resist, Inc., included members of the clergy and academia who pledged financial support for those choosing to resist the draft, including funds “to supply legal defense and bail.” An archive of the organization’s documents, The Resist Collection, is held at the Trinity College Library in Hartford, CT.
90 In the 1950s biologist Barry Commoner worked on a project measuring levels of radioactive strontium 90 in the baby teeth of North American children. As a result of incoming data—namely, radioactive fallout from aboveground testing increases radioisotope burden in the biosphere, including bioaccumulation in humans—Commoner and Pauling partnered in writing a petition calling for a ban on nuclear weapons testing in 1957. The petition gained international support, and eventually resulted in the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT). The treaty was not successfully negotiated until 1963, due in part to Edward Teller’s insistence on a program of peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs). See the original petition online at Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement, s.v. “U.S. Signatures to the Appeal by American Scientists to the Governments and People of the World,” January 15, 1958. On Edward Teller, see Dan O’Neill, The Firecracker Boys: H-Bombs, Inupiat Eskimos, and the Roots of the Environmental Movement (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 296–302. On PNE protest, see Appendix 9.
91 Joseph (Józef) Rotblat was one of two project scientists to leave the Manhattan Project before the bombing of Japan, a move that caused heightened suspicions about his motives. He would spend the remainder of his life calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons and the end to war. After partnering with scientist Yasushi Nishiwaki in deducing the actual fallout from the Lucky Dragon incident in 1954, Rotblat worked with Bertrand Russell, playing an instrumental role in the Russell-Einstein Manifesto and the founding of the Pugwash Conferences. On Russell and Committee of 100, see note 4, this chapter.
92 Cf. Steiner-Chomsky exchange, March 23, 1967, and “An Exchange on Resistance: Chad Walsh and William X X, reply by Noam Chomsky,” New York Review of Books, February 1, 1968.
93 Twenty-five thousand participants attended the “March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam,” organized by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1965. Following several hours of picketing outside the White House, Paul Potter delivered his speech at the Washington Monument. To read Potter’s speech, see SDSRebels.com, s.v. “Antiwar Speeches.”
94 See King’s “Beyond Vietnam.” The speech is a hard-hitting analysis of war, militarism, and inequality: “Now there is little left to build on [in Vietnam], save bitterness. Soon, the only solid—solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call ‘fortified hamlets.’ The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.” Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” speech at Riverside Church, New York (April 4, 1967).
95 In King’s 1968 speech, he called for the development of “a kind of dangerous unselfishness” on behalf of sanitation workers and the building of an allied economic base through boycott, a “bank-in” movement, and an “insurance-in” that encouraged patronage at black-owned businesses. Martin Luther King Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” speech at Bishop Charles Mason Temple, Memphis, TN (April 3, 1968).
96 As part of the “Poor People’s Campaign of 1968,” Resurrection City was organized, built, and occupied for a span of forty-three days from May to June. An estimated five thousand demonstrators participated in the “live-in” located on the Mall in Washington, DC. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy took their toll on the campaign, as did torrential rain on the makeshift city. For successes and failures of the action, see John Wiebenson, “Planning and Using Resurrection City,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35 (November 1969): 405–11, doi:10.1080/01944366908977260.