Noam Chomsky interview
Radio Havana Cuba
Interview with Professor Noam Chomsky, well-known US political analyst, by
Bernie Dwyer for Radio Havana Cuba. Professor Chomsky was in Cuba to participate
in the 3rd Latin American and Caribbean Social Sciences Conference (CLACSO)
27th-31 October 2003.
[Bernie Dwyer]: It’s
really a pleasure to welcome you to Cuba on your first visit here. Our telephone
interview last August swept rapidly across the Internet which is indicative of
the interest people have in what you have to say even after so many years of
critical political commentary. What motivates you to continue keeping in touch
with what is going on in the world and offer analysis, commentary and possible
solutions to world problems?
[Noam Chomsky]: It
seems to me the opposite question is the one that ought to be asked. There is a
moral truism about this that is as elementary as anything can be: privilege
confers responsibility and the people who are called intellectuals, for no
particularly good reason, happen to be privileged.
We have education, training, resources, opportunities and in a country like the
United States, virtually no repression, it’s an unusually free country by
comparative standards, so we just have that much more responsibility than people
who lack those opportunities, like most people in other countries including
those under the boot of the United States, and most people in our own country.
After that it’s just a matter of choice. Do you observe moral truisms or
don’t you?
If you do, these are the kind of things that you naturally and automatically do
and it doesn’t merit any credit or applause or anything else, it’s just
being a human being and using the opportunities that you have.
[Bernie Dwyer]: The slogan
from the World Social Forum which you attended at Porto Alegre in Brazil earlier
this year was that a better world is possible. Is that part of what motivates
you? Do you honestly think that a better world is possible?
[Noam Chomsky]: Possible,
certainly. Attainable, that’s another question. And that goes back to the
first question: if people are willing to undertake their responsibilities
seriously, then a better world is very possible. Unfortunately, there is
probably an almost inverse correlation between opportunity and dedication and
commitment.
So rather typically, it’s the people that live under repression and
deprivation and face serious penalties and lack privilege who are working hard
to build a better world. Those who have the opportunity and every opportunity in
front of them, every kind of privilege, quite typically throughout history tend
to be subordinate to power.
Actually, it’s not a particular observation of mine. The founder and leading
figure in modern international relations theory, Hans Morganthau - a much
respected scholar - once harshly condemned what he called our conformist
subservience to those in power. He was referring to the intellectual classes in
the United States and the West generally. And it’s a comment that is
reasonably accurate and goes back through recorded history: the respected
intellectuals in virtually every society are those who are distinguished by
their conformist subservience to those in power. Others who take elementary
human responsibilities seriously tend to suffer overwhelmingly in one form of
repression or another.
So if you were in Czechoslovakia under the Soviet Union, you might end up in
jail. If you were in El Salvador in the same years, you would get your brains
blown out. Well, those are just the different kinds of repression that appear in
different kinds of societies. And in a country like the United States, or
Western industrial societies, the punishment - such as it is - is
marginalization or vitriolic attacks or something like that, but nothing that
even merits comment when compared with most of the rest of the world.
And this is pretty close to a cultural universal. There are some exceptions but
it’s commonly true.
In fact one of the reasons that we believe that a better world is possible is
because we have a better world. The world is a lot better than it was not very
long ago. Maybe not in every respect - there is more aggression - but in many
respects. We know how it got better. It didn’t get better by some gift from
the gods or the powerful or some benevolent dictator, it got better because
people struggled to make it better and typically, those who were suffering most.
[Bernie Dwyer]: So
would you go along with the axiom that power corrupts? For instance, when one is
listening to election campaigns or leaders of struggles, it’s very seldom that
they maintain their altruistic attitude once they attain the power position.
[Noam Chomsky]: People
who are really sincere about the belief that a better world is possible will
refuse to take power. In fact, they will try to undermine institutions that even
grant power. Maybe to some extent, certain kinds of authority are required to
delegate responsibility and that sort of thing, but one who is really interested
in a decent world would want to reduce that to the absolute minimum, in fact to
constantly be challenging authoritarian relationships and institutions and
require them to justify themselves. Sometimes they can be justified, but the
burden of justification is always on authority and domination. It is never
legitimate in itself. That’s true even if it’s a family or an international
society.
So take Brazil today. It should be a lesson in humility to the industrial world.
Elections were carried out in Brazil of the kind that are almost unimaginable in
the United States and other industrial societies. Brazil, of course, has an
extremely high concentration of capital and wealth - unusually so. It is a
pretty brutal and repressive society. You have to be afraid of the police if you
live in a favela or not even there. Nevertheless, under very harsh conditions,
popular movements developed from poor people, landless workers and steel and
peasant workers. The popular forces reached the point where they could actually
challenge and even overcome a tremendously high concentration of capital and the
media power of authority and repression and elect their own government.
You cannot imagine that happening in the United States. There is no candidate
who can even participate unless he manages to gain a large component of
concentrated wealth and power behind him. Otherwise he is not in the political
system. Well, now we should be humiliated literally by the fact that under much
harsher conditions, poor and repressed people can do what we are afraid to do
and that runs throughout the industrial world.
There are many things happening like that around the world.
That takes in the so-called anti-globalization movements around the
world, (a very bad name: they are global justice movements), that want a
different kind of international integration. People think about them as having
started in Seattle, but that’s because when something happens in the North,
you have to pay attention to it. You know, if a hundred thousand peasants are
storming the Indian parliament: who cares about that?
At the Summit of the Americas, which attempted to ram through the Free Trade
Area Agreement, there were big protests that were reported, but that’s because
they were in Canada. If the same thing had happened in Argentina or somewhere,
they probably wouldn’t have been reported.
It’s interesting that, in fact, when these events are reported, they are
radically distorted. Just coming down here on the plane from the United States,
I was reading the latest issue of one of the foreign policy journals and there
was an article which opened by talking about the World Social Forum, which is
extremely rare because it is almost never mentioned in the United States.
I happened to be in a very good position to see most of the hundred thousand
marchers that were taking part. Anyway, this article opens by saying “The
slogan of the World Social Forum was ‘A Better World is Possible’ but its
slogan should have been: ‘Let’s go back to the Old World’ - a world of
anti-Semitism, of Fascism, of Nazism and so on - and it says, the marchers,
20,000 of them (there were actually 100,000), were carrying swastikas and
calling for killing the Jews and so on and so forth.
Maybe if you look at a 100,000 people and you look hard, maybe you will
find three people who are doing that.
But that’s the picture of the World Social Forum that you are allowed to
present to a kind of liberal intellectual and well-educated audience in the
United States. When it’s in Seattle, they show people breaking windows and all
that, but when it’s in the North, you cannot ignore it. When it’s in the
South you can lie about it as much as you like.
[Bernie Dwyer]: Do you see these popular movements taking the place of
the organized Left political parties in the major task of building a new society
as was mentioned several times during the conference, which commented that the
Left is in disarray?
[Noam Chomsky]: Well,
I have never really thought that the Left was much in “array” as far as
political purposes were concerned. These are usually various power systems,
maybe good things, maybe bad things. I don’t think that these new popular
movements are taking the place of anything, they’re really new. There never
was anything like the World Social Forum before.
The goal of the Left from its modern origins has been to create a real
International. The Left has never been anti-globalization, that’s why every
union is called an International. You want to have international solidarity and
support and so on. It never succeeded. Now the Internationals were very limited
in their outreach and they fell apart, actually under internal authoritarian
reasons in each case.
Now this is different. This is really international and it has participation
from a vast range of components from society: peasant, working people,
environmentalists, intellectuals, poets, all sorts of people. How far this will
go, who knows. There are a lot of disruptive forces inside and a lot of
pressures outside, a lot of difficulties, maybe this one will fail, but even if
it fails, it succeeds. It lays the basis for something that can come next. You
don’t expect anything important to happen in a day - whether it’s the
elimination of slavery or women’s rights or whatever it may be. These are
things that take time.
One of the problems of organizing in the North, in the rich countries, is that
people tend to think - even the activists - that instant gratification is
required. You constantly hear: “Look I went to a demonstration and we didn’t
stop the war so what’s the use of doing it again?” But people who live real lives know that that is not the way
things work. If you want to achieve
something, you build the basis for it.
If you want to achieve something like, say, an electoral victory that means
something, you have to spend decades organizing the basis of the groups so all
local communities can take part and so on and so forth. It’s a lot easier in
countries where there are more opportunities and wealth and less repression.
It’s still not going to happen in a few minutes, so the World Social Forum is
not really replacing left parties. Its place is maybe establishing more
authentic ones and I’m not even sure whether political parties are what we are
looking for. Maybe what we are looking for are cooperatives and communities
which interact and federate and just build a new society.
[Bernie Dwyer]: During these
times of US domination of the world, what role do you see Cuba playing?
[Noam Chomsky]: Well, Cuba
has become a symbol of courageous resistance to attack. Since1959 Cuba has been
under attack from the hemispheric superpower. It has been invaded, subjected to
more terror than maybe the rest of the world combined - certainly any other
country that I can think of – and it’s under an economic stranglehold that
has been ruled completely illegal by every relevant international body, It has
been at the receiving end of terrorism, repression and denunciation, but it
survives.
If you look back at the declassified record and the problems that Cuba was
posing and therefore had to be overthrown, one intelligence analyst said that
“the very existence of the Castro regime is successful defiance of US policies
that go back a hundred and fifty years”. He’s not talking about the
Russians. He is talking about the Monroe Doctrine, which says we are the masters
of the hemisphere. It goes on to say that this really dangerous as it offers a
model that others might want to follow. That’s what is called “communist
aggression”. You have a model that somebody wants to follow. So you have to
destroy the virus.
Kissinger, for example, during the other 9/11 - the one that happened in 1973 -
was concerned that Allende, with his democratic victory and social programs
would spread contagion not only in Latin America, but even in Italy where the
United States at the very same time was carrying out large scale subversive
operations to try to undermine Italian democracy and even supported fascist
parties in Italy.
Yes, Cuba is the symbol of successful defiance that accounts for the venomous
hostility. The very existence of
the regime, independent of what it does, by not subordinating itself to power is
just an unacceptable defiance for the rest of the world. It’s a symbol of what
can be done without using harsh conditions. It’s once again a case of those
under the most severe conditions are doing things that others can’t do.
So, for example, let’s take Cuba’s role in the liberation of Africa. It’s
an astonishing achievement that has almost been totally suppressed. Now you can
read about it in scholarship, but the contribution that Cuba made to the
self-liberation of Africa is fantastic. And that was against the entire
concentrated power of the world. All the imperialist powers were trying to block
it. It finally worked and Cuba’s contribution was unique. That’s another
reason why Cuba is hated. Just the plain fact that black soldiers from Cuba were
able to beat back a South African invasion of Angola sent shock waves throughout
the continent. The black movements were inspired by it. The white South Africans
were psychologically crushed by the fact that South African forces could be
defeated by a black army. The United States were infuriated. If you look at the
next couple of years, the terrorist attacks on Cuba got much worse.
But yes, it’s a symbol of successful defiance. One can have arguments about
what society is like and what it does, but that’s for Cubans to decide. But
for the world its symbolic significance is not slight.
[Bernie Dwyer]: You are
aware of the plight of the five Cuban political prisoners in the United States.
You are also very aware of flagrant abuses, not only judicial but also of human
and prisoner rights regarding the visits of two of the prisoners’ wives and
the five year old child, Ivette. Why do you think that the EU, the UN, and the
other international bodies that are supposed to be keeping an eye on democracy
are allowing this very repressive attitude to continue?
[Noam Chomsky]: The reason is embarrassingly simple. You don’t
challenge the chief Mafia Don. It’s dangerous. Everyone knows that. There’s
no higher authority, there’s just the Mafia. If the Don is doing something you
don’t like, you can only object quietly. That’s the main reason.
The secondary reason is that the European elite share the interests of American
power. They may not like the US throwing its weight around that much -
especially when it interferes with them - but fundamentally they don’t
disagree. They want to support the same programs of economic integration,
so-called neoliberal programs. They are not unhappy to see the US power in
reserve to crush people who stand up and get in the way.
The thing with the Cuban Five is such a scandal, its hard to talk about it. Cuba
was providing the FBI with information about the terrorist actions taking place
in the United States, based in the United States - completely criminal. So
instead of arresting the terrorists, they arrested the people that provided the
information, which is so ridiculous I find it difficult to talk about it. They
put them under very hard conditions and it’s not recorded. You can’t read
about it. So one of the reasons it goes on is because nobody knows about it.
There were a few brief mentions, but all it said was that these people were
informing Cuba that an unarmed plane was going .to fly over Havana. That’s
about the only story that was reported. The actual facts of the matter are not
secret but no one knows.
Take the embargo, which has been challenged by everyone. The European Union did
bring a challenge to it at the World Trade Organization and the US just told
them to get lost. In fact, what the Clinton administration said was that Europe
was challenging a policy, at that time, of thirty years. These were US policies
aimed at overthrowing the government in Cuba without announcing that yes, “we
are international criminals and you are interfering with us and therefore you
have no right to say anything” and then the US just pulled out of the
negotiations and what’s anybody going to do about that?
I mean, the US is a huge debtor. It owes an enormous debt to the world. What
happens if it decides at some point that we are not going to repay the debt?
It’s not like Argentina. The International Monetary Fund is not going to say
anything. In fact, it’s a branch of the US Treasury Department and even if it
did say anything, it would tell them to get lost too.
Look at the record and the serious issues in which the US is involved. Let’s
take the Vietnam War. The world was overwhelmingly opposed to it. It almost
never came up at the United Nations because one of the high officials that I
have talked to understood that if they brought up the Vietnam War at the United
Nations, the UN would simply be destroyed. During the bombing of Serbia, there
was a brief moment - about five seconds - when it looked as though the
International Tribunal might take a look at NATO crimes. During that moment, an
American congressman was interviewed by the right-wing Canadian press, The
National Post, and they asked him what would happen if the tribunal took this up
and he said that we would take the United Nations buildings in New York apart
brick by brick, throw them in the Atlantic Ocean - metaphorically speaking, of
course.
If you take the record of vetoes: the US ran the United Nations in the early
days, because of the distribution of power. By the 1960s it was beginning to
reflect some sort of world opinion. Decolonization had taken place and there
were a lot of participants. However, since the mid 1960s, the US is far in the
lead on vetoing resolutions and Britain is second.
No one else is even close and this can’t be discussed.
They haven’t discussed the fact that the UN is paralyzed by the US
refusal to obey international positions. There was all this fuss in the last
year about Iraq only partially fulfilling UN resolutions. Right, maybe they
should fulfill them all. If Iraq had the veto they wouldn’t have had to fail
to fulfill UN resolutions. I mean the veto is the strongest and most extreme
method of violating UN resolutions. So if you want to be serious about even
wanting to discuss the topic, you bring up the veto. I don’t know one article
in the entire US press in terms of opinion that brought up the point.
These are not trivial resolutions. The US has vetoed resolutions calling on all
states to observe international law. It vetoed the Security Council resolution
affirming the World Court judgment which condemned the US for pronounced
international terrorism. No one mentions this, nobody knows it, it’s not part
of anyone’s consciousness. You go into the faculty club or the editorial
offices and people will never have heard about it. That’s what it means to
have extreme power and a very subservient intellectual class. Exactly as
Morgenthau pointed out – it’s out of history, it didn’t happen.
A week or two ago a poll was taken in Baghdad by the right wing American
Enterprise Institute which had Gallup Poll do the poll. It was reported in the
mainstream press with the New York Times headline “People in Baghdad Glad to
See Saddam Go”. Well, you didn’t need a poll to tell that, but if you read
down the article to see the actual results at the bottom which, in answer to the
question “Which Foreign Leader Do You Have the Most Favorable Impression
Of?”. Jacques Chirac. What does that tell you? A couple of weeks later, the
same reporter mentioned it with the comment “go figure” in that what kind of
crazy people are these that after we go and liberate them and they say the most
popular foreign figure is the one who was against the war? So they’re crazy
Arabs – there can be no other possible interpretation like that they may be
opposed to being invaded or some such thing.
Those things are there, in a sense - they’re not blacked out by the state
censors but this just as well might have been censored unless you think for a
few minutes to realize what it means. This happens all the time.
[Bernie Dwyer]: You had serious problems obtaining permission from the
United States to come to Cuba to participate in this conference. Do you foresee
any further problems upon your return?
[Noam Chomsky]: In a country like the United States people who have some
degree of privilege - which is a lot of people in a country like the US, and
I’m part of it - are free by comparative standards, from government
repression. I was on Nixon’s enemies list, but nothing ever happened and I
never expected anything to happen. Actually, I was up for a long jail sentence
but that was because of openly organizing tax resistance and supporting other
forms of resistance, and I was very public in this so I don’t call that
repression.
But what intimidates people is not the police, but the defamation. Any serious
departure from the conformist subservience to those in power is dealt with
tantrums, lies, and endless vilification. Lies repeated long enough become
truths and you become a holocaust denier and other things. It’s unpleasant but
compared to what other people face around the world that kind of unpleasantness
isn’t worth talking about.
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Thanks to Bernie Dwyer of
Radio Havana Cuba's English
Department for making this
transcript available to use by
CubaNews list.