Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

Understanding
Power

Understanding
Power

The Indispensable
Chomsky

Explanatory footnotes available at
www.understandingpower.com

Edited by Peter R. Mitchell
and John Schoeffel

SCRIBE PUBLICATIONS MELBOURNE

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
PO Box 523
Carlton North, Victoria Australia 3054
Email: [email protected]

First published in the United States by The New Press, New York 2002 First published in Australia and New Zealand by Scribe Publications 2002 Reprinted 2002, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2010

Published by arrangement with The New Press, New York

Copyright © Noam Chomsky, Peter R. Mitchell & John Schoeffel 2002

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. Explanatory footnotes available at
www.understandingpower.com

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Understanding power : the indispensable Chomsky.

ISBN 9781921753923 (e-book.)

1. Chomsky, Noam - Political and social views. 2. Chomsky, Noam - Interviews. I. Mitchell, Peter R. II. Schoeffel, John. 320

www.scribepublications.com.au

Contents

Editors’ Preface

A Note on the Events of September 11, 2001

Chapter One: Weekend Teach-In: Opening Session

Chapter Two: Teach-In: Over Coffee

Chapter Three: Teach-In: Evening

Chapter Four: Colloquy

Chapter Five: Ruling the World

Chapter Six: Community Activists

Chapter Seven: Intellectuals and Social Change

Chapter Eight: Popular Struggle

Chapter Nine: Movement Organizing

Chapter Ten: Turning Point

Editors’ Preface

This book brings together the work of one of the most remarkable political activists and thinkers of our time. The discussions span a wide array of topics—from the workings of the modern media, to globalization, the education system, environmental crises, the military-industrial complex, activist strategies, and beyond—and present a revolutionary perspective for evaluating the world, and for understanding power.

What distinguishes Noam Chomsky’s political thinking is not any one novel insight or single overarching idea. In fact, Chomsky’s political stance is rooted in concepts that have been understood for centuries. Rather, Chomsky’s great contribution is his mastery of a huge wealth of factual information, and his uncanny skill at unmasking, in case after case, the workings and deceptions of powerful institutions in today’s world. His method involves teaching through examples—not in the abstract—as a means of helping people to learn how to think critically for themselves.

The opening chapter introduces two themes that underlie nearly every aspect of the book: the progress of activism in changing the world, and the role of the media in staving off that activism and in shaping the way we think. The book follows a roughly chronological order, and begins with four discussions that took place in 1989 and 1990—the dawn of the post-Cold War era. These first chapters lay a foundation for Chomsky’s subsequent analysis. The remaining chapters explore more recent developments in U.S. foreign policy, international economics, the domestic social and political environment, as well as activist strategies and problems. The book and its accompanying footnotes bring Chomsky’s analysis right up to the present day.

The internet has enabled us to place extensive documentation in our footnotes, which appear at the book’s website. These vast online notes go well beyond mere citation to sources: they include commentary on the text, excerpts from government documents, significant quotations from newspaper articles and scholarship, and other important information. Our goal was to make accessible much of the evidence supporting each of Chomsky’s factual assertions. The notes also add additional depth for those interested in a given topic.

The complete footnotes—which are longer than the text itself—can be easily downloaded from the book’s website,
www.understandingpower.com
(they can also be accessed through
www.thenewpress.com
). Information about obtaining a bound printout of the notes is available on the website, or by writing us in care of the publisher.

The book was put together as follows. We transcribed tapes of dozens of question-and-answer sessions, edited them for readability, then reorganized and combined them to eliminate repetition and present the analysis in a coherent progression of topics and ideas. Our aim was to compile an overview of Chomsky’s political thought that combines the rigor and documentation of his scholarly books with the accessibility of the interview format. Always we remained faithful to Chomsky’s own language and answers—and he reviewed the text—but it was necessary to make superficial alterations for structural and stylistic reasons.

Most of the material is from seminar-style discussions with groups of activists, or from question periods after public talks, held between 1989 and 1999. Some of the answers in chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9 are taken from conversations between Chomsky and Michael Albert. Questioners are identified as “Man” or “Woman” because frequently this device reveals when the same person is pursuing a line of questioning, or whether somebody else has taken over.

We have personally checked and verified the sources cited in the footnotes, except for certain foreign language materials. Most of the sources are those Chomsky relied upon when making his comments in the text, but some are not. Emily Mitchell’s assistance in retrieving reams of this material in the final months of our work on this project was invaluable. We direct readers to footnote 67 of chapter 1 for discussion of one common misunderstanding regarding the footnotes: that the frequent citation to articles from the mainstream media is at odds with the “Propaganda Model” of the media, which Chomsky outlines in chapter 1.

We want to thank our parents—Emily and George Mitchell and Ron and Jone Schoeffel—whose support made the book possible.

—The Editors

A Note on the Events of September 11, 2001

As this book was going to print, hijacked airplanes hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon, killing thousands and potentially triggering major repercussions in U.S. society and in the world. The U.S. media devoted huge coverage to the attacks and their aftermath. But, overwhelmingly, the media omitted a critical, accurate discussion of the context in which they occurred.

When President Bush and U.S. officials announced that “America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world,” the mainstream media in the U.S. mostly echoed the refrains. A lead analysis in the
New York Times
stated that the perpetrators had acted out of “hatred for the values cherished in the West as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage.”
  ¹
Glaringly missing from the U.S. media’s coverage was a full and realistic account of U.S. foreign policy and its effects around the world. It was hard to find anything but a passing mention of the immense slaughter of Iraqi civilians during the Gulf War, the devastation of Iraq’s population by U.S.-instigated sanctions throughout the past decade, the U.S.’s crucial role in supporting Israel’s 35-year occupation of Palestinian territories, its support for brutal dictatorships throughout the Middle East that repress the local populations, and on and on. Similarly absent was any suggestion that U.S. foreign policy should in fundamental ways be changed.

This book was compiled before the events of September 11, 2001. But answers to many of the most important questions presented by those attacks will be found here. Why does the media provide such a limited and uncritical perspective, and such inaccurate analysis? What is the basis of U.S. foreign policy and why does it engender such widespread hatred of the U.S.? What can ordinary citizens do to change these situations?

As Chomsky noted right after the attacks, “The people in the advanced countries now face a choice: we can express justified horror, or we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes. If we refuse to do the latter, we will be contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.” From our frightening, current vantage point, the discussions collected in this book seem more urgent than ever. We hope that the book will provide a starting point for understanding, and will contribute to the critical debates—and changes—that must now occur.

Understanding
Power

1

Weekend Teach-In: Opening Session

Based primarily on discussions at Rowe, Massachusetts, April 15–16, 1989
.

The Achievements of Domestic Dissidence

W
OMAN
: Noam, I think the reason we’ve all come out here to spend the weekend talking with you is to get some of your perspectives on the state of the world, and what we can do to change it. I’m wondering, do you think activism has brought about many changes in the U.S.A. in the past few decades?

Oh sure, big changes actually. I don’t think the structure of the
institutions
has been changed—but you can see real changes in the culture, and in a lot of other ways too.

For instance, compare two Presidential administrations in the 1960s and 1980s, the Kennedy administration and the Reagan administration. Now, in a sense they had a lot in common, contrary to what everyone says. Both came into office on fraudulent denunciations of their predecessors as being wimpish and weak and letting the Russians get ahead of us—there was a fraudulent “missile gap” in the Kennedy case, a fraudulent “window of vulnerability” in the Reagan case. Both were characterized by a major escalation of the arms race, which means more international violence and increased taxpayer subsidies to advanced industry at home through military spending. Both were jingoist, both tried to whip up fear in the general population through a lot of militarist hysteria and jingoism. Both launched highly aggressive foreign policies around the world—Kennedy substantially increased the level of violence in Latin America; the plague of repression that culminated in the 1980s under Reagan was in fact largely a result of his initiatives.
  ¹

Of course, the Kennedy administration
was
different in that, at least rhetorically, and to some extent in practice, it was concerned for social reform programs at home, whereas the Reagan administration was committed to the opposite, to eliminating what there was of a social welfare system here. But that probably reflects the difference in international affairs in the two periods more than anything else. In the early 1960s, the United States was the world-dominant power, and had plenty of opportunity for combining international violence and commitment to military spending with social reform at home. By the 1980s, that same opportunity wasn’t around anymore: the United States was just not that powerful and not that rich relative to its industrial rivals—in absolute terms it was, but not relatively. And there was a general consensus among elites, it wasn’t just Reagan, that you had to break down the welfare state in order to maintain the profitability and competitiveness of American capital. But that difference apart, the two administrations were very similar.