Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (13 page)

Well, the British have it sort of institutionalized, and you don’t vote for Queen. But suppose you could get to the point where elections in England were not for Prime Minister and Parliament, but instead people voted for Queen, and then things ran the way they do now, except the Prime Minister is just appointed by the banks and the corporations. And in the election campaign you’d ask, “Who’s got the nicest hairdo?” you’d ask, “Who can say things nicer?” “Who’s got the best smile?” Well, then you’d have gone a long way towards the desired goal of maintaining the formal functioning of the system, but eliminating the substance from it. And that’s pretty much what we had with Reagan, I think.

Now, I don’t know whether Reagan was contrived for that purpose or whether it just worked out that way, but once having seen it in operation, I expect that people will learn from it. And in fact, I think you could see signs of it in the 1988 election as well. I mean, everybody—the media and everyone else—agreed that there were no real issues in the campaign: the only issue was whether Dukakis was going to figure out a way of ducking all the slime that was being thrown at him. That’s about the only thing anybody was voting about, did he duck or didn’t he duck? That’s like saying, “Don’t bother voting.”

M
AN
: But doesn’t it make
any
difference who wins? I mean, suppose they gave us Ollie North as President?

Yeah, look, I don’t want to say that it makes
no
difference. The figure who’s there makes
some
difference—but the less difference it makes, the more you’ve marginalized the public.

W
OMAN
: Do you vote?

Do
I
? Well, differentially. I mean, I almost always vote for lower-level candidates, like school committee representatives and things like that—because there it makes a difference, in fact. But as you get more and more remote from popular control, it makes less and less of a difference. When you get to the House of Representatives—well, it’s sort of academic in my case, because I live in one of these single-member districts where the same guy always wins, so it doesn’t really matter whether you vote or not. When you get to Senator, it begins to become pretty symbolic anyway. At the level of President, half the time I don’t even bother—I think those are usually very subtle judgments. I mean, it’s a difficult judgment to try to figure out whether Nixon or Humphrey is going to end the Vietnam War sooner [in 1968], that’s an extremely subtle judgment to make; I actually didn’t vote on that one, because I figured Nixon probably would. I did vote against Reagan, because I thought the guys
around
Reagan were extremely dangerous—Reagan himself was irrelevant, but the people in his administration were real killers and torturers, and they were just making people suffer too much, so I thought that might make a difference. But these are usually not very easy judgments to make, in my opinion.

W
OMAN
: What do you think stopped the impeachment drive against Reagan after the Iran-contra scandal?

It would just embarrass the hell out of everybody—I mean, nobody in power wants that much disruption for something like that. Look, why don’t they bring every American President to trial for war crimes? There are things on which there is a complete consensus in the elite culture: the United States is
permitted
to carry out war crimes, it’s
permitted
to attack other countries, it’s
permitted
to ignore international law. On those things there’s a complete consensus, so why should they impeach the President for doing everything he’s supposed to do?

In fact, you can ask all kinds of questions like that. For instance, at the time of the Nuremberg trials [of Nazi war criminals after World War II], there was a lot of very pompous rhetoric on the part of the Western prosecutors about how this was not just going to be “victor’s justice”: it’s not just that we won the war and they lost, we’re establishing principles which are going to apply to
us
too. Well, by the principles of the Nuremberg trials, every single American President since then would have been hanged. Has anyone ever been brought to trial? Has this point even been raised? It’s not a difficult point to demonstrate.
  ⁴²

Actually, the Nuremberg trials are worth thinking about. The Nazis were something unique, granted. But if you take a look at the Nuremberg trials, they were very cynical. The operational criterion for what counted as a war crime at Nuremberg was
a criminal act that the West didn’t do
: in other words, it was considered a legitimate defense if you could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing. That’s actually true. So part of the defense of the German submarine commander Admiral Doenitz was to call an American submarine commander, Admiral Nimitz, to testify that the Americans did the same thing—that’s a defense. Bombing of urban areas was not considered a war crime at Nuremberg; reason is, the West did more of it than the Germans. And this is all stated straight out—like if you read the book by Telford Taylor, the American prosecutor at the trials, this is the way he describes it; he’s very positive about the whole thing.
  ⁴³
If the West had done it, it wasn’t a crime; it was only a crime if the Germans had done it and we hadn’t. I mean, it’s true there were plenty of such things, but still there’s something pretty cynical about it.

In fact, even worse than the Nuremberg trials were the Tokyo trials [of Japanese war criminals]: by the standards of the Tokyo trials, not just every American President, but
everyone
would be hanged [at Tokyo, those who failed to take affirmative steps to prevent war crimes or to dissociate themselves from the government were executed]. General Yamashita was an extreme case: he was hanged because during the American conquest of the Philippines, troops that were technically under his command, although he had already lost all contact with them, carried out crimes—therefore
he
was hanged. Ask yourself who’s going to survive that one. Here’s a guy who was hanged because troops he had no contact with whatsoever, but which theoretically in some order of battle had to do with his units, committed atrocities. If those same principles apply to us, who’s going to survive? And that was just one case, I think we killed about a thousand people in the Tokyo trials—they were really grotesque.
  ⁴⁴

W
OMAN
: Just going back to elections for a second—would you say the ’84 elections were the same as ’88: no substance?

Well, in the 1984 elections there was still an issue. In the 1984 elections, the Republicans were the party of Keynesian growth [the economist Keynes advocated government stimulation of the economy]—they said, “Let’s just keep spending and spending and spending, bigger and bigger deficits, and somehow that will lead to growth”—whereas the Democrats were the party of fiscal conservatism: they had this sad-looking son of a minister [Mondale] saying, “No, no good; we can’t keep spending, we’re going to get in trouble, we’ve got to watch the money supply.”

Okay, for anybody who gets amused at these things, the Republicans and the Democrats had shifted their traditional positions 180 degrees; historically, the
Democrats
have been the party of Keynesian growth, and the
Republicans
have been the party of fiscal conservatism. But they shifted totally—and what’s interesting is, nobody even noticed this, I never even saw a single comment on it in the press. Well, that tells you something: what it tells you is, there are different sectors of the business community in the country, and they sometimes have slightly different tactical judgments about the way to deal with current problems. And when they differ on something, it’ll come up in the election; when they don’t differ on anything, there won’t be any issues.

Two New Factors in World Affairs

M
AN
: To move to a more general level, Professor—I’m interested whether you think that there are any developments over the past few decades that are new on the international scene, which people should he aware of as we analyze things that are taking place in the world?

Well, in my view, there are at least two really major things that are coming along that are new: one is a shift in the international economy.
  ⁴⁵
And the other is the threat to the environment—which just can’t be ignored much longer, because if facing it is delayed too much longer there isn’t going to be a lot more to human history.

I’ll start with the environment. The reality is that under capitalist conditions—meaning maximization of short-term gain—you’re ultimately going to destroy the environment: the only question is when. Now, for a long time, it’s been possible to pretend that the environment is an infinite source and an infinite sink. Neither is true obviously, and we’re now sort of approaching the point where you can’t keep playing the game too much longer. It may not be very far off. Well, dealing with that problem is going to require large-scale social changes of an almost unimaginable kind. For one thing, it’s going to certainly require large-scale social planning, and that means participatory social planning if it’s going to be at all meaningful. It’s also going to require a general recognition among human beings that an economic system driven by greed is going to self-destruct—it’s only a question of time before you make the planet unlivable, by destroying the ozone layer or some other way.
  ⁴⁶
And that means huge socio-psychological changes have to take place if the human species is going to survive very much longer. So that’s a big factor.

Quite apart from that, there have been major changes in the international economy. The world has basically been moving into three major economic blocks; the United States is no longer the sole economic power like it was after World War II. There’s a Japan-based system, which involves Japan and the countries around its periphery, like Singapore and Taiwan, the old Japanese empire. There’s Europe, which has been consolidating into the European Common Market—and that could be a powerful economic unit; if Europe gets its act together, it’ll outweigh the United States: it’s got a larger economy, a bigger population, a more educated population, and they’ve got their traditional colonial interests, which are in fact being reconstructed. Meanwhile the United States has been building up its own counter-block in North America through so-called “free trade” agreements, which are turning Canada into kind of an economic colony and basically absorbing Northern Mexico into the United States as a cheap-labor area. The three regions are roughly comparable by most measures, with the Asian region still far ahead in capital reserves.

No one understands quite how this situation will be affected by the financial liberalization that has been so harmful to the global economy since the mid-1970s. And there are also other intriguing issues. For example, the European powers, especially Germany, are attempting to reconstruct the traditional colonial relations between Central Europe and Eastern Europe that existed before the Cold War—Central Europe has the industry and technology and investment capital, and Eastern Europe and Russia provide them with cheap manpower and resources. Meanwhile Japan is doing precisely the same thing with Russia on the Asian side, trying to construct colonial relations with Siberia: Japan has plenty of extra capital, and Siberia has plenty of resources that the Russians can’t exploit properly because they don’t have the capital or the technology, so it’s like a natural combination. And if these efforts work, then we’re going to have the two major enemies of the United States, Japan and Europe, integrating with the Soviet Union, it becoming kind of a semi-colonial area related to them. And that realizes the worst nightmares of American planners.

See, there is an American geopolitical tradition which treats the United States as an island power off the mainland of Europe; it’s a bigger version of British geopolitics, which treats England as an island power off the mainland of Europe. I mean, Britain throughout its whole modern history has tried to prevent Europe from becoming unified—that was the main theme of British history, prevent Europe from being unified, because we’re just this island power off of Europe, and if they ever get unified we’re in trouble. And the United States has the same attitude towards Eurasia: we’ve got to prevent them from becoming unified, because if they are, we become a real second-class power—we’ll still have our little system around here, but it’ll become kind of second-class.
  ⁴⁷
By “the United States,” I mean powerful interests in the United States, U.S.-based capital.

W
OMAN
: Then do you think it’s possible that the U.S. may not be considered a superpower someday?

Well, you know, despite the
relative
decline in U.S.-based power, it’s still powerful without historical precedent.

W
OMAN
: I know it is militarily
.

No, even economically. Look, it’s a real scandal of the American economic system that the general economic level here is so low. I mean, by world standards, in terms of, say, infant mortality or lifespan, or most other measures like that, people are not terribly well-off here—the United States is well down the list. I think we’re twentieth of twenty industrial powers in infant mortality, for example. We’re at about the level of Cuba, which is a poor Third World country, in terms of health standards.
  ⁴⁸
Those are absolute scandals—the general population of the United States ought to be better off than that of any other country in the world by just a huge margin. No other industrial power has anything like our resources. We’ve got an educated population, like basic literacy is relatively high. We have a comparatively uniform population: people speak English all over the place—you can’t find that in too many areas of the world. We’ve got enormous military power. We have no enemies anywhere nearby. Very few powers in history have ever had that situation. So these are just incomparable advantages, and our economic system has not turned them to the benefit of the population here, particularly—but they’re there, and they’re going to stay there.