Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky Read online

  We’ve been talking about the media and dumping on them, so why not turn to scholarship? Diplomatic history’s a big field, people win big prizes, get fancy professorships. Well, if you look at diplomatic history, it too is in the framework of “containment,” even the so-called dissidents. I mean, everybody has to accept the premise of “containment,” or you simply will not have an opportunity to proceed in these fields. And in the footnotes of the professional literature on containment, often there are some revealing things said.

  For example, one of the major scholarly books on the Cold War is called Strategies of Containment, by John Lewis Gaddis—it’s the foremost scholarly study by the top diplomatic historian, so it’s worth taking a look at, Well, in discussing this great theme, “strategies of containment,” Gaddis begins by talking about the terminology. He says at the beginning: it’s true that the term “containment” begs some questions, yes it presupposes some things, but nevertheless, despite the question of whether it’s factually accurate, it still is proper to adopt it as the framework for discussion. And the reason why it’s proper is because it was the perception of American leaders that they were taking a defensive position against the Soviet Union—so, Gaddis concludes, since that was the perception of American leaders, and since we’re studying American history, it’s fair to continue in that framework. 2

  Well, just suppose some diplomatic historian tried that with the Nazis. Suppose somebody were to write a book about German history and say, “Well, look, Hitler and his advisors certainly perceived their position as defensive”—which is absolutely true: Germany was under “attack” by the Jews, remember. Go back and look at the Nazi literature, they had to defend themselves against this virus, this bacillus that was eating away at the core of modern civilization—and you’ve got to defend yourself, after all. And they were under “attack” by the Czechs, and by the Poles, and by European encirclement. That’s not a joke. In fact, they had a better argument there than we do with the Soviet Union—they were encircled, and “contained,” and they had this enormous Versailles debt stuck on them for no reason after World War I. Okay, so suppose somebody wrote a book saying: “Look, the Nazi leadership perceived themselves as taking a defensive stance against external and internal aggression; it’s true it begs some questions, but we’ll proceed that way—now we’ll talk about how they defended themselves against the Jews by building Auschwitz, and how they defended themselves against the Czechs by invading Czechoslovakia, how they defended themselves against the Poles, and so on.” If anybody tried to do that, you wouldn’t even bother to laugh—but about the United States, that’s the only thing you can say: it’s not just that it’s acceptable, it’s that anything else is unacceptable.

  And when you pursue the matter further, it becomes even more interesting. So for example, in this same book Gaddis points out—again, in sort of a footnote, an aside he doesn’t elaborate on—that it’s a striking fact that when you look over the American diplomatic record since World War II, all of our decisions about how to contain the Soviet Union, like the arms buildups, the shifts to deténte, all those things, reflected largely domestic economic considerations. Then he sort of drops the point. 3 Well, what does that mean? What does Gaddis mean by that? There he’s beginning to enter into the realm of truth. See, the truth of the matter, and it’s very well-supported by declassified documents and other evidence, is that military spending is our method of industrial management—it’s our way of keeping the economy profitable for business. So just take a look at the major declassified documents on military spending, they’re pretty frank about it. For example, N.S.C. 68 [National Security Council Memorandum 68] is the major Cold War document, as everybody agrees, and one of the things it says very clearly is that without military spending, there’s going to be an economic decline both in the United States and world-wide—so consequently it calls for a vast increase in military spending in the U.S., in addition to breaking up the Soviet Union. 4

  You have to remember the context in which these decisions were being made, after all. This was right after the Marshall Plan had failed, right after the post-war aid programs had failed. There still had been no success as yet in reconstructing either the Japanese or Western European economies—and American business needed them; American manufacturers needed those export markets desperately. See, the Marshall Plan was designed largely as an export-promotion operation for American business, not as the noblest effort in history and so on. But it had failed: we hadn’t rebuilt the industrial powers we needed as allies and reconstructed the markets we needed for exports. And at that point, military spending was considered the one thing that could really do it, it was seen as the engine that could drive economic growth after the wartime boom ended, and prevent the U.S. from slipping back into a depression. 5 And it worked: military spending was a big stimulus to the U.S. economy, and it led to the rebuilding of Japanese industry, and the rebuilding of European industry—and in fact, it has continued to be our mode of industrial management right up to the present. So in that little comment Gaddis was getting near the main story: he was saying, post-war American decisions on rearmament and detente have been keyed to domestic economic considerations—but then he drops it, and we go back to talking about “containment” again.

  And if you look still closer at the scholarship on “containment,” it’s even more intriguing. For example, in another book Gaddis discusses the American military intervention in the Soviet Union right after the Bolshevik Revolution—when we tried to overthrow the new Bolshevik government by force—and he says that was defensive and that was containment: our invasion of the Russian land mass. And remember, I’m not talking about some right-wing historian; this is the major, most respected, liberal diplomatic historian, the dean of the field: he says the military intervention by 13 Western nations in the Soviet Union in 1918 was a “defensive” act. And why was it defensive? Well, there’s a sense in which he’s right. He says it was “defensive” because the Bolsheviks had declared a challenge to the existing order throughout the West, they had offered a challenge to Western capitalism—and naturally we had to defend ourselves. And the only way we could defend ourselves was by sending troops to Russia, so that’s a “defensive” invasion, that’s “defense.” 6

  And if you look at that history in more detail, you’ll find the point is even more revealing. So for example, right after the Bolshevik Revolution, American Secretary of State Robert Lansing warned President Wilson that the Bolsheviks are “issuing an appeal to the proletariat of all nations, to the illiterate and mentally deficient, who by their very numbers are supposed to take control of all governments.” And since they’re issuing an appeal to the mass of the population in other countries to take control of their own affairs, and since that mass of the population are the “mentally deficient” and the “illiterate”—you know, all these poor slobs out there who have to be kept in their place, for their own good—that’s an attack on us, and therefore we have to defend ourselves. 7 And what Wilson actually did was to “defend ourselves” in the two obvious ways: first by invading Russia to try to prevent that challenge from being issued, and second by initiating the Red Scare at home [a 1919 campaign of U.S. government repression and propaganda against “Communists”] to crush the threat that anyone here might answer the appeal. Those were both a part of the same intervention, the same “defensive” intervention.

  And it’s the same right up until today. Why do we have to get rid of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua? In reality it’s not because anybody really thinks that they’re a Communist power about to conquer the Hemisphere—it’s because they were carrying out social programs that were beginning to succeed, and which would have appealed to other people in Latin America who want the same things. In 1980 the World Bank estimated that it would take Nicaragua ten years just to get back to the economic level it had in 1977, because of the vast destruction inflicted at the end of the Somoza reign [the four-decade Nicaraguan family dictatorship ousted by the San
dinista revolution in July 1979]. But nevertheless, under the Sandinista government Nicaragua was in fact beginning economic development: it was establishing health programs, and social programs, and things were starting to improve for the general population there. 8 Well, that set off the alarm bells in New York and Washington, like it always does, and we had to stop it—because it was issuing an appeal to the “illiterate and mentally deficient” in other desperate countries, like Honduras and Guatemala, to do the same thing. That’s what U.S. planners call the “domino theory,” or the “threat of a good example,” and pretty soon the whole U.S.-dominated system starts to fall apart. 9

  Orwell’s World and Ours

  Well, all of that is within the rhetoric of “containing” Communism—and we could easily go on. But there’s one word. You look at any other term of political discourse, and you’re going to find the same thing: the terms of political discourse are designed so as to prevent thought. One of the main ones is this notion of “defense.” So look at the diplomatic record of any country you want—Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Libya, pick your favorite horror-story—you’ll find that everything they ever did was “defensive”; I’m sure if we had records from Genghis Khan we would find that what he was doing was “defensive” too. And here in the United States you cannot challenge that—no matter how absurd it gets.

  Like, we can be “defending” South Vietnam. I have never seen in the media, never in thirty years that I have been looking carefully, one phrase even suggesting that we were not defending South Vietnam. Now, we weren’t: we were attacking South Vietnam. We were attacking South Vietnam as clearly as any aggression in history. But try to find one phrase anywhere in any American newspaper, outside of real marginal publications, just stating that elementary fact. It’s unstatable. 10

  It’s unstatable in the scholarly literature. Gaddis again, when he talks about the battle of Dienbienphu, where the French made their last stand to keep colonial control over Indochina, he describes it as a defensive struggle. 11 McGeorge Bundy, in his book on the history of the military system, talks about how the United States toyed with the idea of using nuclear weapons in 1954 to help the French maintain their position at Dienbienphu, and he says: we were thinking about it to assist the French in their “defense” of Indochina. 12 He doesn’t say defense against whom, you know, because that would be too idiotic—like, was it defense against the Russians or something? No. They were defending Indochina against the Indochinese. 13 But no matter how absurd it is, you cannot question that in the United States. I mean, these are extremes of ideological fanaticism—in other countries, you could at least raise these kinds of questions. Some of you are journalists: try talking about the American “attack” on South Vietnam. Your editors will think you came from Mars or something, there was no such event in history. Of course, there was in real history.

  Or take the idea that the United States is supporting “democracy” all over the world. Well, there’s a sense in which that’s true. But what does it mean? When we support “democracy,” what do we support? I mean, is “democracy” something where the population takes part in running the country? Well, obviously not. For instance, why are El Salvador and Guatemala “democratic,” but Nicaragua [i.e. under the Sandinista Party] not “democratic”? Why? Is it because two of them had elections and the other one didn’t? No. In fact, Nicaragua’s election [in 1984] was a hundred times as good as any election in El Salvador. 14 Is it because there’s a lack of popular political participation in Nicaragua? No. Is it because the political opposition can’t survive there? No, the political opposition is barely harassed in Nicaragua; in El Salvador and Guatemala it’s just murdered. 15 Is it that there can’t be an independent press in Nicaragua? No, the Nicaraguan press is one of the freest presses in the world, much more so than the American press has ever been—the United States has never tolerated a newspaper even remotely like La Prensa in Nicaragua [opposition paper supported by the U.S. during the contra war], not even close: in any time of crisis here, the American government has shut down even tiny dissident newspapers, forget a major newspaper funded by the foreign power that’s attacking the country and which is openly calling for the overthrow of the government. 16 That degree of freedom of the press is absolutely inconceivable here. In El Salvador, there was an independent press at one time—it was wiped out by the U.S.-backed security forces, who just murdered the editor of one newspaper and blew up the premises of the other. 17 Okay, that takes care of that independent press.

  So you know, by what criteria are El Salvador and Guatemala “democratic” and Nicaragua not? Well, there is a criterion: in Nicaragua [under the Sandinistas], business elements are not represented in dominating the state much beyond their numbers, so it’s not a “democracy.” In El Salvador and Guatemala, the governments are run by the military for the benefit of the local oligarchies—the landowners, rich businessmen, and rising professionals—and those people are tied up with the United States, so therefore those countries are “democracies.” It doesn’t matter if they blow up the independent press, and kill off the political opposition, and slaughter tens of thousands of people, and never run anything remotely like a free election—all of that is totally irrelevant. They’re “democracies,” because the right people are running them; if the right people aren’t running them, then they’re not “democracies.” And on this again there is uniformity: try to find anyone in the American press, anyone, who is willing to break ranks on the idea that there are four democracies in Central America and one totalitarian state [i.e. Sandinista Nicaragua] that never had a free election—just try to find one statement rebutting that. And if the killings in El Salvador and Guatemala are ever mentioned in the American press, they’ll always call it “Death Squads Out of Control,” or “Extremists Out of Control.” Now, the fact of the matter is that the extremists are in Washington, and what they’re controlling are the Salvadoran and Guatemalan militaries—but you’ll never find that in an American newspaper.

  Or just take this phrase “peace process,” which we hear all the time. The phrase “peace process” has a dictionary meaning, it means “process leading to peace.” But that’s not the way it’s used in the media. The term “peace process” is used in the media to refer to whatever the United States happens to be doing at the moment—and again, that is without exception. So it turns out that the United States is always supporting the peace process, by definition. Just try to find a phrase in the U.S. media somewhere, anywhere, saying that the United States is opposing the peace process: you can’t do it.

  Actually, a few months ago I said this at a talk in Seattle, and someone from the audience wrote me a letter about a week or so later saying he was interested, so he’d done a little research project on it. He took the New York Times computer database from 1980 (when it begins) up to the present, and pulled out every article that had the words “peace process” in it. There were like nine hundred articles or something, and he checked through each of them to see if there was any case in which the United States was opposing the peace process. And there wasn’t, it was 100 percent. Well, you know, even the most august country in history, let’s say by accident sometime, might not be supporting the peace process. But in the case of the United States, that just can’t happen. And this is a particularly striking illustration, because during the 1980s the United States was the main factor in blocking two major international peace processes, one in Central America and one in the Middle East. 18 But just try to find that simple, obvious fact stated anywhere in the mainstream media. You can’t. And you can’t because it’s a logical contradiction—you don’t even have to do any grubby work with the data and the documents to prove it, it’s just proven by the meaning of the words themselves. It’s like finding a married bachelor or something—you don’t have to do any research to show there aren’t any. You can’t have the United States opposing the peace process, because the peace process is what the United States is doing, by definition. And if anybody is opposing
the United States, then they’re opposing the peace process. That’s the way it works, and it’s very convenient, you get nice conclusions.

  MAN: Can I throw in another one? When you have a country which you can’t even pretend is a democracy—there’s no constitution, no parliament, there’s an absolute monarch—you use the word “moderate.”

  Yeah, “moderate” is a word that means “follows U.S. orders”—as opposed to what’s called “radical,” which means “doesn’t follow U.S. orders.” “Radical” has nothing to do with left or right; you can be an ultra-right-winger, but you’re a “radical” if you don’t follow U.S. orders.

  MAN: I have yet to see a single reference to Morocco’s King Hassan as an “absolute monarch.” He has the worst human rights record in the Arab world, torture widespread, he invaded Western Sahara, disobeyed the World Court, one of the nastiest characters anywhere—I have never seen an article that didn’t refer to him as a “moderate.” 19

  That’s right, because we have U.S. airbases in Morocco, and we get plenty of minerals from there, and so on. Or just take Saudi Arabia—Saudi Arabia is even described as “moderate” now. 20 In fact, even Iraq is sometimes described as “moving towards moderation”: Iraq is probably the worst terror-state in the world—death camps, biological warfare, anything you like. 21

  MAN: How about Suharto [Indonesian dictator]—he’s called a “moderate” too.

  Suharto, yeah—that’s the most extreme case I’ve ever seen, in fact, I’m glad you mention it. This is a really astonishing one, actually. For example, there was an article in the Christian Science Monitor a couple years ago about the great business opportunities in Indonesia, and it said: after the Indonesian government stopped a Communist revolt in 1965, the West was very eager to do business with Indonesia’s “new moderate leader, Suharto,” 22 Well, who’s Indonesia’s “new moderate leader, Suharto”? Suharto is the guy who, no doubt with the backing of the United States, carried out a military coup in 1965 after which the Indonesian army slaughtered about 500,000 people within four months. Nobody knows the exact numbers—I mean, they gave 500,000, pick your number; it was mostly landless peasants. 23