Noam Chomsky in conversation with Jonathan Freedland

[Music] welcome thank you already for giving our distinguished guests guests such a such a warm welcome yourselves and we appreciate that I'm Roley Keating on chief executive here at the British Library and it is a pleasure to see you all at this very very special event here propaganda is going to be the big theme of the year here at the British Library come May the 17th will be opening one of our most substantial exhibitions propaganda power and persuasion which we think is the first time a major national institution has tackled this idea in the round drawing extensively on our own collections we're going to be exploring state propaganda in all its forms in war and peace across the centuries from ancient origins particular focus on the 20th century and also looking at where we are now and flashing ahead into the future and this will be surrounded we hope by one of the biggest public programs of events and discussions and debates we've ever had and nothing could be more appropriate or wonderful than that we kick off this great summer of reflection and debate than to have our guest tonight probably the best person we could possibly have to stimulate discussion and debate it's great to have him in London last night he was up the road I think at the friend's house delivering the Edward W Sayid London lecture tackling in that case the Middle East tonight Noam Chomsky as I think needing very little introduction has been at MIT for over 50 years is of course perhaps the most influential figure in modern linguistics one of the greats of analytic philosophy also though of course the very model of the engaged public intellectuals someone who brings their wisdom spirit intellectual curiosity and passion to bear on the great issues of our time most famously most trenchant Lee perhaps for his consistent critique of American foreign policy state capitalism and news media and I think that may be part of our focus for discussion tonight Noam has written over a hundred but one that resonates to this day and I think will for a very very long time indeed is manufacturing consent from 1988 which established yes the propaganda model or analysis of news media where 25 years on are we with that thesis I think that'll be one of the questions we explore tonight as collectively we swim in a sea of social media the internet transforming the provision and shaping of news in front of our eyes here at the library we try to collect the news we collect newspapers we collect online materials we try and create a record of how news documents and shapes our world and I can think of no one better to challenge us professionally and intellectually as to how we do that than gnome and I'm looking forward greatly to hearing what he has to say it remains only for me to say thank you to the Eccles Center for American studies based here at the library it was founded by David and Mary Echols by with a bequest in 1991 and it is one of the ways in which the the the wonders and depth of our American collections a celebrated year in year out here an events like this a typical of the kinds of events that the team put on and we're very grateful for that also delighted to welcome Jonathan Freedland he and I worked together in the founding days of BBC four and it's very nice to be reunited here tonight of course you'll have seen Jonathan's work in Britain in the Guardian you may see him in the New York Times New York Review of Books and familiar as a voice to millions on Radio fours the long view connecting past present and future and I'm sure that's what we're going to hear tonight so please our distinguished speakers thank you [Applause] thank you thank you very much rody for that warm introduction and really really covering the ground of setting up what the conversation we have tonight and is as he said so aptly our speaker our guest of honor couldn't be better placed to discuss this subject we thought we would do is plunge right in with a flavor of the exhibition that's coming propaganda power and persuasion and Noam Chomsky's given me permission to do two things firstly to do what doesn't often happen in intellectually hallowed environments like this which is to do a quick fire round which we will do on the screen in a moment but also he tells me very graciously that he his own children and I'm guessing paps grandchildren as well sometimes say and they've asked a question please give me the five minute lecture version so I say I pass that on because it means that if you see me appearing to be rudely winding up or moving on our honored guest that is because I have the blessing and permission to do it just as we move on cuz we've got a lot of ground together so on with the quick fire round I I thought it would be useful before we ask you to give us a very distilled version of the propaganda model that is the core thesis of manufacturing concern if we just had a look at some examples of propaganda from the exhibition and in a way just to do have a quick look at what is and what isn't and I'm gonna have a go with it there we are I hope everyone can see that I'm Volk ein Reich ein Fuhrer one people one state as opposed one Fuhrer from we guess either in the 1930s this a soviet-era depiction of a weeping Statue of Liberty I'm not sure how clearly as to all of you but we have sort of secret police in the eyes of Lady Liberty one a truncheon serving as a tear and then this from the wartime period in the United States the artist George a rather Norman Rockwell have very different meaning Georgia Norman Rockwell Seyfried was feech by war bonds now Noam Chomsky just start with these three - the lay eye these all look like examples of propaganda what would you say the first evokes childhood memories which aren't pleasant there were it was a very scary period the 1930s especially if you're Jewish and for me it was I remember my parents would sometimes play Hitler's speeches on the radio I couldn't understand the words but you could get the tone and it was very frightening especially the reaction and it had a lot of personal meaning for me because we were the only Jewish family in a mostly Irish and German Catholic neighborhood and boys on the street since that was very anti-semitic though the kids were all going to a Jesuit school and when they came out they were raving anti-semite so this was when they'd calm down later in the afternoon you could but I grew up with a visceral fear of Catholics and I'm the Irish where pro-nazi because they were Irish they hated the British and the Germans because they were German this is all our topic but now that we have a Jesuit Pope to give it a little tremble when you heard about well it changed enough so that when liberation theology came along I got very close to the Jesuit when I would visit say Nicaragua I often lived in the Jesuit house but it took a while to get over it because some of these childhood and fears or can be pretty deep I got when I got older I realized what this ridiculous but it's deep and the Hitler imagery was very striking I remember beer parties when Paris Ville it's that was the environment the interestingly I never told my parents and in those days the children these boys didn't talk to their parents about personal things so they never knew I don't even think they knew what kind of neighborhood we lived in I mean they didn't know your fear of some of them nothing maybe they didn't have any sense of what the neighborhood was like they lived in a way you know it was like they lived their Hebrew teachers they lived in a kind of Hebrew ghetto not physically but the only people they knew were similar people I mean I remember the women my mother's friends who would all bilingual of course but they would call the if they had to order something from a downtown department store they'd insist on speaking Hebrew so they'd get a Hebrew translator you know it was quite and there was a big kulturkampf going on at the time between the Hebrew and the yiddish diaspora and they were uh neighbors sites of their language was Yiddish but I never heard a word of the addition when I was growing up so very potent memories for you well maybe I'll colleagues they can turn up the volume on the microphone so you're here is amplified so we'll take note of that to move to this painting this poster from the water it does this count as propaganda as much as that first picture of it's a perversion of socialist realism it's basically the same and if this was the Second World War of course it's them trying to stir up patriotism for the Second World War it's kind of striking to think about what went on in the First World War the Second World War the United States didn't get into it until it was attacked some wanted to get in but they didn't First World War was quite different the British had a the first state propaganda system that I know of was called the ministry of information that natural name for a propaganda system and the purpose of the the main purpose of the Ministry of information was to convince Americans American intellectuals in particular this is relevant to the propaganda bottle convinced American intellectuals that it was a noble war during the first world war intellectuals in every participant country were lauding the magnificence of their own state the few people that be great mostly ended up in jail like Bertrand Russell but they had to convince they were trying desperately of course to get the Americans into the war and Woodrow Wilson had been elected in 1916 on a peace platform slogan was peace not victory and they had to somehow turn the population around very quickly so they'd begin to hate everything German you know and it was really and it was very successful and it particularly the progressive American intellectuals you know the John Dewey circle New Republic intellectuals they turned completely and they convinced themselves that as they put it this is the first time in history that a country has gone into war not because of military leaders and chauvinistic leaders but because of the the intelligent members of the community reflected and decided that this is what had to be done and then we turned the population around so that they joined us of course the intellectuals that were they were being fed ludicrous British propaganda the kind that was as later exposed and the brice report and you know the belgian children with their arms torn - all that stuff and it worked very well and that's a kind of set off the modern system of propaganda I want to get on to you particularly your point about the propaganda model but just people we leave our quickfire round I would have a look at two newer examples now that's from the Occupy movement as you said the 99% have no borders that's the clue it's quite a deliberately retro style but here's a cause I particularly signaled this out because I thought here's a cause that broadly you might be sympathetic to and yet would you apply the label of propaganda to this image sympathetic to the cause but I don't like this technique of trying to bring people in in fact I I can't stand listening to what's called the no you know uplifting rhetoric it just really turns me off and for the same reason this kind of thing it's an appeal to emotions not understanding and it's obvious what it's trying to say but you didn't like it even when it's in the service of a cause you might simply understand it well I mean I can't listen to Martin Luther King's speeches literally although I greatly admire him because it's in a just the style you know it's a it's an appeal it's trying to arouse emotional support for something very significant I mean I don't criticize it obviously meant something but if you didn't like Martin Luther King what about this man no that's extreme you can see the effect it had by the on the funeral yes it was just worship fact about the only thing like it outside of Kimmel song maybe it was Ronald Reagan's death it was treated like a king had died in fact you can read in publications of the Hoover Institution you know at Stanford University serious research outfit describing Reagan as a they put a colossal figure whose spirit hovers over us like a warm and friendly ghost that's actually George Washington was treated the same way when the colonies the colonies had to create some sort of sense of national identity I mean the term United States plural until the Civil War there's a lot of states you know and they tried to create a national identity you needed a heroic figure so the in the early 19th century there was a George Washington cult that was stirred it's where you get these cherry trees stories and all that business it was all concocted to try to show that he was practically not human he was a noble gentleman that's very funny for example if you go to the Capitol building today there's a statue of George around 1830 I think of Washington in the style of a Greek god you know he's Zeus and there was criticism of it but the criticism was because he was wearing a toga and his shoulder was showing but other than that that's fine he was God you know perfect perfect Roman perfectly and this would fit that category of myth-making it's the same kind of thing and it leaves you cold regardless of the cause this if that was by way of preamble really - and it's it's been very instructive already this notion of myth making bit what a lot of people in this room will have read manufacturing consent I'm guessing quite a few will have read it several times and committed it to memory but for those who haven't and I'm quoting now your children if you can give us the distilled version the five minute lecture on what the propaganda model is and who wrote the book of regionally in 1988 and then I want to sort of push you on what how that stands now well actually I should say that the most of the work on the propaganda model itself was due to my colleague Edward Herrmann he's a professor of finances in fact he's it professionally was a specialist in corporate power and corporate control wrote the standard work on it and it's I mean I agreed with it but I can't take credit for it was mostly his initiative and I didn't totally agree for reasons I'll tell you but what it is is a discussion of the institutional structure of the media but it's looking at the US media so now state media but corporate media and asks an obvious question if you look at the institutional structure and you ask what content you would expect to flow from it what would you predict and briefly without going to the details the the media are huge corporations parts of larger conglomerates they sell a like other businesses they sell a product to a market the market is other businesses advertisers the product is people so they sell people to advertisers so television for example makes nothing no profit if you turn on the tube but they get it from the advertisers and the newspapers mostly lose money when you subscribe they do better from the advertising so so it so the first part of it is it's major corporations showing people to other corporations and then there are other factors like it's very easy to show that the corporate system is very tightly linked to government that people flow in and out the and then the government itself produces just plain state propaganda and that matters and other factors like that no we asked well what would you expect to happen what you'd expect to see overwhelmingly is a choice of issues and framing of issues which reflects the interests and concerns of the state corporate Nexus that's what you'd predict and then the rest of the book is running through examples it's been a little misunderstood it's a lot of journalists regard as a criticism of journalists it's exactly the opposite in fact about a third of the book the latter third I suspect nobody ever read it is a defense of journalists against attacks from liberals from Freedom House you know the Freedom House wrote a vicious attack couple volumes of attacks on American journalists for stabbing the United States in the back in Vietnam and losing the Vietnam War and so on and they it's to them the two volumes one commentary and the other the documentary background for it and I'm kind of a masochist so I actually read the documents and probably the only person ever read them when you read the documents you find that the commentary is totally falsified and in fact what it shows is that the journalists did an honest courageous job what they saw they described accurately and the criticisms are mostly fabricated but they did it within the framework of a an interpretation which is super chauvinistic so for example that if the United States carried out some atrocity it was a mistake or the other side's amount cost to do it and then they leave things out that but the actual reporting was first-rate and I think you can trust it and typically the case so it's a defense of journalism which the journalists didn't like how is able to do that kind of reporting that you do trust if they are simultaneously framing it in a way that you don't you know it's honest professionals they have integrity and especially working in the field takes a lot of courage and and they do an excellent job but within a narrow structure like there are certain topics that just not want report not out of there it might be editorial pressure and when they do report it the framework is essentially a patriotic framework you can see it all the time I mean we give lots of examples just distinguish or you say that the media distinguishes between worthy victims and unworthy victims and worthy victims tend to be the victims of the United States enemies or unworthy victims of those who are whether its client yeah so when say the Russians invade Afghanistan the Afghans are worthy victims because the enemy is attacking them and in fact reporting from Afghanistan during the Russian invasion was from the side of the Mujahideen that's where reporters went to work with the guerillas and when the u.s. invaded Afghanistan is exactly the opposite reporters didn't go work with the Taliban you know they reported from the point of view of the American army I'm interested in how sincere your expression of admiration for journalists is well I want to push you on how sincere that your admiration that you expressed before for journalists how sincere can that be if you're saying that they locate themselves on this side or that side depending on what's going on they accept the frame and the narrative that sounds like a criticism to me well actually that's the one point in which it and I somewhat disagreed about the whole thing I think that's to have the book refer to the media is too narrow because I think that applies to the whole intellectual class that's the way intellectuals are overwhelmingly all through history intellectuals overwhelmingly are servants of power now intellectuals write history so when you read what they write they look very noble and adversarial and so on but when you look at what actually happened there all the criticisms we make of the media apply to them and that's significant because none of the institutional factors hold in that case none of the institutional factors that we looked at have to do with the corporate structure you know the advertisers who purchase it but that's not apply to the a doesn't apply to a college professor I'm there other pressures but not those but the outcome is pretty much the same this is again slightly off topic but if that is the case what made you so different in other words if even intellectuals are subsumed into the always a fringe of dissidents any society look at there's a fringe of dissidents they're treated badly usually this goes back to the earliest recorded history I so got classical Greece who drank the hemlock it was the guy who was corrupting the youth by worshipping false gods you know and it wasn't the guys who followed orders or take a look at at the same time of the other ancient records we have are the biblical records in the biblical records there's there are people who we would call intellectuals they weren't in the English translations it's called prophets that's a bad translation of a very obscure Hebrew word which nobody understands and they they weren't prophets they didn't prophesy they were decent intellectuals you know they condemned the evil king they gave geopolitical analysis said you're leading us into disaster you you should be merciful to widows and orphans and these are decent intellectuals how are they treated they were imprisoned thrown into the desert one of them elijah was called the hater of israel no fairness or Albay epitome of evil in the Bible King Ahab that's the first use that I know of this notion self-hating Jew you know it's King Ahab referring to probably Elijah yes and the and they were all treated badly now there were people who were treated well flatterers at the court a couple of centuries later they were condemned as false prophets and that's very typical I don't know the society where that's not true but I've heard it said just at this point about you that if the argument of the you just advanced and manufacture manufacturing consent was completely right the book should have gone nowhere and you should have been an obscure figure who was shoved to the margins but the fact that you are this giant figure in the book is still cited and quoted it's because of the popular movement if the when I started giving talks about the Vietnam War in early nineteen sixties I I was giving talks in somebody's living room or a church with four people the minister the organizer a guy who wanted to kill me and a drunk girl walking off the streets and that went on for quite a while finally a popular movement developed and when popular - the movements develop people who have some degree of privilege can float above them actually the same was true of Martin Luther King I'm sure he would have been the first to say if if it hadn't been for the young students sitting in and lunch counters and writing freedom buses and getting beaten to a pulp by state troopers and everything that grew from that he wouldn't have nobody would hurt him either it's just I said we were gonna just challenge a few things about it the book was written 1988 since then we've had this explosion of other media social media the internet obviously and access is now available to many who would at least consider themselves and I want to give you if you think they would be right but they would consider themselves outside the corporate media they have their own voices separate to that exchange and need for advertising etc and in fact just to illustrate the point I tweeted earlier today that I was going to have this conversation with you and elicited this question from a Chris Wood here in Britain who said can we still talk about dominance or hegemony in a world where there are so many competing sources of information and propaganda the internet and blogs and Twitter etc does that does this change in the last 25 years render any part of your thesis out of it it's not a great change like when I was growing up in the 1930s now there were all sorts of radical newspapers I mean every imaginable kind in fact as a kid I'd go down to the Philadelphia public library err analog to this not the same obviously and spend Saturday afternoon reading radical periodicals every imaginable kind and I got you know what they were like but but they were other interpretations now sources of information is not exactly correct because the the internet access makes that easier like I don't have to go downtown to the library I can punch something on my computer but it's not that different and they are not really sources of information the information is still coming from journalists in the field is that right so I'm thinking of some of the in the Arab awakenings in Egypt and other places people were reporting as eyewitnesses immediately in real time it wasn't going through the filter of any journalist that's how we found out about it but if you take a look the internet was used for art and social media were used for organizing in Tahrir Square but take a look at what happened when Mubarak tried to stop it by closing down the internet it turned out it accelerated it because people just contact one another in other ways but that face-to-face that is a profound change isn't it because there you'll saying that the authoritarian who in the past could have shut down the six state newspapers he couldn't shut down after had then people would have reacted the same way by face-to-face communication you've got lots of ways of communicating and that's just what they didn't tell her Square and in fact it didn't it didn't even hinder the demonstrations so you didn't feel the we're in any way made it a change in sort of a change but but not in time not in kind I mean degree much less of a change then say from the creation of libraries I mean that was a much bigger change that gave people access to huge amounts of material that before that they couldn't have in comparison the Internet is a small change and which is fine I use it all the time I'm not criticizing it but it's a little different from libraries crucially different in the case of libraries you could be pretty confident that what you would read in the library is more or less serious had some value otherwise it wouldn't have been preserved and stayed there and when you look at the Internet an awful lot of it is just total garbage and if you if you approach it without any framework of understanding which is what happens quite often it can just be a source of deception you get that's how a lot of contemporary cults develop and you don't you I know you told me before you consider yourself a technophobe you don't use social media yourself social media at all I don't like them for other reasons it seems to me they're they create I can see with my grandchildren you know they create very superficial appearances of relationships you know like a kid thinking of a case will write on Facebook you know I'm having an exam this afternoon and immediately a hundred French so-called friends will write back because she never heard from saying gee I I hope it hope you do will and the kid thinks she has a hundred friends it's nothing you know it's just replacing real friends by virtual friends somebody who doesn't use social media you've got quite a good grasp of the teenage thing going on I've got an experimental subject I promise but the argument is out for to wider conversation and soon there's a couple of areas I just want to probe before we do another change that's happened besides the internet change has been a kind of fragmentation of the big media that you were talking a big way in 1988 decline of the big city newspapers would be one phenomena but for example the cable television so there is now Fox News on the right and an MSNBC News on the left that feels like a proliferation of a range of views or for you are they just two heads of the same corporate Beast I think if you look over the last say my lifetime last my conscious lifetime last seventy years there's been a narrowing of media's sharp arrowing in england to remember that as late as the 1960s of the British tabloids which you know beyond junk were serious newspapers mainly labor newspapers and pretty serious ones the New York Post which is a tabloid that was the left-wing newspaper now it's beyond the idiocy The Daily Herald I think it was was the best-selling newspaper in England until the early sixties it was a social democratic labor newspaper also had a lot of loyalty reader loyalty people read it serious it couldn't survive capital concentration and advertising and in fact if you look back from the 19th century to the old today there's been a sharp narrowing of media in the nineteenth century there was a huge proliferation of media labor press ethnic press all kinds of things but all these things are now there on the only instances but all these things are there now are they on the internet it's blogs for every possible political world Australia were actually there were serious newspapers that people participated in and it wasn't just anything that comes to mind or write it down they were committed and they're very interesting survived in fact if there's a very good book which maybe some of you have read by on the reading habits of the British working-class Jonathan rose a big eight hundred page book and it's it's fascinating he points out he concludes that working people in England were I had a richer cultural life than the aristocrats because they were really reading serious work the same in the United States take a look at the labor press in the late nineteenth century the press was written by Irish artisans going into the mills what they called factory girls young women from the farms who were essentially being driven into the mills as the early industrial revolution and it's it's very interesting very insightful very very for them there was no marks no European socialists have never heard about that they were just writing from their own experience of the degrading a character of the industrial system which was destroying their culture their independence their freedom in fact one of the interesting things which is relevant wasn't one of the things they denounced was what they call this is 1850 the new spirit of the age gained wealth for getting all but self you ever hear that that was the new spirit of the age in 1850 and they were bitterly condemning it and there's been a hundred and fifty years of intense propaganda to get this sociopathic concept into people's heads they were resisting it much less now and and and even in my childhood there was still a wide proliferation of newspapers I'm in Philadelphia where I lived there were in those days there was a morning paper and an evening paper and then you got the New York papers and it was quite arranged well that certainly countercultural that view that with the media have narrowed rather than widened let me just get your quick responses on three things and then we're gonna open it up the first one is something going on in Britain at the moment part of the thesis of manufacturing consent is that there is this convergence between the politics and the corporate interest right now more less as you landed here there is this proposal from the government of that from all the political parties to have a form of regulation that will be underpinned or backed by law so the state and on the other hand the people opposing it are the big corporate newspaper groups and there's this divergence of interest and what each one says they're doing the right thing and the corporate business voice says we're speaking for freedom of expression given that you lump the two together you fuse the together in the argument who where do you stand with this argument who's right in this outlet you know I haven't read the report yet so I really can't comment I like that I would probably hope yeah but so I can't comment on if it's even published but divergences between the corporate sector and the state are extremely interesting and they do happen on major issues and they're very revealing and the way intellectuals and the media deal with them is revealing so take for example the u.s. crusade against Cuba it's been going on for 50 years in virtually total isolation the United States practically didn't kicked out of the Western Hemisphere because of it because there's so much opposition when it comes up in the United Nations the votes are you know hundred eighty two United States and Israel if you take a look at malicious it includes a lot of terrorism serious terrorism strangulation of the economy you know and it goes back to Kennedy who was kind of saying about it and it's persisted and there's two interesting things about this a public opinion on this has been studied for about forty years the public is overwhelmingly in favor of normalization okay it's normal for public opinion to be disregarded that's what we call democracy but it's what's interesting in this case is that the corporate sectors opposed big sectors of it agribusiness energy pharmaceuticals these are the guys are usually set policy and they're opposed to it but the state interest in punishing disobedience overwhelms the pressure from the corporate sector I think that tells us something about International Affairs and it says something about yeah because some people if they crudely summarize your politics would say you imagine the politicians are merely the tools of corporate interests and here's an example where they are sovereign they're making a decision and sometimes transit state interests it's not so much Congress it's the executive and they see themselves mostly as responsible for the overall health of the corporate system not the parochial interests of particular corporations and for them it's a crucial necessity and this runs right through the Cold War much earlier to treat the world kind of like the Mafia in fact I think that's the major principle of international affairs you don't read it in journals but I think international affairs can very well be a lot of it can be understood on the Mafia model the Godfather does not Brooke disobedience if some small grocer doesn't pay protection money which the Godfather wouldn't even notice they don't accept that and they don't send the goons in to get the money they get the goons in to beat him to a pulp so others will understand that disobedience is not tolerated it would be an example of that in Cuba you take a look at the actual dump it's a very free country the United States we have rich documentary record nobody looks at it so it doesn't matter much but if you look at it it it's very revealing so the primary concern about Cuba under Kennedy was what they called successful defiance of US policy going back to the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 no Russians just the principle that the hemisphere has to be obedient to us and these guys are not only defying it but they're getting away with it you've just mentioned that you said you've conceded if you like the United States very free country you've talked before elsewhere about the so called freedom of expression in the United States there's a lot of debate going on about United States being in decline and its place losing its place perhaps to China well I mean how do you maybe don't get into the question of whether the u.s. is going to be overtaken but more narrowly how the United States freedom of expression and propaganda compares to other countries is there is the propaganda less coercive in the United States than it is say in China is there is there freer expression more sophisticated hell in fact some of these images Illustrated the US commercial propaganda which grew out of the wartime experience of this great success and what what they called a manufacturing consent that's not our term we took it from an intellectual walter Lippmann leading public intellectual it was very successful that out of that grew the public relations industry it's guru came out of the propaganda commission in the First World War I'm very impressed and then a commercial propagate of commercial advertising that was created now it was called propaganda then so the founding document of the public relations industry written in the late 20s by Edward Bernays was he was someone who had been in Wilson's propaganda Commission he called this book propaganda and it's about it's it gives the standard doctrines of the intellectual classes the which goes back to the English Civil War the people are a rabble they're stupid and ignorant they're meddlesome Outsiders quoting and for their own benefit and we have to take care of them it's straight out of Lenin it's almost identical with Leninist Vanguard ISM that people don't understand we're the responsible men we understand and for their benefit we have to engineer consent and we have to control the minds of the people so that they do the right thing and that's our task that's what propaganda is for whether it's state or commercial and the commercial cases were kind of interesting Bernays himself made his reputation and became a great figure because of the first major advertising campaign that he ran in those days this 1920s that women didn't smoke and the you know the manufacturers realized there's a big market out there losing so he was hired to convince women to smoke and he ran campaigns in which you know models would walk down Fifth Avenue holding cigarettes and presenting the image you want to be cool and modern you know I should like the models you should smoke I don't know how many tens of millions of corpses he created but he became a liberal hero for this that's what commercial advertising was then until today and it was very much admire gurbles picked up he was very impressed by American commercial profit propaganda it was called propaganda advertising we called it now and in fact the Nazi propaganda was modeled on it and he describes in detail how gerbils how you know these simple images you know appeal to the emotions all that and the Nazis picked it up and ran with it now the Bolsheviks tried and that Bolshevik picture is an example but they were too crude to get away with it so the Bolshevik propaganda you can barely believe that given the sophistication of a youth words excitation does that mean you said how sophisticated it operates the United States but does it mean that you would trust information that you got in the American media less than information you would read in the Chinese media for example oak I mean I was in China a couple of years ago and I'm I can't read Chinese but they have a an English newspaper and you can kind of watch television and figure out what they're talking about well anything in written was comical you couldn't believe it but what was interesting was what they didn't report when I got back to the United States after a week in China I discovered that there had been a massive traffic jam from Mongolia to Beijing with trucks sitting there for days because they couldn't get through nobody knew about it there wasn't a word about it there I found out when I came back for all your criticisms of the American media there are still they still value in it you still regard it as free free relatively insane free because there's the United States has very little government coercion but it has enormous obedience which is kind of striking the and I think that relates to what I said about the intellectual classes there there's no coercion at all the only coercion is you know maybe you won't get a good review or something but it's not like being sent to a torture chamber okay well good I'm glad you made the distinction before we wanted him cite another response that came in when I offered people on Twitter to suggest questions to you and one of them was this about Serb propaganda in the Serb propaganda servers in Serbia and the question was the suggestion was that I should ask you why did he endorse Serb propaganda and imply do mascar and turn up lowly a camps were invented shameful said this person on Twitter and it was actually the person sending it was somebody who had themselves lived in sarajevo during the siege of sarajevo who said I was in Sarajevo at the time I could see very well from where mortars and bullets were coming etc and you know you've had this battle with a few people publicly I never said anything about the Balkans but I wrote about Kosovo but said practically nothing about the Balkan but I don't understand exactly what was said he says we accepted sir propaganda the criticism was you had and the particular claim is you know centers on schreiber need sir and the idea that you have tossed down since repartee you've no idea but I say to say yo Pisa what I did it what I said is you should tell the truth about it instead of lying and I do believe that I think it's useful to tell the truth what happened in England particularly in the early 90s was quite dramatic I'm in British journalists and intellectuals seized on the Serb atrocities which were real with just love I mean finally they had a chance to condemn somebody else and seem very noble by agreeing with a hundred percent of opinion and that's irresistible and you start getting a ludicrous propaganda coming out including the left press and that it just became a passion you couldn't tell the truth about it so so I'm certain wouldn't Stryper needs you said you need someone to tell the truth all the truth those those pajamas who were there who reported on it believe the truth this was offering all the Whirley weren't journalists there they were they reported afterwards and what's what do you say is the treatment of what the truth is that well the truth is if you want to go back a few months that the the armies of the Bosnian armies sir Sir Trevor Nietzsche was a protected base theoretically it was so nobody could get in presumably and the the Muslim armies were using it as a base to attack Serbian villages outside and they were very frank and open about it another orage the head of the militias a brag to the press and was reported in the United States and Washington Post and so on but he was sending his troops out into the Serb villages and beheading people and torturing them and then they go back into the safe zone well you know it was pretty clear that sooner or later is going to be a response to this now what he then did was pull out his militias and when the Serbs came in which they did in reaction they were kind of surprised there was no military defense and then they carried out a lot of atrocities the Serb forces did a survey yeah we don't I'm it's called genocide and I don't use the word genocide much I think it's the way it's used strikes me as a kind of Holocaust denial I'm going to use genocide when you kill a bunch of people you don't like that's demeans the victims of the Holocaust I think so I rarely use the word I don't think it's used properly but to kill say a couple of thousand men in a village and after you've allowed the women and children to escape in fact truck them out that doesn't count as genocide it's a horror story but it's not generous you say a couple of thousand to be people claim and would argue that the figure is much higher than that well the figures debated but then you don't really know I mean the highest figures that are given are around 8,000 but it's not from there's been an intensive effort to when enemies carry out an atrocity this huge effort that goes into finding every piece of a bone and DNA analysis and try to get the biggest number you can and when we carry out a comparable atrocity you know even investigation and the Bosnian woman who wrote to me on Twitter said that you were often cited she said by Serb propaganda that children of Professor Chomsky agrees with us does that trouble you if you were being held up prayed in aid by the Serbs no you can't not a like I'm I'm quoted by Iranian propaganda because I say things critical about the United States they can't help that it's I can't help what they do but I think we're to tell the truth about it and the truth is it was an atrocity but nothing like what his claim didn't say the British press that atrocity and this is also true the camps that's an interesting story and there were a couple of [Music] the detention and concentration camps of the first one that was investigated was a Guardian reporter at Vidya me and some ITN yes TV people and they reported on this camp which they described as a detention camp they pointed out that you weren't forced to stay there you could read the early report the eyewitness reports people could get out if you wanted they were holding them there but not a concentration camp later the story changed it became a schvitz same journalists incidentally reported as kind of Auschwitz and Europe they just changed the story not on the basis of new evidence it's just the mood changed there was a small newspaper kind of crazy newspaper LM was called yes hadn't four people or something they said a photographer to the camps who took photographs and essentially confirmed the original story you don't claiming the original story was faked oh no I think it was an eyewitness story a reporter gives an eyewitness description it's usually true you know so I assume it was true that's British reporters then what happened is interesting ITN and the Guardian incidentally went after LM in order to destroy it and they relied on these utterly scandalous British libel laws which are an international scandal and do make it possible for a big corporation to put a tiny newspaper out of business they can't pay the legal costs and so on and then there was a euphoria about it I said great we managed to put out a business a tiny newspaper which published something we don't like okay then something else happened the most respected photojournalist may be anywhere certainly here Philip Knightley looked into it and he's a you know a very respected work goes back to the Spanish Civil War and he did an analysis and he concluded that the LM analysis was probably correct he didn't accuse anyone of distortion and he just said if you look at if you look at it it's probably correct he also wrote a very interesting article to the British addressed the British journalists said you ought to learned something about freedom of the press okay I don't think either of those things was never published no the I was gonna say for the record obviously ITN and the Guardian would say that they've been accused of faking evidence in their foreign but also the and just before we and you know George Mumby is somebody who admires you tremendously in every area so it's just on this issue he feels you're just on the wrong side but it'd be you know but let's let see because obviously we've got bigger themes and topics here I might be good idea to bring up the the lights a little bit had only bigger things with other themes let's take some questions from Professor Chomsky I think we started a few minutes later I'm gonna give give us some added time gentleman here had his hand up early if there's a microphone that we can go there in this front row and you have somebody with a microphone or you just want to say you asked something already standing up that's very enthusiastic is there a second microphone that we can get so why did we get into the person who's already on his feet yeah we'll take two or three of time professor Chomsky thank you for your remarks I report on the environment and I'm interested in language about the environment so we have a consistent narrative in this country about the notion of limitless growth it this is almost unchallenged the thought that we can carry on growing forever a recently david cameron talked about us being in a global race and we had to be among the winners but nobody asked who the losers would be and when the race would ever end i'm just wondering in this case whether it's a question of manufactured consent or just the lack of a good alternative well I think I'm gonna take two or three at a time so I'll bring the question about an exemplary question from our colleague from the BBC but we need them to be shorter than that if we're going to get through lots so not brevity from you if you can yeah hello professor Chomsky thank you very much for being here enjoy your work yeah we're gonna have to my question is a little bit more specific about exploitation of the third world like say I'm not too sure how many people in the room has an iPhone or like say night trainers which I'm wearing so um my question basically is shall we just improve the working standard of like say you know kids who are making our iPhones and shoes in China or in various other countries for us to basically keep checking our Facebook all right oh she reaches for well oh i throws away and and yeah good thank you I got that and I'll repeat it back to the professor when we're here if we got the microphone for this questioner here and maybe we'll get one more in and we'll do lots of rounds so don't worry yeah what are your thoughts about the rise of Chinese power on the world stage please thank you good and you were about to begin on that and I sort of prevented you and why don't we just tack on one more since the microphones there yeah hi No thank you very much for coming I wanted to ask you a question earlier I think you referred to comparison between the internet between the Internet and libraries but I was just thinking to myself as she was saying that isn't the comparison a little bit closer they alternated better a little bit closer to the development of the printing press and isn't the nature of improvement of things to become more valid information helped by that because people will then start speaking to each other communicating scientific articles and stuff which will drive up developments you've written some really interesting stuff but it's become more interesting over time because people have said it's rubbish or it's only partly right or whatever and you've had to adapt to that and develop them and in the libraries that become full of much more valid thank you good I I'm going to didn't why we're gonna have other rounds and I will come back to you so do that so we'll do why don't we just go with that last question the questioner said that you had in some way said that the internet was not such a profound change that the library was a much bigger change and he was saying actually that maybe this is akin more to the printing press the invention of the printing press and that actually would improve quality of ideas and debates because people were share and exchange ideas globally in a way they couldn't do before well the printing press was a huge change I mean it Dwarfs anything we're talking about the libraries were a major change the internet from this point of view is a small change and has mixed effects as I mentioned that there's no quality control peer review which is okay people should be able to say anything they want but it makes it much less useful than say a library as a source of information now the interchange of ideas is fine but you know we had I'm it takes a interchange of ideas between Britain and the United States two countries they were pretty close the biggest change in that kind of interchange that came when sailing ships were replaced by steamboats or by the Telegraph it meant in Smith's 19th century instead of waiting several months to get an answer to a letter The Telegraph you get it instantly steamboats pretty much and now it's faster but it's if you think about it in terms of increments it's not huge it's not as much as the others and so a that's true of many other things so to say the invention of indoor plumbing had a much bigger effect on health standards than modern medicine it's all these things are fine you know but we shouldn't exaggerate Google get to the back of the queue behind the toilet it's basically the argument but the I think that covers the ground that you and that you'd also spoken about earlier I wanted to push on the next point because I cut you off you were about this China and us decline thesis the question are asked about the rise of China and what you think about that and particularly relevant to pop propaganda is very common to talk about us decline in fact we read the main foreign policy journalist is one of the main topics is America over America decline well first of all we should put that in perspective the peak of American power was in 1945 at that point the u.s. totally dominated the world it had half the world's wealth it gained a lot during the Second World War industrial production quadrupled every possible competitor was devastated and destroyed the security situation was incomparable it was just enormous power and American planners understood it and they laid plans to how to run the world and go through it it's quite sophisticated and interesting well that started declined within four years one of the plans was that the US would control all of Asia that's why other countries were not permitted to participate in the San Francisco peace treaty the Japan peace treaty and most of the Asian countries refused to participate except so on and I think you know a lot of British colonies at the time because the u.s. insisted that the only Japanese crimes should be from 1941 on and they had already fought ten years of war under Japanese Imperialism those are the worst crimes but the whole thing again China okay let's talk about China that was 1949 that was 45 in 1949 a very significant event occurred it's called the loss of China the China China was supposed to be a part of the American Empire and this event that they're trying to move the independence actually the phrase is interesting like I can't lose your computers right I could lose my computer but the loss of China means we own it obviously in fact we own the world and we lost it and then one of the big issues in American domestic politics ever since then is who's responsible for the loss of China you know well nobody even questions that it's a good example of how good propaganda really works it presupposes that we own the world menu discuss things within that assumption and it goes on like that the loss of Indochina you know on loss of the Middle East and so on so that was a and ever see and you know the decline continued the world's got more complicated now let's talk about China China as the last had a spectacular growth rate it's a very poor country you take a look at the Human Development Index you and last time I looked at it was 90th all the Western countries are way up on top it's it's got enormous internal problems ecological problems it's got a very militant labor movement you know thousands tens of thousands of labor actions every year protesting the repression it's a major exporter manufacturing exporter but take a close look it's mostly an assembly plant so if you buy a you know an iPad or one of those things it's assembled in China and it's called a Chinese export but the value-added in China is very slight it almost all comes from the surrounding industrial countries in Japan Taiwan South Korea and the West and you know slowly China will move up the technology ladder and some domains they've actually done it so you so you're sounding a skeptical made there about this rise of China it's real but you've been a critic all your working life of American Imperial and American domination if and you know it's obviously from what you decide a big if but if China does eventually overtake would it be better to live in a China dominated world than it's been to live in a US dominated world and it's like asking about a Martian dominated world is so remote from reality there's not much point thinking about it do you you've obviously been a critic of US imperialism and so I'm just imagining a world without US imperialism there is that Martian does that ever happen I don't think it's in the court I mean us decline has continued the word world power is much more diverse now than it was in the past in fact the biggest part of American decline was quite striking is what they call the loss of Latin America I mean Latin America was supposed to be in the back pocket that's the backyard they do whatever we say now a Latin America has become remarkably independent the fact there was a case a couple of weeks ago which I think maybe it was coverage here I didn't see it it was what happened was reported but not its meaning there was a study that came out by the Open Society Institute of called globalizing torture of rendition which is a terrible crime and it studied the countries that participated in the u.s. global torture campaign well included most of Europe included england included sweden and so on included the middle east because that's where the people were sent to be tortured by the dictatorships included Asia and included Africa one continent was totally missing not a single Latin American country was willing to participate and this is doubly significant for one thing that was always as I said the backyard they did what we said and furthermore as long as the US ran it it was the torture capital of the world that's just 15 years ago 10 15 years ago and now it told totally free it's interesting the way that's interpreted in the so there's an article coming out and foreign affairs you know the main establishment journal by that one of the Michael shifter was leading specialists on Latin America and he describes how up till 20 years ago everything was going wonderfully in Latin America countries were modernizing they accept that the Washington Consensus in fact they were getting ruined but forget about that in fact they were revolting against it so everything was going great they were moving towards democracy and markets and under the benign influence of the United States and then something bad happened an evil demon appeared Hugo Chavez and he destroyed everything because of him Latin America is going off in this crazy direction they don't even part he didn't say this but they don't participate in globalizing torture and so on no Travis is regarded as an evil demon in the Western press in fact the coverage of Chavez is astonishing it's I was plenty to criticize not criticized it but he is the treatment of his is like I don't want Hitler or something like that it's to the extent that the the the ceremony at the you know the funeral if you read the American press it says what a terrible guy is the funeral Hammad no judge I want to get to that what actually happened is that every country in the Western Hemisphere except the US and Canada sent the president most of the declared days of mourning that's and Lula wrote a very supportive comment on him this is all the right-wing presidents injera Santos and others the u.s. sent a delegation in which the leading member was a nice guy he's a former congressman the former congressman and health representatives who was kind of involved in Latin America that's the US delegation the dictator you know there all of our clients and presidents and declared days of the morning but try to find something about this let's just get you on these two questions which I'm going to link the first one was about limitless growth and the the idea that that despite the impact that is going to have on the climate and on the environment has that too is that too an example of manufactured consent and I think it links a little bit with this point about our desire for and this is the question I think you didn't quite hear but the desire for iPhones and Nike trainers it's at remains that we are exploiting labor in China and other places and I think the question was asking advice really what should we do should we demand improved standards or should we just stop buying those kind of goods but they're both questions that relate to thing to this global pursuit of growth and what your first question about the environment is probably the most important question there is I mean the human species has come to a point where it can and probably will destroy the possibility for a decent survival and it's not that remote you know our grandchildren and it's pretty sort of pretty severe there's overwhelming consensus of scientists the consensus has consistently turned out to be too conservative it's worse than they predicted you can read the science journals every week there's some new story about it and the effects are quite interesting most of them there's one out of 110 relevant countries there's one that has no national program for the environment and has no program for a renewable energy national program the United States the manufacturing center is extremely interesting it if you look at the public opinion in the United States there's a huge propaganda campaign in the United States quite open incidentally the Chamber of Commerce business lobby petroleum industry and so have announced that they're running a campaign huge campaign to convince Americans that it's all nonsense that humans don't really do with it it's not happening anyway and so on and it's had a slight effect Americans tend to be somewhat more skeptical of global warming and its consequences than other countries but not a huge effect the American population is much closer to the scientific consensus than the media and policy and that's quite interesting and it's led to there's a new campaign that's just underway by an organization called the Alec the American Legislative Exchange Council it's a corporate Lobby heavily funded by corporations and coach brothers and all those nice guys what they do is write legislation for state legislatures to try to get state legislators to accept legislation and there they've got a lot of clout so they get a lot of them in and you can imagine what they're about they just start a new one which is quite interesting from the point of view of propaganda they're concerned about the fact that the American population is paying too much attention to the scientific consensus so what the new program is designed to do in the States and a couple of states have already adopted it is to introduce what they call balanced teaching in the K to 12 you know kindergarten to 12th grade educational system a balanced teaching means that along with teaching the overwhelming consensus of scientists what every National Academy says what all the science journal says along that with that you teach climate change denial and that's valence teaching and it's in the interests of critical education you know getting children to be critical and so on you know well that's it shows the desperation of the corporate propaganda system in its failure to drive the population totally off the international spectrum I mean the public opinion as I mentioned doesn't affect policy much so the United States has no policies in disrespect but few but do you want to get more people in do you have an answer to the to the man who's asking about iPhones and things the require exploited labor or underpaid labor child labor even I mean if you eat your dinner you know a lot of it is coming from super exploited farmworkers under horrible conditions and you can't look at anything in a capitalist system which doesn't involve extensive exploitation whether we should have iPhones or not I mean I don't have one but if people like them ok nothing wrong with it however the endless growth is a problem the edges great because and in fact it's quite interesting here's another thing which is not being discussed and should be if there's ever a historian century from now there may not be but if if we don't succeed in destroying civilization which we're trying hard to do and there are historians around and they look back at what's happening now they'll be astonished I mean the evidence for the climate problem serious problem maybe catastrophe is overwhelming now there are various reactions to it at one extreme there are groups that are trying to do something about it they take a look they're mostly indigenous societies the uncivilized part of the world the Canadian First Nations the you know Australian Aboriginals in Latin America it's quite striking because there's a substantial indigenous population there they didn't wipe them all out the way the English colonists did more efficient but so there's a pretty big indigenous population and the countries that have a strong indigenous population their way in the lead and doing something about it the most interesting cases Ecuador under the pressure it's an oil exporter but under the pressure of the indigenous communities Ecuador is the only oil exporter in the world that's trying to keep the oil in the ground they're asking the European Union for aid to help them not lift the oil keeping the ground where Otto me I'm sure they're not going to get the aid but at least they're trying and we go to the richest countries the United States and Canada they are hell-bent on trying to make the crisis as bad as possible you know very enthusiastic about finding every imaginable way to use fossil fuels and let's go to disaster as quickly as possible well that's you know that's what's happening in the world there are things to say about this but try to find them thank you let's just take around here we've got about 13 or 14 minutes left before we run out so brief questions and we'll try and get brief answers to that's who's got the microphone at the moment okay you go first and we'll get the microphone down and then we're gonna go to you yeah do you see the potential for anarcho-syndicalism to flourish once more as it did in Spain during the 1930s for what I dunno sorry anarcho-syndicalism to flourish once more as it did in Spain in the 1930s if so where okay and that may be up your street and that's I mean yeah how would you explain decline of popular participation in formal political processes in the West I'm talking about lower voice turnouts decline in party membership and so on how would you explain that thank you yeah I got this yet and somebody should have the microphone there now yes given today's theme and professor of Chomsky's association with MIT I wonder if he has any thoughts about the suicide of Aaron Schwartz ah okay can you four people here just give us a in a sentence that's what the Aaron Schwartz story is because I've read you summarizer than I do access to information and then what did you just say in a sense who he was what happened did Aaron Schwartz was an information activist in the United States who was targeted by the United States government for downloading excessively on mi t--'s campus journals from JSTOR and what happened to him he killed himself thank you that's why I wanted you to tell the story that's it rather than me okay and question of two parts it was discussed how the media has massively narrowed in breadth between the 19th century and the president do you see this as part of a wider trend of reduced political innovation as a result of corporate propaganda and then part two is if so how is it possible to subvert this trend okay good and since we this may well be our last it'll go round will squeeze in a couple more and I'll try and sort of bunched them together so gentlemen Ayers got his hand up we've managed to get through the whole evening not talking about the Middle East could we have a quick Bracy we were doing so well as well here we are if you dismiss the internet as a forum how does a disempowered individual counterbalance the onslaught of mainstream propaganda thank you and last one for me yes hey talking about the well I mean nowadays for example we don't have the helmet to deal with this dissidents but I wonder if you could give us a contemporary example of how for example with the using of propaganda dissidents get silenced an example of how dissidents against son get silenced yeah we're against or propaganda rather than of having in fact perhaps a personal example yeah okay well let's see if we can I can think there's a couple there that pulled together well the question that came in two parts was talking about the second part of it was how is it possible to get round this narrowing that happens with the corporate influence over the media it's cetera and there was a similarly one were saying if you are not that impressed by the internet what then can an individual do to somehow circumvent to get round this trend that you've been describing so I'm putting those two questions together I'm impressed by the internet thing actually I was it was developed in the lab where I was working in the 1950s and 60s remember that most of the high tech culture comes out of the state sector it was we don't have a capitalist system we have a state sector which is dynamic that's where the creative inventive work that goes on the whole IT revolution including the internet and computers and the rest of it most of it was developed in the state sector places like MIT in fact a very building lab where I was working in the 50s and 60s that's where the serious work was done thirty years later roughly it was handed over to private enterprise so that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs could become rich adapting the work that had been done to commercial uses that's what we call capitalism one of the many respects so it's and I appreciate it I think it's very good in fact I had personal appreciation my daughter and who lived in Nicaragua during the sandanista period and the United States was basically a war with Nicaragua and there was no way to communicate no mail service nothing however there was the predecessor of the internet the ARPANET which was a military system and I'm on it just I'm at MIT so I'm on it and she managed to get on it so thanks to the Pentagon we were able to communicate during the US war against Nicaragua I like that but I use it all the time you know I look things up I find things what can we do we we've it's better than libraries if you know what you're looking for you know worse if you don't know and that's fine and we have if we want if we went through the hard work you can find access to all sorts of things like in the United States substantially in England to a lesser extent the country is free enough so that you have access a very rich access to internal records that's invaluable I mean a lot of lift just been saying comes out of internal records we keep emerging people to use non corporate owned media I mean representative the BBC over there The Guardian is not it has an unusual not conventional corporate structure I mean would you say that some of those are ways to get States useful I mean like I read the Guardian I really independent but now the fact of the matter is that if I had one newspaper or stuck with one newspaper I'd read the New York Times because the coverage is so much broader and deeper wouldn't I come to England I I have to buy five newspapers every morning and you get put them together you get a lot of things on a lot of junk you know I'm an immense amount of junk but a lot of interesting things but you stay with the New Times even though your book is so critical of the New York Times damning of the New York Times it as I said it's a it's a it's a selective criticism what reporters report is usually quite accurate even though distorted in many ways first of all what they don't report which is just being part of an intellectual community that it's so subservient to power you can't look at it and an editorial discretion and other things but it's a very good source I read it every morning the business press is very accurate and very reliable the Wall Street the Financial Times is I think very good newspaper The Wall Street Journal was American counterpart is so right-wing that when you read the editorials you know laugh or cry on the other hand the news reporting is quite good and often exposes a corporate crime and things like that I think the reason is that that's generally true the business press Business Week and others a couple of differences between the business press and the general press for one thing the business press trusts its audience and another thing is its audience are the guys who run the world they better have a pretty fair picture of what's actually going on in the world there's a lot of other ways do things yes we're not short of information so we're gonna try not to do this short as we can because it goes like that there's a question there about what's your take to explain decline in party membership and in voter turnout in democratic countries around the world there is a mark trend in that direction what is very striking trend and it's only if you I think it's a reflection of the fact that democracy is collapsing so people don't bother participating so take the United States where it's been closely studied I don't know if it's studied that much here but one of the main topics in professional political science is studying attitudes and you can do it very well in the United States as extensive polls you know a lot of them are pretty accurate and we'll constructed so you find out a lot about attitudes you can then look at policy because that's right in front of your eyes and you can compare attitudes and policy furthermore a lot of the polls are stratified so you learn you know what the rich want and what the poor won that when you put all this material together I won't go through the details it turns out an effect that about 70 percent of the population is almost totally disenfranchised that doesn't matter what they think the political class pays no attention to them so they wonder they don't taking power why bother going to the voting booth and as you move up the income scale you get more and more influence that top we essentially get everything you want and you can see it in the big issues right at this moment so if take a look at American domestic politics the big issue is the deficit you know the sequester is you know practically closing down the government we gotta do something about the deficit who cares about the deficit not the population population doesn't think the deficit is a big issue they think the big issue is lack of jobs not the business press the business press thinks the deficit isn't a big problem that we should stimulate the economy which you do with a bigger deficit so it should be bigger not smaller the people who don't like the deficit are the wealthy and the banks other financial institutions I mean over the past 40 years the financial institutions are mostly a drain on the economy I think they have become so powerful that they very largely dominated what goes on in the political system and if you look at their just came a study but two good political scientists looking at comparing wealth with attitude toward the deficit in a very close correlation the richer you are the more you compare to care about the deficit the financial institutions care about it so therefore that's the issue doesn't matter what the public wants and for reasons like this and you can see it in polls when people are asked in polls in the united states does congress represent the population the figures run single digits maybe 10 percent some people you have no faith in it they doesn't have anything with us in fact one very dramatic illustration which nobody ever talks about what you should think about is attitude toward taxes in the United States on April 15th you pay your taxes in a functioning Democratic Society that would be a day of celebration we're getting together to fund the projects that we decided on in the united states a day of mourning and alien forces descending on us steal our money there's nothing there with us in fact attitude thirds taxes is a pretty good index of the extent to which a democracy's functioning and you can look at it and see yourself so I think it's reasonable and natural for people to stop participating the I'm gonna put together two other questions there will some somebody asked can you give an example of a sort of dissenter who is pushed aside by the system and the example of Aaron Schwartz in your own University MIT it doesn't have to be a long answer on this one because we've got two more things I want to get in but well did you have a response on that on Eric well it's not on dissent it's I mean the number of dissenters were pushed aside it's almost universal and going them either they're in jail or if it's Latin America they get their heads below in the United States up in the United States they're marginalized in various ways the United States free country you can't do in the United States what was done to LM in England it's not that oppressive of society and there's more protection for freedom of speech but they're essentially they can't get jobs that marginalized the vilified all sorts things not much punishment frankly but it's real the Irish horse is different case at a very interesting one I know it was reported here but Aaron Schwartz was a very bright young kid hacker very didn't very interesting work on computers and he was part of the hacking community which is in favor of opening up false or sources and the way he went about it was he broke into the MIT computer system and what they called liberated JSTOR JSTOR for those of you know is a it's a it collects it takes articles and professional journals and libraries or individuals they can do it subscribe to it and then you can get internet access to articles coming out in journals so Erin isn't that very nice kid on he committed suicide what what happened is he he broke into the MIT system he freed up JSTOR JSTOR the cold for pressed MIT to do something about him he was stealing their stuff so they called the police they know who it was they identified him then the federal prosecutor got involved by the state prosecutor and proposed a ridiculous sentence should have been a misdemeanor or something but she said you know I'm gonna go to jail for forty years or so he committed suicide actually there was a plea bargain offered that he should agree to jail sentence for a couple of months and no the oh but they the family didn't want that they committed suicide you know it's it's it's a terrible event I mean everyone involved should have pressed the prosecutors not to do anything however there's another issue which ought to be thought about that has to do with a freedom of information if you take JSTOR and make it public the JSTOR goes out of business we live in a capitalist society they can't survive if they don't get subscriptions if JSTOR goes out of business nobody has access to the journals so the next step is okay let's liberate the journals in that case the journals go out of business and nobody is anywhere to publish that's you can't just liberate things pretending you don't exist in the world a lot of young kids think you can do that they're not thinking it through well there are ways around this but the ways around it involve collective act of the kind that doesn't fit with the new spirit of the age and what ought to happen is that there ought to be a public subsidy for creative work okay then there wouldn't be any copyrights there wouldn't be patents the huge saving incredible savings and everything would be open but that requires doing something together and we're not allowed to do that we have to be asked out for ourselves you know very last thing is I'm gonna give you a choice since we've been talking about freedom partly you can either take the question about anarcho-syndicalism and where it might pop up in the world you have described yourself in some places as a man I kiss or with amicus leanings so where money come or you can mmm give us a pricey of your views in the Middle East when we are already nine minutes overtime so the choice is entirely yours well first about anarchism I think there's a there's a simple inadequate but simple answer if you take a look at what anarchism is meant over the centuries it varies all over the place is a very broad range but there's one theme that runs through it and I think it's an important one and I think recognizing it everyone ought to be an anarchist the theme is that hierarchy domination control are not self justifying they require a justification and that's true whether it's a patriarchal family or international society or anything in between now if they can't give the just the burden of proof is on those who exercise authority if they can't give a justification which is almost always then the system ought to be dismantled in my view that's mannerism then there's a lot of variants and I think it's a very powerful notion a lot more to say about it of course on the Middle East that depends what you're talking about I mean if you take a look at it well it's just for simplicity let's take us politics the most important country in the world if you look at the presidential debate on foreign policy or you look at the truck Hegel hearing on defense there were two names that came up far more than anything else in the world Israel and Iran Israel because other countries are kind of mentioned but marginally Israel because both candidates had to show that they sort of vied for who loved it and worshiped it more Iran because it's the gravest threat to world peace so those are the two that were discussed and interesting question is what though there are a lot of questions about why what the US is a real relationship is that would be too long to discuss but the Iran one is quite interesting very interesting and what's particularly interesting it's not getting reported and the United States have checked not at all you can tell me whether it's reported here let's say Iran is the greatest threat to world peace okay you could argue about it but let's assume that it's true what's the threat the threat is that they might be developing a nuclear capability which plenty of countries have okay so let's say that's not weapons but capability so what do you do let's grant that it's a threat I might mention incidentally that that's a Western obsession outside of the United States England and a couple of European countries it's not regarded as much of a threat non-line countries don't think so the Arab world doesn't think so it's a it's a Western obsession but let's accept that since we're here what do you do about the threat well there's a number of possibilities there's some technical proposals that could be pursued one of them in fact was implemented until it was blocked by the West in May 2010 Turkey and Brazil that made a deal with Iran and which Iran would ship its low enriched uranium for storage to Turkey and in return the nuclear powers would provide Iran with the isotopes that it needs for its medical reactor okay that would end the end the alleged threat what happened when they reached the deal as soon as they made the deal and ended the gravest threat the World Peace the Obama administration and the media thrilling behind as always bitterly condemned Turkey and Brazil for breaking ranks and Obama went off to the UN and tried to get harsher sanctions well the Brazilian foreign minister was a bit annoyed with this and he released a letter in which it's from Obama to president Lula president Brazil in which Obama had proposed this probably assuming that Iran would reject it you win some propaganda points then Iran except that it so you kill it it was that a story here okay well that's what happened but it's not in doubt there's something much more interesting there's a much broader approach to the question moved to establish a nuclear weapons free zone in the region there's overwhelming international support for that an online movement to the Arab states Egypt's been pressing it hard for twenty years there's so much international support that the Obama administration's predecessors have been compelled to give kind of verbal assent it would be a nice idea but not now and don't bother us the it's possible to implement the last December there was supposed to be an international conference in Finland under UN auspices to carry this idea forward Iran agreed to attend in early November within days Obama canceled the conference well it says more but I'll stop there you know this ought to be front-page headlines in the United States not a word here probably the same well this is not a case of reporters distorting the facts it's reporters being so obedient as part of the intellectual culture like other intellectuals not reported either so subservient the state corporate power that you just don't report things like that you don't look even and of course we know the reason the basic reason is the United States does not want to allow Israel's hundreds of nuclear weapons that to be either inspected or even discussed well okay that's a serious question I might say that the US strategic analysts many of them disagreed so the former head of the Strategic Command you know that which controls nuclear weapons policy is a it was headed you'll develop one of the founders of the whole deterrence theory and so on he he said he said it is dangerous in the extreme for in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East for one country meaning Israel to have hundreds of nuclear weapons which encourages others to develop them well that's pretty important try to find that I mean I've quoted a couple other people but and he's correct it is dangerous in the extreme but that doesn't fit the paradigm so it's not discussed and as I said before I don't think that our institutional analysis really accounts for this because as a it's over the whole intellectual community and the institutional analysis doesn't apply there I'm glad to hear it's not just journalists who are in your sights but it's a larger and deeper problem you've explored it and expanded it with such clarity I knew the people here would probably have stayed for another hour and a half gladly to hear more review the exhibition propaganda power and persuasion opens here at the British Library 17th of May and runs till the 17th of September it only remains for all of you to join me in thanking professor Noam Chomsky [Applause]

Channel: The British Library

Views: 98,029

Rating: 4.7615895 out of 5

Keywords: Propaganda, NoamChomsky, Politics, BritishLibrary

Id: O0D0E42AA4I

Length: 101min 35sec (6095 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2013