Noam Chomsky on The New World Order + Q&A (1991)

the first struggle today is going to be the struggle against the heat of those television lights in fact I'll start believing in the miracles of Japanese technology when they figure out a way to televise without roasting the person who's standing up in front the the announce topic was the New World Order Central America in the Middle East which touches quite a few bases and the title like that leaves essentially two options one option is to speak in general terms about the New World Order which as far as I'm aware as the old world order adapted to changing contingencies as happens all the time the most important of these changing contingencies have having been about twenty years ago when the post-war international economic system essentially was torn apart and has been reconstructed a second option would be to pick some crucial issues some particular topics and to use them to illustrate the way the the general contours of the New World Order and that means the old world order and it thinking about it seemed to me that the second attack might be more informative and in fact almost any current issue could be used because they all illustrate the same essential features of policy and given us power US policy has an overriding and often determinative influence and furthermore they all illustrate the same aspects of the ideological cover within which policy is presented to us examples of which you just heard from our illustrious leader the two examples that are listed in the announcement the Central America in the Middle East are perfectly natural ones both regions Latin America and the Middle East are covered by what has been the long-standing central doctrine of US policy the a doctrine which says in effect that certain regions of the world are us turf no one else raises their head no foreign entries certainly but crucially no indigenous groups and if they do their heads are cut off if they get out of control as the doves like to put it the Monitor document is of course devised for the Western Hemisphere in a period of unless ambitious days its meaning for the Western Hemisphere was recently clarified in the gates hearings one may be the only interesting thing that happened in the gates hearings as far as I noticed was a memorandum that was released in from December 1984 in which gates was dressed from gates to William Casey the head of the CIA on US policy toward Nicaragua and it opened by saying that we have to start talking tough about Nicaragua would stop the pretenses about preventing arms to El Salvador and all of this other nonsense which is so easily exposed and although I should say the media continued to trot it out when it was useful and let's talk we have to start talking tough and then he said we have to rid the hemisphere of this regime by any means necessary and he means that we can use up to bombing and that and he pointed out correctly that if we don't accept this commitment to rid the hemisphere of anybody we don't like we will have abandoned the Monroe Doctrine which confers upon us that right well it was interesting actually the the day that that appeared I happen to be talking somewhere in Detroit and I suggested to the audience that they keep their eyes open to see what the reaction will be to these two this memorandum predicting that there would be an OLE reaction and in fact that's true it never came up in Congress the media didn't mention it it wasn't considered one of the big issues and that's exactly correct because essentially everyone agrees across the spectrum it's agreed that we have a right to rid the hemisphere or matter the world of anybody we don't like by any means that we that we find feasible and possible and that he is quite right and saying that is the meaning of the menorah doctrine well the Monroe Doctrine was extended to various in this particular sense meaning we have a right to ridden any area of anyone we don't like if it was extended to large parts of the world after the Second World War that's just a reflection of the extraordinary power of the US at the time and in particular it was extended to the Middle East which was described by the State Department right after the Second World War as the most important area in the world in the field of foreign investment and as General Eisenhower described it the strategically most important area in the world because of its enormous energy reserves which have two crucial features first of all whoever has influence and control over them has a considerable amount of leverage in world affairs and secondly there's a huge flow of capital that comes from the profits from oil production and the cheapest and most abundant areas and that has to flow back to prop up the both the corporations and the general economy of the United States and the country that in internal discussion is called our lieutenant namely written at addition to this is our lieutenant the fashionable word is partner as Mike Mansfield put it in the Kennedy years so we have to prop up the economy of our lieutenant and of course ourselves more crucially and control over the energy resources and the profits that flow from them is a major factor in that that's in fact discussed and in turn ohms Declassified secret op planning documents but it's also very evident in policy and we saw examples of that a few months ago so in other words Latin America and the Middle East are the these are the obvious areas to discuss if you want to consider the the core of American u.s. foreign policy interests they both areas reveal to quite a lot about ourselves the reason is because of our overwhelming influence in Latin America for over a century in the Middle East for half a century and what we find there can tell us a good deal about who we in fact are a topic which should be of interest to any honest person well discussion of Latin America could open for example with a Latin American strategy development workshop in Washington Pentagon just a year ago which involve noted academic specialists and others they concluded we mostly quotes they concluded that current relations with Mexico the Mexican dictatorship that means it's a rather brutal dictatorship with a democratic cover current relations with the Mexican dictatorship they said are extraordinarily positive that means that they're untroubled by such trivialities as stolen elections death squads and then torture scandalous treatment of workers and peasants ecological destruction in the interests of private power and so on but they said that everything is not rosy there's some problems on the horizon and the main the only problem they note is quote a democracy opening in Mexico could test the special relationship by bringing into office a government more interested in challenging the United States on economic and nationalist grounds so right now everything's fine because it's just a brutal and murderous dictatorship but if there's a democracy opening we may have some problems because a democracy opening might mean that sec various popular interests might be reflected and that would be harmful to the u.s. concern which is of course investment opportunities and the local wealthy classes and so on well that hits the nail on the head the primary concern of the United States in the third as in fact always has been the problem of meaningful democracy which is in fact the threat to power and privilege and that has to be crushed has to be crushed abroad and it has to be crushed at home and without understanding that you understand very little about domestic or foreign affairs and or about an American society and culture now of course the methods for crushing democratic forces abroad and at home are different abroad you can do it pretty much in a way it's done by totalitarian states you can use violence in fact unrestricted violence at home over centuries of popular struggle the capacity of the state to coerce and control has been limited so a whole variety of other devices have been needed but it's been well understood and it's a major theme of intellectual discourse if you like for centuries that methods have to be found to control and divert what used to be called the rascal multitude and to keep them from interfering in what is none of their business namely the management of public affairs as walter Lippmann put it the elements that rule have to be protected from meddling and ignorant Outsiders that is the mass of the population and if you can't do it by force you do it by other means well a few weeks after this report on our extraordinary on the extraordinarily positive relations with the Mexican tyranny a leading journal in Mexico published an article by a recording on a conference in Mexico conference on International traffic of children minors the report quotes a leading researcher at the National University the autonomous university in Mexico from the Institute for law research who writes that every year 20,000 Mexican children are sent illegally to the United States for the use of for organ transplants or sexual exploitation or various experimental tests the conference report also quotes a report of the United Nations saying that over a million but over a million children a year suffer from slavery forced participation in criminal acts prostitution organ transplant sale to rich countries well is any of this true the answer that is nobody really knows and more importantly nobody cares at least nobody important cares it's not the kind of thing we discuss around here but it is the most whether it's true or not it may be it may not be the interest and interesting fact about our domains is that this is very widely believed there's lots and lots of reports like this one from all through Latin America and other parts of the third-world domains of the United States largely of the United States that report such things and you can get similar reports from the London anti-slavery society and others and whether they're true or not the fact that they're widely believed alone is a reflection of the reality of life in the areas where our influence has been overwhelming this became much worse during the Reagan Bush years which was a period of an enormous catastrophe of capitalism throughout the entire world in the aside from the state capitalist industrial countries themselves which in various ways were able to protect themselves from it Latin America is a striking example we might proceed with Latin America by quoting I'll just pick something that happened to arrive in the mail yesterday a Latin American church journal which has an article from Uruguay by Uruguayan journalists called the war waged on Latin American Street kids his translation of it and he describes the war I'll give some quotes the war being waged against millions of abandoned children throughout Latin America we're death squads run by the police and financed by the business sector target and exterminate Street kids who are trying to survive as beggars thieves prostitutes drug runners or cheap factory workers some of the victims are gunned down while they're sleeping beneath below bridges on vacant lots and in doorways others are kidnapped tortured and killed in remote areas in Brazil where US influence has been decisive the takeover the elimin overthrow of brazilian democracy was described as the greatest victory for freedom in the mid 20th century by the administration when it took place with no little US support the in Brazil the bodies of young death squad victims are found in zones outside the metropolitan areas with their hands tied showing signs of torture riddled with bullet holes street girls are frequently forced to work as prostitutes in one plate town in the first six months of 1991 a thousand so-called disposable children were assassinated in Guatemala City another place where we have succeeded in imposing the kind of values we like the majority of the 5,000 Street kids work as prostitutes they're found in with their ears cut off and their eyes gouged out and so on in rio de janeiro and san paulo reports indicate an average of 3 children under the age of 18 killed daily by these death squads financed by the business business communities almost all murders have been attributed to those death squads going on the journalist points out that this is a region where 183 million people live in abject poverty so that death by violence is only one of the threats for street children regional statistics show that every minute 28 children die from hunger according to UNICEF 69 million children survive by doing menial labor robbing running drugs and prostitution in Ecuador about a hundred thousand children from age 4 up work ten to twelve hour shifts in one region in western run mostly us run corporations Panama had some a system for protection of minors but the minors protective tribunal buildings were bombed during the 1989 US invasion rendering work there nearly impossible following the invasion the number of criminal gangs robbing stores in search of food increased in Peru 50,000 of the 600,000 children born this year will not survive their first year in one resilient state on the Bolivian border approximately a thousand children work as slaves extracting ten another two thousand adolescents work as prostitutes according to Union sources children work 18 hours a day in water up to their knees and are paid a daily ration of bananas and boiled yucca reported according to labor union reports going on I won't go on reading it and the journalist ends up saying that until recently the image of the image of the abandoned Latin American child was the was of a ragged child sleeping in a doorway today the images of a body lacerated and dumped in a city slum well we may feel proud of our contributions to this picture of capitalist democracy triumphant in the New World Order and that's what the New World Order is all about an intensification of the horrors of the Old World Order well instead of continuing through the Latin American horror chamber which is what it is I'll turn to the second area the Middle East and let me just to talk about there to talk about some of their exploits in the Gulf for example but instead let me talk about the topic that's on the front pages right now and has been for the several last several weeks the what's called the Middle East peace process and in particular the conference in Madrid this is not now I'm not going to be giving continuing with Latin American atrocity stories but about diplomacy nice clean topic so it won't be so bloody the but let's have a look and see what we can learn about ourselves from that well I'm sure we all read the newspapers and you've noticed that there is universal acclaim for the diplomatic triumph of George Bush and James Baker in Madrid so let me just remind you of some of the boilerplate our hero is a quote now our heroes exploited the historic window of opportunity opened by their victory in the Gulf to breathe light into on the stalled Middle East peace process showing remarkable courage and vision that happens to come from Anthony Lewis who is one of the most critical of US government commentators on US government policies anywhere in the mainstream and it sort of goes from there over to the real accolades the United States can at last try to bring about its traditional goals of land for peace and territorial compromise and autonomy for the Palestinians in the context of a general peace now that the rejectionists are in disarray and the Russians are no longer causing mischief and the bad guys everywhere know that what we say goes as the president put it last February that's also true in Latin America where what we say goes has been true for a long time with consequences of the kind that I've already indicated the news columns turning from they report with considerable law that the president is dreaming great dreams of peace and justice and of course marching forward to implement them that's diplomatic correspondent RW Apple and the New York Times James Baker is praised for his diplomatic skills and his tenacity and putting together what The Times calls the remarkable tableau in Madrid I should to be accurate point out that not everyone agrees that the US has really shown itself to be an honest broker there are people who claim that Bush and Baker have gone too far in allowing their pro-arab sympathies to influence what they do but it's agreed that we're that they're both well on their way to a well deserved Nobel Peace Prize well that's sort of standard but more interesting than this kind of rather standard sort of Stalinist style rhetoric it's very reminiscent of the days of the genius Stalin and so on for those of you who remember that kind of stuff but that's kind of standard but more interesting than that is the fact that similar perceptions though without the solenoids rhetoric are pretty widespread in substantial parts of Europe and that's that's more interesting and even in fact Europe has to a large extent come to accept the extension of the Monroe Doctrine to the Middle East which is new and has also come to accept to a certain extent the framework of US propaganda that's also a interesting and a noticeable shift I think it's one worth study in itself I think it has to do with the end of the Cold War maybe a comment on that later but even more interesting than that is that the euphoria is reaching much further even to towns and villages in the West Bank and Gaza where expectations are apparently running quite high the lead journal of the current issue of the journal of Palestine studies the lead article in it is by an advisor to the Palestinian Giardini and Palestinian delegation at Madrid well it's holiday who lords the personal commitment of the President of the United States I'm quoting in front of Congress in the whole world to adjust and comprehensive settlement and he's also much impressed by the invigoration of international institutions and the new recognition that we can't go too far with double standards in my view so that's a pretty broad speck in my view this is all total illusion like to give some indication of why let's just start with a brief comment on the matter of our abandoned bit of double standards by chance that issue of the journal of Palestine studies happen to arrive in my home in the same day that the lead front-page story in the newspapers read us accuses Libya in Pan Am bombing that's 270 people killed and the subheading read retaliation waits as White House and the editorials issued stern calls for just punishment overflowing with self-righteousness the news reports told us that this fiendish act of wickedness had become the horrific symbol of terrorism quoting the New York Times again it was not entirely uniform so the New York Times ran an op-ed pointing out that the evidence about Libya was pretty sin and suggesting some government duplicity in identifying Libya m'as accused the government of letting letting the Palestinians off the hook at a sensitive moment in the peace conference and also they charged that Syria and Iran had been led off the hook for similar reasons that the authors of this article representing the dissidents are Robert and Tamara government Robert Kupperman is a leading proponent of what's called low intensity conflict author of manuals on how to implement it efficiently manuals in which he defines low intensity conflict here's the definition it's the threat or use of force to achieve political objectives without the full scale commitment of resources that's to be distinguished from international terrorism which is defined in US Army manuals as the use the threat or use of force to attain goals that are political religious or ideological in nature in short low-intensity conflict is international terrorism as the advocates and practitioners of it are kind enough to inform us and they're not only in their definitions but also in the practice so we have a spectrum then ranging from those who assume that the government case against Libya was proven on the obvious grounds that had been proclaimed and then on the other extreme we had skeptics who are leading proponents of international terrorism and think that the case hasn't quite yet been proven and we should go after other favourite enemies like Palestinians so the issue is should we meet out Stern justice to Libya alone or also to other official enemies and should we use bombing or maybe some other technique well that's what's known as an independent press in a free society now there were some things that were not discussed least I don't see him discussed for example one thing not discussed was the worst air tragedy of the decade that was an air bombing of an Air India plane in 1985 which killed 329 people as a book by Lesley and Andrew Coburn called out of control which discusses some of the background for this apparently the two people who bombed that were trained in a paramilitary training camp in Alabama this was supposedly a sting operation that went out of control the fact that the US had been involved in training the people who bombed it was acknowledged a couple of months later by the Attorney General Edwin Meese in India who sort of promised the Indians we'd be careful to see that that doesn't happen again but that was not a horrific symbol of international terrorism and you don't have huge squads of thousands of people you know scouring the region to see what sensors you can discover and so on and so forth now that one agency mentioned though it's the worst air tragedy of the decade there was some mention of another air tragedy the downing of an Iranian commercial jet with 290 people killed that's also more than the most horrific symbol of terrorism of the decade that was described for example by the the Middle East correspondent of The Boston Globe Mary courteous as she put it the accidental bounding of the Iranian passenger plane by the USS Vincennes which is in which was part of the naval Armada that had been sent by George Bush to help out his pal Saddam Hussein in the iran-iraq war and in fact the shooting down of this plane was a rather decisive event in ending the war on us turn on Iraqi meaning US terms no question one might ask is how the news columns this news columns remember how can they be so so sure that it was an accidental downing well of course there's an easy answer to that the US did it and therefore it follows that it was an accidental downing just as US international terrorism is laudable it's low intensity conflict good thing not terrorism however not everyone agrees again there's a spectrum of opinion in this case for example one of the people who does not agree is u.s. Navy commander David Carlson who was the commander of the vessel right near by the Vincennes who wrote an article in the US Naval Institute proceedings in which he describes some quoting it now how he wondered aloud in disbelief as they watched the Vincennes shoot down what was perfectly obviously a commercial airliner passenger jet taking off in a commercial corridor and his assumption is this this was out of a need to prove the viability of its high-tech missile system well the commander of the Vincennes didn't go completely unpunished the president reacted he gave him granted him the Legion of Merit Award along with the officer in charge of shooting down the commercial airliner for exceptional I'm quoting from the citation exceptionally meritorious conduct and outstanding service and for the calm and profession atmosphere under his command in the Gulf the shooting down of the airliner was not mentioned in the citation although that's the only known action of the vents in the media kept a dutiful silence about this at least at home in more civilized parts of the world like for example Malaysia third world journals were quite open about reporting the facts including the Legion of Merit Award in reviews of u.s. international terrorism which they don't understand there's only low intensity conflict an accidental Libya's response to these charges was a call for world a hearing by the world court or some other international inquiry call that was regarded as reasonable by the Arab League but of course dismissed here without any discussion as utter nonsense that's what's known as invigoration of international institutions just as what I've just described is what's known as the abandonment of the double standard well for those who are willing to consider fact what I've just mentioned is like a crumb from a mountain of evidence that illustrates what a Salvadoran Jesuit Journal recently described as the ominous halo of hypocrisy covering us statements and actions an ominous hail of hip hello of hypocrisy that seconds and disgusts any honest person who suffers through the daily output of the commissar culture that's a major element of the new world order just as it was a major element of the old world order well let's put that aside and turn to the third feature that the lead article in the journal Palestine studies finds so encouraging along with most other opinion the personal commitment of the President to adjust and comprehensive settlement and let me know review at least what I think is happening it seems to me three major questions arise about what's going on right now one is why is it happening now why this big diplomatic flurry right now - is there a break with traditional American policy and three what about the apparent conflict between the United States and Israel well let me let's start with first why right now and in fact we might turn back to page one of the Boston Globe in that which has that lead story about the u.s. charges against Libya that's the lead story and by accident or you know because they got a subversive in the editorial board or something there's an adjacent story right next to it which discusses White House concerns over polls that show that George Bush is falling rapidly because of the problems with the domestic economy well could there be a correlation between those facts actually there could be the story of the past 10 years the major story of the past 10 years is a huge assault against the general public which familiar with huge transfer of resources from large part of the public large majority the public in fact to wealthy privileged sectors investors and so on now when a state is involved in policies of that kind it's necessary to divert the public the ignorant and meddling Outsiders somehow so they don't pay attention to what's going on around them and that's true whether it's at a latarian state or a democratic state and there aren't a lot of ways to do this two of the ways are to inspire fear of terrible enemies who are about to destroy us and that's got to be accompanied with awe for our amazing leaders who rise just in time and save us from destruction so that we can once again be standing tall as Ronald Reagan put it when he succeeded in overcoming the threat to our existence from Grenada if you can remember event for our back in fact this is pretty much the story of the last ten years every year or two there's some fantastic threat to our existence but then with incredible heroism or a leader somehow beats it down and that's a natural concomitant of the social policies that are be carrying being carried out domestically you'd find that in any state just as another natural concomitant as various devices to set sectors of the targeted populations the most of the population set them against each other so they hate each other and so on instead of paying attention to what's going on this is all pretty standard well it's all particularly important right now for several reasons for one thing the the social and economic catastrophe that resulted from reagan-bush programs is getting harder and harder to you know kind of put to the side and where and where people see it and that means that efforts at diversion are needed and rapid and increasing ones secondly there it's also necessary to divert attention away from these foreign policy triumphs that have supposedly he you know shown what great people we are and led to the bush rhetoric in fact every one of them has been a complete catastrophe from the point of view of any human value at least that's true Grenada and Panama and most strikingly recently the Gulf it's not too pretty to look at the Gulf after our great triumph there and notice couple hundred thousand Corpses logical disaster Saddam Hussein firmly in power thanks to the support given to him by George Bush and Norman Schwarzkopf who backed his crushing of the popular rebellions the shirt Kurdish and Shiite rebellions the impact for once I should say gotta give the press credit the the diplomatic chief diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times it's a technical term which means State Department spokesman in the New York Times Thomas Friedman had an accurate description of what happened he said that right after the you know George Bush was out fishing in Norman Schwarzkopf was you know adding himself on the back or something at the time when the when Saddam Hussein was sort of authorized to here are the rascal multitude the explanation that was given by Friedman expressing the State Department position is that the United States was seeking to restore what he called the best of all worlds that it the best of all worlds would be a takeover by some Iraqi generals who would wield the iron fist much as Saddam Hussein did in the period up until his one mistake in life namely when he stepped on us toes in August 2nd 1990 as iron as wield the iron fist I said I'm Hussein had done much to the satisfaction of the US ally Saudi Arabia and Turkey and of course the boss in Washington well that's essentially correct it'd be a little embarrassing to just restore Saddam Hussein after the fuss but we need a clone we got to find somebody exactly like him and surely we don't want to allow anything as dangerous as a democracy opening in the Middle East any more than we want a democracy opening in Latin America or for that matter in the United States and if the way to block it is by supporting Saddam Hussein's iron fist well you know in the interests of what's called pragmatism that's what we have to do pragmatism is a nice technical term that meanings doing anything you feel like for your own interests and therefore we pursue pragmatism and that overcomes even our high moral commitments to human rights and so on and so forth well so there is a need to divert attention but still it leaves a kind of a bad taste I mean maybe the smart guys understand that this is the right thing to do but the population having been aroused the considerable hysteria over the need to destroy the beast of Baghdad has a kind of a tough time figuring out these subtle points about why we're supporting and while he's massacring everybody in sight the so you got to overcome that somehow there are also our regional problems the Arab tyrannies that lined up in the Gulf Crusade these are what the British imperialists in their they called the Arab facade that manages the local oil system and the interests of the imperial powers the British view was that we should veil absorption of the colonies behind constitutional fictions such as buffer state or sphere of influence and so on but of course as Lord Boyd George put it when complimenting the British on blocking a disarmament an international disarmament agreement he said we have to reserve the right to bomb the [ __ ] that's the sort of bottom line so we reserve the right to bomb [ __ ] but you got to have this Arab facade out there that you know you sort of pretend our countries but they're actually managing the local wealth for you and those guys have a problem too they though tyrannies or any tyranny to has to preserve a certain degree of credibility with population and if they are exposed as just agents of the United States and restoring the traditional Anglo American condominium over the wealth of the you know that lies under the ground in the Arab world that won't be so good for them so they need something and thirdly speak continuing with the urgency of the peace process so-called there is in fact the window of opportunity that's not a joke it is in fact correct which is largely correct and saying that what we say goes and in fact that means that what you see in the Gulf is what we say because that's what we want we have held all the cards and now that what we say goes we can ram through traditional US policies which takes us to the second point what our traditional US policies and is there a break with them well the simple answer to the question what are us of course the way in which we're going to you know get credit for this and the Arab facade is going to get some credibility is by dealing with the festering Palestinian problem the main the simple answer to what US traditional policy is is very simple forward it has been adamant and inflexible opposition to the peace for us is now before I continue I have to make a side comment on political discourse every term of political discourse has two meanings it has a dictionary meaning and it has what we might call the PC meaning the politically correct meaning that is the meaning that's used to event advance power ends and they're always different so for example terrorism in the dictionary meaning it is what the army manual says the threat the use of use or threat of force to advance political ends but in the PC meaning of the word international terrorism is the threat or use of force to implement political ends when it's carried out by others not when it's carried out by the United States or client states then it has another name it's called retaliation or defense of freedom or something like that the same is true of the term democracy there's a dictionary meaning in which a state is democratic societies democratic to the extent that the population has some meaningful way of participating and managing their own affairs but then there's the pc meaning in which democracy means the rule by elements that appreciate the transcendent needs of those who own american society and therefore must govern it i borrow one of the favorite Maxim's of the founding fathers that's the principle on which the country was founded and the only those who understand that are capable of participating in democracy and the pc since well the same is true with the term peace process there's a dictionary meaning in which the peace process means something like efforts to advance peace and then there's the pc meaning in which the peace process refers to whatever the US happens to be doing at the moment if what the US happens to be doing at the moment is undermining the peace process and barring the peace process at every turn that's the peace process actually it's all quite simple once you understand the rules the reason for institutions like universities is to teach you the so don't forget to do your homework but once you figure all this stuff out you can play the game rather well well breaking the rules and keeping to English instead of PC language the traditional US policy has been - has been as I said rigid opposition to the peace process rigid inflexible invariant opposition to the peace process which is why it never gets anywhere you can see this very clearly if you look at the more or less irrelevant factual record the record is irrelevant because it's not politically correct it teaches the wrong lessons but let's look at it anyway if you look at the for example you could start with the UN General Assembly the UN General Assembly has a vote every they meet every winter and they have a vote every year on advancing the peace process I won't run through the whole record but the last one was December 1990 when the vote was 144 to 2 United States and Israel and that's the way it is all the way back it's always something like that you know into - we're in is everybody who wasn't asleep that day or something like that and - is the United States in Israel sometimes with varies a little in 1989 I was 150 one two three four completely unexplained reasons Dominica joined with the United States and Israel maybe somebody has some insight into that but in effect it's the US and Israel blocking the peace process at the General Assembly well what about the Security Council notice incidentally the United States a very powerful country that means when the US vote if there's a vote at the General Assembly which is let's say hundred and sixty to one and so on and things like that happen pretty commonly if the one is the United States its veto that's what it means to be in a position to be able to assert what we say goes the what about the Security Council well of course that's out because they're the United States can just flat veto everything as in fact it's been doing since 1976 in 1976 first major u.s. veto the the there was a resolution which called for quoted a settlement a peace settlement on the pre-1967 borders arab-israeli settlement that means the internationally recognized borders with guarantees for the sovereignty territorial integrity and political dependence of all states in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries including Israel and a new Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza that was introduced to the Security Council by Jordan Syria and Egypt it was openly but it was backed by virtually the whole world it was publicly but backed by the PLO according to Israel the current President of Israel time Hertzog who was then UN ambassador it was not only backed by the PLO but actually prepared by the PLO another example of their terrorist past it was vetoed by the United States it is therefore out of history try to find it in records of the peace process or documentary collections and so on in short it's just not politically correct there have been the same thing happened in 1980 but in effect the Security Council was ruled out as an agency for advancing the peace process the United States there have been a series of other proposals rejected by the United States and Israel as opposed to the many others I won't run through the record now the US a very powerful country so we can block a proposal by just saying no period Israel is less powerful and therefore they have to be a little more vigorous in their opposition so in the case of the 1976 Security Council resolution while the u.s. just vetoed it Israel reacted differently they reacted by bombing Lebanon killing about 50 people in a raid that was described quite openly and in fact even reported as having no not a reaction to anything which was not exactly correct it was actually retaliation against the United Nations for considering this resolution and in 1980 when Saudi Arabia announced the so-called THAAD plan which again sort of along the same lines most of those plans are along the same lines Israel reacted according to the Israeli press by sending phantoms which probably means nuclear-armed phantoms over the oilfields and the Hebrew press pointed out that foreign intelligence agencies are digging into their files to look up their records on the capacity of Israel to destroy the oil fields meaning push too far with things we can do well that's the way a smaller and weaker country has to respond the u.s. it's just simpler we just say no and that means it's off the agenda and it's out of history if you have a well-disciplined commissar class at least well this problem continued through the 1980s Yasser Arafat for example kept annoying everybody by calling for negotiations with Israel leading to mutual recognition this required considerable acrobatics in the doctrinal institutions so for example take a typical case the chief current chief diplomatic correspondent the New York Times again Thomas Friedman who was Jerusalem correspondent then he had to do things like say when if headlines in the Israeli press said Arafat offers negotiations Paris supposed to be the dog says no there had to be an article by Thomas Friedman a couple of days later saying the Israeli peace movement has never been more distraught there are no Palestinians to talk to interview with Shimon Peres saying if only there were some Palestinians as beautiful as we are we could settle all of this but unfortunately they're all terrorists who won't talk to us and that routine went on year after year of the New York Times even refused to publish nah I refuse to publish the facts but even refused to publish letters referring to the facts and occasionally even went as far as writing to correspondence explaining that they were not going to allow letters on it actually some of those are around it was all done quite brilliantly the result was to craft a version of history which has no relation whatsoever to the facts or actually has a relation to the facts for the logicians in the audience the relation of contradiction but apart from that has no relation to the fact but does have striking utility for a power and that was achieved in a manner which would have been be much admired by any totalitarian state now there are reasons for this there are reasons why the United States has been constantly opposed to the peace process it has two features that the United States will not accept one is it calls for an international conference and remember the Monroe Doctrine has been extended to the Middle East long ago it's too important to allow anybody to interfere that's us turf nobody's allowed in so no international conference to every call for all international efforts to advance the peace process have at least a rhetorical commitment whether anybody believes it or not but they have some rhetoric about self-determination for the Palestinians and that's unacceptable to the United States not because the US has anything particular against the Palestinians they basically don't exist but because that would entail Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and it's been US policy that they should essentially maintain continued control over those territories so therefore for those two reasons the US has always blocked the peace process now turning to Madrid you'll notice that it overcomes these two defects it's completely unilateral nobody else was allowed in actually to be more precise Gorbachev was invited in but that's because he is the completely powerless leader of a non-existent state and therefore he could provide a certain kind of propaganda cover and people could talk about international conference but anyone who had even you know met the minimal condition of existence would not be allowed in secondly you'll notice again that there were nothing for the Palestinians in fact that's built into the very structure of the conference they are part of a joint palestinian jordanian delegation which is the traditional US policy that there is no independent Palestinian nationalism hence no no issue for them to talk about and the outcome of both that meeting and any aftermath will be determined by US policy so going to that what is US policy well here you can find out actually there's the US government has been kind enough to inform us there's a public record can't find it in media as far as I'm aware but that's there you can pull out the documents some of it is even in the media occasionally the US position was made very clear in fall of 1989 by James Baker with what was then called the Baker plan the Baker plan then had to do with negotiations between Jordan Israel and Egypt with some Palestinians who we like allowed in but the end Baker presented five points and the five points were that you read him in the State Department bulletins that one point was directed the Palestinians had said that any Palestinians who are permitted in by their overseers the United States and Israel will be permitted to discuss one topic namely implementation of the so-called Shamir plan and in part in public statements at the same time Baker made it clear and explicit that as he put it the only plan under consideration is the Shamir plan there is no other initiative on the table so we want to find out what US policy is we turn to the Shamir plan which is in fact the Shamir Paris plan the coalition plan of the labor Likud government two major parties in Israel which had been put forth in May and was now endorsed and the Shamir Paris plan has actually Amir Peretz Baker plan has three basic principles principle one says there can be I'm putting it there can be no additional Palestinian state meaning there already is a Palestinian state named Jordan and if Palestinians and Jordanians and the rest of the world don't agree that just shows they're kind of you know anti-semites or ignorant Arabs or something like that so there's no issue of Palestinian self-determination there already is a Palestinian state that's Jordan and there can't be an additional one point number two says there can be no change in the status of the occupied territory of the occupied territories meaning Gaza Strip and West Bank except in accordance with the basic guidelines of the government government of Israel which bar any form of Palestinian self-determination point number three says no PLO meaning Palestinians can't pick their own negotiation representatives even to sign the capitulation at point four the fourth point that says there will be what are called free elections run under Israeli military control and looked at a television set you know what that means with most of the Palestinian national leadership rotting away in prison camps without charges those are free elections so that's it that's the Shamir Paris Baker plan nothing much has changed there since sometimes it's called autonomy that's the current term for it in the Israeli press more honest than here one of the leading and most respected Israeli journalists Annie Rubenstein right in the mainstream and though particularly though recently just a couple of weeks ago described autonomy as the kind of autonomy that exists in a prisoner of war camp where the prisoners are autonomous I'm quoting it where the prisoners are autonomous to cook their own meals and run cultural events furthermore he went on to say the autonomy is exactly what the Palestinians have now namely the right to run their own services and there's a reason for that he explained he's pointed out that even the most extreme expansionists greater Israel enthusiasts don't call for literal annexation of the territories because that would have a problem associated with it it would mean you would have to extend to the territories Israeli law including the minimal services that are provided for the second-class citizens of Israel itself the Arab citizens and he said that probably bankrupt the Treasury and he estimates would probably double the income in the territories so it's much more efficient just to have heavy taxation but to provide nothing in return under autonomy namely the autonomy of a prison camp well that's what is being offered now exactly as it was offered at Camp David that's why it's so praised in the United States well looking back there's a street of this somebody stopped me if I go on too long but I'll give a little bit of history it's worth looking at US policy has undergone some changes from 1967 to 1971 US policy called for it was right in the mainstream it called for implementation of what was then the international consensus which meant a political settlement on the internet pre June 67 borders with the wording that I just read that was actually drawn from the resolutions of the time reiterated in 1976 territorial guarantee is insecurity and right to live in peace and so on and so forth at that time there was nothing for the Palestinians okay they weren't part of it it was just the settlement on those borders official US policy said that there might be minor territorial adjustments which would furthermore be mutual minor and mutual territorial adjustments just that fix things up but that was the position in February 1971 a problem arose president Sadat of Egypt offered a peace treaty in those terms virtually identical with the terms of official US policy Israel rejected it calling for looking for bigger that was under the Dougs incidentally the Labour Party looking for broader territorial gains and the United States had to decide whether to pursue its own policy or to change that policy now it was a kind of an internal you're a kradic conflict Henry Kissinger won out he was the National Security Advisor and pursued his policy which was what he called stalemate keep things the way they are no peace treaty Israel responded the Sadat's offer by recognizing it as a genuine peace treaty the US backed the rejection that's a big split in change and US policy actually coincidentally that happens to be the month in which George Bush appeared on the national scene as UN Ambassador although he had nothing to do with the policy any property anymore she does now but the ever since then the US policy has been flatly rejectionist and separated from the rest of the world in the manner that I described now from 71 the 73 was that was a period of for those of you know this history of great ilysm both in the US and Israel the assumption was that Israel had overwhelming military power you could disregard the Arabs altogether as the former chief of military intelligence in Israel you Josefa harka be not Dov incidentally as he put it at the time war is not the Arabs game they don't know which end of the gun the whole so we can just keep the stalemate Kissinger accepted that so there was no need to respond to Sadat's offers or anything now in October 1973 those illusions were shattered turns out they did know which end of the guns behold there was a kind of a near thing policy had to shift Kissinger who was incidentally no great genius does understand things like violence pretty good understanding of that and he could see that the eric egypt had it you know they so therefore you had to pay attention to them and therefore at US policy shifted and it shifted in the perfectly natural way since egypt could not simply be dismissed as a basket case the thing to do was to incorporate it into the u.s. system that is to accept so that's actually long-standing offers to turn egypt into a US client state and to remove it from the conflict there that's the major Arab military force and if you remove it from the conflict you've essentially eliminated the only Arab deterrent which means that Israel is then free to continue to pursue the major policies which u.s. supports and pays for namely integrating the occupied territories and attacking its northern neighbor Lebanon well that is the Camp David agreement the Kissinger shuttle diplomacy was culminated in the Camp David agreement which had exactly these properties and I was quite obvious at the time to anyone who was willing to look at the facts without ideological blinkers and it's incidentally conceded in retrospect it's called ironic ironic is another one of those technical terms which refers to the predictable consequences of intended us actions which happen to conflict erratically with the professed values so that's what's called ironic and the political science literature and so on but and that's a term that applies very broadly to almost everything all right but the so that was ironic but as I say it was obvious to any ten-year-old at the time it's now conceded well that's exactly what Israel did of course with huge USA the Carter Administration raised aid to the stratosphere so that Israel could in fact continue to do this with the Arab deterrent removed well then comes the invasion of Lebanon actually it was one in 78 another in 1982 its purpose was to destroy the moderates in the PLO that was again conceded that's widely conceded and pointed out at the time I'm conceded proclaimed in the Israeli literature general Harkavy he pointed out that this was a war for the West Bank the problem was PLO moderation they kept making these annoying demands for negotiations leading the mutual recognition and so on and that's no good we wanted to go back to terrorism like shooting down planes and that kind of stuff then they're easy to deal with the point was actually put rather well by the editor of the New Republic martin peretz in a speech in in an interview in israel right on the eve of the night right before the 1982 invasion he advised Israel in quoting to administer to the PLO in Lebanon a lasting military defeat that will clarify to the Palestinians in the West Bank that their struggle for an independent state has suffered a setback of many years then the Palestinians will return be turned into just another crushed nation like the Kurds and the Afghans and their problems which are beginning to be boring will be forgotten well you know it's possible that with regard to the Afghans that if you go to some of the more extreme Stalinist elements in the Communist Party bureaucracy you could hear similar comments on the Afghans back in those days and I should say that appearances comments on his attitude toward the Kurds do rather accurately capture US policy toward them as we've just seen again well that's us Paula that stays like that until the day now there's a spectrum as always there the Hawks and the doves so let's look according to the Hawks the Palestinians deserve nothing like other crushed Nations and then there's the doves and here a good example is Thomas Friedman again on the occasion of his receipt of the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Israel he had several interviews and Israeli press where he advised Israel to run the occupied territories in the manner in which they run south Lebanon now that means under the control of a terrorist mercenary army which with big prison camps where you hold hundreds of torture chambers actually we hold hundreds of hostages to ensure that the villages submit to the rule of the terrorist mercenary force and you know you bomb beyond the borders when you feel like it and so on that's a proper way to run the occupied territories however remember that this is a dove speaking so his position is you should give the Palestinians something right and what he actually said is if they said if you if you give quoting if you give off net a seat in the bus he may limit his demands so you ought to give off meat a seat in the bus well you know again you could imagine some but maybe there's something you know Nazi somewhere who's advising the Syrians that they should run what is now Israel the way they run the Bekaa Valley and Lebanon but they should give Jaime a seat in the bus because then maybe a limit as demands that would be the doves or maybe somebody's advising South Africa that you should give [ __ ] a seat at the bus and maybe it'll shut up or something well that's the does so again there is a spectrum and we learn a little more about ourselves by looking at it well the the doves view view is that the Palestinians should be given a seat in the bus namely autonomy the autonomy of a prison camp basically what they have now but nothing more no citizenship no independence the great achievement of the Madrid conference and the one that's called forth such raptures in the American is that the Palestinian representatives permitted in by the United States have partially agreed to this so the news cut actually the Israeli Lobby is naturally quite enthusiastic the New York Times a day hasn't op-ed by the deputy director of something called the Washington Institute for Near East policy which is an organization that journalists go to when they don't want to express their own opinions but they want their support for Israeli policies expressed for them by an objective outsider that's a standard journalistic trick the Washington Institute for Near East policy has no other function as far as I'm aware than to provide such statement and it it's deputy director notes I'm quoting and that gains were made in Madrid the Palestinians reversed the thirteen their 13-year rejection of autonomy which was called for in the Camp David Accords the Accord is welcomed by Menachem Bagan because they removed the Arab deterrent from the conflict and offered Palestinians the autonomy of a prisoner of war camp as the mainstream Israeli press points out well the news columns in the US are much impressed by what they call putting the New York Times the Palestinians self-adjustment to the real world that is the acceptance of a period of autonomy under Israeli domination during which Israel can establish the facts of permanent domination with enormous subsidies from US taxpayers the idea is that now that akhmad has limited his demands he's praised for what is called the new pragmatism this willingness to accept half a loaf under Israeli domination instead of the all-or-nothing demands that's referring to the demands for self-determination in a Palestinian state alongside Israel a totally absurd idea supported only by the entire world outside the United States and it's Israeli client and therefore by definition extremists rejectionist and not pragmatic pragmatic means self-adjustment to the real world which is what we say goes if you do that then the news columns are willing to welcome you as pragmatic that Clyde Haberman and the same is true of a host of others I won't bother referring to it the in fact so much of it that I won't know too late to talk about but it's standard open the press at random and you'll find similar praise for the new pragmatism in until 1988 continuing the history a little bit the u.s. was quite satisfied with the status quo as was Israel in 1988 the Intifada was beginning to raise some costs costs for Israel to control it costs for the US which in fact was becoming something of a laughingstock internationally because of the increasingly desperate insistence that the Palestinians were not repeating magic words produced by George Shultz for them to say it became a joke in fact so the u.s. made the obvious decision to pretend that the Palestinians capitulated and impose upon them the US position say okay they accept that our position there's actually a name for that and the diplomatic literature it's called the trollop ploy referring to trollop now this was done by the Kennedy administration who you remember we're big intellectuals they referred things like novels and the references to a trollop novel where the heroine interprets a meaningless gesture by you know the hero or whatever as an offer of marriage so the trick is if you're really stuck in a diplomatic corner what you should do if you have enormous power and control over the world information system is pretend that the other guys accepted your demands and then stick them with it and count on the media and the academic scholarship and so on to say yeah they capitulated your demand and in mid-december 1988 George Bush George Shultz that was at the time went through this comic act claimed that Yasser Arafat had said the magic words in fact he has any literate person could see he was saying exactly what he'd been saying for years it was just as far from the US demands as ever and though Palestinian spokesmen could ever accept the actual u.s. demands but now they were stuck with it because George Shultz had said so and everybody repeated it so that into that story the US then moved to what we're caught what was called a dialogue with the Palestinians they were offered a chance to opportunity to have P and the Masters and a chamber where they were told in the first meeting transcripts were leaked and published in Israel in the night and and and Egypt not here though they were in English in the Jerusalem posts or if I could read them the transcripts of the first meeting the u.s. polled Palestinian representatives that they should understand two things one there would be no international conference so forget about that and two they should call off the Intifada or what the US described as the riots which we regard as terrorism against the State of Israel so in other words go back to the previous status quo and forget about any political settlement and then we'll agree to talk to you well this was understood very well within Israel I should say the Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin of the dovish Labor Party had a meeting with peace now leaders shortly after the opening of the dialogue and he told them don't worry about it it's quite okay we're in favor of it he said the dialogue is a low-level dialogue which is completely meaningless and which will provide us he said with a year or more to crush the Intifada by force and he assured them they will be crushed well that's what happened they were crushed there's a limit to what flesh and blood can endure violence works the dialogue diverting attention as needed as intended then came along the diplomatic initiative to divert the daned the bush vision Baker Paris Shamir plan purpose of which was to divert any attempt to implement the real peace process that brings us right up till today that's as far as I can see that's what's happening at Madrid well just last comment there is a you know there's some thinking behind this there is a strategic conception behind it it's one which is more or less permanent you know it's part of the old world order the new world order you know the next 10 years in the world order and so on the strategic conception about the Middle East is pretty simple the major issue there is the energy reserves the US has to control them nobody else is allowed interfere u.s. turf too important there's a method for controlling them the method is first of all to construct an Arab facade family dictatorships which sort of manage it for us very weak so we have to worry about them you know having any funny ideas they the Arab facade has to be protected from the population of the region that requires regional enforcers that's the second part preferably non Arab they have an easier time killing Arabs so that's Turkey Iran Israel Pakistan provides kind of praetorian guard for the Saudi elite and so on it's what Ben Gurion used to call a periphery pact so there's this regional enforcer system and then in the background that the guys with the real muscle the US and Britain in case things get out of control that's the system and that doesn't change very much now anyone who contributes to this system has some rights the Arab facade obviously contributes they manage the oil wealth for us the regional enforcers contribute they have right we obviously had rights in fact ultimately the only ones who do and so too are British lieutenant as sort as long as they remain a lieutenant the what about the Palestinians well they don't contribute to this system they don't have wealth they're not power in fact there are damn nuisance they stir up Arab nationalism you know that is these pressures for these Democratic openings that are always a problem so they have a negative value in fact and since they have no that contribute nothing to our domination of the region it follows by quite simple logic you know that they have no human rights whatsoever that's elementary principles of statecraft human rights depend on your contribution to the needs of power and profit other other than that you know irrelevant well they don't have any rights in fact they probably have negative rights as I mentioned they're even a nuisance and from that you can pretty well predict US policy and in fact it works pretty well remember this stuff is not quantum physics you don't have to have you know it'd be a big thinker to understand it big efforts are made in the academic disciplines and elsewhere to make it look difficult but in fact it's all pretty straightforward and I think we my knowledge is almost nothing in International Affairs or any of this stuff that again a literate teenager couldn't figure out in a few minutes and that's pretty much the way it works and if you understand it you can see what's going on and you can usually predict pretty well what's going to happen all you have to remember to translate politically correct discourse back into English so you can get out of those problems but that's not too hard either well that the the thinking with regard to the Palestinians the position really has not changed as far as I'm aware since about 1948 at that time back in 1948 the Joint Chiefs of Staff already recognized Israel they were impressed by Israel's military victories and they recognized it as a as the second most powerful regional military force and a possible potential base for u.s. power that relationship then got established in later years that there's no time to discuss there was also discussion of the Palestinians the Israeli Foreign records show it the u.s. didn't talk about it much and didn't care about them but the foreign ministry in Israel Moshe show rates foreign ministry this is incidentally that it does pointed out that in their internal records that the Palestinians they said will be they will be crushed they will be dispersed like human waste and join the most impoverished masses in the Arab world so there's nothing no worry about them as martin peretz put it there just another crushed nation like the kurds and therefore there's nothing much to we don't do pay much attention to them that's been the policy ever since and as i just mentioned that was its back ravines statement to the peace now leaders in february 1989 reassured them that they will be broken well will they be broken actually the answer doesn't lie in the Middle East that lies in the hands of those who are funding the operation there is certainly no hope in the president any faith and the president's noble intentions or other illusions rather it's necessary to do some other things first one is to clear away the mountains of rubble that conceal the events of history not only in this case but in almost every other one to view what's happening without any illusions and to create public pressures that can put an end to the extreme rejectionist policies that the United States has been pursuing virtually alone in the world if we're honest we will also be able to see that this is true in Central America and indeed throughout the subject domains generally what is euphemistically called the South the president is right to a degree when he says what that what we say goes what remains to be determined is what we choose to be [Applause] surprise allegations and about the articles that came out in Newsweek and the New Republic yeah describe news do I have any comments about the October Surprise allegations not particularly Ted the honest truth haven't really followed it much and the reason I haven't followed at much as I just don't think it's all that important tell you the truth I mean I wouldn't regard it as particularly surprising if the Reagan Bush administration had tried to figure out a way to make a deal with the ayatollah khomeini to hold off on the hostages until they until after the election however i think that how many would have done it whether they made any effort or not I think that Reagan and Khomeini you know the Reagan I Reagan didn't exist but the people around Reagan and how meny probably recognized each other as the kind of folk who can do business with each other you know you know they're that kind of guys we like they didn't particularly like Carter who wasn't all that different but had these annoying characteristics of coming out with sermons about human rights and so on which didn't have a lot of effect in policy but kind of we're irritating the Reagan Bush people were just straight you know - straight thugs they get along with each other just fine and it would have made a lot of sense for the earing for Iran to deal with them rather than Carter so whether the allegations are true or not I don't think they would have had a lot of effect on anything that happened as to their possible connection to the North nor do I find it in the least surprising that people should try to steal elections I mean that's just standard everybody tries to do that the so I don't understand what maybe I'm missing something but I don't understand what the importance of the issue is if it's supposed to have something to do with the Iran with the sale of u.s. arms to Iran via Israel that's almost certainly false because there's a real logical problem there that you have to deal with quite apart from what the facts may be so suppose we grant the whole story suppose we grant that you know William Casey or somebody made a deal with the ayatollah to hold back on the hostages and in return the US was going to send arms to iran so let's say we believe that for the sake of argument okay ayatollah khomeini holds up his end of the bargain the hostages are held Reagan comes in now then we ask the following question why does the u.s. send arms to Iran I mean that was what it was supposed to explain but it doesn't explain it we still have to ask why did the US send arms to Iran was it because they made a promise you know they're so honorable that if they made a promise to the ayatollah khomeini they got to live up to it well we can put that one aside is it they're afraid that the Ayatollah Khomeini is going to go to the New York Times and say hey these guys made a promise and they didn't live up to it well you know you can forget about that one in fact there's no reason why they should have lived up to it but it's true that they did send arms to Iran via Israel and this can't be the reason and just to close the story off we know the reason the reason was explained very clearly ten years ago by in the public record in fact I actually looked about it it came out of it ten years ago that quote you know a lot of stuff about it from the public record there were no hostages around that had nothing to do with hostages and the story was explained by the top Israeli officials who were involved or Eva Braun II who was the essential amount of the ambassador to Iran David Kim key who was the deputy director of Mossad in fact all the guys who later surfaced in the Iran and they were in the iran-contra story which was mostly a cover-up and they explained the reason straight out and they were perfectly coherent and standard and in fact normal they said that where they're sending armed us is sending arms to Iran via Israel in order to try to overthrow the regime the US didn't particularly like the regime it wanted to restore it nor did Israel they wanted to restore something like the Shah we need an iron fist in the kind of hands we can trust like generals and there's a standard way to overthrow a civilian regime that you don't like and that is to send arms to the military I mean after all who's going to overthrow the regime you know I mean not civil rights worker you know the people who will overthrow the regime or the military so you establish contacts with them and one way to establish contacts is sending arms and another way is military training and so on that's in fact the purpose of a lot of the military missions throughout the world to keep a grip on civilian regime so if they get at it in trouble you know they don't like think that democracy openings or that sort of thing we can control them and it's done standardly almost reflexively and it often works so for example when the u.s. overthrew the democratic government in Chile throughout that whole period where they trying to overthrow the government they were arming the military when the US was trying to overthrow the Indonesian government back in the early 60s it was sending arms to the military and as McNamara later testified that to Congress he said that paid dividends the army actually overthrew the regime and incidentally he slaughtered about half a million people so ever I was happy about it but that standard and it's appears that that's exactly what was going on in the early 80s it certainly didn't have anything to do with hostages because there weren't any so it doesn't seem to me that the October Surprise would tell you anything even if it were true this is one of the reasons I honestly tell you honest truth hadn't really pursued it and have no opinion about whether the facts are right or wrong this is a two-part question really one part is that ever since the Second World War we've basically been told that the reason for our large defense expenditures were to counteract the Soviet threat now that the Soviet Union is completely pitch elated is going to bankrupt our defense spending has gone down by infant estimable amounts and that seems to me to lead to the question what was the real purpose of the military buildup since it doesn't seem to diminish when the threat goes away and thereby what what are the current reason is for our largest managers and what can we expect in the future tied to that is that now there's a growing awareness on a lot of people's part about environment I mean the fact that going off the end of the scale in terms of influence into the atmosphere and into neva aerated water and there's a lot of concern on many people's part because of that and yet the government resources they're our focus in terms of taking care of problems or tackle that requires a radical response because we are in a radically new situation in terms are we going to the environment in the last ten years for instance we bankrupted our own government by having our large defense expenditures - during the Reagan years which was doubled or tripled the national debt and ends up costing us some interest payments 200 billion dollars a year at this point what happens with that with our military spending is we're spending half our government budget part of it for the interest payments for the past military buildup part and so the focus in the world that was afterwards what about the Pentagon budget and it's perfectly true that people were told for years that it was defend ourselves against the Russians but that was about as plausible as the fact that you know we have to defend ourselves from you know Hispanic narco terrorists or something else of course that was never the reason then it was always perfectly obvious that that was never the reason and the internal record makes it entirely clear that it was the never the reason and that's exactly why it continues now exactly pretty much the way it did before the reasons for the military budget were real and they were significant and we might as well understand them that's why they're going to go on one reason for the military budget is its domestic every there isn't any such thing as a capitalist society and in fact it couldn't survive for a week every society has a powerful state which carries out programs typically for the benefits of those who own the society and we do - and our state has to funnel resources to the advanced sectors of Industry public resources so the public people like you have to pay the costs of research and development for high-tech industry and you have to provide a fate guaranteed market for excess production so that advanced sectors of industry can remain competitive this means like computers and Blazers and everything else and for all kinds of reasons which we could go into the make the main mechanism for that in the United States has been the Pentagon system so that you know you look at the history of the development of computers well its way it works and so that and that remains constant you know it doesn't change by now that's sort of institutionally embedded secondly the Pentagon system does have a role its role is to do what it's always done namely intervention in the third world some somebody has to make sure that those people don't raise their heads you know that they fulfill their service function the function of providing resources and raw materials and cheap labor and opportunities for investment and export of pollution and so on and so forth and if they have funny ideas about democracy openings and that kind of thing somebody has to make sure that you knock those ideas out of their head and that requires intervention forces and international terrorism called low-intensity conflict there's some other things and economic warfare and various other things well why do we need things like nuclear weapons well the fact is that you know Texas yeah the u.s. is a global power that means we're often carrying out intervention in areas where we don't have a conventional force advantage and you have to make sure you intimidate everybody properly so nobody gets in our way you know so you have to a very intimidating military posture as long as the Russians were there was the Russians played a role in this the Russians were a deterrent that's what is a technical term for that too it's called fighting with one hand behind their backs like the Vietnam War was supposed to be you know we made this mistake of fighting it with one hand behind our backs meaning there was always a fear that if you went too far you might run into the Russians and they've got missiles and nuclear weapons and all that kind of stuff a mother principle of statecraft if any of you are going into government is that you never attack anybody who might be able to shoot back you only attack completely defenseless people and you want to make sure that you don't run into trouble so if there is some powerful military force around you have to fight with one hand behind your back that's kind of bad and we needed this and it is completely explicit incidentally even in the open like record they go back to nineteen nineteen eighty and you look at Carter's Secretary of Defense Harold Brown or Eugene Rostow of the Reagan administration the same time they both pointed out that our strategic nuclear forces provide an umbrella within which under which our conventional forces can be used as meaningful instruments of political control you know translating a simple English if we can intimidate people with a big threatening military posture we can use our conventional forces to do the usual thing intervention and subversion and so on and that still remains in fact the problem that you mentioned although that the problem of the disappearance of the Russians leads to rhetorical changes in this and even some technical changes like weapons systems change a bit but the problem was in fact dealt with in the public record again every year in a spring the White House delivers the Congress something called I think it's called the National strategic survey or some such thing in which the White House presents to Congress in a glossy booklet in simple language that they understand that the reasons why we need a much but you know a huge military force because we're threatened by enemies even greater than before so therefore we need x y&z the bottom line is always the same and for a long time the argument was more or less the same you know the Russians etc after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 when you couldn't even pretend anymore that the Russians are around the first of these was produced in March 1990 and it's public record you can get it and you read it you notice that the bottom line is the same you know we need a huge military force and we need to make sure that the industrial base is for military expenditures is still there so don't forget plenty of money for the electronics industry and so on and why do we need it well it's not the Russians anymore you know you can't conjure them up the reason was the growing technological sophistication of third world countries and in fact if you'll notice we now need Star Wars for that reason in fact we need Star Wars because somebody's got to fund the computer industry and produce lasers and so on but since the Russians aren't around we now need Star Wars because of the growing technological sophistication of third world nations and since the Russians aren't around other rhetoric had the change and was interesting to watch it the they said they pointed out this is March 1990 you know while George Bush and Saddam Hussein are still great buddies they pointed out that the main problem is going to be the Middle East where we have to have extensive intervention forces that will be able to move in there in case you know anybody does funny things let's monitor a doctor and remember and they pointed out that main target of intervention forces will be the Middle East and then comes the following phrase where the threats to US interest could not be laid at the Kremlin's door okay so now that the Russians are gone you can concede what was always obvious the Russians had nothing to do with it it was always indigenous threats just as it is everywhere in the world people have these nationalist tendencies or they try for democratic openings or you know priests organized Bible study groups that begin to lead the peasant associations all kind of rotten stuff goes on and you need intervention forces to stop that and now that we can we have to you know the Russians aren't around we can concede that the threats to our interests were not at the Kremlin's door but we still need exactly what we needed before and in fact if you take a look it's take a look at what's happened I mean again like I said it's not very deep it's pretty trivial the Berlin Wall fell in 1982 sit November 1989 a months later the United States invaded Panama okay restored the 10% white minority you know the money launderers the bankers and those guys eliminated whatever populist elements remained from the 3 host years took over control of the military forces which were out of control eliminated any possible threat the u.s. denomination of the canal killed a couple hundred maybe a couple thousand people you know nobody cares the it was like a footnote to history you know it's so in sand 'red that it doesn't even barely deserves to be mentioned in the historical record but there was one innovation it was the first time in 70 years that you couldn't say you were defending yourself against the Russians because the Berlin Wall had just fallen so if you remember we were defending ourselves against the arch maniac Noriega who was going to lead words of Hispanic drug peddlers to destroy our society and that game was played for a couple of weeks until it was over and then everybody forgot about it in short it's interesting Bush is constantly criticized by the media for being kind of inarticulate you know he can't formulate the reasons why we're doing things as coherently as it was done before and that's extremely unfair way I could be fair to our leaders I mean for 70 years there was a reflex anytime you want to smash up somebody in the third world he screamed Russians okay so it was easy now you can't do that anymore so we're back to the days when Woodrow Wilson was sending the Marines to Hispaniola into Mexico in 1916 and there weren't any Russians around so we were defending ourselves against the Huns or the British you know all the way back to the merciless Indian savages of the Declaration of Independence we're always defending ourselves from somebody you know but the fact of the matter is we're always just securing our own interest you know extending and that's what you need a Pentagon system for as well as the domestic reasons try to figure out some other way to keep my institution functioning MIT or more significantly IBM you know yeah two quick questions one is you spoke of the fact that this recent peace conference or whatever foreign policy exploits that the u.s. gets involved in is a diversion or a smokescreen for the let's say economic woes that are facing this country in part but there also are real reasons like ramming through the traditional rejectionist program shown insignificant but in light of that how will the u.s. be able to justify the continued aid to Israel and the fact that the issue of ten billion dollar loan guarantees are coming up for discussion come January 1992 and second of all irrespective of who is responsible for the tragic downing of the Pan Am 103 flight Libya was the scapegoat for that or is deemed as the perpetrator of that act who is the scapegoat for the fact that Israel most recently reaffirmed economic social and scientific ties with South Africa and was not reprimanded for that you know it was glossed over by the media and never to be heard again there's not have to be a scapegoat for that because the u.s. is in favor of it and the meteor in favor of it so you don't need a scapegoat as to the ten billion dollar loan guarantee all right I never really did yet to the third of the three points I was going to talk about that reminds me the third was the conflict between the US and Israel which is mostly about the modalities of rejection ISM it's a trivial one on the loan guarantee the the way in which it'll be I mean you don't have to ask me read the newspapers they're telling you how it's going to be done the government and the press are telling you the justification for the 10 billion for the 10 million dollar loan guarantee what you justification is humanitarian it's a great humanitarian Enterprise and obviously we're being humanitarians so will therefore give Israel the loan guarantees of course will condition it on the that will require that they not use it for settling Russian immigrants in the West Bank which means we're telling them use another dollar not the one we're giving you for settling Russian immigrants in the West Bank and everybody will be happy with that there's no debate in the United States as to whether it is a humanitarian effort again if you go to the Israeli press they point out openly you know there's nothing humanitarian about this there what's what's in fact happening if it is true that Soviet Jews face a legitimate fear of persecution let's say that's true then they qualify for entry into the United States under US immigration laws of course the u.s. won't let them in because Israel doesn't want us to and we don't want them to either we want them to be forced to go to Israel this is quite open inside Israel so for example the Minister of Immigration Michel kleiner has an article in the just couple weeks ago and these Hebrew press in Israel in which he he says he's going to Germany because they got a big problem in Germany now the Germans are letting Russian Jews in and he's got to go there and stop them from this you know anti-semitic action and he describes how he's going to do it he's going to tell them here's roughly almost literal translation he's going to tell the Germans that they've already fulfilled their quota with regard to discrimination concerning Jews in this century and they should start treating Jews just like other people at last now they don't let anybody else in so therefore they shouldn't allow the Russian Jews in so in short because of the Holocaust you know the Germans should stop discriminating with regard to Jews and not let Soviet Jews in so they'll be forced to go to Israel well there's nothing humanitarian about that I mean maybe you decide to do it or you decide not to do it but it's a humanitarian issue is zero there's no humanitarian reason for forcing Russian Jews to go to Israel and if you're thinking about problems of refugees there are plenty of them so for example right across the river there's hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who are being driven out of quate with the authorization of President Bush who makes you know various apologetics for it which are featured in the Kuwaiti press therapy they're not leaving because they're under fear of persecution they're being tortured and driven out and so on they're going into a very impoverished country no not getting any aid so you know right next door there's a much bigger humanitarian problem and one can think of a number of others without too much imagination so the the pretense the pretext that will be used is humanitarian and there won't be any debate about that because it serves US interest it serves US interests of trying to extend Israeli control over the territories that's the standard interest served by this so therefore we force Russian Jews to Israel and the American taxpayer pays for that's the way that we present it I'm sorry he presented that way but that's what it amounts to I'd like to come back to Latin America and the US support of democracy down in December of last year than much touted democratic elections were held in Haiti and the u.s. got a kick in the teeth a few weeks before with our estates appearance on the scene and also since December 19 when he was elected there's been a big change in the tone of the reporting in the US press about our Steve between then and the coup on 30th of September what I'd like to ask is do you have any comments on the events up till now in Haiti and what you see in US policy in the future there in the immediate future and how important do you consider the US public stance on democracy that has been such a big deal generally and specifically in Haiti recently versus US interests down well it's no there's no question that the US was not happy with aresty and would have much rather seen a standard representative of business interest however the u.s. accepted the rst government and in fact was even you know I'm more or less favorable to it now I think the reasons are basically - first of all Haiti is considered so hopeless you know that it's assumed that you know we can get some guy in there who has who supports poor and as you know interested in liberation he's not gonna be able to do anything anyway the constraints are so narrow you know the economic situation is so horrifying that the limits on any choices he can make probably won't make any difference so therefore we can tolerate him furthermore the US has just made a big rhetorical story about supporting democracy in the New World Order and all that kind of stuff and it's a little you know it's a propaganda is it possible there's a lot you can do but some things are tough it would be tough to you know to oppose what's obviously a popularly elected government to blatantly now after the coup the u.s. kind of was standoffish about it you remember right after the military coup that throughout our estate there came a lot of reporting and talk about his terrible human rights record and he's not a real Democrat and all that kind of stuff actually his human rights record is stellar as compared with anything before after anything the US support but and the u.s. kind of reluctantly went along with the OAS boycott and I suppose the reasons are pretty much the same there's no real gain I mean I'm sure that the US would much prefer to have a standard representative of the you know the industrialists and the the guys who are getting the good press and the press you know yeah the ones who are called the Democrats meaning the industrialists and so on but it's not so simple to see how to do that and since Haiti is not really considered very important because the options there are so restricted I suspect the US will continue to sort of stand back try to manipulate things so that the business classes and maybe the military restore control maybe with iris-t to some kind of figurehead and then we have to will law ourselves again on Eric great contributions to democracy that's what I suspect would probably come out frankly I think for the u.s. it's kind of a minor issue there's big humanitarian issues for example these thousands of people fleeing the both people a couple hundred of them died the other day who knows how many hundreds or thousands are dying but remember there's been going on for 20 years and I'm sure you know the there have been people fleeing from Haiti and the Dominican Republic for decades and they drown at sea or you know if the Coast Guard picks them up they send them back and and that's a really human rights horror which has been going on for a long time it's hitting the newspapers now but it's not really new it's increased because of the who but sure but it's been going on for a long time so you know back in the late 1970s or was already quite substantial thousands and thousands of people both from Haiti and the Dominican Republic so you think from the point of view of the u.s. rhetoric and democracy that it will just eventually sort of fade into the background they'll try to make everybody forget about it I mean Haiti isn't that important but yeah I mean you've got to maintain the rhetorical stance you know we've got to maintain the rhetorical stance of being in favor of democracy we got a problem remember there's a problem with the rascal multitude in the United States - they have to be subjected to illusions about the US commitment to freedom and human rights and democracy and so on the commissar culture has its own tasks and you don't want to make those tasks too hard you know like latent support for a brutal military dictatorship that's why for example when the u.s. supported Saddam Hussein and putting down the Kurds and the Shiites there was a little bit of a propaganda problem as you remember we had to bring in all this business about stability and so on and then quickly turn to another diplomatic triumph I mean these are constant problems and controlling populations and since Haiti is kind of marginal you know they probably figure they can tolerate the appearance of democracy there I was wondering since you're talking you're talking about the New World Order if you can make some comments and about the United States attempts to isolate and demonize North Korea considering what's going on now in the papers because aside from the Middle East peace talks what has been in the papers recently is the whole new Korean nuclear campaign as well as officials coming up with statements saying that you know aggressive force must be used to contain North Korea also that if there's a strong was any indication they've been greater force using in Korea and so if you can make some comment about that situation taking into consideration of us warming helps yeah you recall when after the Gulf War Colin Powell made some statement about saying there's still a couple of things that haven't been resolved like Cuba and North Korea on Libya and a few others which have to be integrated into the I mean the u.s. system is supposed to be a world system that's always been the position certain pieces of it are still not integrated into it North Korea is one of them kind of interesting column the other day in The Wall Street Journal which maybe noticed from South Korea reporting that the South Koreans want US forces to remain even after possible unification with North Korea because they're afraid of Japan no interesting sidelight on this they have some history on that issue you know but yeah I don't really expect the United States to do anything serious to go after North Korea it's too it's too dangerous too far away you know it's not the kind of thing you can do a more likely target of us attack in fact the most likely one is Cuba Libya you can always just bomb at will you know that's not a big problem you bomb and whenever you want a punching bag around Cuba will take a little more work and it's the next most likely target and you know that you can see the mechanisms Cuba was has been under us terrorist attack for 30 years the Kennedy administration launched the world's by far the world's largest terrorist operation international terrorist operation against Cuba right after the Bay of Pigs and I went on for a long time may still be going on we usually learn about these things couple years later they're under illegal embargo and economic strangulation the United States has intimidated Latin America enough so they're not going to break the embargo and the European countries in Japan don't care that much and I'm gonna get in the way of the United States so these they were able to survive for a while by assistance from the East Bloc but now that we have Gorbachev new thinking as it's called meaning subordination the US power that wonderful thing they've stopped giving them substance sustenance so now you can continue the economic strangulation assumption being that that'll worsen the internal situation enough so that there will be you know protests and dissidents and that will intensify the repression which is our a severe enough and that'll cause an internal breakdown and sooner or later it'll get to the point where things have gotten so bad that you can send the Marines in with being pretty security that nobody's going to shoot back and you can call them liberation that's probably the scenario and if you know the economy really is in trouble that might be accelerated so as to happen before the next election it's not inconceivable but that's what I'd yes the next likely one is North Korea I think it's going to be just something to talk about for a while so you think it's just a media campaign I mean they want to integrate North Korea into the US dominated system but I don't think it's a big init policy initiative for the US for one thing if North Korea did get absorbed into the Western dominated economic system Japan would be the main beneficiary not the United States okay because that's in the Japan sphere of influence and the US has no particular interest in strengthening Japan actually you can see this going on in Eastern Europe right now throughout the decade the United States has been kind of trying to [ __ ] the opening up of the Soviet Union in fact right now that's continuing the u.s. is still to this day you know it's trying to strengthen the central forces in the Soviet Union against the separatist tendencies of the Republic's I mean just last August Bush called for called finally Ukrainians not to move towards independence you know and in fact throughout the decade the US has been opposed to trade with the Soviet Union which would have led to more rapid liberalisation and opening up and so on the US would prefer to see some kind of Iron Fist over there rather than opening the region up and turning it back into conventional third world and I think that's not hard to understand simply ask yourself who's going to be the beneficiary of returning Eastern Europe to its traditional quasi colonial status which is what's happening well the minute beneficiaries will be mostly Germany and its surroundings and Japan if they decide to get in on the act those are the cap first of all they're nearby that's where the traditional trade patterns are they have excess capital to invest which the US doesn't have so the u.s. is kind of likely to be left out in the cold and that one as a result there's no special interest in it and I think probably the same is true with regard to North Korea its might yes many way we own time for five more questions and please limit it to one question each my question is about the between government and the US government my first question is there are a lot of talks after the Gulf War about there are a lot of talks in the Middle East especially after the Gulf War especially in Israel that Israel is no longer an assets for US interests but another liability and that's why they believe that the so-called powerful iPAQ and other Israeli interests in Washington you see are no longer powerful Kremlin door this is propaganda you know academic and journalistic propaganda you always have to present the the major US interest has the me it's very clear in the internal documentary record where it makes it extremely explicit what should be obvious even without a record that the threat to US interests primary threat is indigenous nationalism what's called ultra nationalism and the planning record things like democracy openings nationalist regimes which are responsive to pressures from the population you know to take their own resources or improvement of living standards and so on that interferes with the service role of the third world and that's always been the fear with regard to Israel I mentioned the not just 1948 start we go through the record it's pretty clear 1948 the Joint Chiefs already recognized Israel as part of the regional control system didn't much do with the Russians it had to do with indigenous nationalism of course the Russians you know they thought might stir it up or support it and so on so they play kind of an ancillary role but if the Russians didn't exist it would be the same by 1958 the National Security Council already recognized that as they put it a logical corollary to opposition to Arab nationalism is support for Israel as the most reliable pro-western force in the region along with Turkey in the 1960s Israel was regarded by US intelligence as a barrier to NASA right pressure Egyptian pressure against Saudi Arabia now you know the Russians could be on Mars for all this matter there were there were nationalist pressures in the Arab world they were threatening the Arab facade which runs the energy system for the benefits of the United States and that out of he stopped in Israel was a barrier to it the in the 1970s was kind of open you know like so the real the people who really talk the truth you know weren't just talking for propaganda purposes like Senator Henry Jackson you know the Senate's main expert on the Middle East and oil he pointed out back in the early 70s that US policy toward the region was based on a triangular relationship between Israel Iran and then under the Shah and Saudi Arabia there was all sort of tacit alliances you know I didn't have public alliances and the but the idea was that Israel and Iran would as he put it repress radical nationalist forces in the Middle East that might threaten the what I what the British called the Arabs Assad you know the tyrannies that run the oil States the family dictatorships and that probably remains the case I mean somebody somebody's got to serve these interests be a base for us power in the region furthermore I might guess my strong suspicion is that the Saudi Arabian they'll eat and the Emirates like this say I think they support Israel I think they support Israeli power now it's very hard to prove that because these are real tyrannies you don't have one piece of paper from them you know that to find out what their policies are like trying to find out what a corporation is up to they're basically like corporations completely fascist they don't leave any paper trail they do whatever they feel like internally and so we don't have any documentary record but from whatever secondary record there is it looks to me as though there's probably been a kind of an alliance between say particularly the Saudi Arabian elite the guys who run the thing and Israel and they like Israeli power as a barrier against nationalist pressure just as it was a barrier against Nasser right pressure so for example personally I wasn't in the least bit surprised to notice that just to discover that Saudi Arabia was funding his Israel's operation of providing us arms to Iran to restore the traditional you know that part of the traditional alliance that makes perfect sense nor was it surprising to find Saudi Arabia and Israel cooperating in the us-run international terrorist network directed against Central America and so on in fact all of this is completely natural the Arab facade is there basically to serve US interests you know I mean they got their own interests but they got to do what the US tells them they got to be protected they don't mind Iran and Turkey and those guys as long as they protect them there are nationalist forces in the region it's not a law of nature that says that the wealth of the Arab world should be funneled to the West particularly to the United States in England in order to enrich us and a couple of thousand rich people there a lot of other people in the Arab world are getting virtually nothing from it that's not a law of nature and therefore the local managers have to be protected the Russians were a problem insofar as they supported nationalist group but these nationalists are still around Russians are not so I don't see any real change showing up in the u.s. relation to Israel other than propagandistic as far as apex concerned it seems to me there are powers what it always was secondary you know I think it's a bad I mean this is a impressionistic you know if I give my impressions my impressions are that it's a very serious misunderstanding of American pluralism to think that lobbies have very much influence now as long as AIPAC is lobbying for things that the executive wants to do anyway it'll be influential as long as it as long as the lobby lines up with significant power interests it can be influential if it opposes those power interests it'll go down at too quickly now there's one exception to this and that is business lobbies but remember business lobbies are just reppin their own representatives in the executive and in Congress so that's a different issue no I don't want to make this like you know this is kind of broad brushstrokes I mean it's not that the lobbies have no influence the so-called Israeli Lobby has a big influence intimidating people I mean the main thing they've achieved is not so much lobbying the executive as intimidating everybody else so people know that if you open your mouth you're gonna get a ton of mud thrown at you and this and that and you know that makes people back away particularly in public life and that's had an effect it's doubtless had an effect on portrayal of the whole issue and suppressing and it you know might have might that might be a significant effect but if they were ever to oppose a more or less unified US policy they would disappear and I think we just saw that so for example George Bush there was a real US interest in delaying that loan for a couple of months there's no serious dispute over you know they all basically agree but the u.s. wanted that long delayed and the current government of Israel wanted it fast primarily to try to block the Madrid conference they don't like the Madrid conference and if the US had given the loan guarantee and September's probably would have blown the Madrid conference out of the water because you know the Arab states couldn't I mean they would have just have been happy to come but they couldn't have done it because of domestic problems and as a result the u.s. won put that off for a couple of months and then maybe everybody get about it and then you go ahead with what you're planning anyway but and it's because that was a real interest yeah small issue no this very small issue but a real interest the Israeli Lobby simply disappeared I mean one flick of George Bush's eyebrow and they went home in fact two flicks of his eyebrow could have probably stirred up a wave of anti-semitism throughout the country which are really really frightened them that's the I mean you know these domestic lobbies I don't think one should exaggerate their significance that's not the way American democracy works my opinion okay could you comment on any perceived connection between about a week and a half ago when Libya was blamed for the PanAm bombing all of a sudden shortly thereafter the most of the Western hostages in Lebanon who are supposedly held by Iranian and Syrian controlled people were mysteriously coincidentally released and that is very interesting yeah I would be I mean it might mean something it might not I'd be cautious about drawing conclusions from that I suspect that these arrangements to release the US hostages precede the bombing of you know the thing I mean look these these kind of you know this sort of the cover men's and the ABE Rosenthal's and so on could be correct when they say that Iran and Syria are being led off the hook because they have some role to play in u.s. planning Libya remember has been a punching bag for ten years it's easy every time there's a domestic problem you go bomb Libya attack Libya or something like that and that's easy they're completely defenseless you know Qaddafi nobody likes anyhow nobody's going to defend them so they want to bomb a bomb you know that's kind of like automatic maybe Libya was involved I mean maybe not nobody still has any particular reason to believe that they were involved in the disco bombing in 1986 maybe they were but there was certainly no evidence around at the time that could convince a rational person the German investigators didn't believe it you know they thought it was complete fraud and this was all suppressed in the u.s. press but it was published like I had article about it right then based on an interview with the top the head of the what amounts to the German FBI who was actually interview carried out biased US Stars and Stripes reporter you know with the head of this thing saying there's not a particle of evidence that Libya had anything to do with this there's a couple of weeks after the bombing this is mostly propaganda and noticed that it's all you shouldn't be deluded by it I mean there are if we were interested in terrorism we could do simple things like going after say the people who who were responsible for the worst air tragedy the Air India flight or who were responsible for the second worst one namely the year an airliner that we don't go very far to get those guys we're not the extradite anyone right who was walk over to the White House and so if there was any concern with international terrorism you had nowhere to go but whether this has anything to do with release of the hostages I we don't know I mean like I don't know any more than the White House is going to have another war some sort of conflict before the election because he needs something but if the if they are facing real domestic problems and you know the meddling Outsiders are beginning to you know make a fuss and people really start paying attention deciding look we better do something about this catastrophe around us it'll be necessary to divert them and there aren't many ways one way is to set oppressed groups against one another actually they Thomas hearings were perfect example of that you take the two most oppressed groups in the country and you set them at each other's throats no perfect you know the affirmative action thing is exactly the same you don't have a meaningful and unemployment program you know a meaningful employment program what you do is if you're clever what you do is target particular sectors so that other sectors equally deprived will hate those guys you know instead of hitting the guys who are picking up wall-e you know we're making all the money and establishing the policy so there's all these techniques which is our standard and will continue but the other major ones are the ones I mentioned foreign enemies who are going to overwhelm us or at the magnificence of our leaders who rise up at the last minute in the nick of time to save us that standard and they could resort to that my guess is it would be Cuba though yeah I guess some of us still need our fig leaves to keep hope and in the Middle East and the the Madrid talks the the fact that the Palestinians went in it and agreed to it some of us have been hoping that there would be a momentum that would build up so the there would be some conclusion which be other than what you've described what do you think of it I think that's possible only if there's enough internal pressure in the United States to compel the state to change its traditional policies people who are going to have faith in the in George Bush and James Baker are simply contributing to oppression as well as contributing to the destruction of democracy here by fostering illusions I mean like you I hope that something decent will happen there but it's not going to happen unless there's enough domestic pressure so I mean any ruling group has got to worry primarily about its domestic enemy the main enemy of any group that's in power anywhere is the domestic population they got to be kept under control if they become disruptive or do things you got to react doesn't matter who you are fascist state a Democratic Society anything and if there's that kind of pressure yeah US policy could shift I mean it's not a look it's not a crucial interest of the United States that Palestinian rights be denied it's a very marginal interest kind of like Haitian democracy very marginal interest as a result that could shift but it will require pressures here faith and you know the good will of our leaders is just a way to make sure that things continue the way they are Israeli labor party there's no change I mean you take a look at the report I mean the you take a look at the New York Times report and forget the headlines and read the words and the Labour Party took its traditional position traditional labor party position has been complete rejection ISM I mean I have time to run through it but I was planning to in fact have notes on it if you're interested but the and there's a lot of documentation on this in the Hebrew literature a lot of interesting things to say labour party position has always been complete rejection ISM and remained so the Labour Party and Likud differ on the modalities so the Labour Party has traditionally pursued what's been called the alone plan the that's what's called territorial compromise here territorial compromises it farce everybody in Israel knows that territorial compromises the name for the plan which says Israel takes what it wants in the occupied territories but takes no responsibility for the bulk of the population who were administered by Jordan now that's minimally different from the Likud program which says we extend sovereignty over the territories but we grant the population autonomy which means we don't take any responsibility for them I mean the differences between those plant those proposals are minuscule and in fact many Israeli doug's authentic dubs not in the waiver party and Palestinian nationalists actually regard the Likud programs as more helpful to their interests and the yeah but what does that mean they tell you what that means no no they tell you what it means sure they can say anything they like as long as they don't tell you what it means and what it means is we'll take what we want in the territories we will take the water we will take the other resources we'll take the nice suburbs around Jerusalem which by now is a huge area extending will into the West Bank and remember is and we'll take the Jordan Valley in fact we'll take everything that we want but we won't take responsibility for the population because we don't want to pay for it we don't want it we and that then comes what's called the demographic problem it's another term of art which means the problem of too many non-jews and what is by law not the state of its citizens but the state of the Jews that's what it is and you know the idea traditionally has been if the second-class citizens by law are sort of like 20% or less you can kind of finesse it and the new york times will still talk about the symbol of human decency and all this kind of stuff but if it gets to be 50% you know it starts to look like a Rhodesia or something then it gets to be a problem so you have this demographic problem and you also have the process play the problem of providing you know extending the normal services that any state any state whatever it is provides to its own citizens you got that problem which is costly and then there are two ideas on how not to do it one is the Likud idea of autonomy and the other is the Labour idea of territorial compromise they come out about the same way they're not all that different in certainly as far as extending Giroux slum men Israeli settlement in Jerusalem including Russian Jews is concerned remember there are two issues there one problem is to keep a Jewish majority but another non-trivial problem is to keep a Zionist majority remember that a lot of the Jews in Jerusalem are non Zionists or anti-zionists the whole religious group and that to go back to the Israeli literature there's a phrase they breed like rabbits which is used for two groups Palestinians and Orthodox Jews they all breed like rabbits and the big problem is that the in effect a lot of these or thought a lot of these Orthodox Jews are not only non Zionists a lot of them have called for Jordan to take control so they can have religious freedom again so you have to keep expanding the population the Judah Zionist Jewish population first to overcome these two problems of those guys who breed like rabbits and so there's got a and this basically no disagreement on this I mean you look back at the settlement programs going way back to you know 1967 September 1967 first Labour Party settlement program was internally announced by Shimon Peres incidentally internals since been publicized and it called for expansion around Jerusalem settlement around nob Lewis settlement in the Jordan Valley you know settlement and the Golan Heights in fact pretty much what's happened you know Likud does it a little differently but there aren't major differences and incidentally contrary to a lot of the reporting here the Likud policies in the territories have also often been less harsh than the Labour Party policies so when Menachem Bagan came in in 1977 you know the hawk torture stopped demolition of houses stopped expulsion stuff got worse again for a period when Ariel Sharon came in but for the most but you know you and in fact when Labour came back in in 1984 it all started again I mean these are very complicated things you know they're not the way they're portrayed but the fundamental point is there isn't much difference no there is much difference between the Labour form of rejection ISM and the we could inform the US has traditionally favored the labor form to regard it as kind of more rational so like also the US doesn't see there's something about the Likud policies that the US doesn't like Likud labor tends to be much more western-oriented that's why they have people like Abba Eban you know who talk with nice British accents and that kind of thing they could it's kind of like more Eastern European or you know they're kind of like evoke anti-semitic caricatures and so on but and they could tends to do things in a very brazen fashion and defiant fashion so typically say when James Baker shows up in Jerusalem they'll pick that day you know to defiantly establish a new settlement somewhere to say you know thumb their nose at them and the u.s. doesn't like that it's kind of embarrassing what they prefer is the Labour Party technique which is not to do that but to wait till the next day and then not to establish a new settlement but to do something called thickening old settlements in exactly the same place and then nobody notices it but it sort of ends up the same way the Labour Party as I say it's kind of much more attuned to the norms of Western hypocrisy then Likud is and for that reason the United States always tended to prefer labor yeah let's let's go here yeah I almost lost track of all the questions going to be I once had a friend was just like yourself and intellectually I do I once had a friend was an intellectual he's a mentor of mine but he's now dead his name is Walter ogni and he would spend time like yourself talking to people sorry I didn't understand exactly could you say again okay I'll go I'm not stretching one side of friend time like you do right now yeah talking to people like myself and he was an intellectual like you his name is Walter Rodney he's a mentor he's not a water run here and I traveling the natural analysis but the answer to the question the British questioner because I feel for the people are Haiti as I feel for the people of man who became infamous after Jim Jones and Johnston as you would understand that's not the way you'd like your country to be seen in the world so this is my question what would you prescribe and my new I'm not I'm like - I'd like you to give answers and I'm willing to listen what would you prescribe because I'm sure that we have spoken today is not just for intellectual consumption but you've probably got something in mind yeah yeah would you prescribe for the domestic audience but myself was living here at the moment and what you call the the way the Americans look at them the indigenous nationalists who live in these poor countries who suffer like the people in Haiti yeah well what I I maybe I wasn't clear but what I prescribe is extending democracy in the United States that is creating popular forces in the United States which are able to become significant enough to take control over at least significantly influence policy decisions well in a longer run to break down the autocratic hierarchic institutions which have controlled after all at corporate run system and in that way to allow the possibilities of you know to allow people in the subject domains a degree of openness and freedom that they're not going to have as long as the American population remains you know spectators and Outsiders that's what I recommend I mean not very profound third world nation as far as the third world is concerned well you know the third world has extremely narrow options open to it it's just very oppressed and it's very hard and first what's on life it's my place to recommend things to them you know like okay well look I'm I mean intellectual doesn't mean anything you know I mean a guy who drives a taxi cab is no less an intellectual than a guy teachers in university often more intellectual but the point is we're talking about people you know what should people do well you know somebody somebody in the who's sharing ideas with us the moment right I meant someone who's sharing find it I mean you know at my advice I don't have much in the way of advice to the third-world countries for one thing they always the depressed that I'm talking to the United to people in the United States right I'm talking to people in the United States and what I think they ought to do if you ask me what the Palestinians ought to do or what the Haitians ought to do or what the Nicaraguans ought to do frankly I don't have a lot to suggest I think that they have to decide what they're going to do what I would like to do is to take our boot off their neck okay then they can decide what they want to do I mean if somebody wants my advice you know I'll like I'll tell them but I don't see why they should pay any attention to it and I think your opinions are worthwhile okay you touch very briefly on the propaganda side of all these events that you were discussing today and I read recently in the paper ABC is complaining about losing a lot of money and they're trying to force the FCC to do away with regulations with the number of media outlets that any corporation is able to control presently it stays at 12 which is up from three only a few years ago and wondering what effect you think this might have on the presentation of these events in the media and the propaganda assault on the people in this country and I know that you contribute to Z Magazine and they're trying to put together the radio I'm wondering if you think that can have any real effect and you know if besides forums like this how we can get the message out to more people in this country to do just what you said a moment ago is to make people wake up and to remove the boot of oppression of the United States government on people around the world well you know if there are any answers to this question that aren't obvious nobody's ever found them every social time the only reason we're not living under slavery or you know military dictatorships or something is because over the centuries there have been lots of popular struggle which have extended the domains of freedom and the only way those things happen is by you know education and organization and the pamphlet literature and pressures and hangover institutions and so on and so forth and if there's any other way of doing it nobody's ever found it so sure I mean all of these ways are fine I don't have anything to say I don't think there is anything to say that isn't obvious do you think that the increasing concentration of corporate control of media has you know how can we counter that I mean I've written about it but you want to know the truth they don't really believe very much what I'm writing I mean it's true that there is a there is increased centralization of like you know there's one newspaper in town instead of two and there's three channels instead of four and so on but I don't think honestly speaking that things would be very different if there were 50 you know if there were 50 corporate controlled television channels they would all do approximately the same thing because they all respond to the same interest I mean it might have a marginal effect on opening up a few things but not much in my view even though as I say I've written about it but but radio or things yeah I think you radius is important but that's not a corporate control channel say what I mean is like instead of just GM and you know you got also GE I don't think that's gonna help a lot because they basically have the same interests on the other hand if you have say community radio or you know independent what are called alternative what do we call the independent press especially if there's organizational structure behind them you know you got the Central American Solidarity movement behind it or you know you've got the feminist movement behind it or something if there's some popular force behind it then these things mean something you know they help people get together and think things out and do things and so on and so forth sure that's tremendously important in fact that's one pressure against the major ideological institutions is also important I mean after all there are people inside them who are trying to press things to the limit and they can do more if they have more outside support I don't think it's a matter of choice between one or another thing they're all important [Applause]

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

Views: 3,511

Rating: 4.7538462 out of 5

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Id: XPRj1z4epe0

Length: 137min 23sec (8243 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 03 2017