Noam Chomsky - Prospects for World Order 8/24/95

it is needless to say an honor and a privilege to be invited to speak in the Pauling lecture series and a particular privilege to be able to do so today on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations as the contours of a New World Order were being constructed from the ashes of the most terrible single catastrophe of human history there were conflicting visions at the time of what the new world order of the day should be defined they're still highly relevant one view was that of the United Nations which is now possibly facing its demise the second was a view that is sometimes called realism in international relations theory which was critical of the utopianism that accompanied the founding of the United Nations the realist vision was articulated with great clarity 50 years ago by one of the most respected an important statesmen of the 20th century Winston Churchill who was speaking for the victors one of the big three he explained that according him now the government of the world must be entrusted to the satisfied nations who wish nothing more for themselves than what they had our power placed us above the rest we are like rich men dwelling in peace within their habitations and we must keep the hungry nations from under control for us there will be danger earlier in century the peak of British power before World War one Churchill had outline the this realistic vision more fully this time in secret in the British cabinet meetings records of which have recently been released after quite a few years apparently considered rather sensitive he said we are not young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance we have inverse to ourselves and altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world we have got all we want in territory but our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of that splendid possessions mainly acquired by violence largely maintained by force often seems less reasonable to others than to us so we have to teach them lessons in reasonableness this was part of a call for expanding the military budget I should say a sanitized version of that did appear in his writings but with a very different tone well that the more humane among the conquerors didn't find those measures so reasonable not for example Adam Smith who bear condemned what he called the savage injustice of the Europeans who he saw very clearly two hundred years ago were brutally creating the first world third-world divide that is now so dramatic and was far less so at the time well Adam Smith was a figure of the Enlightenment pre-capitalist anti-capitalist in fundamental ways and he was also smart enough to detect the fundamental illusions of the realist picture that Churchill eloquently articulated the first is that contrary to the Churchillian version the rich men enjoying their ample hesitate habitations are never satisfied rather they will follow what Adam Smith called the vile maximum of the Masters of mankind all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else the second and more crucial point is that the we who are enjoying their vast and splendid possessions were not the people of England nor France nor the United States nor other imperial powers except occasionally by accident rather continuing in his words the principal architects of state policy designed to ensure that their own interests are most peculiarly attended to however Grievous the impact on others including the people of their own country that's a very valid comment in his day the principal architects were the merchants and manufacturers of England as he explained today it's the huge transnational corporations and financial institutions that dominate the domestic economy and in fact the International economy and hence its politics as well well to correct the realist vision with Adam Smith's insights it comes out like this the rich man of the rich societies will pursue their vile Maxim seeking to expand their vast and splendid possessions that they have gained by violence and hold by force resorting to savage injustice when necessary so that those who do not will simply fall by the wayside the lot of the vast majority of people including those of their own countries is simply to serve and so no that's the realist division the other vision of world order the competing 150 years ago was the vision of the United Nations or at least the rhetoric that accompanied its founding which I won't review because you're engulfed in a flood of such pronouncements and it's unnecessary to repeat them as to which of the conflicting visions prevailed history has provided a rather clear and unflattering answer now there were and are of course plenty of people deeply committed to the vision of the rhetoric the term that accompanied the United Nations then a noun and who sought to make it more than mere rhetoric that includes I suppose the vast majority of the population of the world which is why reality has to be masked in so much secrecy and deceit it's why the occasional honest comment such as Churchill's before the First World War has to be concealed from the population for almost a century in this case and I think it'll be a long time before they study it in British schools the to make the rhetoric included also prominent individuals - and Helen Pauling ranking high among them but real power has always resided elsewhere well in the United Stated over the years from great praise to letter contempt I'll return to that at the end suggesting a rather simple realist principle that I think it counts for the variations but first let's look at the the failures and flaws of the United Nations that have cause this needs changes in attitudes towards it there is a standard version of this it runs sort of like this at the beginning there were great hopes they were dashed by the Cold War the when the Cold War ended around 1989 1990 it there was a period of hopefulness and then hopes were dashed again by the ethnic conflicts that swept the world since well there's some representative quotes from the most interesting period 1990 right after the end of the Cold War and before the new catastrophes began these are from the Washington Post in the New York Times and leading columnist sand editorialists but they're perfectly standard I've actually reviewed a lot of them in print and this is a completely exception with pattern so here's a few during the long cold war years the Soviet veto and the hostility of many third world nations made the United Nations an object of scorn to many Americans who were rightly at fault by the sight of breehn face Soviet ambassadors casting vetoes and shrill anti-western rhetoric from third world nations although with the end of the Cold War 1988-89 Soviet policy changed bringing about a wondrous sea change in the United Nations which can finally work the way it was designed to well that's the picture as of 1990 and then comes the delusion that disillusionment the year of ethnic conflict replaced the Cold War and the UN again failed to deal with them so maybe the time has come to bid it farewell that's in capsule form the story I'd like what I'd like to do now is to look at these two ears the Cold War and ethnic conflict and compare the vision with the reality and also ask just what role the UN played in this so let's take the Cold War well again there's a standard version I don't know there waste much time on it that's you've heard it over and over it was for example articulated by President Kennedy who proclaimed that the communist world from Havana to Moscow to pay paying as it was in those days to Saigon and so on is a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy planning to take over everything else his right-hand man Robert McNamara announced in his confirmation hearings its goal is total obliteration without any hint of moral restraint anywhere to be found in the entire literature of Marxism and so on there's that's the standard version now there is a more sober version of that for example it's given in scholarship so take take say the leading the most respected American diplomatic historian is also a major historian the Cold War John Lewis Gaddis he pretty much accepts what's called the Orthodox position post revisionist position that's often called and realistically he traces the Cold War to 1917 agreeing with George Kennan and others as you know right after the Bolshevik takeover in 1917 there was a Western invasion and gas explains the immediate Western invasion as defensive on sighs should say that this invasion was taken rather seriously for example Britain used poison gas which is the ultimate atrocity in those days like nuclear weapons after World War two usually poison gas in those days was reserved to those who were called recalcitrant Arabs or uncivilized tribesmen among whom it would spread a lively terror again quoting Winston Churchill and documents released about 15 years ago and yet to enter popular consciousness also worth reading well why defensive according to Geddes because it was a preemptive strike he explains it was taken to ward off a potential Soviet actions in his words it was a response to a potentially far-reaching intervention by the new Soviet government in the internal affairs not just of the West but of virtually every country in the world namely the revolutions challenged to the very survival of the capitalist system so as a preemptive strike and therefore justified what was the challenge well the challenge was obviously not military conquest certainly not at that time and in fact not at any time he argues agreeing with most serious scholarship and in fact with the internal documents rather the challenge the potential challenge that was going to come that justified the defensive invasion was the demonstration effect of an alternative social models development model that might have appeal in the traditional service areas of the south but even among working people and the poor in the industrial himself that was a prospect that varied greatly concerned Lloyd George Woodrow Wilson is Secretary of State Robert Lansing and many others and indeed that remains the primary concern as far as record reaches which right now is into the 1960s right through that's the primary concern the over the Soviet challenge for example when John F Kennedy and Prime Minister Macmillan of England were discussing the Soviet challenge in the early sixties that was precisely their concern and this wasn't just the Soviet Union the same concerns were voiced with regard to China and Vietnam and many others ensure it was the perceived success of the so-called communist model there's nothing to do with communism but that's what it's called it's the procedure except the communist model that was considered a threat and that's pretty understandable when you look at the comparable situation and the comparable Western domains I should add that Stalin's awesome crimes were of course well known but almost totally irrelevant to these calculations Truman for example liked and admired Stalin thought he was honest I said what happened inside the Soviet Union he didn't care about he thought it would be a disaster if anything happened to the great man and his great friend and said you could get along fine with Stalin as long as the United States got its way 85% of the time shirk the same view in internal records of course early 1945 after that is Churchill and internal cabinet records was defending Stalin as honest and trustworthy and we've got to deal with him he admired and he spoke in fact very glowingly of him in private meetings mass-murderer was not known but not relevant in this respect Stalin falls into a sort of a pretty traditional pattern he falls into a long line of monsters and gangsters including su carto will be visiting in a week or so trujillo sane and a host of other killers and torturers including the man who president roosevelt called that admirable italian gentleman who had brought fascism to italy and even including hitler well into the late 1930s the crime what's is not following orders but we don't get our way eighty-five percent of the time or more history is very clear on that a few years before the Kennedy McMillan exchanges that I just mentioned President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles the Secretary of State had highlighted the central issue in private internal discussions recent recently Declassified they were lamenting the ability of the communist so-called to appeal directly to the masses and gain control of mass movements something we have no capacity to duplicate because the poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich the big problem of world history and how many others recognize their on position on who should plunder whom was a pretty hard sell so the opposition had a kind of unfair advantage and they were trying to figure out how to deal with this well rich record which suggests a different perspective on the Cold War that perspective happens to be reinforced quite powerfully I think when you look further for example at the quite rich and interesting record of declining documents which stress forcefully and consistently that the major threaten US interests and quoting is radical nationalism that calls for improvement in the lower living standards of the masses and development for domestic needs based on the principle that the first beneficiaries of a country's resources should be the people of that country not foreign investors conception that must be destroyed in all its forms as the State Department insisted in the Charter for the Americas that it imposed on the Western Hemisphere right in 1945 as the new world order was being established consistent themes that run through the whole record as they do for Britain before us and though I haven't looked I imagine France and Belgium and anybody else you look at which is consistent with this for some pretty dramatic examples of it so take one example from just a few years ago you recall that about ten years ago the United States was engaged in what the World Court condemned as the unlawful use of force against Nicaragua and when the World Court condemned the United States for its aggression against Nicaragua were to desist from the crimes as well as the unlawful economic work there and of course the u.s. dismissed the judgment without concern and in fact Congress voted right after another hundred million dollars to increase the unlawful use of force against Nicaragua well at that time the selling point what the Reagan administration used to sell Congress on the need to do this was the the what they could be something is done and the announcement by the government of Nicaragua that they were conducting a revolution Without Borders and that became the centerpiece of the US propaganda campaign it was all over the media the journals as I say it induced Congress to step up the war the sound earnestness had actually announced that they were going to conquer the world case you didn't know it they were going to carry out a revolution with that word well that's an interesting case that's because the in fact was based on some reality as propaganda usually is it was based on speech by a Sundance the leader Thomas bore faith and in which he said every country has to carry out its own revolution we can interfere with anyone else but we would like to construct the model that will work so well that others will want to follow so that in that sense he said our revolution transcends words so in a certain sense the the US propaganda was correct he again was issuing a challenge the others might want a development model that others might want to follow and that requires a defensive response namely international terrorism and aggression and terror and torture and so on because after all we have to defend ourselves from that challenge so there's nothing true about the fabrication incidentally the fabrication was perfectly well known it was exposed instantly right in the mainstream in the Washington Post in fact within days but nobody cared it was just too useful so therefore it continued to be reiterated as something is to revolution Without Borders it's kind of an interesting fact about our own culture that this kind of thing can happen so easily and so off another point of view from which you can gain some perspective on the reality of the Cold War I think is tip is to carry out the following test which is indeed rather useful after any war it's very interesting after any war is over to ask whose rejoicing and who's unhappy when you carry out it often makes the war look rather different than the way it was interpreted about what it was really about so let's look at the Cold War whose rejoicing and who's unhappy well honey in the east the people who rejoice are easy to find that's the old Communist Party leadership they are rich beyond their wildest dreams just delighted with everything that's happened obviously they're the victors in the Cold War they are now the managers of the u.s. Center prizes that are being set up they're sort of taking on the role of the typical third world elite very rich very powerful working for the bosses somewhere else and very well-off so their delight they're called in fact the capitalist nomenclature very often that's the old communist party hacks who are now very powerful very rich very much beloved by the West so they're the victors they won in the cold who's unhappy about the end of the Cold War in the east well they're poles now taken by the West about attitudes in Russia and so on Western run polls so pretty accurate and one of the questions they asked regularly is what do you think is the best period of Russian history well the latest one that was taken two thirds said the pre perestroika period you know before the before Gorbachev that was the best period two thirds that's up from fifty percent about in 1992 the future has declined that's it's rather general through the region people are delighted that the tyrannies collapsed but they're less than happy about returning to the third world status that they had before so they're less than happy about the fact that since 1989 in Russia there has been have been about a half a million excess deaths resulting from the reforms according to a recent UNESCO study which indeed approves of the reforms but gives the figures so there's people who one were in the east and there's people who lost the war in the East what about in the West well among the people who were rejoicing about the end of the Cold War our Western business leaders for example the directors of General Motors and dave repents and Volkswagen and so on and their reasons that are explained with great clarity in the International Business press for example the British Financial Times which has been pointing out that the big games from the end of the Cold War typical example is an article called green chutes and communism ruins and it's horrible over there but something good some green chutes the green chutes are that the effect of the capitalist reforms has been to cause tremendous impoverishment and unemployment so it is now possible for Western investors to get highly trained skilled educated workers for a fraction of the cost of the pampered Western workers I'm quoting who will have to abandon their luxurious lifestyles as Businessweek added so they're on the other hand who's unhappy in the West well among the people who are unhappy are the pampered Western workers who are less than overjoyed having to give up their luxurious lifestyles now that say General Motors ordained lament that cannot only threaten and in fact bring down their wages and benefits and increase their working hours and so on by either moving or threatening to move to Mexico but now also to Poland and Slovakia and so on so they are less than delighted they lost the Cold War well if you look at this way there are winners and there are losers the winners are the Communist Party leadership and Western business leaders the losers are the people in Eastern Europe and the people in the West actually that's not uncommon after worse and it relates to Adam Smith's point about who the we are and when you talk about we the Cold War makes even more sense when you look at it in a broader historical perspective so east and west Europe did not be the differentiation between Eastern and Western Europe that goes back to the 15th century the last time they look alike was about the 15th century that point Western Europe was beginning to develop and Eastern Europe was beginning to turn into its service area its third world as we would call it now providing resources and raw materials and cheap labor and investment opportunities and markets and so on that was beginning on the 15th century actually pre Columbus a fault line incidentally that runs kind of through Germany and it continued that difference continued to deepen right after this century so I say Russia was becoming relatively impoverished relative to the West more and more up until the first world war and for large parts of Eastern Europe had continued up to the Second World War the so the east-west relationship was a first world third world relationship what's called a north-south relationship these days one of the few foam is emits used for the European conquest of the world the lie is that the South surface areas on the third world there pursue only what's called complementary development complementary to the interests of Western power they're not supposed to follow these bad ideas about development on the basis of the principle that the beneficiaries of the people's resources should be the people of that own of that country which supports the interests of the rich men in the rich societies and Churchillian realistic rhetoric and if they try development that's got to be stopped and it's sometimes in other ways but it's got to be stopped that's the north-south conflict goes on and it begins successful that is if there is a demonstration effect then they become what is called in the planning documents a rotten apple that might spoil the barrel or a virus that might infect others and obviously you can't allow a virus to spread so they've got to be eliminated for example my n days joy was described by Henry Kissinger as a virus that might infect people all the way to Italy not because Chile was gonna conquer Rome but because it might be it might send the wrong message to Italian voters namely that social democratic parliamentary procedures can succeed and that's got it stopped so the government was overthrown and the effect neo Nazi regime regime was instituted and supported think about the east-west conflict a good part of it fits into that framework there was a big East of the third world was following a path of Independence and furthermore it was becoming a virus it was imposing that challenge that was so threatening from 1917 at least into the 1960s for the reasons I mentioned well typical piece of the third world it's not like grenade it's a six of the world even when it was a deeply impoverished third-world country under the Tsar it's still a big military force which frightened people and that was even more so in the 20th century took on a life of its own and that's called the Cold War but basically a lot of it falls right into the traditional north-south framework I think when you think it through from this point of view which i think is the accurate one well I should also add that the aftermath of the Cold War is completely understand intelligible and indeed predictable in these terms most of the region is going back where it was so the parts that were part of the industrial West like the Czech Republic in western Poland are again becoming like the industrial West and the parts that were deeply impoverished world countries are going back pretty much to that status they look more and more like the third world with the small wealthy elites the old Communist Party to a large extent and the suffering and impoverished mass of the population typical view wherever you go Mexico South Egypt anywhere well this position is reinforced I think when you look at the continuity of policy right through the whole period so let's just take the period when the Cold War ended 1989 certainly ended by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 we have a huge Pentagon system so what has happened to the Pentagon budget since the end of the Cold War we needed this huge military system because we had to defend ourselves from the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy ok the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy isn't there so what happened to the Pentagon system answer it's the same it's actually higher in real terms than under Nixon right now about 85% of the Cold War average and we're not the current Congress is driving it up so I've been the reason the reason we were told for 50 years can't be the reason in fact there is a new official reason the reason is now defend ourselves from the technological sophistication of third world powers it's literally the case not from the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy anymore and that about as much plausibility is the other one so obviously it's a different reason and it's not very hard to figure out the well pics a Cuban you know on the front pages right now for thirty years from Cuba we had to carry out the world's biggest international terrorist campaign and economic warfare and so on and so forth because we're defending ourselves from the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy okay then walls no monolithic and ruthless conspiracy so what do we do we intensify the pressure against humans we met embargo type and now even more so so something's got to be wrong with that story 1989 well the first event that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall was the u.s. invasion of Panama few weeks later event that it barely merits a footnote in history I mean it's kind of thing that happens over and over but there was a difference this time but for since about for a long every such action was justified by defense against the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy we had to defend ourselves from the Communists and there were revolutions without borders and so on they were gone so this time we were defending ourselves from Hispanic narco traffickers led by the Archdemon Noriega who was in fact kidnapped and brought here and tried for crimes that he committed while he was on the CIA payroll kind of small the United Nations let's turn out of the United Nations they were in session that was their winter session and there were indeed some Security Council vetoes 3-1 Security Council veto was on Israel's actions in the occupied territories voted 14 to 1 the United States and he towed it the other two were condemnations of the u.s. attack on Panama the both vetoed by the United States the General Assembly also had some very lopsided votes you know it's kind of similar to eat those know technical veto there in fact one was a resolution condemning the continuation of the unlawful use of force against Nicaragua voted unanimously US and Israel alone against resolution condemning Washington's the illegal economic warfare against Nicaragua again two votes against United States and Israel that's actually one vote when you think about it's like resolution condemning the illegal US economic warfare against Cuba two votes against the United States in Israel the preceding year the US had gotten Romania that they dropped off traditional standard line about the grim-faced Soviet ambassadors in the Soviet vetoes that were paralyzing the United Nations now the only thing that's wrong with that is the facts which are perfect they're not debatable the you know perfectly clear and explicit facts assess the 1960's the United States is far in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions in second place the United Kingdom France is a distant third and the Soviet Union is fourth that's not controversial that's a fact same is true in the General Assembly there are plenty of votes in the General Assembly with numbers like one hundred and fifty three to one or one hundred and fifty to two or something like that why issues including aggression human rights international law observance of international law terrorism and so on through them you'll find consistently the one is the United States with maybe Israel or El Salvador or somebody dragging along consistent pattern since the nineteen sixties it's almost totally suppressed in our Free Press and no it's pressed but there's just endless lying about the claim dramatically different from the easily documentary facts on controversial fact which again is an interesting fact about our intellectual culture you can think about it and draw these conclusions well let's put that aside and turn to ethnic conflicts since the end of the Cold War namely within the imperial system that collects Soviet Union so inside the former Soviet Union and the Balkans were Imperial systems have collapsed their ethnic conflicts and it doesn't call for any deep thoughts from leading intellectuals in fact it is standard and expected with the decline of some system of Authority and tear it so post-colonial Africa quickly broke into ethnic conflicts work to take the most recent case prior to the collapse of the Soviet empire take the Portuguese Empire that's the last empire that collapsed in 1975 and immediately it led to violent ethnic conflicts in Africa and Southeast Asia where the Portuguese colonies were the moat three most important were Mozambique Angola and teamwork these are the most cases of ethnic conflict in the modern era and they don't have anything to do with the Cold War they go back to 1975 the deccan Angola there's a lot of time so perhaps I can just cook the historical Davidson who says that in his words those responsible for the Contra subversions against Mozambique and Angola will be cursed by history for enormous and terrible crimes which will Longway heavily on the whole of southern Africa he's referring to you and me incidentally if it's not obvious and he's quite right in fact too kind the United Nations Commission on Africa estimates 1.4 over 1.5 million dead and over 60 billion in damages in the Reagan years alone 1980 to 1988 by way of South Africa with strong us support that's and within framework of what's called here constructive engagement and an angle that continues at a horrible level worse than the Balkans in fact well that's - of ethnic conflicts the third teamer is not a slight matter it's the worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust a clear unambiguous ethnic conflict and indeed the worst case in post-war history outright aggression still continuing we're getting to the 20th anniversary in a few weeks and it's proved that the United Nations failed to stop it big failure so therefore let's dismantle the United Nations until we look a little more closely and we find that it's true that the United Nations failed to stop it because the u.s. blocked the United Nations in the words of the State Department things to turn out as they did and it was my task he writes to render the United Nations utterly ineffective in anything it might do to prevent the aggression and I was very successful in this task he takes great pride in it then points out within a few weeks about a tenth of the population had been slaughtered approximately the level of total casualties in Eastern Europe under the Nazi attack he says I'm not padding that and then he goes on to the next sentence so it's true that the United Nations not next topic so the United Nations was indeed rendered utterly ineffective but it's not the problem with the United Nations the u.s. role was decisive not only diplomatic ly but also militarily the invading Indonesian army was 90 percent equipped with American arms under a treaty that required that they can be used only for self-defense Henry Kissinger who was then Secretary of State secretly sent more immediately right after the invasion the couple years later indonesian army had actually run out it was beginning to run out of arms because of the ferocity of the assault so the President Jimmy Carter took off a little time from sermons about human right and isolated the flow of arms at the point when the slaughter was really approaching genocide in 1978 well that there's consequences to this Anna's senator is held all over the place for his dedication of the international law and morality x' lone voice of honor the united nations standing up against all kind of third-world tyrants now for claiming about the united nations unless it's able to stop genocide in Bosnia it has no right to exist and so on and so forth Jimmy Carter need not mention Henry Kissinger is also giving speeches about the importance of peacekeeping at the United Nations and so on this year well interestingly the team was pretty remote place but the coverage of it was quite hot pretty 1975 in the context of concern about the collapsing Portuguese Empire when the invasion took place with decisive US diplomatic and military support coverage began to decline that what there was was mostly with all in fact reiteration of State Department lies or quoting Indonesian generals by 1978 when the atrocities peaked and new US arms were flowing coverage reached zero in the United States not a word anywhere also interesting historic by the 1980s coverage began sometimes accurate coverage but it's interesting in character the tone of the coverage he is given for example by a New York Times editorial headed Schoen of Indonesia well ok shaming of Indonesia but how about shaming of the United States or shaming of the New York Times that's a perception and you're not allowed to have or you read that we didn't do enough we made a mistake we didn't do enough to stop the carnage and the terror and so on well the fact is we did more than enough as ambassador has himself written and as the record of military aid shows it wasn't we didn't do enough that's not saying that the rest if the Russians had said we didn't do enough to stop the atrocities in Hungary or something yeah that's not quite the way to put it the last couple of years to to put some constraints on US participation in this still continuing atrocity the Clinton administration defines have to search for sort of devious ways to avoid the congressional restrictions which it indeed has done but nevertheless that's important it's symbolically significant and might even was enough pressure lead to Indonesian withdrawal that's conceivable there are also inside Indonesia that we don't hear about human rights groups student groups labor leaders and so on has begun to speak way out condemning the Indonesian invasion of East Timor and in fact speaking up for human rights and working with working people and so on now in Indonesia's and and talk about these things it's not so simple it's not like here here you do it nothing happens to you there you're in a terrorist tyrannical and vicious state but there and that's another thing that might be called the shaming of the United States I think that we don't report it and support them whether we don't do it ourselves it's certainly a lot easier well the end of Portuguese Empire 20 years ago that are far the consequence is the end of the Soviet empire the end of the French Empire long slow process that still works consequences the Algerian war the words in Indochina our own wars in Indochina left about 4 million people dead in 3 countries in total ruin and this the aggressors benefit from impunity within the doctrinal system and these aren't even called ethnic conflicts because we're one of the participants but if we use the term in any meat since these are ethnic conflicts on a huge scale with dwarfed anything that's happened after the fall of the Soviet empire there was all of these things but it was very far at the margins when you take a serious look and indeed that's recognized in internal documents say the Middle East there's a ethnic conflict mainly for quite some time 20 years so nothing to do at the end of the Cold War makes it to the front pages here so for example after the bombing of Oklahoma City bombing you remember big headlines all over about how Oklahoma City looks like Beirut big tragedy you know the horrors of Beirut are coming right the mainstream America furthermore if we have find the guy if it turns out that the people who did that horrible atrocity we're from the Middle East we're gonna bomb everybody in sight and so on and so forth Oklahoma City was indeed looking like Beirut of course has been looking like Beirut for quite some time exactly ten years earlier most of the day since we like anniversaries that was when the largest part bomb in history went off in Beirut this was a the worst terrorist act in the Middle East at the peak of concern about international terrorism it was a bomb big huge car bomb very much like Oklahoma City who was set off outside of Moz time to go off to kill the maximum number of people when they were leaving killed mostly women and children you know all over the place children in their beds and all sorts of things like I'm very much like Oklahoma City huge catastrophes no in that case it's not too difficult to chase the perpetrators to the ends of the earth or at the bomb any country that's harboring them and so on at least if the US Air Force has the capacity to bomb Washington and California and Texas and so on with maybe a few extra bombs left in London and the reason is because as is perfectly openly acknowledged the bombing was carried out the CIA with the assistance of British intelligence so it's true Oklahoma City was looking like Beirut for good reasons because they looked like Beirut there's no problem finding the perpetrators and punishing them just Sunday and the United Nations Clinton called on all the nations of the world to join with us in ending the horror of international terrorism and making sure that any nation that tolerates international terrorists has becomes a pariah and is punished and so on again that's easily within our power but somehow this ever gets discussed it's not the fact that the Oklahoma City bombing was a virtual duplicate of the Beirut bombing ten years earlier of course they're aware of it I mean I know personally I brought the attention of lots of journalists in the United States and England if they hadn't been aware of it themselves they probably were but this is undiscussables you cannot speak of u.s. aggression or ethnic conflict when there's a conflict between us and people in Indochina it ends up with formal you know them killed and so on is the very symbol of ethnic conflict and there's some reasons for the problems there there is also a grand success in the least right next door overcoming ethnic conflicts just with Nobel Peace Prizes recently Oslo to just the place it was a day of all as the headlines said in which we celebrated the u.s. triumphs and bringing to an end at least close to an end this terrible ethnic conflict between Jews and Arabs and the Middle East actually what happened there is a little different there's not much time to talk about it but in fact what happened was a most impressive power played by the United States involving which tells a lot about the New World Order and also about the failures of the United Nations fact of the matter is that for about 25 years the United States rendering the United Nations utterly ineffective in anything it might do to bring about a resolution of that conflict the diplomatic resolution that's certainly been true since February 1971 when Egypt accepted US policy official US policy on the Middle East and call for a full peace treaty with Israel on the international borders with all the security guarantees and all the wordings of the resolutions in fact identical to official US policy that was with the support of virtually the entire world Israel rejected it recognized it to be a genuine peace order but we offer but rejected it and Henry Kissinger succeeded in the split inside the US government as to whether to continue with their traditional policy or to shift to opposing our traditional policy and opposing negotiations and diplomatic settlement then Kissinger won men battle achieving what he called Stanley meaning no diplomacy and ever since then the United States has been opposed Mac settlement well that was by the United Nations UN mediator so that's one time when the UN was rendered utterly ineffective by a u.s. veto a few years later January 1976 when the Security Council debated a resolution calling for political settlement in sported by the entire world in fact the Arab states PLO supported it Western Europe supported non-aligned countries Eastern Europe it was vetoed by the United States history like the February 71 events that was Kissinger again same thing happened under Carter same resolution eliminated the UN the Security Council was eliminated the issue therefore came up regularly in the General Assembly in fact every year the votes were always like 150 to 200 or something like that was December last serious vote was December 1990 stage is important that was the last of the annual votes that was 144 to usual numbers what happened December 1990 well and the the Gulf were effectively understand that well actually George Bush put it rather clearly that the new world order is in effect in his words it means what we say goes certainly in the Middle East and the rest of the world is back off Europe pulled out of the game the non-aligned countries we're out of it this array Arab world completely collapsed at this point the US but ran through its own completely rejectionist proposal which involves limited instead of complete withdrawal and no rights at all for the Palestinians that's the position the US had upheld against the rest of the world for 25 years and now is able to ran through a genuine peace process could be instituted as it was immediately at Madrid it's genuine because was under a unilateral us control and it followed the rejectionist u.s. position and that's exactly what has been implemented in fact what has been implemented even Oslo two is partially than any proposal that the Israeli government itself had ever made from 1968 right up to the present so naturally it's a day of law and another case in which the UN failed for reasons that are worth thinking about well we're not UN after 50 years now there's a good deal of self-righteous commentary and it's about its failings I've given some indication of why and where it failed I think you can check and see if you think this is right the lion's share of those risk of that responsibility falls not very surprisingly on the world's most powerful states and in particular its most powerful State exactly as any rational person would have expected the most powerful state has indeed been rendering the United Nations ineffective and ambassador Moynihan's words since the 1960s when the United Nations fell under what is called here the tyranny of the majority sometimes known as democracy the whole story is amazing well right now the years and increasingly now in fact more announcements in this morning's paper the United States is proceeding to dismantle the United Nations on May 1st Congress announced radical cuts in US assistance to UNICEF and similar organizations I was very well time on May 1st UNICEF had its annual press conference the UNICEF of course is run by an American the u.s. insisted on that does another standard power play Carol Bellamy and she gave the press conference which wasn't reported but interesting UNICEF estimated that the number of children who were dying from easily treatable diseases meaning and can cure it for a few pennies a day had risen from 11 that in a year to 13 million a year and that's what UNICEF was trying to deal with so on that day aside from not reporting the UNICEF report Congress cut Congress cut aid the UNICEF and in fact UNICEF will disappear it has the wrong priorities the federal the FAO the Food and Agricultural organization that's slated for disappearance again as the wrong priorities poor and hungry people around the world the international labor organization that's going to go the same way and there's a reason for that the deals with worker rights and the US as the worst record in the Western Hemisphere and Europe with the exception of El Salvador and Lithuania so we're third actually in ratifying conventions on worker rights including things like children's labor and things like that and further additional crime two years ago it Christmas the United States it very rarely criticizes a rich industrial country but it broke the pattern and criticized the United States for violating international labor standards by the employment of permanent replacement workers which is in gross violation of universally accepted international labor standards so that they're obviously not to be allowed disappear the UN the same story USS sharp cut funding for it and is going to get rid of it it has the wrong priorities the vast majority of the world's population there used to be a monitoring office just provided data on transnational corporations in fact it was the only source of information on transnational corporations that was killed the couple years ago it's the wrong information I mean it was pretty hard to get the information anyway but at least you could know you just can't that's almost dead and we'll blatant fraud about new information order and so on which is well documented in scholarly work published by university presses but unreviewable the UN conference on Trade and Development that's slated to disappear was announced this morning in fact because its functions will be taken over by the World Trade Organization so it's irrelevant well for those of you who know about these issues that's total nonsense the problem with that is that it keeps refuting the neoliberal fundamentalism of the World Trade Organization and showing that it's false and fabricated and so on they've got their the gut economists are giving the wrong analysis they're continually undermining the claims about the wonders of the free market that are preached to by the World Trade Organization but preached in a very special way there preached to the poor abroad and at home they have to accept market discipline but they are not preached to people I say Newt Gingrich and his constituency Cobb County Georgia which gets more federal subsidies than any comparable county in the country because it's represented by the biggest welfare in the country the market discipline they always have massive state protection in all sorts of ways in our case the biggest form of sets of the transfer payments to the rich is the penny and that's why the budget doesn't go down in fact goes up when reactionary status of the current type take over so no one for them disciplined for the poor next mistake of documenting explaining and analyzing the consequences of all of this so they go to be taken over by the World Trade Organization that doesn't have defects the United Nations are slated for dismissal amazing thing will go that's not passed unnoticed they should say the South Commission which represents the overwhelming majority of the population of the world the non-aligned countries couple years ago called challenge to the South published by Oxford University Press unreviewed to my knowledge which called for a new world order based on justice and freedom and they explained what's going on in the world well and they pointed out that the Democratic parts of the UN are being dismantled the parts that have commitment to the general population instead of those who matter none as areas discussed or recorded apart from the margins just as the actual record on vetoes some General Assembly votes and much else again these are things that might interest us might even concern us least those people who have some concern for the nature of their own society and our own culture well the principle that explains the attitudes towards the United Nations that are articulated by the intellectual culture I'm afraid the principle is all too simple in so far the United Nations is following the orders of Churchill's rich men and the rich societies exactly to that extent it is honored to the extent it deviates from that it is condemned it's rare in a complicated world for a simple criterion to be such a good predictor but if you look carefully you'll find that this is an extremely good predictor of the whole oscillation of them back including the hopefulness in 1990 well if Churchillian realism continues to prevail in a global system and there's no way increasingly at home as well because there's an obvious domestic analog to all this if that's the case then the future is going to be bleak but we should remember that these are by no means laws of nature nor are they laws of society even if such laws exist but these are human decisions that can be made differently within human decisions the unit institutions that have no particular claims of permanence or legitimacy as throughout history all of this can be changed as it has been in the past and in the same ways in the age-old freedom can be advanced if we so choose you've been listening to MIT professor of linguistics and philosophy know'm Chomsky delivering the 1995 ava helen and linus pauling memorial lecture for world peace the title of professor Chomsky's lecture was prospects for world order the lecture was delivered on the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis Oregon on October 24th 1995 in a moment we'll return to the question and answer segment of the program no Amjad Sookie is world renowned for his revolutionary work in linguistics and philosophy he was an early opponent of the United States invasion and war in Vietnam and has since become equally well known for his criticism of u.s. foreign policy throughout the world at the time of this lecture October 24th 1995 his most recent book was World Order's old and new in recent years his publications include hegemony or survival America's quest for global dominance failed States the abuse of power and the assault on democracy and perilous power the Middle East and u.s. foreign policy dialogues on terror democracy war and justice with Jill Baer H Carr to find out more about Noam Chomsky and his work please visit his website at WWE Champion foe and now we return to the question and answer segment of the program but if people want to say something and talk it you speak up I hear you and I'll repeat if people can't meet Opower simply look at the simply take the realest position that Churchill articulated the rich men and the rich societies run the show and simply ask yourself who's the richest who are the richest men and which is the richest Society the United States is overwhelming the richest and most powerful Society in the world by any measure economic power military power security you name so of course if that's the biggest voice I mean you know what could be more obvious propaganda system which naturally tries to efface the obvious but if you think about it reasonably what else would you expect to happen doesn't happen but it'll only changes people inside the United States which is also maybe the freest country in the world do something about it we're not living in Indonesia you know I mean we're not living in Iraq it's easy to get here to change policy but of course first you have to be aware and you have to want to change it you have to do something about it otherwise it'll just go by the natural processes western press 1983 around 1983 early the unesco called for what was called a new information order and it came under better attack in the West American press government intellectuals and so on still being attacked for trying to impose constraints on press freedom and in fact that's not what it was claiming did that's not what you what the new information order was calling for what it was calling for was an end to the monopoly over global information on the part of powerful Western actually tyrannical institutions which is what the private the media corporations are they're calling for the fraud was exposed at once there are very good academic studies that the best one I know is a book published by the University of Minnesota press by edited by winning pressed and Edwin Herman and Herbert Schiller careful academic study showing what the actual information were was how reacted how that how the exposing the lies about it very effective never reviewed never discussed the books called hope and folly and the attack on the UNESCO continues unchanged just like the revolution Without Borders is the people like say Erskine childr is a distinguished Irish diplomat has been in the UN forever has written about this and others write about it but without eight without any ability to penetrate into our intellectual culture which isn't remarkably I mean you know we don't live under tyranny but the similarity the totalitarianism is pretty dramatic sometimes but it doesn't compare with the usual consequences of the breakup of tyrannical systems like it's nowhere near as bad as what followed the breakup of the Portuguese Empire the French Empire and so on but it's bad enough and few years it's been going on since 1985 and even in the 90s the atrocities in Angola were worse by a long shot than the Balkans so compare for example Sarajevo and quita well everybody knows about Sarajevo huge coverage of Sarajevo you know horror Serbian crude Serbian peasants bombarding sorry AVO it is an atrocity and about 10,000 people have been killed during the same years about 25,000 people have been killed in cuido that's just one town and Angola of course they've been killed - you can check to see how many index entries there are for Crito in the new york times they're being killed by the wrong kind of person is the wrong person to mention namely by a person who was hailed as a leading freedom fighter in the 1980s and a great hero namely the man who was the Contra subversion that we were backing that basil Davidson who I quoted said would be cursed by history so we don't talk about that the it's bad enough you know it's nowhere near other things but bad enough the reasons for it you can debate and argue but I think it's pretty clear where it's going u.s. policy has been more or less the the Europe wants to quiet it has wanted to quiet it down because it's dangerous for Europe the United States also wants it to quiet down not blow up into a regional conflict that might involve Turkey and Greece and harm u.s. interests anywhere as long as it's contained it's not a big problem for the West and therefore you know the European powers have become involved in peacekeeping and relief operations the u.s. refuses to become involved at all except just to bomb somebody but not do anything else US policy has been to keep it contained and now that it looks like the kind of solution that Washington is wanted may be achievable the u.s. is moving in to try to achieve it that solution is a partition of the former Yugoslavia into a greater Serbia and a greater Croatia Croatia being our ally which is getting us military support and aid and training and it looks like that's what's happening I mean behind the facade of you know preserving Bosnia and so on it looks like what's emerging is a partition between Serbia and Croatia in which there may be something called Bosnia but mostly on paper and now that that looks feasible Washington is indeed trying to move in to implement it and there's some conflict now between the White House and Congress is to you know whether to even go that far I mean there are all sorts of reasons for this and one could look into it but yeah I think that's the rough contours of it this country depends what we do with it now this country has all sorts of advantages all sorts of prospects extraordinary wealth tremendous amount of freedom and all kind of privilege I mean it is what you make of it just ask yourself what's changed anything in the past and we got a couple thousand years of history to look at what individuals did never made any difference what organized groups of people did made a big difference I mean we you know that's why we don't have feudalism we don't have slavery in recent years the civil rights movement as an example the anti-war movement solidarity movements environmental movements feminist movements you name them right in our own immediate history they've made a big difference when the labor movement has been the centerpiece of most struggles for social justice for obvious reasons when people get together even people who are poor and without power and privilege and so on what they get together they can do quite a lot in fact there's no limits to what they can do but if they sit alone and ask what can I do nothing and it's not that there's any big secrets about this I mean we all know how to do it if you're interested in if you're concerned with something you ask first of all what it is you find other people who have similar concerns they usually exist right near you and maybe they're even organized you join them and you do the kinds of things that will advance those interests and concerns in coordination with others it can get to be huge mass movements I mean for example let's take say that we're the richest country in the world let's take the poorest country in the hemisphere where people and ask how they reacted Haiti you know there is no country that has fewer opportunities than Haiti I mean it is just totally it was a very rich country I should say and a lot of Europe's wealth comes from Haiti which was the richest colony in the world and the u.s. plenty of it too but now it's a desert practically well you know a couple of years ago people in the desert the poorest people in hemisphere the Haitian slums and Hills managed to construct out of their own efforts a vibrant lively civil society based on grassroots movements and unions and all sorts of things and it was so powerful nobody was paying any attention to it because nobody looks at what goes on with those weird people but it got powerful enough so it swept its own president office astonishing everybody and calling forth a huge terror of course which we incidentally back but that's what you do about it now you know if we were to do that no country would there would be no terror because nobody knew that does and you know the capacity if we want to understand something about democracy we should go to places like Haiti and ask people there what democracy is now the idea that we're going to Haiti to teach them democracy isn't even ludicrous I mean we should go there to learn lessons and what democracy is so that we would understand the kinds of things that you're asking about which people here have forgotten you know they don't understand what they know up in the what literate peasants know up in the hills and hate and hate so let's go there and ask them you know actually we can figure it out without asking them but those are the answers and people do it under conditions in comparably worse than any we can dream of so we can certainly do it balcony I'm sorry it's pretty hard for me to see the balcony but if somebody will make them so okay I see some hands but what somebody yeah mm-hmm well you certainly write about spending the money and in fact there's good data on this which just came out for the from the won one of the Center for Responsive Politics I think it's cool just came out with a data analyst study of the effect of camp the correlation between campaign spending and electoral victory in the 1994 elections they do this regularly and it turns out that about 90% of the people elected in 1994 were people who spent much more than their opponent that's higher than 1992 and this is a pattern that goes way back in history which translates into saying that those who are capable of buying the election win the election to an overwhelming degree 90% is not a small number of course they are the transnational corporations and the other business groups and those who amass an enormous amounts of capital and can only be combated in an electoral arena by a very highly organized public that's one of the reasons why business and the government that they more or less run are so intent on destroying labor unions because they are the core of the opposition to this the best major way in which people have been able to combat it so you're right about spending money but it doesn't help if one of us spends money you're not going to compete with the private tyrannies who its profits are going through the roof and control know that fortune 500 for example control about two-thirds of the entire gross domestic product of the United States right now plus a big piece of the International economy and those are private tyrannies remember that those are totalitarian institutions if any if anything deserves the name then not public they're completely hierarchic internally they do what they want you know main controller the more I'm in very limited controls actually technically there is a control they all have state charters and it could be taken away but until we remember what democracy is that question won't arise as it stands they have tyrannical control and extraordinary power and if and while you can try to compete with them in the electoral arena and it's worth doing if you remember that that requires massive organization of say the Haitian type on the transnational corporations I think you're right and I don't know exactly what your group is doing but you got to think through what this means I mean you know the problem isn't a chip manufacturing plant that may be good or bad you can worry about it but the problem is who's making the decision to put it there and who's gonna run it and who's gonna decide what it does and so on in a democratic system people here and elsewhere would be making those decisions in a system where power is vested in private tyrannical unaccountable systems it's done other ways institutions it's done other ways and those are the crucial issues I mean we could very maybe own our opinions as to whether it's a good or bad idea to have a chip plan but I don't think at least people who believe in democracy oughta differ on the question of who should make that decision somebody else up there yeah yeah she pointed out that I had said that what happened Haiti wouldn't happen to us but garment workers were killed in the United States and students were killed did you mean Kent State yeah at Kent State and in fact authorities can do things to us - yeah things can happen but have a look at the scale Kent State four people were killed actually it's kind of interesting that we only remember Kent State like about a week or so before that I think it was eight students were killed at Jackson State which is a black college but somehow that's disappeared so okay I don't mean to say that you forgot I mean we forget but yes a few students were killed and that's an atrocity but twelve you know the garment workers yes they were killed in fact throughout the early part of the century the United States had an unusually violent labor history in fact it appalled most even the right wing in Europe into the late 1930s workers were getting killed I think if I recall about 700 through the early part of this century from about 1900 up till the late 30s well you know 700 is an unpleasant number but and full and 12 is an unpleasant number but you know in Haiti in two years little tiny country in two years it was like 4,000 and in Central America and in the 1980s it was maybe 200,000 and in you know in Indonesia in 1965 when it became our huge friend it was maybe half a million or a million something in that order mostly landless peasants within four months which led to total euphoria in the United States I should say so you know yeah you're right about the violence but look at the ski and the scale tells you something I mean whatever kinds of repression people face here is invisible by comparative standards at least for those of us who are relatively privileged and the right color skin and that sort of thing for people with a relative degree of privilege and color or right color and so on there's by comparative standards you know the repression is extremely limited it's true it's there but you know very limited and the chances that the terror of the say Haitian type could be used against a popular movement in the United States are pretty remote there's certainly nothing in history to suggest that it could happen but I think you can understand the appeal it's easy to understand the appeal the fact is that to an astonishing extent the civil society has dissolved in the United States it's a pretty astonishing so for for example over 80% of the population the latest figures or 82 percent of population don't think that there's a democratic system at all and that is they on the regular Gallup polls there's a question who does the government work for and their various choices and one of them is the few and the special interests not the people meaning it's not a democratic system that's been running about 50% for a while it just shot up to over 80% on the economic system over 80% think it's inherently unfair in recent polls cynicism about institutions is going through the roof you know it's also accompanied by huge confusion so for example a considerable majority of the population thinks that the government has a responsibility to help poor people but a considerable majority the population as opposed to welfare that is the government helping poor people well that's a success of the doctrinal system which has gotten into people's heads the idea that welfare means giving money to black women maybe black teenagers or black women driving Cadillacs and you know breeding like rabbits because we're gonna pay for them okay if that's what welfare is then no sane person wants to pay their hard-earned money for that but if money's going to go to poor people which indeed welfare does then they're perfectly happy to pay for that and certainly people vastly overestimate the part of the federal budget that goes the welfare it's very slight it's always been slight it's declined about almost close to half since 1970 but so you get plenty confusion like over 80% of the population thinks that working people don't have enough say in things but a majority think that unions have too much of a say in things that's the only way in which things but unions have been demonized okay so what you have is a very cynical population very confused scared frightened angry full of hate you know easy to very dangerous situation you know kind of situation which demagogues can easily construct the scapegoats that people want to kill you know immigrants welfare mothers who knows what and in that civil societies collapsed in another respect there is virtually there's very little in the way of organization in the United States so political parties don't exist both of the parties should simply be disbanded with anything they're not participant parties anyway you can't get together and decide on the party platform it's handed down from above unions are which were that traditionally in most countries here to leading force for social justice and democracy they have declined they still exist but they severely declined and the same is true of other kinds of organizations people literally don't even join bowling leagues anymore on the there's a very significant proliferation of grassroots organizations on every imaginable issue but very localized often people don't know what's going on in the other you know a couple blocks away so there's plenty of people involved I don't know how many but huge numbers of people and are involved in something or other but in a highly local way think made usually very specific issues very specific issue oriented and unrelated to other things that ought to be connected with them you know a little bit somewhere else no in those conditions very strange things can happen one of the things that can happen is the Ross Perot phenomena people just looking for something anything maybe that you know I mean if you know somebody came and said I'm from Mars and I'm gonna lead you under which millenarian movements with messiahs have in fact developed in many societies yeah we don't look back very far to see similar situations you know we're different than other countries but there are there are analogs if not parallels so in a way I think it's analogous to Iran around the late seventies when you know there were big popular movements developed to try to get rid of this tyranny well they ended up you know under control of extreme religious fundamentalism actually something like this happened in Germany in the late 30s it's not people were frightened you know society was dissolving everything was going wrong they didn't know who to blame and somebody come along came along and said you know blame it on the Jews okay blame it on the Jews it worked well it'll work if we let it work there's certainly a lot of people would like it to work what's all the hysteria about immigrants about or about welfare mothers or you know what's that for well you know that's part of these efforts it's like it's like it's blaming it on the Jews you believe well who have the people higher up stopped from speaking you who have the people from higher up stopped from speaking well first of all we don't other people from higher up did it but let's say they did let's say they did you know I mean there are plenty of people who are speaking there plenty of snake activists plenty of other civil rights activists they keep speaking I mean to the extent that there has there has been repression here like black panther leaders were killed and it's not zero but the idea that we face the kind of repression that keeps us from speaking up I don't think is to be taken seriously when you think about what is faced by other people who do speak up yes that's true yeah yeah so your point is that there's the government is trying to keep us disempowered so that the game goes on and to parties and it's not really democratic I think there's something right about what you're saying but if you don't mind my saying so I think you're being caught up in the propaganda system it's not the government is doing this the government is a reflection of private power and part of the property there's been a huge propaganda campaign in the last 50 years on the part of a very class conscious business community who are kind enough to tell us what they're doing namely fighting the everlasting battle for the minds of men and indoctrinating people with a capitalist story and so on and so forth that's what the huge public relations industry is about and they are had very definitely have the goals that you're mentioning and indeed one of their goals is to make you hate the government but know there's plenty wrong with the government and they'd love you to blame everything on the government but the reason that they want you to hate the government the reason that they've been building up this sense of anti politics you know let's get rid of schools and public assistance for health and everything else is because they would like you to blame it on the government and not look and see where power is namely in the fortune 500 the government government has a flaw that General Electric doesn't have government is potentially democratic youth there's a way of inflating and when you when you say the government is doing this that and the other thing to us well yeah I mean sure the government is reflecting the interests of the people in it but that's because but they could be representing us there is no way for private tyrannies to be representing us so yes they would like you to hate the government a lot wrong with the government lot to be hated about it a lot to be changed about it but the main thing about is is you can participate in it and there are ways of changing what it does and therefore it's got for at least people who believe in democracy advantages that other systems of power don't have it's potentially our system of power and private corporations aren't so yeah I think you go along with what you're saying and if the system is not them to the extent that the system is not democratic you know it's not zero or a hundred percent somewhere in there and it changes to that extent it's because we've succumbed to propaganda offensive and institutional arrangements which have you know atoms of consumption and not dealing with each other and hating each other and so on now that's within our control you know especially for relatively wealthy and privileged people it's very much within your control and it's true that there's some repressive apparatus down there but you know when you look at what happens around the world I mean for us to be talking about repression is a joke I mean if people if student groups in Indonesia resolutions saying Indonesia ought to get out of East Timor if working people in Indonesia can stand up and say we want to have unions if writers in Indonesia can get up and say we want a Free Press under the conditions of Indonesia and they do for us worried about repression is not even a joke and you don't have to go as far as Indonesia can go right south of the border I mean just cross the border into error that our traditional domains and you will see what it means for people to speak up if Jesuits in Central America and I'll saw the door speak up they get their brains brains blown out by the US train security forces that's not happening does Oh so the question if I understood it correctly is what happens to movements that are so key to particularly ders that if they are taking out the movement does well you know that to the extent that that exists we just don't understand what democracy is I mean a democratic system is one in which the population is doing things now you know if a group gets organized there's always somebody to come around and say I'm happy to be your leader follow my orders and to the extent that you allow that to happen well you've given up you know not just because their orders will be for them not for you which is usually the case but that's the wrong structure so it's perfectly true that if a popular organization is so hierarchically structured and hasn't controlled in such an authoritarian fashion that taking out a leader can kill it well there was something wrong with that popular organization from the very beginning and that's you know that's that's Leninist organization on the left and of course it's tyrannical what else can you expect it to be it'll lead to the Soviet Union we in the day that Adam Smith was talking about well it's not really the individuals you know it is the institutional structures that exist just as in his day like when he said when he was talking about the men and the merchants and the manufacturers who have taken state power to advance their interests he wasn't necessarily talking about this particular person over here maybe that particular person over there as a merchant that meets very benevolent and wants to give away everything and so on maybe but he was talking about a structure of merchants and manufacturers and we have a structure of institutions too we we have our economic system our social and economic system is based on arrangements of private power they are fairly recent dense corporations basically they're pretty recently they don't go back that far they got their powers mostly in the early part of the century you know it's not like ancient history they achieved through courts mainly not through legislation the rights of private persons in fact immortal persons with all the rights of persons except your immortal and your huge and even things like freedom of speech don't make any sense for an institution that's for people and they have now grown and expanded enormously to the extent that the top 500 of them which have just celebrated their fourth straight year of double-digit profit growth now control two-thirds of the domestic economy and as I say a large part of the International economy and they're pretty much out of control unaccountable there's there that that you don't know what they're doing and they don't have to ask you what they're doing you can follow their orders if you want but that's about it those are hugely powerful institutions basically totalitarian in character and yes they have an that's effect on what the government does that's why 90% of those who spent more than their opponent won the last election the that's the main reason and it's also why the policies of both political parties are way to the right of the attitudes of the general population so the general population on issue after issue is over here and both political parties are over there and if you look where they are it's where the bosses are takes a balancing the budget that's considered the major issue we gotta balance the budget you know business is totally in favor of it both political parties are in favor of it when Clinton gets up and makes a speech you said of course of course we have to balance the budget that's not in question well population thinks it's the most important issue 5% that's the same percent that thinks that homelessness is the most important issue that's where the public ranks when people are asked should we even do it about a quarter say yes when they're asked the sensible way should we balance the budget if the cost is education or health or environment and so on in fact we truly balance the budget under any realistic conditions well it's pending on how the question is asked it's usually about a quarter of the population think so at all and 5% think it's an important issue so but nevertheless the party somewhere else well there happen to be where the business community is same on every other thing depending on but some parts of the budget cut namely primarily about 61 by about 6 to 1 the population is opposed to raising the Pentagon budget that's the one part that's going up okay and in fact it's dramatic no it's rather dramatic to see how overwhelmingly opposed the public is to almost everything that's being rammed through well okay that you know that gives you the beginnings of an indication of where of where the roots of political power are if you look more closely you'll find that this goes way back in fact if you look very closely you'll find that the country was founded on that principle go back to the Constitutional Convention and have a look at what James Madison was explaining to the to the convention which in fact got implemented in the Constitution his he insisted we made was that democracy is very dangerous if they had it in England you know their model for a possible society at the time if there was democracy in England people would get together and vote and take away the rights of landed proprietors and there we can't permit that so we better not have democracy and he said the government has to be constituted so that it fulfills the prime responsibility of government which is in his words to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority has to be set up that way and in fact it was set up in that debate you know this goes on right up to the present that's the core of the Eisenhower Dulles Congress and the discussions that I was referring to and the whole democratic theory so-called which is about this and so on and so forth but that doesn't have to be the case and in fact you know over time there been many struggles many victories for democracy and freedom and rights in this country I mean in the 1920s it looked very similar to now total business dominance you know no workers rights the Red Scare or the Wilson administration had virtually destroyed the unions that eliminated independent thought it was considered the end of history in fact great joy about the end of history you know tyranny of the Masters and so on okay a couple years later it all fell apart and you know there was a popular reaction which led to substantial range of rights for working people and poor people an organization and so on and yet it succeeded to devote some of its resources not a trivial part in fact to the wealth to the needs of the general population instead of the minority of the upland and it just goes on and on like that you know there's a constant struggle sometimes you win sometimes you lose there will continue to be an unequal struggle as long as there is concentration as long as there are tyrannical systems that control internal to them the mass decision-making over how the country works in other words as long as there's a private corporate system of manufacturing and financial and service and other industries but those are illegitimate structures there's no reason why they should exist and I credit society I don't think they'd exist he pointed out tell me if I get it straight that a lot of people think the war on drugs is the disaster and social disaster and all sorts of problems but the common wisdom is that for a politician to get up and say we ought to do something sensible about this is suicidal and the president in his speech at the UN the other day made this the centerpiece in the war on drugs that's quite correct but the reason why it's I mean there isn't it's very it's had very clear effects on the non society it has had no effect on the use of drugs but at plenty of social things you know the prison rate in the United States has zoomed since 1980 we were at the level of the worst countries in the industrial world around 1980 we're now way on the prison population has gone up by three or four per capita since 1980 without any change in the crime rate and it's going up even further and it's mostly possession of drugs and highly targeted possession of drugs and laws are crafted so that the urban ghettos get way more penalties than say the white suburbs but yes it's had those effects it has had almost no effect on the use of drugs and I don't think it was intended to the same is true in the third world it's been a big intensifying counter insurgency operations against peasants and you know massacres by paramilitary forces run by landowners and the military hasn't changed drug production so whatever it is it's not having an effect on drugs and I think it's intended to in fact if you look at the president's message the other day here's what a Free Press ought to say about it in my opinion be you in on Sunday President Clinton announced that we were now in a national emergency and unusual threat for the national security and all that kind of stuff and he called he said you know the US government - and he now called upon others to join us with this people and other countries to identify nation's persons and companies businesses that were involved in money laundering or that were significantly involved in the drug traffic in Colombia the wording was approximately like that well if we all want to do our patriotic duty we can easily help him out on that easily in fact just using straight just playing government sources so for example who's involved in money laundering well there was a year ago studied by the OECD you know the organization of the rich countries did a analysis of the flow of money from narco trafficking it's illegal so you can't be certain of the numbers but their estimates are that more than half of it goes through US banks okay so we know institutions to go after if we're interested in money goes to Colombia according to them well that was a secret it was reported in the country's leading newspaper but unfortunately not this country's leading newspaper is reported in Mexico's leading this paper excelsior I don't think was ever recorded you although it's a oacd study so if we want to go after institutions involved in money laundering we know just where to start and put them out of business because that's what the president said we have to do in Colombia well there's some evidence about that too during the Reagan years the CIA and I think the Congressional Research Service one of the main research services government research services did some studies of flow of chemicals from the United States descent Latin America from big American corporations to Latin America well it turned out they discovered that there's a the capital exports to Latin America are way in excess of industrial needs and if you look at the chemicals that are being sent it's the ones that are being used to make cocaine so we know just which companies to go at if we're interested in the significant involvement in the drug flow in Colombia well what about nations that was the other what nations are involved in the drug racket in Colombia what was one obvious one giving half of its military aid for Latin America to Colombian to the military which is all in bed with a narco traffickers I mean you know if you want to it's not a big secret either you read in every Amnesty International report and Human Rights Watch report and church group study and every international monitor in the European Parliament everyone else what is obvious to anyone that the there's a linkage close linkage between the military the narco traffickers the landowners the paramilitary forces and funding isn't even officially involved in drugs that's the police we're not you know we're funding them to some extent but it's almost sort of an obvious start on nations that are involved in you know production in Colombia and we can go on like this again if there was a fruit press that's what it would be saying and if it doesn't say it you ought to be saying it or at least look into it and find out about it and then there's an answer to those questions and also an answer to your question if this is correct and I think it is it means that there's that this has nothing to do with the war on drugs and in fact why is there a name you can ask the question well why is there a war on drugs altogether I mean you know drugs aren't good for you but in terms of the actual harm that they carry out most of the harm that they carry out is due to the fact that they're illegal the actual if you look at say deaths from drugs and comparing with say deaths from tobacco it's like I wanna although it's surely not good for you I don't think there is a single recorded overdose you but doesn't harm other people the use of tobacco farms other people and it's vastly greater in scale well I don't Philip Morris is the biggest corporate to advertiser for the Gingrich Congress and the deregulation is just freeing them up from in the tort reform from any protection by victims okay and if you look at what they're doing in the third world the u.s. is using muscle real muscle to force open foreign markets to advertising aimed at women and children in Thailand and you know China and so on and if countries won't agreed to let us advertise our lethal narcotics there we're gonna impose trade sanctions on them which is serious in the case of a big country like the United States that's how it directly involved in serious narco trafficking not at a small scale in China there was one recent study by an Oxford University epidemiologist who estimated that about 50 million people will die from the use of tobacco in China who are I think he said now the one now under 20 or something like that big numbers okay so trafficking and illegal narcotics in not illegal unfortunately but in maybe they shouldn't even be illegal but not suggesting that they should but trafficking and lethal narcotics yes but getting back your point about why is it suicidal for any politician to say any of these things the reason is we've let the propaganda win so yes it's it possible for people to say obvious things yeah all years is that so you're sure they believe it I mean if the only thing here is one thing well you know why shouldn't you believe it nobody's saying anything else but we have plenty of opportunities to get a different message out again there's a lot of opportunities for people like us in a society like this and you don't make use of them then yes it will be still be impossible for people to think rationally about the topic drugs is something comparable to social cleansing in Colombia in Colombia the paramilitary forces go out and get rid of people that they don't like you know peasants union leaders Street kids whoever they don't like you get rid of them you can slaughter them that's called social cleansing well here we're more civilized society we put them in jail okay instead of social cleansing and the technique for putting them in jail to an overwhelming extent is actions which are called crimes like having a joint in your pocket so there's a reason for it and there's an effective and people should be able to understand that but not if they don't hear it so how do you change universities so they're more open to critical thought and independent ideas and so on and so forth it's about the easiest I mean there are a lot of hard tasks in the world but this is about the easiest one there is I mean they're very few you know universities are not utopia you know but of all the institutions you can think of it's hard to imagine one that's as free you know at least an enormous range of things that people can do inside a university to change just changed radically in the late 60s through the action of a relatively small number of students who managed to organize most of the student body to free to place up and make them think about all kind of things they never talked about like the dependence of the university on military spending and you know the social effect of Technology and all sorts of questions that nobody ever thought about this is the main it was the main university in the world in the country meaning in the world small number of students before I came here you know teachers at Evergreen State University was undergraduate then good things like South End press grew out of it the magazine grew out of it a lot of the local organizing around grows out of it and so on well it's a couple of kids from MIT who actually the majority of the student body directly involved in these things okay you know what I wouldn't say it's not a revolution but it's a big change now there can be more changes like that and there if you can you know there is no place easier to carry changes like that out than inside a college and university they're gonna be universities got to free and independent you would run into problems not so much inside the university as in the relation between the university and the outside society so universities are parasitic they depend on outside systems like state legislatures and private corporations and so on and in fact in the late sixties when universities like MIT we're starting to get to free and independent places like IBM we're starting to set up their own counterpart colleges saying okay you don't teach obedience the way we want we'll do it ourselves you know and the state legislature isn't even more of this you know force in a state university but that's the point at which train free up the universities becomes engaged with the problem of democratizing the whole society and you've been listening to MIT professor of linguistics and philosophy know'm Chomsky delivering the 1995 ava helen and linus pauling memorial lecture for world peace the title of professor Chomsky's lecture was prospects for world order the lecture was delivered on the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis Oregon on November 24th 1995 to find out more about Noam Chomsky and his work please visit his website at wwlp.com this program was produced by PDX justice media productions to find out more about this program and the many other programs in our video and audio library please visit our website at WWDC so our ji you'll find programs featuring speakers such as Amira Hass Paul Krugman Phyllis Bennis Jeff Halper Diana Mbutu and many others thanks for tuning in and thanks for supporting listener sponsored radio public access cable television net neutrality and all forms of grassroots democratic community media

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Keywords: Chomsky, 24Oct1995, v1c

Id: 3jdj1RX1oWM

Length: 118min 56sec (7136 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 10 2012