Noam Chomsky - The Chomsky Sessions

so we can just start right in years ago you wrote an article or an essay called responsibility of intellectuals so we'll start there and move on to all sorts of other topics the first problem with that title was what's an intellectual so what is an intellectual it's not a term i use very much but it's a term that's used it refers to people who have sufficient sufficient privilege and opportunities so that they're able to speak about affairs of human interest and concern and do it with a degree of prestige and authority which may or may not be warranted and they're called intellectuals so a physicist working in a lab is not called an intellectual but if he happens to give a talk on you know nuclear proliferation yeah then he's an intellectual uh a literary critic who writes about uh english poets in the late 19th century is not an intellectual but if he happens to discuss the cultural changes that are developing in the modern in the modern world well okay then he is intellectual if a say a shoemaker happens to have a very insightful commentary on international affairs or domestic affairs or human relations is usually not called an intellectual but it's not much it's not a very meaningful term nonetheless what's then an intellectual's responsibility the focus of your essay we start with the fact that the people designated as intellectuals have privileges otherwise they wouldn't enter into that category they have a degree of authority prestige justified or not and these characteristics confer responsibility the more privileged privilege yields opportunity uh prestige deserved or not yields a degree of credibility uh the more opportunity and uh credibility you have the more responsibility you have pretty straightforward like almost everything but but what's the nature of the responsibility in other words if we say that an intellectual is failing to meet her responsibility what does that mean we couldn't start with some elementary moral principles that any decent human being ought to accept that in fact most people will say they accept so for example one elementary truism is that we should apply to ourselves the same standards we apply to others if not more rigid standards in fact should be more rigid standards so one responsibility of intellectuals is to look at the facts of past and current history we'll look at the actions of say our enemies and the way we've treated them and look at ourselves and the way we've treated ourselves and then ask whether we are meeting that elementary moral condition and that arises all the time you know so for example there happens to be an inquiry going on in england where they're investigating um tony blair or jack straw and others for other the background of their involvement in the invasion of iraq there's no such inquiry in the united states the united states people with power and privilege are immune from any inquiry of discussion that's part of the part of the prerogatives of imperial power but there is one in england well it's elementary that blair was involved in direct aggression lawyers will try to work their way out of that conclusion but that's their job but it's elementary uh look at the definition of aggression in say the nuremberg proceedings the general assembly and so on yes it's invasion of iraq's textbook case well there's a way to deal with aggression when it when when it's enemies who carry it out in fact that's what the nuremberg tribunal was about it's the gold standard for how to deal with crimes of aggression that was the major crime charged at nuremberg there were other crimes but so for example the german foreign minister fund river drop was hanged one of the major charges was that he was involved in a preemptive war the germans invaded norway and he was foreign ministers of course he's involved they invaded norway because they knew in fact it was not a secret that britain was planning to use a base in norway to attack germany so this falls under what's called preemptive war you carry out military aggression to stop uh an impending attack on yourself and uh he was hanged well okay let's take colin powell before we go into this because this will come up later i just want to hang with the uh the intellectuals for a second um to make it more concrete can you give some examples of just a few or as many as you want of people who you think do fulfill the responsibility of intellectuals let's say in the united states or maybe um and and what makes you say that about the particular person what makes me say it is that they do specific people oh well let's take howard zinn who died recently or equal ahmed who died a couple years earlier or edward syed who died shortly before equal well these are happen to be old personal friends but they were also uh edward and ekbal were very close friends uh ekbell and howard were close friends and interacted constantly so they're a kind of a cadre if you like of prominent intellectuals and scholars activists their lives and their work were intimately intertwined and they dedicated a large part of their lives and work to pursuing elementary moral truisms they could run through them but that's what they did so okay that's responsible intellectuals okay maybe a way to to see it is some intellectuals but not journalists because we're going to get to journalism in a minute who fail miserably who have the prestige who have the access who have all the characteristics that you describe as associated with being an intellectual but who don't meet their responsibility violate it routinely that's i mean i know there are a lot you want to start from a we'll go on for the rest of the day but it's virtually everyone just give a uniform a few specific examples where you give the person and the instance all right let's take a look okay let's take a couple of years ago the new york times published some released tapes nixon tapes a big battle about it henry kissinger didn't want them released i think there was a court trial finally they were released there was an article about it if you look through the tapes most of the disc it led to a lot of discussion uh mostly gossip you know nasty things nixon said about somebody or anti-semitic remarks or something but there was one sentence that appeared in the article which as far as i could see elicited no comment at all except for me and a couple other people uh it was a it was a point where they were talking about the bombing of cambodia and nixon kind of was ranting on about cambodia and he told kissinger his loyal servant that he wanted him to relay orders to the pentagon about bombing of cambodi and kissinger obediently did so his words were something like this to the military anything that flies against anything that moves now if you look through the archival record of all states it's going to be hard to find a call for genocide that's so clear and explicit and it wasn't just words because it happened a few years ago two leading cambodia scholars taylor owen and ben kiernan published an article in canada in which they discussed documents that had been released during the clinton years about the bombing of cambodia and it turns out that it was known that the bombing was extremely intense that was known right away it turns out it was five times as high as what had been reported the bombing of rural cambodia was greater than the total allied bombing in all theaters during world war ii and as they point out uh the bombing the effect of the bombing was to turn the khmer rouge from a kind of a marginal guerrilla group that no we knew anything about uh to a mass army of what they call enraged peasants who wanted to take revenge for this monstrous atrocity well we know what happened later okay so what how did intellectuals react to this it's easy to check the uh the karen and uh owen article as far as i'm aware appeared once in the united states namely on z net uh i've never seen any other mention of it as far as i know it appeared nowhere in england the uh and i doubt if it appeared anywhere else it uh has never received any comment that i've seen the kissinger remark had disappeared was of no injury there was no comment on it when it was published in fact it was kind of like a side remark in the article the gossip was much more interesting and if you check the records you'll find the same actually i've brought all of this up repeatedly in talks to respectable audiences you know uh the royal institute of philosophy in uh england which is deeply concerned with issues of moral philosophy comparable groups here uh specialists on cambodia and journals which are which uh uh posture heroically about the terrible crimes of the khmer rouge nobody can hear the words i mean it's if you're talking to a filter that cuts out certain words and phrases now the kissinger remarks happened to be approximately at the time when the international tribunal was trying milosevic and he died before the judgment but they were having a really hard time putting together much of a case we could go through the details of that they're interesting but they were having a pretty hard time it was mostly uh you know as compared to the trivial ease with which well you know suppose they had found a statement from milosevic saying anything that flies against anything that moves it would have been euphoria all over the world the western world uh he'd immediately be tried you know executed we'd talk about how noble we are and so on and so forth okay now this is virtually a hundred percent of intellectuals i'm talking about so we have a kind of a fact to explain there's a relatively small number almost infinitesimal uh of people who um fulfill the responsibility of intellectuals they use their their credibility they use their their their access they use their tools etc etc to try and uh discuss reality in a way that actually is consistent with human well-being and consistency and so on then we have virtually everybody who has those attributes who has those advantages who um is capable of understanding when it serves their interests so they'll they'll search far and wide for something about somebody who they wish to prosecute but is completely incapable as you describe it even incapable of hearing the words when it's contrary to this background of interest okay now it might not matter because the fact is the crucial thing but lots and lots of people hear that and the and the way that they dismiss it is to say it can't be because what would explain it why would all those people behave in such a way how could they possibly have the mental capacity to see the truth and not see the truth not you know it must be the small number of people who are confused not the large number of people um how do you answer that that is how do you how do you explain the phenomenon being so lopsided actually orwell had a word for it he called it doublethink a double think is the capacity to hold two contradictory ideas in mind and believe them both that's practically a defining characteristic of intellectual history secondly it is not i'm not talking about the united states as far as i know this is close to historically universal i find very few exceptions and furthermore it goes back to the earliest recorded history furthermore every person who asks this question knows the answer all they have to do is look at themselves how many people have failed to go through an experience like for example when you're you know six years old and your little brother takes a toy and you want the toy and your mother's not looking and you're bigger than he is so you grab the toy and then the kid starts yelling and your mother comes in and she starts centering you for taking the toy and how do you answer you say yeah i took the toy because i wanted it and he's smaller than me or do you say look he didn't want the toy anyway and besides it was mine and he really stole it from me uh so i was right in other words can you know anybody can answer can you know who anybody who hasn't gone through such experiences in their life and so their friends are not yeah so we all know the answer to the question right you there are ways and easy ways to rationalize whatever happens in a usually complicated word word uh the world so as to protect yourself furthermore the fact that intellectuals act like this is close to tautology you don't become a respected intellectual unless you do this kind of thing not you know through not like kissinger just servility the master but because you internalize it let's take a look at history i mean there are people who don't do it a small portion they're usually uh are they are they praised are they honored i mean they're usually treated very badly depends on the nature of the society they can be thrown out of their jobs in a civilized society like ours they just get vilified and defamed in a u.s possession like say el salvador they get their brains blown out and nobody here even cares about it or knows about it in say the post-stalin soviet union they got sent to prison or exiled and if you go through history furthermore it's kind of striking that let's just take that last example compare uh the old soviet union you know free gorbachev uh post stalin different period pre gorbachev and compare say u.s possessions at the same time actually we've just gone through a very revealing incident about how intellectuals react to that in november 2009 there was uh there was enormous uh attention given to and celebration of some very critical events that took place exactly 20 years earlier in november 1989. in november 1989 the berlin wall fill and quickly the soviet union collapsed that was a major event in world history and it was a huge commemoration of it on the 20th anniversary and what was written about it is you know mostly accurate and very revealing it was heralded as a triumph quoting vatsala favel one of the heroes a triumph of love and non-violence love and non-violence overcame the soviet union and it collapsed and that's the lesson we learned in fact there's there's a generation of people who call themselves the niners their consciousness was formed in november 1989 and they're dedicated to love and non-violence obama is picked as the leader and so on so that's what we learned in november 1989 when the soviet union collapsed well one week after the fall of the berlin wall something else happened an elite salvadoran battalion which had just come from several months of training at the john f kennedy special forces school in fort bragg and in fact a couple of days later had a special group of i think a couple of dozen special forces sent to el salvador to beef up their training this is the top battalion in the salvadoran army the pride of the u.s run salvador and army right after that they broke into the university they murdered six leading salvadoran intellectuals jesuit priests also their housekeeper and her daughter in november 1980 not in 1990 2009 a report was published in the spanish press easily accessible to anyone in the spanish press presenting the actual document that ordered the assassination signed as had been suspected but not proven signed by the chief of staff and the top officials in the salvadoran army all so close to the pentagon and the u.s embassy that you can barely find a ray of light between them of course it was never published here never published in england and so on so all of that happened in 1989 well it wasn't just that's love and non-violence now it's not just the killing of the jesuit intellectuals the killing of the jesuit intellectuals closed off a decade of monstrous atrocities in el salvador maybe 70 000 people killed you know another hundred thousand in guatemala you know who knows how many in nicaragua all carry all are organized right in washington they have a massive terrorist war the decade in el salvador plenty of religious martyrs in fact the decade started with the assassination of an archbishop reading mass by the same hands so it's not a small event furthermore that understates it there's a huge event that took place uh that has to do with history of the catholic church uh the catholic the church in the early centuries was radical pacifist that's why christians were persecuted because they were radical pacifists in the early fourth century going far afield i know it's the same i know it's the same point we're not going for no i know it's the same point okay uh and this is exactly to the point in the fourth century the radical pacifist church was changed the emperor constantine took it over and turned it into the church of the roman empire so the cross which had been a symbol of the suffering of the poor was on the shield of the roman empire well from the 4th century until almost today the church was the church of the rich and the persecutors in 1962 pope john the 23rd uh changed it he called vatican ii big conference and that adopted what was called the preferential option for the poor it's from the gospels and that led to a movement partic particularly in latin america where priests nuns lay people others started bringing the message of the gospels to poor peasants and trying to get them to think about their horrifying conditions under u.s dominated tyrannies and try to organize to do something about it well the u.s didn't wait long immediately it reacted john f kennedy organized a military coup in brazil one of the main centers who took place right after the assassination was all set up by him and robert kennedy that established the first of the neo-nazi-style national security states in latin america you know torture massacre and so on and brazil is a big country so the dominoes started to fall and country after country fell under a plague of repression that had no parallel since the conquistadors uruguay chile and they finally ended up with argentina maybe the worst killers of them all and reagan's favorites and finally it spread to central america in the 1980s then came these hideous terrorist wars throughout a large part of it was a war against the church and we knew who was responsible because they take pride in it so the school of the americas now renamed which trains latin american killers you take a look at its talking points advertising points uh it takes credit for the fact as it says that the us army helped defeat liberation theology that has helped destroy the church the church of the gospels that's not a small event in history it's a rather significant event in history and it was effectively terminated by the massacre in november 1989 of course not totally there are residues you never kill ideas completely is that a major event well take a look and see how much commentary there was on it i can give you a hundred percent of the commentary next to zero okay but i can even take here in boston where we are i know of one discussion of it in boston at boston college the jesuit university where in fact i was one of the speakers but one of the speakers was ian sabrina he's the one surviving jesuit came up to give a talk a very good talk what he pointed out and stressed was that murdering the jesuit intellectuals was terrible enough but much worse was murdering their housekeeper and daughter who as he put it are the symbols of the crucified populations of u.s domains how many comments were there on that well there actually was a hop comment the uh the the hero of uh eastern europe fatsala favel it came to the united states shortly after the murder of his jesuit colleagues in el salvador and he gave a speech to a joint session of congress and he got a rousing standing ovation for calling the united states the defender of freedom uh the the press was just uh and commentators were totally euphoric including the left so you know washington post had editorials about why can't we have amazing intellectuals like this who uh tell us that we're the defender of freedom right having having slaughtered his counterparts in el salvador plus everything that came before uh anthony lewis you know way out at the far left of imaginable criticism uh gushed about how we were in a romantic age it's hard to believe it's a romantic age and so on and so forth okay uh does any of this enter history can it even be comprehended in fact if you i've tried to talk about it blank wall or else fury usually fury and the reaction saying oh you're justifying atrocities you're justifying stalin you know so the picture is even in the case of of incredible barbarism um over extended periods of time individuals who are intellectuals meaning they've accrued this this respect and these tools and these resources and so on for purposes of advancing their own career and being taken seriously and of being appreciated um sort of habitually almost reflexively um follow the party line there are people who don't and then there are some who in fact they start starts very early what's the difference in childhood no i don't mean what's the difference in behavior i mean i mean maybe you've thought about this and maybe you haven't if you have to i mean of course you can take the two sets of people and you can say okay this one said this and this one said this and that's the difference but there might be also a difference in their value system or in their personality or in their or in something that explains why somebody ends up over here and somebody over here which matters to people who are about to go to journalism school are about to go to college and want to be here and not here the question for their mothers and their psychologists psychiatrists they vary and we know they vary because we know all these people and they have all kind of different reasons whether it's a six-year-old kid stealing a toy from his brother or anthony lewis talking about a romantic age when we've just carried out a mass slaughter or you know they vary all kind of reasons and it's it's maybe of interest to their family and friends but it's of no general interest and what's of general interest is the way the system works and it works starting very early i mean i could give exact examples but i'll just talk about it generally i suppose a kid in say third grade decides that what the teacher is saying is ridiculous and he's not going to do it i can give you some examples if you like well what happens is he's classified wrong he becomes a behavior problem right if some other kid sitting next to him says yeah of course what the teacher is saying is ridiculous well i'm going to do it he's a nice kid and he goes on and it sort of goes on from there there's filtering systems like this all the way if you sit on a fact if you're if you're on a university faculty and you get letters of recommendation uh for you know students who want to apply or faculty members or looking for a job there's some standard terminology that you get used to a great guy brilliant wonderful but he lacks collegiality you know or he he's hard to get along with or something like that what that usually means is he's a political radical or something like that and uh it's not it's kind of unders nobody will tell you i mean some people will like you know i can name five people will tell you but uh it's kind of understood and it's even understandable i mean you want your department to be collegial you want people to be nice to each other you don't want somebody in the department getting up and saying look you're a war criminal and showing it and demonstrating it that's not nice it doesn't feel good so you sort of keep these people away you've had a little experience with this yourself uh so there's there's techniques that start from childhood a massive filtering system and it means that uh you know it doesn't it's not a hundred percent you know it's uh even a totalitarian state isn't 100 this certainly isn't but they're very effective uh filtering systems that lead to certain outcomes uh i it's quite interesting for people like ed herman or me or others who do critical analysis of the press journalists and commentators are infuriated they say nobody tells me what to write which is absolutely true but if they didn't already know what to write they wouldn't be there so the the solution whether we're talking intellectuals or journalists isn't in the genes of the people and it isn't even it's in the structure of the situations that they find themselves in which over and over and over um produce this kind of almost reflexive behavior to the point where they don't have to think about it they don't have it's not as if they're making a conscious choice okay today i will lie about barbarism in order to get an extra to you know an extra star on my resume they just do it because they've done it all along and they keep doing it very dramatic if you look at journalism is kind of like an easy target and a little bit unfair because the journalist has to get something out tomorrow they can't think about it much and so on much more interesting is scholarship that's why most of my own critical work is on scholarship not on journalism because in the case of scholarship people have time they have resources they have security they can think about what they're doing and what you find is with very rare exceptions pretty much same thing like take say the study of there's a huge uh there's a huge study of american foreign policy and international relations and i just happened to have been reading one of the most prestigious international relations journal which is partially devoted to one of the lead issues which is called american wilsonian idealism so one of the main theses in international relations theory dealing with the united states is the impact of wilsonian idealism well you know it's quite interesting i mean these articles i happen to read are typical so i'll pick them but run through the whole field the the people are on uh the study of wilsonian idealism keeps to almost entirely to words you know so we ask when wilson said self-determination did he mean this or did he mean that and you have a big scholarly discussion of it and you look at his letters and what he wrote to his wife but you don't look at any of the facts and the facts are glaringly obvious right now so right now for example haiti as everyone knows has been hit by an incredible disaster you know hundreds of thousands of people killed you know billions of dollars of damage everybody's everybody wants to give ten dollars to show how wonderful we are did wilson not will somebody an idealism have anything to do with this i have to be blind not to see it there wilson's plenty of other things but wilson was one of the worst killers in haiti he destroyed the country he was already half destroyed by the french he sent the marines his into haiti on ridiculous pretexts as always they killed thousands of people according to haitian historians maybe 15 000 people they reinstated virtual slavery remember haiti was liberated as a slave revolt they uh one of the main things they did and this is wilsonian idealism was wilson sent the marines to disband parliament haiti had a parliament it was kind of derided in the united states so they disbanded parliament at gunpoint and the reason was very simple the u.s had written a constitution actually franklin delano roosevelt took credit for it probably you know boasting but anyway there was a u.s written constitution which the parliament refused to accept why because the constitution contained what we're called in the united states progressive measures namely permitting u.s corporations to buy up haiti's lands now as explained you know by economists and other serious thinkers that this was very progressive because obviously haiti needs foreign investment and how can you expect americans to invest unless they own the place so this is just for the benefit of haitians that were doing this if you read the press and commentary it's just we're so benevolent you know tears come from our eyes we're trying desperately to help them and then the marines ran a referendum in which five percent of the population participated the traditional you know collaborationist elite that you find in every colony the rich elite they participated and there was 99 0.9 percent approval so it was a democratic election and they got the progressive uh the progressive legislation with the obvious consequences well one of the consequences is to add a further blow to the agricultural system leading to urbanization this goes on right into the night i won't go through the record but clinton was one of the worst offenders in this respect destroy the agricultural system for reasons that every economist can explain are very rational that was explained i mean haiti shouldn't be producing rice it's much more efficient in the world if highly subsidized u.s agribusiness should get most of its profits from subsidies floods haiti with rice and hades rice farmers are quite efficient of course can't compete with it if they go into the cities so they so women can sow baseballs and miserable assembly plants that's you know that's efficient i mean any decent economist can explain that and of course we want to be efficient and progressive so we drive them into the cities we destroy the agricultural system along comes a hurricane it's a class-based disaster like most disasters you take a look the people the rich people up in the hills you know got shaken up a little but nothing much happened huge catastrophe among the poor people living in urban slums why are we there why are they there well wilsonian idealism had a lot to do with it all of these things are happening at the same moment at the same moment that the scholarly articles are appearing about wilsonian idealism and what did he write to his wife in a letter and did he mean this that or the other thing at the same moment the front pages are showing us about this hideous class-based disaster which substantially results from one of many of cl of wilson's horrendous crimes and now we get back to orwell and double think you have if you want to be respected intellectual you have to have both these ideas in your mind at the same time and accept the believe both of them and not notice the contradiction and this is overwhelming all i'm able to be picking it because it's so dramatic but you just take a look at you know on and on i mean sometimes it's awesome most of the time most of the time um there's this idea of objectivity and lots of people on the left get very excited about that and then they critical of it they get upset by the idea of objectivity so i'm wondering um as a precursor to asking you about objectivity first um broadly um ewan ed wrote about this how does bad journalism work and what are the linchpins of it not now i'm not talking about well answer as you will and um how would good journalism work instead what is it about the behavior of the new york times that is abhorrent to you things like what i've described and what is it structurally within the new york times which causes it in your view first of all the new york times is not very much different from the elite intellectual culture in general so my own view is much more striking and scholarship and more significant but in the new york times uh you know they're kind of obvious institutional factors the new york times is a major corporation huge corporate system uh like other businesses it sells a product to a market the product is other businesses advertisers that's what keeps it going the product for the new york times happens to be fairly privileged audiences you know it's what sometimes called the political class you know the maybe 20 of the population that are managers economic political doctrinal managers and so on so what the new york and furthermore it's tightly linked to other institutions of power like the state for example which is enormously under corporate influence in fact that's blaring at us every day in the newspapers so here you have a system you're saying that they're selling that 20 that sector of the population to companies they're selling the audience to the advertisers that's the real product that they're selling part of it but they're also linked to state power to other corporate power i mean these are the that's circles in which they live that's what you have dinner with uh there's a flow up and back of people and same with you know npr and so on there's a small elite group which have institutional roots and now there are plenty of honest journalists and you know do good work but they do it within this framework uh and if they sort of drift from the framework they're usually cut off in fact some quit and discussed uh but that's it's you know it's kind of like the rest of the filtering system what do you expect to come out of a system like that suppose you're looking at it from mars you see huge corporations selling privileged people who are managers themselves to other businesses linked to other systems of power like the state which are heavily influenced in fact dominated by these power systems what kind of product do you expect to come out okay that's what you see okay so and what about good journalism in other words what would you do to generate there are concrete examples a couple of months ago i happened to go to mexico i was invited for the 25th anniversary of a newspaper which as far as i'm aware is the only newspaper independent newspaper in the hemisphere it's called la granada it's very successful it's the second largest newspaper in mexico it gets no commercial advertising because business hates it uh it lives it has very smart reporters and you know good people you know really bright the kind of intellectuals you and i would like they write for it they do investigative reporting it has regional subsidiaries i think the only mexican journal that reports regularly from chapa's where they have a regional office and elsewhere how does it survive subscriptions i mean they're probably a couple of wealthy donors who give it some money but primarily it subscribes from a very loyal subscriber base and it's the second largest journal in mexico and you know just the couple of days i was there just reading it i learned things important things i could tell you that did not appear in the western press uh okay how do they do it well that's how they do it and they illuminate the advertising as the source of revenue be happy to get advertising in circles i mean they'd be happy to get advertising but you know business is highly class conscious uh they're not going to subsidize uh clearly they're they're not appealing to it they're not they're not doing what you need to do to attract those kinds of ads right right as far as i can you know i'm sure there's plenty of criticisms are they objective well what does it mean the notion of objectivity belongs in graduate philosophy seminars it doesn't apply in the real world this is a topic for elite intellectuals to have abstract discussions about anybody whoever they are has a point of view you can't help it if you're doing quantum physics you're looking for certain things and you're not looking at other things maybe what you're not looking at turns out to be extremely important but you cannot help having a point of view the whole discussion is a waste of time the whole discussion is a waste of time good uh there's like most discussions that take place i mean you know there are clear cases where you can see that the search for what is called balance is a charade and so let's take something really important like the survival of the species it should be an important question uh there's two views on the on the matter of whether the species can have decent survival one of them is 99.9 of scientists who say we're really getting into trouble with uh anthropogenic warming of the atmosphere on the other side there's uh rush limbaugh glenn beck sarah palin the congressman himhoff the editors isn't it but you don't see the balance that those crazies occupy 98 of the airwaves now when you see an article in the new york times or anywhere else they have to balance it and so you get both positions and the end result and of course you know there's a ton of advertising and propaganda from the business world that wants you to believe it's not happening uh which is kind of interesting itself because the executives who are doing this advertising know exactly as well as the scientists that it is happening and they know that it's going to destroy their grandchildren and it's going to destroy everything that they own but they still want people not to believe it now there are institutional factors there too they go back to the nature of markets go into that you know the future of the species is an externality you don't consider it when you are making trend involved in transactions so there's good reasons for that too anyway it's happening and we see the results i mean right the results have been so incredible that by now there's a sharp decline in the united states in belief in human uh anthropogenic you know human involved global warming it's not it's down now to about a third okay now that's a death sentence for the species i mean if that continues and you know i'm really not exaggerating i mean we can argue about the time span but it's going to lead to the people who are saying it will smile that over lunch oh yeah because if you're if you're in a market system take these executives say that's an interesting case you're the ceo of say exxon mobil uh you you read everything that you know people read in the z magazine you know you know what's happening you know exactly what's happening you know that the danger is extremely severe and that the longer we wait the worse it's going to be but that's what economists call an externality it doesn't enter into your day by day decisions your day by day decisions in a market system are forced you are forced to look at certain things and not to look at others so you are forced to look at short-term profit and market share if you don't do that you're out and somebody else is in and you can actually rationalize doing it on grounds that well if i didn't do it i'd be out therefore i couldn't do any good for anybody ever i don't think that's the grounds that it's done not that i'll be out it's that i'm really doing the right thing that's what i'm saying i'm really doing the right thing for the world because if i get people not to believe in what i know is true then maybe they'll put more money into solar energy and incidentally maybe i'll make some profit out of that as they're trying to do so in the long run it's really good for the species it's like it's not that different from stealing a toy for your brother except that in this case it's forced by an institution namely the market one welcome to one of the dynamics of that you mentioned is that if you're an intellectual or a journalist there's tremendous price to pay for being good you're marginalized your um material well-being is hurt you are in certain danger depending upon where you are thrown out by a u.s run elite battalion a lot of things can happen okay um we can't offset that entirely but still can you name some good journalists around the world and in the u.s who deserve to be known and for another reason which is imagine somebody who's off to journalism school they're told who the good journalists are and of course they're the irresponsible intellectuals etc etc and it would do wonders if they actually took a look at people who were a model of what of what one should be doing so who are some of the people who in your view are really good journalists the correspondents on the ground do extremely good work i mean if i were on a desert island somewhere and i was allowed to have only one newspaper i'd get the new york times i mean it gives you a tolerable picture of what's going on in the world and the journalists who are on the ground typically don't lie they describe accurately what they see same with reading say the ap wires the journalists on the ground i could give names but there are plenty of them in fact i think it's normal it's kind of interesting that in the book that ed and ed herman and i wrote manufacturing consent a large part it's it's hated by journalists and the press and intellectuals because they claim it's attacking the press it's unfair actually a large part of the book is defending the press if you take if anyone opens the book they'll find the substantial part of it is defending the press against attacks from what are considered the liberals freedom house you know the main institution that's supposed to support freedom and democracy launched a huge attack on the press several volumes of denunciations claiming that the press lost the war in vietnam because they lied about the tet offense if they're so pro-communist and antagonist to the united states that they distorted what happened and therefore we lost this noble war that's freedom house well you know ed and i went through the two volumes we found that the number of outright lies was straight lies was just phenomenal when we actually looked at the facts what we found is the reporters on the ground were reporting what happened honestly courageously and accurately but within a framework that is just destroyed by ideological fanaticism so somebody would write an article saying you know the the air force came and they bombed this place to smithereens and the soldiers came in they killed everybody was around and uh you know it's just necessary to defend freedom and democracy in south vietnam yeah so the reporters were honest professional accurate but deeply ideological in contrast freedom house was just lying through their teeth in that case presumably for you the model of a good reporter good journalist good commentator is not only somebody who um relays facts that they see but is not subject to the uh this is roughly the period you know within a year or two of when the milan massacre took actually it's actually the period when the milai massacre took place 1968 which is what we're talking about uh the milei massacre which was finally broke through thanks to sy hersh independent journalist working for dispatch news service was very smart guy he picked the moment of a huge demonstration in washington you know a million people a lot of journalists around so he picked that moment to release publicly the information on me lie that had been around for a year and a half nobody paid any attention to so it became a big thing and that's kind of the symbol of everything that went wrong it's a wonderful symbol for liberal intellectuals because you can blame it on half-educated half-crazed gis in the field who didn't know who was going to shoot at them next there was a gen a couple of journalists mainly kevin buckley who was a saigon correspondent of newsweek he and an associate alan shimken i think his name was did a detailed analysis of what was ha of of the context of me lying this was part of a series of what were called post-tet pacification campaigns huge mass murder operations to which milai was a minuscule footnote and was such a small footnote that the there's a quaker hospital which is kwangnai right near where it took place i mean they knew about it at once they didn't even bother mentioning it because it happened all over the place uh well buckley uh wrote this all up newsweek wouldn't publish it he gave it to me ed and ed herman and i wrote about it in political economy of human rights south end book in 79 and what we pointed out was that yeah it took place and it's easy to focus on it because you can blame it on bad guys not like us uh but what was actually taking place in the air-conditioned rooms where people just like us were sitting was incomparably more horrendous you think anybody ever mentioned that well actually one person did 30 years later so it's marginally noticed but you know what kevin buckley did and his associate was really good journalism just briefly what's irrationality and then conversely what's rationality well a perfect example of extreme irrationality is what we've just been talking about what are well called double think the ability to have two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time and to believe both of them that's the peak of irrationality and that virtually defines the elite intellectual community yeah okay so that's irrationality now let's take concrete examples of fundamentalist irrationality so i'll give you a real example actually it's an example i knew about about five years ago but i didn't publish it because i sounded so crazy it couldn't be true turns out to be true it's now verified in january 2003 immediately before the invasion of iraq george bush was trying to round up international support for the invasion and he met the french president president shirak and in this meeting with shirak he started ranting about a passage from ezekiel the book of ezekiel it's a very obscure passage nobody understands it's a passage about gog and magog nobody knows if they're people or places or whatever they are but gog and mago are supposed to come from the north and you know attack israel and then we get off into ultra fanatic christian uh evangelical madness there's a whole big story about how gogan magog come down attack israel there's a battle in armageddon everybody gets slaughtered uh and the the souls who are saved rise to heaven okay some kind of story like that uh reagan apparently believed it when his handlers didn't control him enough he was kind of off by himself he'd start raving about this stuff and for him gogan maga were russia for bush gogan magog where iraq so he told this to shirak and sharack had no clue what he was talking about so he approached the french foreign office the elysee and said you know what this madman is raving about and they didn't know either so they approached a belgian pretty well-known belgian theologian who wrote a sort of a disquisition on this passage and the way it's interpreted and what it might mean and so on okay how do i know well i know because that belgian theologian and his friend sent me a copy of it with a background of the story i never published it because this just sounded too off the wall finally i i was talking to an australian academic researcher and i mentioned it to him he decided to look into it it turns out to be correct in fact the story appears in the biographies of shirak and in other evidence so yeah that actually happened so here's the world in the hands of a raving lunatic who you know is talking about gogan magog and armageddon and the souls rising to heaven and you know the world survived uh well okay that's that's not a small thing in the united states i don't know the percentages but it's maybe 25 30 percent of the population yeah that's pretty serious irrationality okay uh science then um what's science i mean why is something scientific what marks something as being sensible science or nonsensical non-science masquerading etc on the one hand and since you're going to answer fully how do you feel about left criticisms of science um leftists who who criticize science as being you know whatever they say it's imperial or it's sexist or it's uh rooted in western whatever and so on well you know like anything that we understand about at all with regard to things as complicated as human affairs the answers are pretty trivial if they're not trivial we don't understand it there's a category of intellectuals who are undoubtedly perfectly sincere who who if you look at it from the outside what they're actually doing is using polysyllabic words and complicated constructions which apparently they seem to understand because they talk to each other most of the time i can't understand what they've been talking about and you know even people are supposed to be in my field and it's all very inflated and you know a lot of prestige and so on that has a terrible effect in the third world in the first world rich countries it doesn't really matter that much so if a lot of nonsense goes on in the paris cafes or the yale comparative literature department well okay on the other hand in the third world popular movements really need serious intellectuals to participate and if they're all ranting uh postmodern absurdities well they're gone i mean i've seen real examples could give them to you but uh so there is that category and it's considered very left-wing and very advanced and so on and so forth well some of what appears in it actually makes sense but when you reproduce it in monosyllables it turns out to be truisms so yes it is perfectly true that if you look at scientists in the west they're mostly men and it's perfectly true that women have had a hard time breaking into the scientific fields and it's perfectly true that there are institutional factors determining how science proceeds that reflect power structures i mean all of this can be described literally in monosyllables and it turns out to be truisms okay on the other hand you don't get to be a respected intellectual by presenting truisms and monosyllables now a lot of the left criticism so when the left so-called leftwards i don't consider it left when the left criticism so-called happens to be accurate well okay that's fine so if you point out a lot of things just like what i mentioned there are a lot of no that's fine pointed out you know everybody can understand it you take a look you see it's true and so on on the other hand a lot of so-called left criticism seems to be pure nonsense in fact that's been demonstrated conclusively so there's a there's a very important book by jean-barco and alan sokol forget what it's called dangerous illusions or something where they simply go through the they happen to concentrate on paris which is the center of the rot but it's all over and they go through the most respected french intellectuals and run through what they say about science and you know it is so embarrassing that you kind of cringe when you read it actually sometimes one of my most striking ones is one of the very few who actually is a scientist and knows something about science uh la tour has a background in science and philosophy of science they go through an article of his and i think i'm remembering correctly in which he uh he's somebody in france had or somewhere had discovered that one of the pharaohs had died of tuberculosis and they did it by you know analysis of whatever dna or something uh latur wrote an article ridiculing this because it's totally absurd because it's good to talk about tuberculosis only discovered in the 19th century and everything's a social construction and therefore it wasn't constructed yet so it didn't happen i mean you know it's kind of at the level of bush and shirak but but it's taken very seriously and this is considered very leftist but one point to look at i think is that the description of intellectuals the description of journalists and now the description of this sector of part of what causes off the left um you have something similar going on even though the price is much lower um you have those guys sitting in the air-conditioned rooms bombing the hell out of the world for their careers for their for their status because of their reflexive lessons that they've learned and then over here you have people who are in literary criticism or whatever field they might be in who are also completely divorced from reality or obscuring it or dolling it up for similar reasons of course the price is much less i mean it's high but it's in the third world yeah but it's still rich countries it's just a pain in it it's still not like but uh bombing the world yeah um i think but it's the same phenomenon they're hard to understand i mean if you they're nice people a lot of my friends and if you look at what's happening i think it's it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on i mean suppose you're a you know a literal literary scholar at some elite university or you know anthropologist or whatever i mean if you do your work seriously that's fine you know but it's not very i mean you don't get any big prizes for it on the other hand you take a look over in the rest of the university and you got these guys in the physics department in the math department and they have all kind of complicated theories which of course we can't understand but they seem to understand them and they have you know principles and they deduce complicated things from the principles and they do experiments and you know they find neither they work or they don't work and so and that's really you know impressive stuff so i want to be like that too so i want to have a theory in literary in in the humanities you know literally criticism anthropology and so on there's a field called theory we're just like the physicists they talk incomprehensively we can talk incomprehensibly they have big words we'll have big words they draw you know far-reaching conclusions we'll draw for our inclusions we're just as prestigious as they are now if they say well look we're doing real science and you guys aren't uh that's a white male sexist you know bourgeois whatever the answer is how are we any different from them uh okay that's appealing and there are other things that went on remember that a lot of this stuff comes from paris and interesting things were happening in paris in the 1970s the french intellectuals were the last group of intellectuals in the world who were dedicate overwhelmingly not 100 but you know it was very standard and respected to be a dedicated stalinist and maoist okay by the mid 70s i was getting to be a pretty hard physician to uphold so what you had if you take a look at what happened is there was a sudden shift people who had been flaming maoists and stalinists suddenly became the first people in the world to have discovered the gulag and went on a tear about how everyone else supports you know stalinist and malice atrocities and we're france of course so we have to be in front of everyone uh so therefore we've exposed it and now we're open this was called the new philosophy you know a new philosopher or something and it went over all kinds i mean i remember meeting i won't mention names because it's embarrassing one of the leading french cultural theorists who happened to visit me around 1974 and she was a flaming maoist a couple years later she was one of the first people to understood to have you know discovered stalinist and malice atrocities well okay when you went through that transition you've got to do something else how you're going to be you know on the front pages okay along comes the invention of post-structuralism all right what about religion what what do you think religion is well for one thing it's virtually depending what you mean by religion i mean if you believe if you mean the abrahamic religions you know we're on weak ground here because of course i'm religiously illiterate but okay judaism christianity and islam well no i mean i guess yeah and and the other such religions of that type what are those well buddhism is different spiritual beliefs among native americans was different i mean there's all kind of religions the distinction that we're talking about there the we're talking about the abrahamic religion no the hindus are different it's quite different buddhism is quite different i mean if you really look at these systems of belief they differ a lot in fact no but what i'm asking is what is religion per se not what some beliefs are sometimes belief that there's something in the world which is beyond my grasp which is determining the way things happen and it's going to you know it'll be a consolation for me maybe you know if my child is dying i'll see him again in heaven somewhere i mean these kinds of beliefs and that there's a sort of a spiritual force somewhere beyond my grasp and that explains why things are happening and that's probably ubiquitous and it's perfectly understandable yeah i mean you know weird things are happening like the sun is going around the earth you can see it and it doesn't have that happening but you see it well something must be making it happen okay so it's apollo on his chariot pulling the sun and the same with everything else goes on you don't understand anything that's happening in the world in personal life and you know why are why is my child this sweet little wonderful kid dying he didn't do anything so there's got to be some explanation somewhere so it's instead of stories to make sense of reality except not science i mean apollo pulling the sun with the cherry it's early science and it's a kind of a scientific theory you know it's gonna look worked out you know not not trivial like you know for example the classical greeks did discover a lot of things but if you say it now when there's lots of evidence other than that then it's no longer sciences that just means that our understanding has deepened right but you know the transition from magic to science is a pretty smooth transition and it just i mean even the word the word science in english it didn't even appear until the mid 19th 19th century i mean there was a word it meant something else just meant knowledge in the 19th mid 19th century there was a divorce between science and philosophy before it was just philosophy in fact if you study if you go to oxford let's say you can study natural philosophy and moral philosophy natural philosophy is what we hear called the natural sciences moral philosophy is what we call the humanities but through german you know it's the same thing so the whole concept of science in our sense is a pretty recent one uh and it's it began and there was a an intellectual revolution you know it sort of begins with galileo and what goes on and it led to enormous insights and after a while science just kind of took off and became a special domain in the early 19th century it was uh i'm taking say kant he couldn't have told you whether he was a philosopher or scientist you know he taught astronomy i mean he taught moral philosophy and yeah an intelligent educated gentleman did all those things well by the mid 19th century becoming very hard to do all those things the sciences were reaching a point where you really understand things uh and you couldn't be a a gentleman who knows everything uh so okay things got professionalized and we get you know what we call science separate domain but recall how recent this is prior to that people were trying to figure things out and we we might now call what they're trying to figure out the magic but these are pretty smart people like say isaac newton they're not a fool exactly i mean he's now kind of people laugh about the fact that he would spend most of his life working on chemistry and church fathers that was alchemy and church fathers that was perfectly reasonable i mean in terms of the what are called corpuscularian theories that everybody accepted you know the world is made up of little building blocks like bricks yeah shift a few and you get uh gold from lead that makes perfect sense that's for the church fathers that made perfect sense too i mean he was coming right after the humanist period when there had been a sudden discovery of the wealth and richness of classical civilizations which hadn't been known so the belief expanded that these guys really understood something and they were kind of keeping it secret for us so they're doing it in an esoteric way and if we can decode what they were doing we'll get all kind of wonderful discoveries so it wasn't an irrational pursuit and uh not that long ago you know this is the 17th century and this is isaac newton listen in my lifetime right so so when you come to closer to the present um you have some things about religion that have been painful and cause suffering and uh great harm and other things about religion that have been pretty um exemplary and that have um contributed to justice truly take let's say take liberation theology that was that was a revival of early christianity and it was so threatening to the united states that the u.s launched a war against it i want to switch to a political variant of some of the things we've been talking about which is the term called sectarianism a lot well sometimes it's genuine disagreements right which should be worked out you know you know with solidarity mutual sympathy and support and so on i've we've all been in activist groups and you know this goes on and on we have long meetings because they're real issues to discuss so that's uh phenomenal that's the right kind of it's the right kind of if you like sectarianism a lot of it's ego tripping you know i want to be lenin uh so you follow me and uh there's a lot of that uh i've got my doctrines and ideology and if you don't accept them uh you're an enemy of um you know the working people or whatever it happens to be as extremely common among groups that have don't have much mass support you know that are kind of isolated that don't that don't either don't have a lot to do or like to believe that they don't have a lot to do and sectarianism is one of the ways of avoiding engagement we don't have to give examples i mean it's rampant a lot of it's pretty ugly but it's not only the behavior there's something about it seems to me holding a viewpoint in a sectarian fashion sort of like holding a viewpoint in a fundamental assassin has this element of it's true because it's doctrine it's true because it's in a book it's true because i believe it or because somebody else who i admire believes it and it's un it's unchallengeable it's just the way it is well that's what that kind of sectarianism of course can destroy groups in fact any decent government infiltrator and there are plenty of them would want to stimulate that kind of sectarianism we've all seen it happen to you remember say in the 60s one of the things that every group had to learn often the hard way is that even among your small circle there's a provocateur and the after a while it got to be sort of possible to pick them out they were the ones who were going to show up at the trials and you know that sort of thing but if pretty soon people got to know that if there's someone in the group who's dressed like a hollywood version of a hippie and who's saying you know stop this nonsense let's go out and kill the cops and so on and so forth chances are he's a provocateur sometimes it doesn't have to be a government for rockington a lot of these small groups are parasitic unpopular movements and they try to recruit you know so they join they work they sit around the meetings longer than anyone else they you know try to get in a position of some kind of control and then recruit it to their own particular sect that goes on all the time and it's very disruptive to popular movements but i'm talking about of course but i'm talking about good people who have historical you know have in their lives has been perfectly sensible people who uh for whatever reasons become sectarian meaning they adopt a a set of views and are no longer open are no longer open to the possibility that those views could be wrong that any evidence could be contrary to those views they no longer can see the world except in terms of those views that's sort of what i mean by sectarianism where it's not because they're trying to they're not police it's just but that's part of life you know i mean you have it in the most advanced scientists yeah like texas a einstein i use that example often you know he just wouldn't believe that as he put it god could throw dice with him you worry about behaving in that fashion getting caught in that kind of tree yeah yourself sure anybody sensible okay you shouldn't do it because sometimes you really do believe you're right and you should pursue it so but what's the personal antidote to the rampant phenomenon for an individual it's just to try to be as open-minded and sympathetic to others as you can it's not easy and uh in controversial complicated situations or even in the hard sciences i mean i find it all the time and just in professional work okay you sort of try to deal with it somehow and the structural antidote imagine you're i don't think there is in general there isn't one because it's a good thing i mean i don't criticize einstein for having not been willing to believe quantum theoretic approaches and in fact that is you know way better than i do a lot of good experimental proposals came out of that uh you know like uh what's it called the quantum uh you know things too far apart to communicate that are you know the name for that i feel what it is that came out of an experimental proposal that einstein and a couple others made but uh so there's nothing wrong with it i mean that's the way uh human behavior ought to be i mean it can get to the point where it's uh it becomes a personal ego trip uh it becomes an effort to take over and control uh but these are just aspects of human life that you have to deal with it can happen in a family you know yes there's no there's no general answer there is this creationism uh phenomenon um which bears on science also what has been your reaction first a lot of it comes from a religious source i mean people and a lot of it's really genuine you know people do not want to accept the idea that what they interpret as meaning uh everything is determined it doesn't mean science doesn't mean that but that's if you have a superficial understanding of science and in fact even if you read what plenty of scientists and philosophers say it's basically saying look you don't have any free will you don't know any choices everything's determined it's all you're just kind of acting out there's something in a system of controls but you have nothing to do with uh i don't want to believe that in fact don't and i can easily see why other people don't want to believe it they want to believe that there's something good going on in the world maybe i can't grasp it but there's a force somewhere that is trying to make us better make the world better make good things happen and bad things not happen and it's just and also just for personal reasons to go back to the mother of the dying children child you know i want to see my child again someday so i'd like to believe it uh well you know one consequence of this array of beliefs is to think that the world was created and that's very common i mean you know founding fathers for example who didn't want to separate church and state were mostly were called deists the idea was god something that was even said this way god is a retired engineer he uh got the whole thing started gave it a kick in the pants and then he left and you guys are supposed to run it uh well that was you know kind of like sort of a secular religion that was common at the time but at the same time the the us has since its origins has been kind of off the spectrum in religious book and extremist religious beliefs i mean if you do look at there are comparative studies and you know belief in the united states belief in miracles in the devil you know the world was created 10 000 years ago and so on it's just off the spectrum you don't find that and i mean to some extent you find it in other industrial societies like in england you find it but the united states is literally off the graph and this goes back to its origins i mean the country was founded by religious extremists the people who founded you know the new english settlers of new england were following god's will you know there's a streak in u.s history which is called providentialism very dominant streak goes all the way from you know founding fathers so-called up to the current presidents and so on uh god has a conception of history and we're acting it out and some of the ways in which this was applied are pretty remarkable so for example the core of take say the english settlers in new england you know mayflower and all that stuff they the first charter of the massachusetts bay colony given by the king king charles was i think 1628 and the goal of the masters colony was to bring the benefits of civilization including the christian religion to the indians who are pleading for it we're doing them a favor in fact if you look at the great seal of the massachusetts bay colony six around 1629 you know they had a seal it's it's very revealing it ought to be in the world every classroom in the country uh what it shows it's the founding of the country and what it shows is an indian with spears pointed down sign of peace and out of the indian's mouth is a scroll and the scroll says come over and help us. so the colonists were carrying out what is now called the responsibility to protect you know fancy term for imperialism that's common so they were carrying out the responsibility to protect they were totally selfless they were coming over just to answer the plea of the indigenous population to come over and help us that's the time when the famous phrase city on a hill was produced 1630 john winthrop gave a famous statement and said we're a city on the hill you know we're not like any other country in the world we're benevolent to selfless coming over to answer the plea of the indians to help us that goes right until today that's a leading theme of scholarship that we're different and journalism of course that we're just different from everyone else because we're a city on the hill shining city on the hill as reagan put it it's right to this minute and the reason it comes from our answering the plea of the natives to help them well in fact they exterminated them and that was explained too you take a look at you know leading supreme court justices commentators others they say well you know the ways of god are mysterious although we came to help the indians and we tried you know everything we did was in their interest somehow they withered away you know and we that's the phrase that was used they just like the leaves and autumn they kind of blew away uh and this goes right on to the prison i mean you know towards the end of the century like say early 20th century i mean it's pretty hard to go on with this so you get people like theodore roosevelt one of the most extreme racist you know murderers in american history that's why he's on mount rushmore he he explained to uh he was during the second term of his presidency it must have been maybe 1906 or seven i don't know when exactly he gave a talk to a group of missionaries in which he explained to them that it was for the benefit of the native population that we exterminated them literally almost his words he said because it enabled a superior race to replace them and that was very common i mean you read things like that in walt whitman you know ralph waldo emerson i mean the great heroes this is extremely racist country and they invented a mythology of anglo-saxonism we're all anglo-saxons you know like you and me where anglo-saxons uh jefferson for example who's a big believer in this said we've got to go back to like i know the eighth century or something when there were pure anglo-saxons before they were contaminated by others and that's the ideal of you know humanity and justice and everything this runs i mean benjamin franklin for example that we franklin thought that we shouldn't allow immigration of germans and swedes because they're not white enough they're kind of a little off color but we the pure anglo-saxons just carry civilization forward i mean this it goes it's incredible the history of it i won't go through it but hitler looks mild in comparison and this goes right through then in fact hitler kind of used this as a model it goes right through american history because right until today it's part of the american exceptionalism wilson idealism you know uh it uh very racist and uh it's just all over okay well these one aspect of these beliefs is uh just you know what most of the world would call religious extremism so there were what we're called great we awake reawakenings in american history periods of sort of mass enthusiasm because you know christ is coming or whatever it may be and it's all over the place you know it just keeps recurring there's a big one in the 1950s and you get it's it's changed in the last 30 years in an interesting way and this has been right through american history but it was never it never really entered the core of the political system i mean there were you know it was it influenced things but there was a big change i think it comes from jimmy i don't think it's ever been studied but my impression is it comes from jimmy carter jimmy carter was an honest sincere uh you know fundamentalist christian probably believed everything he was saying you know kind of like an honest simple guy so all this business you know which most of the world considers kind of like off the wall uh he believed and i think party manager american elections are essentially run by the pr industry and party managers got an idea i think i can't prove it but seems to me what happened is this the party managers recognize that if you pretend to be you know a devout christian you pick up like 30 of the vote and in fact every presidential candidate since carter has professed to be a devout christian you know it takes a bill clinton probably is about as religious as i am his handlers made sure that every monday morning there was a photograph of him in the baptist church or whatever it is you know singing hymns and so on and so forth i mean that's a way in which you sort of pick up a segment of the population and i don't think there's a single exception since carter integrity honesty and everything else goes down the drain of course as a habitual obstacle it's appealing to something that's pretty deep in american culture including you know it's intermittent uh uh intertwined with uh racism with uh you know anglo-saxon fanaticism with uh come over and help us you know you find it's just a big strain in the culture you've been very skeptical of what are called conspiracy theories popular conspiracy theories from county assassination through 9 11. so not dealing with those specific theories but more with the general issue what advice would you give to people who are trying to figure out when elites are in fact virusing conspiring and when the view that they are doing that is really just a cultish conspiracy theory so to say take the second world war okay that's we're not talking about the roosevelt administration you know most liberal administration ever uh from 1939 to 1945 there were meetings taking place i mean these people have brains there were meetings taking place of high level state department planners and the council on foreign relations which is kind of like the out-of-government closest uh organization of you know business people others who are kind of have interest in foreign policy it's not a secret organization and there's a lot of conspiracy theories about it but it's quite open and they were meeting regularly they had something called the war peace studies group in which they were planning for the post-war world well that makes good sense i mean they were conspiring to figure out what to do in the post-war world by that argument everybody is inspiring yeah it is the word of general motors is conspiring it's a conspiracy it's a conspiracy they're working together top-level planners to decide how to run the world and what they said is extremely interesting in fact they laid out principles which were quite interesting which are still carried out they're still the guiding principles they were implemented in the early post-war world their proposals are almost the same as those that the government developed in the late 40s okay that's a real conspiracy theory now there in fact is one book about it by larry shoop and william minter uh it's called imperial brain trust okay the phrase is okay they should have given it a different title because it gives the mainstream an easy way to just disregard it it's very accurate it just quotes the documents it's virtually unmentionable and the people on the left who are looking for conspiracy theories never mention it it's a that's a conspiracy an open conspiracy which had lots of consequences uh it still does or takes say the i mean there are some technical conspiracies like where people go to jail for conspiracy uh one of them uh has enormous influence and uh should be better known i mean in the 1940s general motors firestone and standard oil of california conspired to buy up and destroy the very efficient electric railway systems in los angeles and many other places uh and uh convert it all to use of uh fossil fuels you know trucks cars and so on well you know that was one part of a huge social engineering project the government and others to the corporations which just changed the country changed the country to something which may destroy the species we're now living with it the you know wasteful use of fossil fuel which was purposeful they were taken to court uh they were sentenced they got a fine i think five thousand dollars or something like that but it was a real conspiracy and one with enormous consequences and there are many more like it the difference in kind between that and what people are referring to when they're talking about conspiracy theories what's the difference in kind one difference is these are real they're real major conspiracies which have huge consequences but what a lot of people are looking for is some you know it's kind of a little bit like the people who listen to rest limbo they want an answer you know the world is rotten there must be something going on that we don't know about and if we could only ferret it out you know that would tell us why the world is rotten actually the reason is right in front of your eyes and there's plenty of evidence about it but that's not exciting enough so we want to believe take say the kennedy conspiracy theories i mean there's only one interesting question that i know of about the kennedy assassination namely was it a high level conspiracy with policy consequences uh if it wasn't then unless you worship royalty i don't see why it's different from the last killing in roxbury you know yeah you don't want somebody to be killed but uh the conspiracy theorists that good friends incidentally who think i'm you know i really think i'm kind of like a major criminal for this they're devoted to something else they want to show that there was a high level conspiracy which took away from us this magnificent person who is going to do all sorts of terrific things you know and make it a better world and it's because they killed him that we got into the awful mess that we're in well you know there are ways of investigating that you can look at kennedy's policies you can look at his statements you can look at his actions you can look at what followed when exactly his advisors same people including the doves contin you know made the decisions and you can see that you know he was one of the hawkish members towards toward the hawkish side of his administration he was dragged kind of reluctantly into a little support for civil rights and a few other things and he was carrying out the terror wars against cuba right to the day of the assassination and on and on and furthermore nothing changed i mean what changed with the same advisors the ones who were giving even the ones who were advising him on withdrawal you know how good i did they did change their positions because the facts changed but there's no indication and there isn't the slightest particle of evidence of any high-level conspiracy so therefore you look for something else you know the cia didn't like him for this that and the other reason and there's a huge industry about that and of course you know in all these things you put piles of factoids together you know if you have no conception of what a theory and an explanation is and remember most people outside the sciences don't what you do is collect factoids you know this happened that happened how do you explain that i'd explain this i mean if you were to look at scientific experiments that way you could disprove all science i mean that's one of the reasons why scientists do experiments instead of taking videotapes of what's happening out the windows you take videotapes yeah why did that thing move over there i don't see any reason for it you know so obviously somebody's pushing it okay these elementary facts understanding is mostly gone outside of the sciences it's one of the reasons why i think you know any educational system people ought to study something about the sciences just so you learn what an argument is you know from then you see what an explanation is but for most of education that's gone uh so they're trying to put something together or any of these very elaborate schemes and systems there's no evidence for them but you got to believe like it's not that i disbelieve them like maybe they're true maybe the right maybe it was the cia maybe it was the mafia maybe it was this maybe it was that who cares you know it has essentially no significance unless you believe that in the camelot story that kennedy was just about to do the most magnificent things and that's why i was killed but then you have to have some evidence for that and when you look at those stories they're extremely interesting even really good people i could list them good historians the kind of evidence they give is kind of shocking the main idea is well kennedy was kind of a machiavellian he had these plans in his mind to do all kind of wonderful things but he had to conceal them from his advisors because they would have blocked them so he therefore said you know we can't get out of vietnam before victory but that was in order to delude mcnamara and other people so they wouldn't know that he really was going to get out you know and it goes on and on like this i mean it's all just worship of royalty you know it's which is kind of nice you know you feel something magnificent was happening and the camelot story is a very easy one to believe in because kennedy was no fool he knew he understood right away you want to get a good press and you know good record butter up the intellectuals make them think you love them and he did you know he you're a little too young to remember but in the early 60s in cambridge you know every morning on the eastern shuttle uh harvard and mit professors were flying down to washington uh to have lunch with jackie and to say hello to jack and you know talk to dean and all that kind of stuff and coming back in the evening just glowing with the joy at how they were rubbing shoulders with royalty and they were treating them nicely probably making fun of them when they left but and they got a very good you know got a very good image you know that's where the camelot story comes from but if you try to look at the facts and it just you know it just shrivels away so what you have to do is say well the facts really didn't matter he had these machiavellian schemes and so on all right that's the kennedy assassination story the 911 one is pretty interesting actually it's a huge part of the country i mean i think it's like maybe a third of the population or half the population the activists in it the people in the center of it as far as i can tell very few of them are people with any record or involvement in political activism you know doing anything maybe a couple here and there most of them are just drawn into it and uh you know there's and they have factoids too like somebody found the nano thermite whatever the hell that is and the bottom of building seven or whatever okay i i have no idea what it means or if it means anything but that's the core of a large part of the evidence that was done by the bush administration now the people who are writing about this they are experts in physics and civil engineering on the basis of an hour on the internet okay so you spend an hour on the internet you become a super expert in civil engineering and physics and you learn what nanothermite is and you know and so on and it's it's kind of like i mean you know i don't have to tell you what it takes to understand something about physics it's not an hour on the internet they've managed to collect a very small scattering of architects and you know one or two people who are supposed to be scientists and a couple of others who write articles in the journal of 9 11 studies and maybe sometimes an online journal somewhere and so okay that proves that the scientific world is with us and then comes along a big story there's some obvious questions like suppose the bush administration did it why would they blame suites yeah are they insane you know i mean they wanted to invade iraq right everybody agrees with that so why don't they blame iraqis no okay if they had blamed iraqis open the shut case they could hold countries for you you get a u.n resolution and nato supports you you just go ahead and invade iraq uh since they blamed saudis therefore harming themselves that's their closest ally they had to go jump through hoops to try to invent stories about weapons of mass destruction and connections al qaeda and all this other thing they finally invaded iraq so like are they lunatics i mean that's one possibility of course he got another explanation for why they should blame saudis the 9 11 person would say yes because they're very very they're very devious yeah that's exactly what you get they would have been too obvious if they'd blamed iraqis so they had to do it some other way you know yeah you can look even find answers to anything if you try hard enough and huge efforts are going into this uh nothing's ever going to happen they tried it for you know seven years they never indicted bush of course we're never going to they go on for another 50 years it's never going to have any effect it does have an effect it diverts a lot of energy and effort from from trying to do something like say stop the war in iraq but of course you know that takes effort and it's costly and so on they also feel extremely brave because it's so risky to write a note on the internet saying you know i think bush is a really bad guy wow you know you're practically in guantanamo and you know then they can find some guy who uh instead of teaching his courses that thought about this stuff and therefore wasn't rehired which is normal and like you know i would have never been rehired if i'd done it i taught courses on this kind of stuff but in my spare time you know they have some duties at the university but you can put all this stuff together and get some story so you're feeling very brave and bold and then comes stories about the reasons why people like me don't go along we're secret cia agents we're i think the phrase is left gatekeepers there's a category of left gatekeepers the government inserts into the popular movements people who pretend to be critical but they're really gatekeepers you know they're just trying to stop the real criticism and like you know bush put the bombs in building seven and so on and you can build up big stories like that and a lot of people believe i mean it's a little bit like believing that uh the reason for well for you know why my life is collapsing is because uh the rich liberals who own the corporations are giving everything away to illegal immigrants yeah it's an answer too you know you'll find some factoids about that but people who are you know kind of at a loss you know they don't trust anything rightly you know they don't trust institutions they think everybody's lying to them their lies are no good nothing makes any sense okay these things have a certain appeal they like rush limbaugh they have an internal logic that maybe they'll make and if you don't understand what an explanation is a collection of factoids is an explanation there's one part of it that is pretty striking at least to me which is if 30 or 40 percent of the united states population believes that bush did it i mean obviously it's ludicrous but 30 to 40 percent of the population believes he did it well that means there's virtually nothing that the left can say to that 30 40 percent of the united states that's worse i mean i mean how bad can you get right so so then you have to ask why is that 30 40 not doing anything given that they think they live in whatever it is that they think yeah they think they're living they're run by a mass murderer wants to kill the american people okay let's go on to the next topic but it is no but it is interesting because it says what do you have to do to talk to that sector of people not about 9 11 but about changing the world that they live in i ask a lot of people that so you know you think you're being run by a maniac who wants to kill all the americans why don't you do anything about it the answer is always the same it's hopeless yeah there's nothing we can do i mean we're just victims of some powerful force but it is an important answer because it says something to us about what our agenda has to be we have to overcome that you have to say look there are things you can do about the real problems first of all figure out what the real problems are then you can do something about them but of course that's you know that for the person you're talking to that's a much harder choice it's easier to say i can't do anything i give up uh it's easier to say that than to say look there are a lot of things i can do and then go ahead and do them and they really are risky and so on it's that way with a lot of things i mean take say the uh that's very graphic it's very true this one's very graphic there are a lot of others not quite this graphic but i mean take say the israeli lobby story it's extremely convenient to believe that the israeli lobby controls the united states first of all what can i do you know the jews are so powerful i can't do anything the other thing is it preserves american innocence so we are the city on the hill it's just that we're being lit around by these jews what can we do and in many ways it's a very attractive position i mean it falls apart as soon as you look at it obviously but it doesn't make any difference and it does attract a lot of people on the left a lot of people yeah is there such a thing as human nature or are the groups or the people who deny the possibility of such a thing which includes a great many marxists correct in denying that there's any such thing as human nature well either there is such a thing as human nature or humans or angels from another planet or another universe i mean any organism that exists in the organic world has a nature that's what distinguishes it from other organisms so we're different from insects we're different from apes you know and so on and so forth and that can either be because we're like other organisms and we have some kind of a nature or it's because maybe god implanted us in the world or something like that those are the two options now you're absolutely right about marx people call themselves marxists in fact even well-known marxists like gramsci that there's no nature the human nature is just history if you can find a couple of phrases like that in marx they can't have meant what they said what they probably meant was a human nature can take many different have many different exemplifications depending on circumstances which is of course true the same is true of insect but but this has become a kind of a slogan that's considered sort of very it's considered that if you on the left they're what's called the left but if you deny that there's any human nature you're in favor of change if you say there is a human nature you got to be reactionary because you're saying you know people have to be rotten and have slaves and so on there's nothing like that in fact if you take a look at marx who they'd pay filthy to he was a dedicated believer in human nature i mean in fact he took most of his ideas right out of the enlightenment and the romantic period where he lived with then he carried him over that's his concept of alienation for example and you know somehow your fundamental nature is a need for creative work under your own control if it's dominated by others you get alienated labor you know the whole story comes out of that it's based on a conception of human nature uh is there any evidence for it well let's take the real study i mean let's let's assume we're not angels okay we're organisms so therefore there is human nature okay then we try to discover what it is well we do it the way we discover what b nature is it's much harder you know we're much more complicated organisms and unlike other organisms we can't do direct experiments but if you want to study the parts of human nature that have to do with the issues that matter in human affairs you can't do anything much in the way of comparative evidence because humans are just different there isn't much in the way of comparative evidence some but it's pretty thin and what there is is you know at an evolutionary distance of in 12 15 million years it's a long time other animals have changed and we've changed so you just don't get much i mean there's some comparative evidence but not much direct experimental evidence yes there's some in some areas i like to say language where i work yeah there's quite a lot of evidence there and that it's a unique human property there's nothing remotely like it in the animal world as far as we know but you can learn a lot about it because it's kind of isolated and you can separate it from other things actually many of the questions you'd like to ask about language are beyond experiment the traditional questions like for example how you and i are doing what we're now doing how are we able to produce freely uh new expressions that have maybe new ideas that have never been expressed and if you say it i understand it and so on and so forth what's sometimes called the creative aspect of language use which is a big topic and you know in in the tradition i mean descartes rousseau humboldt others but we don't uh we can't study that we can study the mechanisms that enter into it but not much about the as soon as you get the choice and decision and so on you're kind of at sea but there are a lot of topics you can study there are many that are beyond what we know how to study but there's got to be a nature otherwise we're kind of like either we're angels or kind of like amoebas you know anything that happens to us it just shapes us and we become some shapeless form a baby could grow up to be a penguin yeah or something yeah exactly i mean like there's a huge debate about whether there's an innate language faculty well you know i mean the answer to that is so trivial that you could have to wonder who's asking the question i mean like if say my granddaughter and her pet a chimp or you know songbird or whatever have exactly the same data how come my granddaughter picks out of the data something that's language related reflexively of course and then again reflexively ends up doing what you and i are doing whereas the other animal's going to take the first step well it's either a miracle or she's got a language faculty there's no other option but there's a huge debate about that even among people called scientists and people are extremely rational about themselves for some reason but yes there has to be a human nature if there wasn't you know it's it's stuff it's inconceivable and we can try to find out what it is well you know on issues that really matter to us uh the scientists don't tell us very much let me tell you a little ah so for example why are people say altruistic why do you help others okay there's some evidence from biology most of it just sort of gives some basis for what you know anyway so people tend to be more caring for their children and for their cousins let's see okay you can give a story about kin selection you know the genes that get proliferated and so on and it tells you something i mean it doesn't tell you why people on cape cod go into icy waters and storms to try to rescue stranded dolphins you know no kinder relation but they do it you know and it doesn't tell you why they spend huge effort in doing that but they don't care about a kid starving across the street you know they don't tell you a way to take care of your step children you know where you know their step children i mean so yeah it tells you something and there are some there's one there's one category reciprocal altruism worked on by robert trivers very good biologist which actually has some interesting results you know you help somebody else to help you you know so on most things you just have to rely on what we call intuition you know meaning introspection experience evidence of history whatever they may be and you can get some not vacuous speculations about what human beings are like what's the utility of the view that there is no human nature that causes it to be widespread particularly on the left the utility is that you can convince yourself if you're sufficiently irrational that that means we can introduce changes incidentally these views are extremely popular among a segment of the left the leninist segment they may deny it but the i mean these views are useful for people who want to be managers if they're no human nature then if i control people there's no moral barrier to it because if there's no human nature anyway i can determine what they should be and of course i'm completely benevolent because so there's there's no human age for other people there is for me so i'm benevolent and i know what's right and therefore i can kind of help these amoebas to turn into good things instead of bad things it's a very convenient doctrine for the managerial class which includes a lot of left unfortunately there are people who will respond to the idea of justice equity fairness people controlling their own lives and they'll say oh yeah it sounds nice but human nature precludes it uh human nature is such that um and i'm talking about you know caring people who will just say yeah of course i'd like to live in a better world like that but it's like asking a tree to fly it's not possible because there is a human nature and human nature is such that it precludes the possibility of that kind of situation and yields instead what we see all around us and we've seen through history how would you um try to talk to to counter to address that kind of view which is very widespread well that two ways first the way you counter you try to count you try to evaluate any factual statement you made a factual claim back it up uh do you have scientific basis for it do you have evidence for it well you know they're gonna say my evidence is all over i have a history of well that's what they're to say i have a history of suffering and conflict and you have a history of denial and benevolence and uh you know dedication to improving things you know history tells you all kinds of things doesn't tell you what you want at the same history can tell you the opposite if you want so you're picking out of history certain features which have an interesting consequence they prevent you from doing anything they're very self-serving i mean if nothing can be changed then it's fine if you just want to be a rand or something but you have no evidence for it because if you take a look at history and just as well find the opposite you can show in history that kropotkin was right and saying that mutual aid is a factor in evolution okay it's as good as the evidence to the contrary so you take the range of history and experience and so on and you can pick out something that will justify you in just looking out for number one or you can take something that would justify you in devoting yourself to the welfare of others it's your choice but you can't claim any argument from history and actually really take arguments from history seriously you know we could argue that how seriously he should do it but there is something noticeable i mean there is a tendency throughout history towards uh more and more commitment to justice equity and freedom and you see it pretty clearly and we even see it in our own lifetimes and like they say women's rights rights and minorities uh concern over future generations the environmentalist movement it was very limited 40 or 50 years ago now it's quite broad you go back further say say right to vote you know right to associate the right of freedom of speech you know uh by and large writes there has been a ten there's regression you know a lot of horrible things but one pretty noticeable tendency in history is towards more freedom and justice and equity but the interesting thing actually one of the interesting things is when you when people engage in antisocial behavior they have to and routinely do act as though that's not what they're doing they cover it with a rationalization well why would you need to do that if anti-social behavior was actually wired in and part of us we wouldn't alibi it would just say that's what we're doing i mean the wolf wouldn't say i'm eating the sheep because i'm trying to help the sheep they would just say i'm eating the sheep because i'm hungry that's right and the same thing goes for a human no nobody does that henry kissinger probably would say it on the cambodia bombing but you know if yeah that's a good argument why do you bother to rationalize what's the purpose of education in current society you know and say now in the united states we live in the united states so well we know the cliches about what it's supposed to be i'm not asking that what's the real purpose a lot of the purpose and this has become it's always been there but it's becoming quite striking in recent years is just a training for obedience and conformity actually there's been a substantial movement since the 1960s in this direction which the 60s were very frightening to elites liberal right wing whoever they didn't like the fact that too many people were just becoming too independent and they kind of they focused and the literature focuses on the crazy fringe which existed of course but what it tries but what really worried them was not the crazy fringe but the mainstream of the activism uh which was civilizing the country it was raising questions that were difficult and unpleasant you know war and sexism all sorts of things and but the real problem was people were just becoming too independent and in fact it was so overwhelming that they couldn't even keep quiet about it i mean there you talked about this before but there's a very important book which everyone should read by the first publication of the trilateral commission it's the liberal internationalist elite from trilaterals europe united states and japan and that's the liberal side liberal internationalists and they were worried about what they called excessive democracy groups of people who are usually passive and apathetic are beginning to enter the political arena and press their own demands too much pressure on the state we have to dampen it down we have to have more what they call moderation and democracy one of the things that concerned them very much was students and part of the proposal this comes from harvard university professor who contributed samuel huntington is uh that the problem was that um that we've been seeing failure of the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young their phrase now that phrase is usually not expressed it's sort of kept under wraps but there was enough concern so that it came out the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young aren't doing the job schools universities churches the young are not being indoctrinated properly and we have to do something about it now that was part of a very widespread phenomenon no runs over to the law and order efforts of nixon it includes the drug war which was motivated by this to a substantial extent including mythology that was contacted about an addicted army and all sorts of other things it shows up in raising tuitions and other disciplinary techniques uh for the young to try to indoctrinate them better it continues right to the present on the obama administration for example it's obama has stiffened the extended the bush proposals of what's called no child left behind which also came from liberals you know edward kennedy and others no child left behind is a kind of a euphemism which means trained to test don't allow children to be creative inventive explorer and so on and so forth make sure they pass that next test and in fact this pressure because the teacher's salary depends on it and you know a lot of pressure so evaluations and so on well that's all of us you know anyone who went to a good school like we do did got there because we were obedient enough to do this idiotic kind of stuff so yeah you have a test coming that's all crazy you memorize what you have to memorize two days later you forget it and then you go on you do what you feel like i mean anyone who hasn't had this experience is pretty unusual but now it's it's it's the framework for teaching and i think it traces back to the concern about the failure of the institutions to indoctrinate the young actually let me give you a personal example when i was in mexico i happened to give a talk at the unam the major university you know a couple hundred thousand students very high quality you know good campus you know uh it's free i also gave a talk at a city college university which is not only free but it's open anybody can go a lot of people aren't ready to go so there's proprietary courses maybe you've got to wait and so on and so forth also quite high quality i was impressed the city university was established by lopez obrador sort of leftist mayor but it's running you know nice campus doing good things research institutes and so on that's mexico poor country from there i just happened to go to california for talks california is maybe the richest place in the world it had a great public education system best anywhere it's being destroyed the in the major universities say berkeley and ucla tuitions are going up so high uh that it's becoming like private universities almost and furthermore they have big endowments and like private universities and very likely they'll be privatized so the kind of jewels in the crown will become you know harvard yale big elite universities the rest of the systems meanwhile being degraded so it's going down to a very good state system but it's being degraded now that's the richest place in the world that mexico is one of the poorer places in the world it's not for economic reasons any more than it's for economic reasons that mexico has maybe the only independent newspaper in the hemisphere and we don't have them except on the fringe these are social and economic decisions there are all kind of reasons for them could look into it but but they're worth considering and the educational system is being uh constructed consciously and in fact you know the legislative read the legislation and the commentary uh so as to essentially indoctrinate that's what training to test means i mean i can tell you personal examples from teachers i could actually even see with my grandchildren but teachers who i've talked to have told me that and students or parents have told me that you know i remember recently a parent told me that her her daughter like i forget what maybe sixth grade or something i was interested in some topic that came up in class and asked the teacher about it and you know wanted to think about it some more teachers i'm sorry we can't talk about that because we have to make sure that on this that doesn't come up in the test and you've got to pass the test yeah i'm sure that happens all the time okay those are forms of indoctrination imposing discipline and so on they've always been there in fact you know you go back to the origins of the one of the really impressive things about u.s educational history by comparative standards is that the u.s set up a mass public education system way before europe did and in fact has big research institutes research universities which europe didn't have and so on so it was well in advance and a lot of the economic industrial success of the united states is based on it but even at the very beginning during this period a large part of the purpose of the mass education system was to turn independent farmers into disciplined factory workers which was a big change they didn't like it these are huge changes there's a lot of battles and struggles about it you go back to the 19th century you know working people regarded wage slaver labor is approximately like slavery and even abraham lincoln you know it's different from slavery because it's temporary that was a pretty it was the position of the republican party you know and that was a very common view and to try to drive that out of people's heads and get them to be subordinated to big corporate institutions in which they're essentially cogs and a machine that was hard and a large part of the industrial of the education system was training for that that's not everything i mean you know there's creative teaching too so in this view the the current educational system while there are holes and they're you know basically it's it's um its aim is to um indoctrinate is the word you're using is to take it right is to take the incoming classes um to acclimate them to boredom uh to make them capable of enduring incredible boredom um obey orders follow discipline and so on um and to be skilled at the skills that are called for by the system that they're about to enter okay so if and in some cases that means that there's a small sector of people who are going to run the system out there who are conveyed certain kinds of skills that are associated with thinking and being open-minded and so on they're going to be the masters okay if that's the picture of education as we suffer it i guess is the right word in the united states and developed world and so on um what is good education what would be a system of education i mean take say graduate education in the sciences i take where i am mit one of the reasons i've never dreamed of going anywhere else is because i like the culture there it's a science-based university it's kind of research oriented students are expected to challenge they're not expected to copy down what they were told if they can get up in a class and say i i don't i think you're wrong i got a better idea that's good that's it doesn't work 100 but the you know the kind of culture is that's what you're supposed to cultivate and in fact that's what a good education in the sciences is and for a pretty good reason if it wasn't that the sciences would die i mean they survive on challenge creativity you know new ideas which often come from young people you know i mean any faculty member has got a great cell functioning if they don't learn from their students there's something wrong with them you know and that's what education ought to be in fact there will be across the board i suppose uh i know you don't like to give advice but nonetheless suppose somebody's getting out of school and they're thinking about becoming a professor a professional yeah and the person says i want to do i want to be socially relevant i want to be responsible i want to contribute to justice is becoming a professor a good route to follow or are the pitfalls and the dangers so bad that i'm likely to be dysfunctional and incapable of carrying out my will first of all remember that no human being is solely a professional you're also a human being so you can be an algebraic topologist and do extremely good work social socially relevant work i mean texas mit which you remember the faculty peace groups you know which were not very radical but by the standards of the day were you know kind of like off the spectrum we're mostly from mit faculty and mostly scientists professional scientists nobel laureates you know the person's asking you about becoming an economist a sociologist a psychologist but first thing is you know to be a professor or a carpenter or whatever you decide to be does not exclude being a human being so there's plenty that you can do but suppose you want to go into a profession that has immediate human consequences economics sociology history and so on it's not excluded it's going to be hard but there are people who do it you can give names you know there are people who go into those professions and do extremely good work there it's not so easy you know you do run into the filters and the barriers the question a little bit of course it's possible i have friends but um what does the person need to do to protect themselves from what occurs 90 of the time um which is the loss of those desires and the following out of you know the instructions to advance how does the person protect against that by just being honest and having a thick skin i mean you have to understand what the reaction is going to be if people don't like to be challenged i mean it's the same you know even in the i mean sciences are better in this respect but even there and uh in you know other field literary teaching languages whatever it may be uh being a professor can be a very comfortable job i mean you can be a professor in some ivy league university and do nothing but keep rewriting your thesis you know with sort of you know more data or you know you dug up some more documents or something like that you don't have to bother thinking you don't bother seeing students they never raise any interesting questions and and you're you're well off you know much better paid than because they're much better paid than they ought to be including me uh and uh it's a nice comfortable life so uh uh and and they're gonna like it if they're gonna be challenged and furthermore if you're say uh you know an economist and you challenge it you've got a lot of forces pressing against you not just the i mean i might say you know take say right now obama i mean when obama picked his economic advisors we're in the midst of a huge crisis we had to pick economic advisors who did he pick i mean did he pick nobel laureates who raise a couple of questions like joseph stiglitz or paul krugman or others you know not flaming radicals but they do raise some questions and they're nobel laureates very respected in their field i mean not even considered what he picked is the people who created the crisis larry summers you know robert ruman reuben big advisor ken geithner okay because uh you know he's in the pocket of the financial institutions i mean the ones who put him into power so you know he picked people who are going to do their job is kind of interesting to see how that worked you learn a lot about how the political system works just by paying some attention to what's you know again on the front pages so obama know the financial institutions which are now pretty much the core of the economy since big changes took place since the 70s they preferred him to mccain they were the core of his funding they sort of got him in and he's expected to work for them naturally and that's what the advisors were that's what the policies are you know you bail out goldman sachs by picking up the debts of aig and you know the whole story well you know it led to a lot of popular anger uh a lot of the popular anger is seriously misdirected but the anger is understandable i mean here we are bailing out blankfein and those guys the ones who created the crisis and they're making more profits than ever and giving out huge bonuses and so on after we bail them out not just tarp that's a small part of it you know they claim they paid back tarp that's a tiny part of it but here those guys who created the christ are doing great meanwhile we're suffering you know for manufacturing workers it's kind of like the great depression like one out of six unemployed so you know there's anger and obama is a politician he had to respond to it so uh he kind of responded by changing his rhetoric so you know started talking about greedy bankers and they shouldn't have big bonuses and so on uh he was taught a lesson very fast within days the bankers and financial institutions and others announced very publicly you know i read a front page story in the new york times you keep talking like that now we're going to destroy you we're going to drop you know we've funded you and other democrats we're going to not do it we're doing it to the republicans it's even people are supposed to be his friends ahead of j.p morgan chase's it's claimed a friend of his advisor and so said forget it you know you try talking like that you start talking about regulation even if you don't mean it now we're just going to get rid of you within days obama conceded he gave an interview to the business press bloomberg news which he then saw on the wall street journal and elsewhere on which he said oh you know these bankers are really fine guys they're my best friends he said i speak for the american people when i say they deserve their bonuses because we believe in the free market is that what the american people are saying american people wants to turn the shreds you know but i speak for the american people because we believe that these are great guys and they deserve their bonuses and everything else because we believe in the free market which doesn't believe in for a minute you know the succession of events was kind of like a caricature of the critique of the harshest critique of the political system all right so this leads into the next uh large area that i want to talk about with you which is uh the economy or economics i have a sequence of questions about economic institutions structures etc um let's start with the most obvious prominent one that people talk about in your view what's wrong with private ownership of the means of production well here i agree with the american working people in the 19th century i mean wage labor is fundamentally no different from slavery unless it's temporary which it was for a lot of people in the 19th century uh we should not have uh relations of uh hierarchy dominance subordination uh centralized control over the means of life people who give orders in other departments if you have private ownership of the means of production it means that first of all the people it's not just one person it's a institution so you get like maybe it's corporation or private business or something first of all internally it's essentially a totalitarian institution almost necessarily there's a group at the top maybe a person or a group they make the decisions they give orders people down the hierarchy get the orders transmit them at the very bottom you get people who are permitted to rent themselves to survive that's called a job wage labor and you get the outside community who's allowed to purchase what you produce and of course they're very heavily propagandized to make them want to consume it even if they don't so that's the nature of the system it's kind of about as close to totalitarianism as you can imagine and it gets even worse because when you get to the corporate system these are state-created institutions given great privileges by the state meaning you know the public to the extent that the system's democratic i mean you can argue maybe on technical economic grounds that it's worth giving them those privileges but that doesn't change the fact so just take the very nature of corporations corporations are based on what's called limited liability meaning if you're a participant in a corporation and the corporations say carries out mass murder there's limited liability the participants aren't guilty guilty of it so corporate manslaughter for example is a huge phenomenon but it's almost never punished i mean i could give some reference a few references on it that have not studied very much okay that's a big gift that and that's just the beginning i mean after that the state has given massive other uh benefits to corporations i mean it's it's now just embedded into american law in fact we we saw a really dramatic and striking example in january the supreme court decision on citizens united versus federal electoral commission the ultra right on the court they're called conservative but nothing with conservatism the ultra-right majority appointed by bush managed to railroad through with radical judicial activism just what they're alleged to oppose they managed to ram something through which in effect grants corporations the right to buy elections i mean they were doing it anyway but you know i do it all kind of complex and indirect ways now it says simply you can advertise for the candidate you like right to the end as much money as you want i mean when it's discussed it said corporations and unions but that's a bad joke so it's corporations uh and it was the uh the decision was supported by the aclu they were one of the groups that i think they presented a brief in favor of it and you know i kind of understand it in a way i mean it's based on the idea that goes back a century that corporations are what are called natural entities about a century ago the courts and the you know courts and lawyers uh kind of shifted to a view of corporations which had in fact been articulated but it was kind of like in the background but that it finally became sort of formalized a century ago and that is that corporations though they are state-created legal entities are natural entities meaning persons so they're identical with persons um humans of flesh and blood well humans of flesh and blood have say the rights of the you know bill of rights so therefore corporations do and this has already been happening like it didn't come out of the blue but it became kind of institutionalized furthermore a decision was made also by the courts that corporations are identical with the managers identical so the corporation becomes like not workers and community forget about them but not even shareholders it just becomes management which means the management of a corporation is a person with all the rights of persons uh okay now let's and then later legislation becomes much worse so the so-called free trade agreements which don't have much to do with free trade give corporations meaning corporate management rights that go way way beyond the rights of persons we could run through them but that's a core part of nafta and the world trade organization and so on so here you have these state-created entities which of course get massive support from the public in all sorts of ways like most of their research and development and so on which have rights way beyond persons the management does okay now comes the supreme court in january 2010 and says you the management of corporations can buy elections directly and the aclu approves because that's free speech after all they're persons you know persons have the right of free speech and so of course and in fact the the actual majority decision was extremely interesting the president noticed this or even legal commentators but the majority opinion written by justice kennedy includes the harshest critique of the media that i have ever seen goes far beyond any media critics i've ever i know of far beyond any i would have said or ed herman or norman solomon or anyone else what justice kennedy said is look he said media corporations like say cbs have the right of free speech we don't censor them so therefore why shouldn't general electric it's just you know they should have the right of free speech free speech means money you know that's quite interesting i mean cbs is given massive gifts from the government like access to the public airways many other things in addition to the normal rights of the corporation on the condition that they fulfill a public trust the public trust is you know convey information honestly and you know give opinions and so on now they're often criticized for not meeting the public trust which they don't but kennedy is saying although he probably doesn't even understand what he's saying he's saying they don't have a public trust i mean they're like general electric well general electric by law has a commitment namely to maximize profit if a executive of general electric deviates from that he's actually breaking the law so what kennedy is saying is you know cbs the new york times and so on have no public trust they're not supposed to prevent news or information or anything there's nothing they're supposed to do just make profit i mean have you ever heard a criticism of the media anywhere near that harsh but it kind of passed and the aclu approved of it because they're all caught up in some crazed ideology about these how these state-created artificial institutions are persons of flesh and blood i mean you know it shows you how i'm just barely sampling what happened it's actually much worse than this okay well these are you know parts of the you know parts of what's what's part of what's called a free enterprise system it's a bad joke but going back to your question you know once you have private ownership of the means of production that's the way it's going to go almost automatically in the united states maybe more extreme than other cases but you know the united states is a highly class conscious business class they're all marxists if you read the business literature it's like reading maoist's red book you know values may be inverted but the terminology is the same and they're fighting a bitter class war constantly they never relax for a minute and it makes good sense you know their job is after all the maximized profit and power can't criticize them for doing it in fact they're even legally bound to do it so can't criticize them but i mean these are just aspects of private enterprise plus the fact that they're just based on an intolerable principle hierarchy and domination okay so in the economic system that we're most familiar with we have the private ownership we have the hierarchies of decision making we have the misattribution of rights etc etc but then there was this thing that came along called socialism or 20th century socialism which still exists i guess in some in some places but has in many other places disappeared um what was wrong with that depends what you mean by it first of all the socialist movement that came along no i mean the actual systems that were established what do you mean like stop leninism freaking yeah it was just another form of tyranny and one of the first things that lenin he didn't hide it particularly in fact in the early 20th century you know before the years before the revolution lennon was pretty harshly criticized within the socialist movement because of his doctrines in fact he was criticized i think even trotsky said this because his doctrine is that there should be a dictatorship of the proletariat marxist notion which to marx meant something quite different you know something like producers take over production so there should be a dictatorship of the proletariat it should be run by the party which is the vanguard the party should be run by the central committee and the central committee should be run by me he didn't put in those words but essentially what it came down to and all for the best of reasons when he had if you look at lenin's writings he veers away from this in early 1917 so say from around april 1917 this is the course of the popular revolution you know he became much more libertarian so you read april theses state and revolution is practically anarchist texts then he got power and he went back to just what his doctrine was and you know among the first acts were dismantled not totally destroyed but take away the power of the soviets factory councils any of the popular institutions that developed during the revolutionary period dismantled the constituent assembly because there were social revolutionaries representing peasant interests and so on and finally turn the place into what was actually called a labor army now we've got to drive them to industrialization this was all very progressive i mean it all comes from a particular reading of marx not marx's reading but it doesn't matter the proletariat is the agency you know the engine of social change to freedom and justice and so on but that can't happen unless we have an industrial society of course you don't have a proletariat russia is a backward peasant society and kind of a third world colony of the west almost big army and stuff so unusual third world colony but structurally rather like that and marx himself was very much interested in the revolutionary potential of the peasantry in his last years and he worked a lot on it but all that was kind of suppressed by the you know the urban socialist and like that stuff but the picture was well we have to industrialize the country then we'll have an urban proletariat and then the iron laws of history start working and you get socialism and communism all kind of wonderful things oh very progressive trotsky went along with it and what he developed was a tyranny for good reason you know for principled reasons uh stalin turned it into a monstrosity but i think the basic structure was already there uh okay that's that be that's what was called socialism now you have two major propaganda systems in the world uh the hugest one by far is the western propaganda system you know u.s britain and so on overwhelming there's another propaganda system after 1917 the bolshevik propaganda system nowhere near as powerful but it had a lot of appeal especially in the third world you know they were industrializing being well intellectuals liked it for all kind of reasons so it did have appeal now these two systems disagreed on a lot of things but they agreed on one thing namely that this is socialism and they agreed on it for different reasons the west agreed on it because they want to defame socialism say look it's just this tyranny the bolsheviks wanted it because they wanted to kind of profit benefit from the moral appeal of socialism which was real now when the world's two propaganda systems agree on something it's kind of hard to disentangle yourself from it so okay this became what was called really existing socialism in fact probably the worst blow that socialism ever faced maybe up till hitler you know i you may remember in 1989 or so 88 roughly then when the russian system was finally collapsing i was asked by a leftist journal to write an article on you know what does it mean when socialism collapses and i wrote an article i said this is small victory for socialism if this goes then i explained why they refused to publish it and it finally appeared in an anarchist journal in montreal but i actually wrote something like that for the nation in the symposium they had i don't think anybody understood a word or what i was saying i mean even the people who were strong and stalinists and so on but i think that's true now you know out of the marxist movement there came another strain uh people like uh well-known people you know anton panakook is head of the second international educational system at carl cors others later here like paul maddock strict marxists but they had a different position they're very opposed to bolshevism in fact lenin had a famous pamphlet about them they called the ultra left infantile something or other that was kind of left you know kind of left-wing marxism wasn't very far from uh anarcho-syndicalism in fact it was a pretty close relation a lot of these people were very much in favor of the spanish revolution you know uh anarchist revolution but uh so there was that strain they wanted workers control and factory and factories you know elimination of the party hierarchy very anti-leninist but that was although that was some of the leading figures in the marxist movement that was disappearing i mean who's read hanukkah you know but uh you know you have okay who else but in fact the stuff didn't even reach the west until the 1950s but uh the uh and then there was of course the whole and you know uh left libertarian movements anarchists and narcosyndicalists sorts of other people but that didn't become socialism but socialism became lenin or else social democracy a german social democracy which you know was kind of reformist parliamentary social democracy which did do things for workers rights and women's rights and so on but it's within the framework of state capitalist democracies so that's that was socialism but the real socialist movement was pretty much crushed what's the word class mean to you or the concept what do you think it refers to what's class i know it has a history but i mean what i'm pretty simple minded frankly if if i can't see something in simple terms i don't understand it in these areas it's not like science uh if you take a look at society there are just different roles that people play i mean there are people who give orders and everybody would take orders actually and in fact it gets institutionalized so for example you know takes a corporate system again it's very strikingly institutionalized um there are the directors and the banks who own them and so on and so forth they basically set the framework they're the managers who sort of work out how to apply things they have their own initiative and they give orders and you go down the line and then people just take orders i mean they're not totally passive like workers can strike and all sorts of other things but the array of decision-making and control is fairly sharp okay those are classes by virtue of the position in the economy and the roles that people play they have different interests opposed interests and so use different terms for other kinds of hierarchy and domination so let's take a patriarchal family so maybe the father gives the orders and the mother follows the orders and the kids do what they're told okay we don't call that class yeah but but it's but that's just a terminological point and it's another illustration of the same kind of structural relationship economic classes and then there's others okay is classlessness possible in an economy that's kind of like asking whether slavery is necessary you go back to the 18th well you know 18th century if you asked people so how can you have a society without slaves i mean can you look around and they see them everywhere they're everywhere now what can you do and furthermore it's benevolent in fact look slave owners had arguments in fact good arguments i don't think anyone's ever given an answer to them so slave owners argued that they're more benevolent than northern manufacturers for good reasons i mean when you own a slave you have capital and you want to take care of your capital you guys the northern so we're nice to our slaves because we need them you guys northern manufacturers you don't you just rent people you you have no responsibility for them you want to throw them out you throw them out they throw them out you get others in fact that revealed itself very dramatically in american history in a period that's kind of suppressed although we have the information i mean if you you told me you taught in school that slavery ended in the civil war it did for about 10 years by 1877 there was a compact made by north and south that the south could do what it felt like essentially so they reinstituted slavery but they reinstituted in a much more brutal form what they did is criminalize black life so if a black man is standing on a street corner he can be arrested for vagrancy if he looks at a white woman he can be arrested for attempted rape you know or something and it didn't matter if you're you know you were in for a ten dollar fee you'd never get out because you couldn't pay the corrupt judge and you couldn't pay the lawyer you didn't have any money anyway so it was essentially permanent servitude these criminalized blacks were then handed over to industry and that's a large part of american industrial development this big southern industrialization based on mines you know steel u.s steel and so on a lot of it's just based on agriculture of course they went back right back to the cotton fields i mean this is a large part of american indus uh economic history that's base and it was worse than slavery for exactly the reasons that the slave owners had always argued when we own these guys we take care of them when we just pick them up from the jails we don't give a damn about them you know if they die of starvation fine we got more from the jails uh so you had a period worse than slavery it went up to the second world war it was not small big impact on american industrial history uh during the second world war you needed what's called free labor you know you needed them for wartime industry so okay there was you know blacks sort of got out of the criminalized slavery and then there was a wartime post-war boom uh mostly based on the state sector but it took place like the 50s and the 60s there was a big economic boom and there were jobs for you know black men and auto factories and so on yeah pretty decent jobs you know get a car you know a home and so on well by the 1970s that was over uh there were social and economic decisions made to essentially de-industrialize the country and turn it into a financial center so if you go back to say 1970 the the role of the financial institutions in gdp gross domestic product was i don't know maybe three percent and now it's like a third and that's changed all sorts of things that can comet in fact was ascending industry out of the country i mean two years ago the head of ibm montgomery i think testified before congress interesting testimony what he said is you know in the earlier years what was good for american corporations was good for the country because you get jobs and so on and so forth says now it's not true anymore what's good for the corporations bad for the country and ibm is a perfect example i think they have like 70 of their employees in india and not not just i mean the ones that they hire themselves you know they're overseas you can take a rowboat and go out to your job and this is striking in the case of ibm because the the corporation exists thanks to huge public subsidies i mean that's how computers were developed and on and on so here they are a corporation that exists thanks to fantastic public subsidies for their own economic reasons it's better to move production overseas you know dell for example is one of the biggest exporters from china and so it goes but so it's not even a pretense anymore that what's good for the corporation is good for the country okay all this happened the result is that first say poor working people which means heavily black later hispanic there's no jobs so what do you do throw me to jail just like uh after reconstruction that's the main reason the level of criminalization and the you know of incarceration in the united states is shot out of sight around 1980s kind of like other industrial countries now it's maybe 10 times as high as most of them that's mostly black and hispanic on sort of drug charges you know kids picked up with a joint or something and they become slave labor again they're farmed out to corporations you know in fact often private jails which is against international regulations but it happens anyway so it's kind of like a if you take a look at the whole history of african americans it's approximately what it is well okay uh going back to the question why be opposed to slavery no that wasn't the question the question is is classlessness possible well was slavery possible was it possible to get rid of slavery it was possible but there are a lot of pressures that prevent it so technically we didn't have slavery after 1877. but in practice we did up shot you did you want to communicate that while it's maybe possible to get rid of collapselessness it's pretty much hopeless i'm getting rid of getting rid of formal slavery was progress i mean blacks are better off than when they were slaves so yes improvement but the kind of improvements you can make remember that the people who own and manage the society are going to fight back they're not going to give up right so you got to keep struggling can we eliminate class in other respects sure why not why can't workers run factories in fact it's a very live issue right now these issues are just below the surface right now so let's be concrete there's an economic crisis and there's an environmental crisis and it's agreed across the board that one way the united states has to try to deal with this is to overcome our hopelessly backward infrastructure backward as compared with europe and japan so we have a terrible transfer transportation system was designed that way it was designed and you know like massive social engineering projects after the war to be highly uh inefficient in efficient from the point of money making but based basically on wasteful use of fossil fuels that's why you have suburbanization you know destroy the railroads and so on and so forth major state corporate projects all right that's now kind of like can't go on you know we gotta sort of at least catch up to the rest of the industrial world so you need high-speed rail okay how do you get high-speed rail well obama sends his transportation secretary to spain so that he can use federal stimulus money meaning taxpayer money to buy at this make contracts in spain for spain you know it's like not some superpower to provide us with high-speed rail at the very same time obama's continuing to follow the deindustrialization policies from the 1970s you know closed down gm plants and so on and so forth it's kind of like so couldn't couldn't imagine a more massive criticism of the socio-economic system destroying a factory doesn't just mean destroying the factory it means destroying the workforce you know the community the community is usually built up around the factories and so on well there's an answer the people in those factories could take over the plants run them themselves convert them to high-speed rail production it's a task but not an insoluble one like conversion of american industry to wartime production in the 1940s was a far bigger task and was done very successfully it might need some community federal support okay a fraction of what's paid to the banks so it's fairly feasible it it has to at least be in consciousness you have to at least be able to think about it and then to proceed to do it and it's not impossible there have been steps there are first of all there are examples of it you know scattered through the country there are such examples and there are cases which came pretty close to working the most important one i know is in ohio youngstown about 30 years ago i guess youngstown steel the town was sort of based around the steel industry steel town u.s steel decided to move somewhere else there were a lot of protests i mean strikes you know i think there were even sit-downs you know a lot of community protests and finally uh an effort led by stoughton lind radical lawyer uh it went to try to take it to the courts so that to try to get the courts to agree that the uh so-called stakeholders you know the community in the workforce could take over the corporate institution that was being dismantled and i went to the courts and they finally lost in the courts not for any economic reason no they lost because they didn't have enough public support you know if they had enough public support it could have won well you know those things are you know they're right they should be on everyone's fingertips right at this minute because that's what's happening in the country i mean if we want high-speed rail and we don't have to go to spain to buy it with taxpayer money american workers are have the skills and the ability and the managerial capacity and so on to do it themselves but okay that would be uh from some point of view that's a reformist measure from another point of view it's a very radical measure it's a move towards eliminating uh class society and it's you know it's not that utopian the biggest obstacle is the absence of consciousness organization uh the biggest obstacle is the other side is an obstacle yeah they're going to give away they're of course an obstacle sure they're going to fight the whole yeah they're going to fight to hold what they own but that's true of everything i mean that's why the business classes have been fighting like mad to get rid of something like say social security okay um do you have any i don't know whether to call it advice what do you think activists seeking a better economy might usually focus their enemy energies on you just answer that in some sense as one example anything any serious mistakes have been made in left approaches to the economy um that should be corrected well the biggest mistake is non-existence it's very hard to find left approaches to the economy in anything like except for very small groups you know or i mean sometimes large number of people but you know not organized for activism so yeah that these popular forces have to be created i mean there's experience after all even in american history like say take the 1920s in the 1920s the labor movement was basically destroyed woodrow wilson again the great idealist he played a major role in destroying the unions which he hated and but it was pretty dead in fact there's a famous book of labor history by david montgomery one of the great labor historians called the rise and fall of the american labor movement or something like that and by the fall he means the 1920s it was pretty much gone it was so much gone that right-wing europe and british newspapers couldn't believe how workers are oppressed here they're killed and so on well you know it changed in the 1930s big revitalization but not fast the depression hit in 1929 it wasn't until around five or six years later that you really got substantial labor organizing cio organizing for example some radicalization of the afl and you got to the point where you had sit-down strikes sit-down strikes are frightening sit-down strikes are one step before taking over the factory so as soon as that started happening uh business got nervous new deal legislation got passed valuable legislation but a large part of it was just trying to damp down what's going on we're not five years into this recession yet it could happen of course there were things then existed that don't exist now uh one of them which we're not allowed to talk about was that there was a communist party uh now you know the communist party was all tied up with stalin worship but for most people in the party here that didn't mean much i mean i can remember it is my personal experience now like my aunts and uncles who were you know unemployed workers or in the communist party and they'd say the right words about russia but they didn't give a damn what happened in russia they were interested in unions civil rights you know rights for blacks workers rights getting a vacation and a union uh establishment that's what they were interested in and in fact the communist party was right in the forefront of almost anything that was happening whether it was civil rights you know rights for blacks union organizing and so on well that was crushed we call it mccarthyism but it started before that because the idea that you could have a millet radical worker-based force was intolerable to american power liberals conservatives anybody but and that doesn't exist now but it can be reconstructed some other terms without worship of some foreign power now just a few questions about the political system um in elections you sometimes suggest voting for people who you simultaneously have uh devastating criticisms of as a lesser evil as something that is uh is the best one can do in the short term um but then there's also the problem of um of trying to um build long-term institutions of resistance including within the electoral arena say for instance a third party so the question is how do you weigh the benefits how in your own mind how do you weigh the benefits of of supporting a a liberal corporate candidate who's much better than a than the other as against supporting a a third party candidate or a process that is completely independent of that dynamic to make your choice i mean what is it that's going through your head when you come up with that i think i don't think there's any formula that depends on particular circumstances like texas a 2008 i happen to live in massachusetts it's a safe state you know how it's going to turn out so i felt free to vote for the green party which at least is making some kind of effort whatever one thinks about it to [Music] develop a lasting alternative um if i was in a swing state say pennsylvania i probably would have voted for obama because i think it would have been very dangerous in the short term to have mccain and palin in there um not that i like obama i think as don't have to say but uh other other times i just haven't you know just kept away from it didn't see anyone voting at all sometimes there's a point sometimes there isn't depends on the options the alternatives so for example if gore had been elected in 2000 it's not obvious that we would have gone to war in afghanistan and iraq we might have but not so clear if mccain had been elected in 2008 we wouldn't just have a majority uh ultra right in the court we'd have an unbreakable unbreakable majority so there are and there are many choices like that first of all it's not a high level decision i mean i think it's the kind of it's like a tenth rate decision yeah so other things are way more important but you know if you want us the 10 minutes you're going to spend on this decision i think there are a lot of you know options to consider i mean the united states is just not a functioning democracy but in a functioning democracy uh which which do exist i mean bolivia for example people vote but that's just a break in an ongoing struggle so you know you vote and you go back to what you're doing uh in the united states the way the thing is set up is not supposed to be any participation you just you know big hoopla about the vote you know signs all over the place work on getting out the vote you push the lever and you go home well that's a serious failure of democracy so you want to try to overcome that democratic deficit is sometimes called the lack of functioning democracy it's pretty striking how how it's been achieved in the united states in fact the very concept of democracy is almost non-existent so it takes a uh primaries i mean let's imagine you had a functioning democracy with our own institutions i mean our institutions you know they could be democratic it's not that they're inherently undemocratic so political institutions you have say the new hampshire primary in a democratic society what would happen is the people in a town in new hampshire would get together in their own organizations and assemblies and groups whatever they are and take off a little time from whatever political and other activities they're engaged in and say okay let's work out what we would like to see in the next election and they'd come up with some sort of program we'd like to see this then if some candidate says i would like to come to town to talk to you they would say well you can come if you want to listen to us and the candidate could come and they would explain to him what they want and then they would say if you can give a convincing reason why you'll support these things we'll consider voting for you or maybe we'll have our own representative we don't care about you uh that would be a functioning democracy and what happens is totally different uh nobody meets in the town the candidate and his pr representatives and so on announced that he's coming to or she sometimes is coming to a town in new hampshire and you know they kind of gather people together and the people sit there and listen to the candidate saying how wonderful i am i'm going to do all these great things and nobody believes a word and then they go home well you know that's the the opposite of democracy and in fact we see it all the time i mean take say april 15th i mean in a functioning democratic society that would be a day of celebration that they hand in your taxes you would be saying okay we got together we worked out some plans and programs that we think ought to be implemented and we're now participating and you know providing the funding to get these things done that's a democracy in the united states a day of mourning it's a day when this alien force you know the government which comes from mars or somewhere uh is uh arriving to steal from us our hard-earned money and use it for their own purposes whatever they are that's a reflection of the fact that the concept of democracy is kind of like not even in people's minds no i'm kind of exaggerating it's not quite this sharp quote it's pretty close it's a very great success you could discuss in a similar fashion the voter turnout or the reasons why people vote who for who they vote for so voter turnout what do you think take voter turnout i mean there's a lot of effort to get voter turnout and people go for all kind of reasons i mean sometimes the reasons are quite interesting like take there was an election in you know which people regard as having a startling result in massachusetts in uh january senate senate election which gave the republicans what's called the 41st seat well that concept alone is interesting uh the there's two formal political parties in the country democrat and republican the republicans have lost any pretense almost of being a traditional political party they have almost no policies i mean the policy is no to whatever you produce they're kind of like the old communist party and that party discipline is almost unanimous almost everything is unanimous they haven't had you know 40 votes they had now they have 41 almost invariably unanimous doesn't matter what the issue is maybe appointing somebody to some post in the bureaucracy so it can function the democrats who are kind of there are groups called moderate democrats they're pretty much the ones who used to be called liberal republicans uh their the party alignment has shifted so that the liberal republicans and the traditional usage have been essentially expelled from the party and they've switched over and become what are called moderate democrats meaning republican old-fashioned republicans so the moderate democrats sort of go along with a republicans on all sorts of things then there are the democrats that are called left almost entirely kind of centrist pro-business democrats a couple of stragglers now they've all agreed to require a super majority on everything that means the majority rule can be blocked and is blocked if unless you have a super majority and the technique that's used as the filibuster well the filibuster had been around for a long time was occasionally used it's now so filibuster has now become kind of like the signing statements i mean they had existed in the past the signing statements are when a president says okay i'll sign this legislation but i'm not going to follow it for this and that reason there had been such cases but with bush too it became something totally novel i think there were more signing statements than in the preceding 42 presidencies it just became routine and obama's picking it up and the filibusters become the same it's just a way to for this party disciplined party of no to insist on a supermajority for anything in fact it got to the point where one republican senator shelby just announced he's going to hold up every presidential nomination i think 70 nominations routine nominations uh and of course he asked for some special gift for his state unless you meanwhile they're saying out of the other side of their mouths we don't like pork but unless you give me this gift i'm going to hold up every nomination and that works with a party that keeps the party disciplined you know okay so brown the guy elected in massachusetts he was the 41st vote that means even a super majority won't work now the vote has been it was it was described as being you know kind of like a popular rebellion against the government the leftist government taking over that's not what happened what happened was quite interesting uh first of all a flood of money poured in toward the end from the financial institutions and that's for the reason we already discussed obama had started making some mild noises about the greedy bankers and so on and part of the reaction was to say okay you talk like that we're going to eliminate your super majority so money a lot of money poured in if you look at the voting which was you know the data were published within a couple of days brown the republican won primarily for two reasons the affluent suburbs uh he were very much engaged and very supportive of brown so they're condemning obama because although he's giving him a lot he's not giving him enough so we want even more that's the affluent suburbs the urban areas which are mostly democratic you know working class poor voting was very low and they were essentially telling obama you're giving everything away we want to bother with you we're not even going to take part particularly interesting was the union vote uh there was it was lower than usual but the majority of the union vote went to brown and it's been discussed in the labor press the good labor press like libra notes you know they interviewed people and union leaders and so on the uh working people were just furious about the health care program now you know it's it's portrayed as a critique of the health care program in fact people don't like the health care program but because it doesn't go far enough like considerable majorities of the general population certainly obama voters even more were in favor of a public option medicare buy-in and other things which obama just can't so they don't like it because it didn't go far enough that's the majority of the population not exactly what the headlines say but in the case of the union leaders activists working people in unions they were furious because obama has been willing to give up everything practically except for one thing on which he's been a insistent namely taxing them for their health care plans it's called taxing what's called an excise tax on cadillac plans the cadillac plans are not what rich people get it's what working people have succeeded in eking out of their employers through the union in trade-off for giving everything else away so part of the trade-off in the class war is in the unions this is a bad error the unions from way back is to give up on almost everything but at least to get some benefits for your own people not for others just for your own it's one of the reasons we don't have a national health care program is because of the focus of the unions on ourselves not others like very different from canada same unions but in canada the same unions insisted on health care for everybody in the united states they kind of bought into the corporate systems okay healthcare for us the result is that unionized workers get pretty decent you know by u.s standards pretty decent health care plans okay obama wants to and the thing he insists on they'll give away everything else insists on taxing them pretty heavily so of course union workers are furious so they voted for brown they're shooting themselves in the foot but yeah but the voting is understandable but you can't i mean the blame for the irony so to speak really is the real left i mean the anger is justified the the willingness to sort of rebel and get upset is justified it's perfectly sensible there's just no avenue that does anything except make it worse yeah and that's generalizes over the country so you know i've been saying for some time and other people have too it's it's a serious mistake for the left to make fun of the tea party movement and sarah palin and the rest of them i mean it's easy to make fun of them a lot of it's just kind of comical and ridiculous but that's not the point what we should be doing is ridiculing ourselves i mean these are people who ought to be organized by the left um most you know there's all kind of groups like there's militias and you know black helicopters and so on but i think at the core of it it's just legitimate grievances you know these are people who've worked hard all their lives done everything they're supposed to uh their lives are they're being shafted they have been for 30 years you know wages have stagnated declined benefit you know services are collapsing they never were very good and schools are lousy what's happening to us you know why is this happening to me well i mean they get an answer from say glenn beck you know the rich liberals are taking over everything they don't care about you and they want to give it away to illegal immigrants and so on and so forth all right that's a coherent answer when you listen to him it's an internally coherent answer it says something so okay they accept it the liberal democrats aren't going to give them an answer they're going to say this is happening to you because for the last 30 years we've been working with the corporate system to de-industrialize society and enrich bankers and so on we're not going to hear that yeah and the left is just not telling them anything or it's trying to but it's not doing it that's extremely dangerous it kind of has a whiff of the late weimar republic to it and so ridiculing it doesn't make sense so it's like the union workers in massachusetts shooting themselves in the foot as became clear right away i mean as soon as brown was elected he managed to get in super fast with the help of the so-called moderate democrats in time to help vote down an appointment for the national labor relations board which is the one pro-union relatively pro-union appointment that was likely to get into the nlrv nlrb since reagan has just been it used to be one point some device for supporting workers rights and it's almost eliminated but if you eliminate you know the last pro-union person gets worse so when they were voting for brown that's in fact what they were voting for but that wasn't what was in their minds what was in their minds was anger at obama for insisting on one thing namely taking away their health benefits but if you go back to the late 60s and you come all the way forward we're talking 40 years in those 40 years there's been a left there's been leftists there's been people who are critical of all these things that you're talking about and yet they if we are honest about it haven't produced an awareness or mechanism or pretty much anything that that speaks to the broad population even at a moment when it is furious and it is irate at the government at employers at at wall street and so on and so forth so either we've been doing something wrong or it's hopeless i mean if we've been doing everything right and gotten to the place where we are that's not a very good sign it would be much better if we had if we've made mistakes if we have have you know failed to operate as well as we should have and therefore there's things that can be done so the question arises in in trying to to improve the political system and also in trying to just raise political consciousness and therefore activism in broad populations what do you think um should have been done that hasn't been done in these domains or shouldn't have been done that was done in other words what mistakes or what failings do you think are responsible for the mess that we're in well on the left such it is does talk about these issues but it's uh on the left is just a conglomeration of uh various a lot of people count knows it's a lot of people but very scattered and issue oriented so there's a part of the left that's dedicated to gay rights there's another part that's dedicated to environmental issues there's another part that's uh you know concerned with uh nuclear weapons i mean you know aggression or whatever maybe there's a whole lot of issues but they tend to be kind of separated there's no you can't really identify an organized left that's addressing the kinds of concerns that the general population very rightly has so what part of the left has been talking constantly clearly to the right people about the fact that the financialization of the economy from the 70s has led to some stagnation basically of real wages and incomes and deterioration of limited benefits and so on in fact a large part of the issue oriented left unfortunately has alienated this population i mean we may not like it but the fact is that a large part of that population is racist is sexist you know as opposed to gay rights and so on and while working on those issues is correct it's got to be done in a way which recognizes the reality of the audience that is out there all right moving on to one of those areas race in america racism you've already talked about it to a certain extent um what is race what is race and racism i mean it just what is it well we know what it is i mean it's the first little you know race is i may hear the posts and honor this is sort of right it's a social construction we decide that there's different races you can a lot of different ways you can categorize people uh we do it by you know color or hairstyle or whatever it is uh and it's um it's a deep strain in american history you know it goes right back i've talked about it goes right back to slavery never really changed but it's real and uh it shows up very strikingly in people's attitudes people's attitudes are quite different from what is usually claimed there's good one of the things that political scientists do pretty well is study popular attitudes in extensive polling and they publish straight and interesting results actually the current issue of the main political science journal political science quarterly happens to have a an article reviewing a lot of poll studies on attitudes towards social justice issues and the results are pretty interesting and it turns out that contrary to what is commonly claimed the population is basically kind of social democratic in their attitudes so and in fact the most interesting part is the author identifies the people who call themselves anti-government you know right-wing libertarian get the government off our backs so that kind of thing so just looking at their attitudes they tend to be in favor of more aid for more federal spending for education for health for uh helping poor people you know for social security pretty much the same things that liberals would say but there's an exception two exceptions they think we're giving too much to blacks and we're giving too much to people on welfare well it's like it has no relation to reality but we can see where it comes from now it comes from unremitting propaganda that's based on traditional racism you know the blacks are getting everything they're taking our country away from us and on this sort of reaganite type uh you know extremist propaganda about the welfare you know the black mother and her cadillac coming to steal your money at the welfare office or you have enough propaganda like that and you you get this split and attitudes now notice i'm talking here about the people who regard themselves as anti-government you know right-wing the general population is similar but less striking in a way and that shows up on other things too actually when you ask people they didn't happen to in these polls but it's been done before what do you think you ought to give to say poor mothers with dependent children of course it's more than it's all it's way more than we actually do that shows up on foreign aid too regularly you ask people what do you think about foreign aid they say we're giving everything away to those undeserving people who are ripping us off now what do you think we ought to give them like maybe 10 times as much as we do you know so you and these are failures of the left too you know you're supposed to educate people but what i think it means is that the audience is there you know people's general attitudes are kind of more or less social democratic okay what about in parallel questions of sexism plays a big role and there's it's one of the real achievements of the 60s actually the post-60s movements i mean this is were raised in the 60s in an interesting way i mean a lot of well a lot of people know way more about this than i do but from what i could see a lot of the i think the feminist movement really took off in the 70s and later and part of it at least was a result of sexism in the left i mean you know i i remember from the resistance movement it was very striking you know the women were supposed to you know write the you know hand out the leaflets and so on in fact it was even ultra sex this in some cases and the men the resistors were doing something difficult and dangerous and courageous and at one point by the end of it they were kind of being told look you guys are oppressors that was very hard for a lot of people to take i mean it led to real breakdowns here we are courageous moral doing something really hard it turns out we're oppressors it was psychologically quite difficult but i think out of that came at least one strain of what became the feminist movement there were others and it took off and there'd been a lot of changes i mean there's a lot of problems but countries very different from what it was in the 1960s in this respect and you could see it at places like say mit i mean like when i got there in the 50s mit was white males you know well-dressed differential you know working on their whatever it was particularly professional concerns uh if you walk down the halls now it's half women maybe a third minorities informal dress informal relations a lot of activism very scattered like everywhere but you know booths here and there are doing this then the other thing okay those are changes we've already done some ecology stuff do you believe global warming is occurring largely made largely human made and susceptible to human correction i have to ask the question because of course there's a growing number of people who would say no i don't have any particular technical expertise but i don't see the slightest reason to doubt the evidence that's been presented or to question the overwhelming consensus of scientists it just so yeah i take it for granted that it's anthropogenic and substantial measure then we have the follow-up pretty obvious question how do you understand the seeming willingness of government and of those people who are in position to actually by virtue of their own activity affect what goes on in the world rich powerful people to uh to just permit the likely calamity or at least watch it occur um my feeling is that uh say ceos of corporations like exxonmobil or general elect or whatever they have about the same beliefs as you know college professors on most things so yeah they know it's happening and they don't really question it and there is a kind of a standard answer which is not totally false that they're concentrated on more short-term problems so yes they have to make sure the bottom line is good enough next quarter or else they lose their salaries and that sort of thing that part is true but it doesn't go deeply enough you go deeper it gets back to what we're talking about before this is part of a market economy i mean we don't really have a market economy it's kind of like a quasi-market economy but there are market elements in the economy and among those market elements is you simply have to pursue short-term interests or else you're out somebody else will pursue them i mean like suppose there are say three car companies uh you know for the general motors and chrysler let's say let's imagine they're comparable and suppose one of them say gm says okay i'm going to devote resources to making better cars 10 years from now okay they're not going to be around 10 years from now that's the way market systems work to the extent that there is limited competition as there is you are compelled to focus on short-term gain an advantage over others or else you're just out of the game in fact in the u.s legal system it's a legal requirement for the ceos so yeah as part of the quasi-market system we have you're just going to have to avoid these things and economists have a word for it it's called externalities to sort of put in the footnote and it's true of every transaction well it's also i mean the more extreme version is i'm going to pay its i meaning the head of whatever it is general motors i'm going to pay attention to the fact that what we do influences global warming that's paying attention to something that affects everybody else my profits go down i'm out of business no i can't do that you know i mean the financial crisis is a perfectly good example but i could want to do that and not do that but if i do that i'm out i mean like take say the financial crisis i mean now the you know big economists talk constantly about the systemic risk we didn't pay enough attention to systemic risk yeah of course not you can't you know and in fact this was pointed out years ago i mean like 10 years ago two pretty well-known economists john eadwell and lance taylor wrote a book called global finance at risk and basically what they pointed out is that because systemic risk isn't considered it's an externality you just there's got to be a catastrophe i mean that means you're under pricing risk there's more of it than you should take uh and so yes of course it'll crash and then there's other factors like perverse incentives and so on and so forth but it's just like built into the system yes if say you and i make a transaction maybe you sell me a car or something i mean if we got our brains functioning we'll try to make a good deal for ourselves but we're not paying attention to the effect on somebody else like congestion and pollution and gas prices going on the system that's not the nature unless the system includes that which markets don't one of the very well-known inefficiencies of markets like every student learns in freshman course and then you forget about it this explains why the ceo the powerful people in the economy regardless of their desires personal desires they may be horrified by global warming can't do anything to deal with it but there's something or can't do anything in that domain and what they do is interesting like take petroleum which is considered you know very progressive in this respect what they're trying to do is to buy into the alternative technology market figuring okay that's going to be a profitable market so we'll work on solar collectors there is one other revenue so take for instance a company that years back has somebody at the head of it who's anti-racist he can't in fact hire blacks in the united states at a higher rate than they're getting because once again he's now you know depressing so even though he desires to do it the market prevents him from doing it because other people won't do it and he'll be out competed but the government could then pass a law saying you have to so what they'll do is what they'll move is move their production to mexico and then to china and so on but you know there's actually pretty interesting study i mean tom ferguson's work which is some of the best work i know in political economy uh what he's for example he did a lot of studies on the new deal and it's something that shows up elsewhere too what he found is that during the new deal roosevelt and the new deals were getting pretty good support from a particular sector of industry uh high-tech internationally oriented industry like swope head of ge was quite strongly new deal on the other hand they were passionately opposed by low-tech labor-intensive domestically oriented industry and for just this reason you know say for general electric you know capital intensive uh okay they want a disciplined workforce they want disrupted so and it's not a big expense for them so okay we'll have unions uh they're internationally oriented so they wanted the export promotion policies of the new deal for a manufacturing industry it's quite the opposite labor costs make a big difference they don't want the labor force unionized they don't care much about international trade so you get this difference of political support but we still come back to the government because the government is in is slightly different um not to say there aren't constraints on it but it is still slightly different and i could certainly imagine maybe it's naive but i could certainly imagine a president obama or others you know it doesn't matter who mccain anybody marshaling the office the bully pulpit and everything else to scare the bejesus out of the country on global warming um you might not in other words that might be manipulative etcetera but you can imagine doing it and you could imagine as a result a powerful upsurge which would then create a context in which corporations are you know sort of the market dynamic is overwhelmed and and you get some results but they don't seem to be doing it well it did happen pixel al gore he tried he tried and he was smashed he became denounced as a liberal elitist out of touch it takes jet planes you know the point is they're always strong counterforces and defamation is one of the easiest things to do you can make up lies as much as you want and you can make people look ridiculous and so on if you have enough clout so okay that's what happened uh yeah it could have worked but you know it would require a lot of popular organization actually roosevelt did it to a limited extent but he did it but he had a mass popular movement behind him you know the labor movement really did organize and there were plenty of other movements the country became pretty radical so yeah he had a basis for going after the bankers and so on and instituting some reasonable legislation you know glass-steagall social security wagner act and others not trivial right it's an offshoot question you're not a vegetarian right do you think there's a moral case for vegetarianism and do you think it might emerge i think there's a moral case for it and you know a ton of letters that come to me about it uh but there's a moral case for a lot of things like there's a moral case for the fact that if you look at deaths from starvation human deaths among children forget everyone else among children alone deaths from starvation or starvation starvation-related diseases are about twice the level of rwanda not a hundred days but every day okay that's a problem now you can say well let's deal with both and mention a thousand other problems let's deal with them all well you have time and energy happen to be finite which means you have to pick and choose you can't do everything out of the question so you have to set priorities and say in this case uh suppose i have a choice between devoting my i could pick 20 other cases let's pick this one suppose you have a choice between devoting energy and effort to writing books about and you know giving talks about and so on uh trying to save the children which is not pennies a day was known nothing to it very little effort to save the uh to stop the double rwanda style killing among children every day and there's a choice between that and essentially carrying out mass genocide of domesticated animals because that's what vegetarianism means it's an effort to reduce animal suffering but the fact of the matter is that suppose we all became vegetarians the first thing you'd have to do is eliminate almost all domesticated animals because they're well they're raised to eat for eating meat that's why we have you know cows chickens sheep and so on and so forth so somehow you've got to get rid of them that you can't just let them reproduce and proliferate or you know but first of all i'll starve to death if you don't feed them so it'll be genocide anyway uh so there is a big and that's that's one of the immediate consequences of vegetarianism you can pretend i don't notice but it is so okay these are things to balance does the fact that a significant number of seemingly and presumably really well-meaning caring sensitive people put huge amounts of time into concerns around animals and not into concerns about humans strike you as one more ex one more indication of the failure of the left because they basically feel maybe we can succeed on this front this front's hopeless they can't succeed on that front yeah but i think that yeah look i don't want to criticize particular people actually my own children for example one one of them's vegetarian the other semi-vegetarian okay they made their choices find choices some respect it they do other things which are great you know and the people can make those choices and maybe a sensible choice in their own lives maybe they can spend time we're talking about that i'm talking about people who are animal rights activists who are devoting time and energy and organizing to that their priorities i said my priorities we all have to do that i think we can understand each other's reasoning we may have different judgments about how priorities ought to be ranked another thing that you will encounter as an organizer is the person who will feel that the deck is stacked that it's just impo that that what you do has no efficacy it has no possibility of succeeding and they will again try to argue from history saying well look there's crime there's torture there's poverty there's recycled forms of oppression um no matter what you do it's like rolling a rock up in the hill eventually it's going to come down and crush you so why bother and that's what a great many people who will say who will be honest enough to admit okay the situation is oppressive okay people maybe are capable of something more but city hall is too strong to fight you know the state's too strong how do you deal with that history doesn't tell you that what history tells you is that a lot of things have been overcome it wasn't easy it wasn't complete there's always problems there's regression but lots of things that were considered entirely acceptable not long ago are considered totally outrageous now now they can run through the list it's pretty easy now if you want to say some somebody suppose somebody comes back and argues that well now it's different it's much harsher well that's plainly untrue it's much easier now i mean the forces of repression that exist now are nothing like what they were in the past uh there's a like we have a legacy from people who have struggled to make things better and we're a lot free more free we're more free we've got a lot more opportunities a state repression exists other kinds of repression exists but nothing like in the past now it's extremely unlikely now that say the government could carry out anything like say wilson's red skier or even co-intel pro which is not that far back i mean they can do things but they've lost the ability to use force and we know it and they know it i mean that's in fact one of the main reasons for the development of the public relations industry in modern systems propaganda i mean systems of power knew and recognized and in fact said you know or say a century ago that they are mostly in the more free countries like england the united states that they have essentially lost the capacity to control people by islands so therefore they'll control them in other ways uh actually that even shows up in the uh and and the other ways to do it is by controlling opinion and attitudes as huge industries developed to do that actually it even shows up in just the financial institutions now you take a say a standard you know academic history of you know financial institutions barry iken green one of the main economists economic historians he's very straight about it he says of course market systems impose if they'll let the run free you know in financial market systems they're going to impose tremendous burdens on people a lot of people they're just going to suffer badly you know crashes and so on but in the 19th century this wasn't much of a problem because they couldn't do anything about it but then he goes on to say with the increase and i think he calls it politicization of the masses you know forming a parliamentary labour parties and unions and so on and so forth it became harder to impose on the population the costs of market systems so in after the second world war when a new global system was set up the brenton wood system keynes and harry dexter white and what they did was institute uh control over capital control over capital movement and control over speculation fixing currencies they introduced them as a way of compensating for the inability to distribute the costs of market systems to the public this reduced the costs and it did that's why we had a couple of decades of huge growth and equitable growth and so on it was very straight and there has to be a corollary that he didn't add and but you can't add and that is with the breakdown of this system in the 1970s with the financialization of the economy yeah you're getting the costs of uh financial markets distributed over the public again and something's gonna have to be done about it but yeah that's a lot of thinking goes into this and there are it shows there's a lot of results okay switching into another area international relations what does colonialism mean well like any term of about human affairs is it covers a vast range there's all kinds of colonialism i mean the the worst kind of colonialism is what's called settler colonialism like the united states or australia or israel now to a lesser extent a settler colonialism like united states and australia means you exterminate the indigenous population maybe not 100 but you know pretty close so that's absolute worst kind of colonialism that's us there's other kinds of colonialism which are less extreme so take we were talking before about wilson and haiti and clinton and haiti okay it's a form of colonialism in which you effectively take over the country for your own benefit get as much as you can out of it drive the population and to destroy the agricultural system drive the population in the cities all for the most benign reasons you know have great economic progressive reasons and you end up with say the earthquake that just happened that's another kind of colonialism other kinds are and there's many other kinds um so you know say take take the us in the philippines which happened to be an innovation in imperial history the us invaded the philippines in the about a century ago it killed a couple hundred thousand people it was vicious racism i mean these guys unbelievable racism they weren't even people here weren't even sure whether the filipinos were humans or the apes they were exhibited in international fairs and that sort of thing i mean it was just horrendous when you look back at it of course all for the most noble reasons we're uplifting them christianizing them you know giving them civilization the usual stuff there were scattered opponents people like not unknown people like mark twain he wrote very sardonic and cutting anti-imperialist essays now he wasn't hanged he didn't have his brains blown out but they were suppressed they in fact i think they finally came out around 20 years ago in some scholarly addition that nobody ever read syracuse university press but they were there there was an anti-imperialist league but it just all right now what happened after you conquered it that was the innovation this has just been studied in a really magisterial book great book by alfred mccoy who's historian of the philippines among other achievements he's the first person to have studied in detail how they dealt with the population after they'd more or less still haven't totally conquered them still going on but uh pretty much sort of pacified the country well it turns out there was a major innovation in imperial history which had a lot of consequences right till today in the philippines and everywhere else what was instituted was a very sophisticated a high-tech control and surveillance system now the technology of then was not the technology of now but it existed you know telegraph radio other surveillance techniques every technique was used that was available to try to control monitor subdue the population uh there were also pretty sophisticated techniques of undermining resistance that were used so co-optation of elites uh spreading rumors you know using every device you had to try to undermine uh the nationalists and the it was done very well and of course there's a male fist and the background is the philippine constabulary the something which happens in every colonial imperial system you have a you know kind of a paramilitary force of collaborators which should do what you tell them and they're usually trained killers so and you can set it up so let's say you pick people from one tribe to kill another tribe or you know use the rural population to smash the urban population it's done in various ways in fact we do it right now this minute that's the way the us is hoping to run the occupied palestinian territories there's a u.s armed u.s run army that's supposed to subdue them and highly praised by obama and kerry and the liberals and so on anyway this array of techniques was worked out with in quite impressive detail and applied in a very sophisticated fashion it still applies philippines is still pretty much under this system uh the philippines which remains a kind of a quasi colony is the only part of east and southeast asia that has not been part of the so-called economic miracle you know take a look at taiwan south korea you know even indonesia and so on there's been a lot of economic development not the philippines they're pretty much under this system that's the one part of the region that we still run and it there was an immediate blow back uh wilson and the british during the first world war used a lot of these techniques domestically uh consciously could apply them at home too now it's extreme so you go to britain and it's a surveillance society now cameras on every street corner you know the allegedly anti-terror devices i mean here too you know the patriot act is so it's a very these are and the us applied them in other countries right away so haiti dominican republic you know nicaragua well that's another kind of colonialism and a very uh it makes a lot more sense than occupying the country it works much better it's cheaper it can work very effectively in the philippines it's 100 years you know it applies back it develops techniques to apply back home for controlling and subduing populations and breaking them up and so on well that's another kind of colonialism in any event to get back to your question there's no answer to what is colonialism it's just one form in which powerful systems subdue others and they subdue their own population there's nothing new about that i mean that was pointed out by adam smith like you know he's not a fool i mean what he pointed out and what the international affairs specialists don't seem to understand is that you want to understand how a country works you cannot ignore the domestic distribution of power he said just pointed out in the wealth of nations you want to understand england which is his concern you have to recognize that the architects of policy are merchants and manufacturers and they set policy up so that their interests are very well dealt with even though the impact on the people of england may be grievous and of course elsewhere it's even worse we call the savage injustice of the europeans is it horrible that's basically a truth of enduring truth about the power systems empire in india the cost of there was a cost of the british empire by the population by the populations there and by the population of england and the population of england who were also kind of colonized redistributed yeah so it's a class war you know okay that's that's true and that's true for just about every imperial conquest and as i say the most extreme form is just extermination like settler colonialism okay at the other end of the spectrum in the best sense of the word what do you think internationalism means or implies or constitutes internationalism should be what uh you know what has always been at least the terminology of the left i mean unions are called internationals i mean not because they are internationals but because they ought to be and their internet their initial formula creation was motivated in part by the idea that we ought to be concerned with working people and peasants and other oppressed people around the world solidarity international solidarity was the core ideology of unions the internationals that were formed are called internationals because that's what they were supposed to be committed to uh the world social forum today uh which is about as close as there is is uh you know gathers uh i mean if we weren't so totally you know caught up in crazed ideology we'd call the world social forum the one pro globalization group in the world i mean that's it's not devas where you get a bunch of rich people talking about how to enrich yourselves which is called globalization uh the world social forum with all of its defects you know brings together people from all over the world you know all walks of life mutually interacting you know the people women have giving seeds to each other you know supportive ideas about how to improve the global world for the vast majority okay that's um that's internationalism we should be doing anti-imperialism is a form of internationalism when do you think it's right okay for an individual in the united states to denounce human rights violations in another country as compared to when do you think it's either hypocrisy or interference now i'm talking individual not the government well you know again it's a question of priorities right uh and priorities how much time you should put into it you know when is it literally if you're our human rights violation somewhere makes sense to criticize them period it makes sense to criticize them if you can do something about them if you can't do anything about them it's just posturing but if you can help human rights activists or oppressed people or whatever somewhere else sure you should do it the question is always priorities time and energy are finite can't get around that and the question is how do we compare how do we decide how to distribute our energies when there are human rights violations and there are very clear criteria for that they are almost 100 percent violated but they're extremely clear uh what you do what you prioritize is what any moral human being does the predictable consequences of your own actions that's what should be prioritized i mean somebody else's actions you know i can criticize them but there's no particular moral value to it unless i can somehow improve things the one thing you can improve is what you are doing so overwhelmingly our priority ought to be our own engagement in human rights violations which we can change and incidentally that's kind of independent of scale even if the ones we're carrying out are not so terrible and the ones that somebody else is carrying out are awful but we can't do anything about it then elementary morality says let's focus on ourselves the practice is almost diverse almost 100 the reverse and furthermore it's kind of irreversible i mean this great pleasure taken in the crimes of others especially if we can't do anything about them if some animation if it's an enemy if some enemy commits horrible crimes and we can't do a thing about it it's just irresistible to posture heroically about their crimes for one thing it's costless because you can't do anything about it for another thing it shows how noble you are another thing is you can lie like a trooper you can say anything you want and if anybody says well man maybe that's not quite accurate you can come back and say oh you're a genocide supporter you know you're in favor of holocaust so there's a whole stream of techniques that's available so just perfect and intellectuals just love it you know in fact you see it all over the place i mean there's even a new literary genre that developed in the last 10 or 15 years which is very highly respected and that is castigating ourselves for not criticizing strongly enough the crimes of others that's that's just marvelous for one thing you're criticizing ourselves so look how moral you are uh and you're criticizing ourselves for not doing enough about the crimes of enemies which we can't do anything about in fact if you look at the literature on this it's it's it's astonishing i mean it's carried out like almost to a t it's like a caricature of itself and the people are nice people actually i know some of them you know perfectly nice people perfectly decent they think we ought to really sacrifice ourselves you know and castigate ourselves for not doing enough about say paul potts genocide which there was no suggestion about what to do about but meanwhile totally ignore everything we're doing totally another international kind of concept and issue self-determination what's what does it mean what sort of rate is self-determination and what under what circumstances are people to ex uh entitled to exercise the right and conversely when are people not entitled to exercise it right again like most things i don't think i don't think you can give a blanket answer it depends on circumstances [Music] well you know from one point of view everybody has a right of self-determination like you have a right to control your own life just like individuals do on the other hand self-determination is not done in isolation it has consequences for others okay so you have to take that into account then you have to start balancing things so i take say secession in the south in the united states should southerners have the right of self-determination well who was asking for self-determination white southerners not black slaves so it wasn't that the south was asking for self-determination on the contrary a large part of the population which didn't have a voice was opposed to self-determination for the white masters there are lots of other questions and the same is true in every other place i mean i think there's you know you pick the case that you find a complexity of considerations and you have to kind of work your way through them but i do not see how there can be formulas about this because self-determination while of value is only one of many values and as in human affairs generally values often conflict do you have views about international structures new international structures that might better protect you know the weak poor uh people are subject to violations starving imposed upon etc actual institutional structures that could you know interesting but i'm pretty much in the mainstream of american public opinion on this uh totally different from a lead opinion or anything that's articulate but if you look at american public opinion which i've i've written about it and you kind of reviewed the polls and they're pretty standard and consistent nobody really doubts them considerable majority of the public quite a large majority think that the united nations not the united states ought to take the lead on international crises a majority of the population think we ought to give up the veto at the security council and everybody ought to and just follow the will of the majority even if we don't like it and you know it continues like this like say uh i haven't seen a poll recently after the huge propaganda offenses for the last couple of years but two two years ago you know before the huge propaganda offenses about uh i forget the exact number but a considerable majority say iran the big issue considerable majority of the population agreed with almost the entire world that iran has the right to enrich uranium as does any sign or the non-proliferation treaty i mean what we read here is iran's defying the world by some interesting definition of the world the world means not just us the government means the us government whoever happens to agree with it that's the world it excludes the large majority of the population of the united states it includes the non-line countries which is most of the world who vigorously support it and so on uh but yeah i think they were right a large i'm still talking about polls two years ago now it could be different a large majority opposed threats of force against iran that is they oppose the united states being a rogue outlaw state which violates the u.n charter u.n charter though nobody will mention it bars the threat of force in international affairs meaning everybody in the american political system is a criminal because across the board it's all options have to be opened well the population opposed that a very large part of the population i think was around 80 percent i thought the united states should live up to its legal obligation legal determined by the world court to observe the non-proliferation treaty meaning make good-faith efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons that's last time i saw 80 uh the most interesting vote in this connection just keeping to the top issue in international affairs is a huge percentage again i don't remember the numbers but it was quite large i thought that we should establish a nuclear weapons-free zone in the middle east now that's that's the right answer to the problems such as they are that are arising uh technically the united states says yeah sure but of course nothing being done about it a nuclear weapons-free zone it's a very interesting concept if you're really interested in non-proliferation like obama claims he is uh the one thing you'd support is nuclear weapons-free zones those are you know they're small steps but steps towards reducing the threat of nuclear weapons and proliferation and the facts are extremely revealing i'll run through some of them with regard to the middle east is overwhelming popular support around the whole world the united states and britain of course what that would mean is no nuclear weapons in iran or israel or nu or u.s forces deployed there that would be a nuclear weapons free zone that's why it's not even on the agenda except for the population uh well it would be an important step it's feasible you know inspection procedures of course and so on but it's technically feasible and it would mitigate perhaps eliminate whatever dangers there are but it's not on the agenda also not mentionable is that the u.s and britain have a very strong commitment to this very strong commitment the reason is because of something that is unutterable when the u.s and britain went to war with iraq they tried to provide a very thin legal cover for it and what they appealed to is a security council resolution 687 from 1991 which called on iraq to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction and the story was they hadn't done it so we had a right to invade if you read that resolution it calls for the establishment of a nuclear-free weapon zone in the middle east so therefore the u.s and britain way more than any other country are committed to this well you can't talk about it because it it like it it's like you know pornography or something worse but those are the facts population supported it could eliminate problems it gets much more interesting than this there are nuclear free weapon zones in the world uh one was just finally achieved in africa after a lot of negotiations it's being blocked by the united states the reason is that the african union all of it regards the island of diego garcia in the indian ocean as part of africa because it's a part of mauritius which is part of the african union well britain under u.s orders kicked out the whole population some years ago illegally of course in order to build a big u.s military base so britain didn't accept the african union agreement because the master says you can't do it they're very loyal the us refuses to accept it so the us is blocking the african union nuclear weapons free zone because we insist on keeping a base a military base after having kicked out the population for new storage of nuclear weapons and crucially for bombing that's one of the main bases for carrying out aggression in central asia and the middle east you know your bomb iraq comes from there in fact just a couple of weeks ago the navy announced that they're sending a big submarine tender to diego garcia to service nuclear submarines and so on and so forth so we're blocking the african union nuclear weapons free zone we're refusing to even talk about the middle east one which is critical and it's more there's more there's a south pacific there it's always more there's a south pacific nuclear free zone which finally it was held up for a long time by the french because they wanted to use the french islands for nuclear weapons testing all right they finally did their nuclear weapons testing now it's being held up by the united states because the pacific islands like palau and so on they're used for nuclear weapon storage and for nuclear submarines so okay we're blocking the south pacific zone meanwhile obama is giving you know highly praised speeches about how awful nuclear weapons are we got to do something about it and there's massive at least pretended concern maybe actual concern about the possibility that maybe iran's developing nuclear weapons we don't you know if anybody from mars was watching this they'd be amazed that the species can even go on you know how can you do all this without collapsing ridicule about yourself well it's easy in a well-disciplined society i was thinking roughly the same variant on what you concluded with thinking you know a novelist there's no such thing as a novelist who is cynical enough and creative enough to come up with a scenario that even remotely approximates the reality for i mean the interesting thing to me is that you know there are novelists to try to do it like say heller or you know vonnegut and they're red and people laugh but they don't realize it's the thing it says actually i saw this uh when one of michael moore's documentaries we never went to the movies but we did go to one of his stuck i think was the one about gun columbine i guess carol my wife and i went to but we decided to go see it in a lower middle class town just to see what the audience reaction will be like because they're the people he's making fun of they were laughing you know i thought it was great you know making fun of all these guys with guns and so on i probably all have guns uh they thought it was you know really funny well done but i don't think anybody perceives their reaction there's a movie out now called avatar it's the biggest movie going i don't see how it's possible for a human being to look at that and not realize that the thing that's being presented is based on indochina and it is yeah it is it's just clear and they even took they even took some film footage and altered it but you can if you've seen it all you can see it and it's you know so it's this horrendous critique of imperial kind of attitudes and everything else the audience absolutely loves it and don't realize it's about iraq also i mean it's it's just clear i don't know about you you're younger than i am but when i was growing up you know a radical kid you know writing about anarchism this and that we were playing cowboys and indians yeah and we were killing the indians you know i mean i sort of knew in some counter in my mind or something wrong maybe this isn't totally perfect [Music] okay so like the other question that i asked earlier or questions that i asked earlier the mistakes that you think the anti-war movement has made over the years and things that maybe we should have done differently and different approaches that we may make in the future clearly we've had some successes uh even some significant successes but on the other hand we've also failed in in some sense so what what do you think we've done that we did that wasn't so wise and things that we should have been doing i think there were a lot of things that could have been a lot better for one thing sectors of the anti-war movement and we know who they were very you know nice people our friends and so on uh undertook tactics if you're undertaking some always if you're any kind of an activist you know you're picking something you decide to do you have to make a distinction between two kinds of tactics you could call them you know feel good tactics makes me feel good about myself and do good tactics does something for somebody else well you know the anti-war movement dissolved to a large extent into feel-good tactics which were harmful in fact the vietnamese were aware of it like they talked to them you know what they liked was quiet non-violent demonstrations you know a group of women standing quietly somewhere what they didn't like was what was being done uh say weathermen these are tactics that are understandable from the point of view of the people they were frustrated they were bitter nothing was working okay let's go out and smash some windows or let's go out and have a fight in a third avenue bar and show the people who are authentic and so on well you know these are like just gifts to the ultra hawks they help to build up support for the war and it was obvious they were going to have that effect and a lot of it was that i mean a lot especially as the movement sort of you know kind of dissolved into sects like after 68 a lot of it was that so a lot of it was just self-destructive the other big error was to stop i mean by 1975 end of the war around 70 percent of the population condemned the war as fundamentally wrong and immoral not a mistake those are kind of unbelievable figures because nobody ever said that you know where'd they get it from you know what did they even mean who knows nobody checked but you know that meant there was a huge reservoir of possible support for anti-war activity it was dissolved it left everybody went away you started condemning the khmer rouge or doing some other thing okay so then comes the central american massacres and so it goes on now there are other things like i have almost nobody almost nobody agrees with me about this but my friends on the left many of them don't even understand my own view and which goes back to around 1970 that the us won the war uh the business world recognized that like you read it in the forester economic review but the left is committed to the doctrine that we won you know we stopped the war the vietnamese won the people united and the rest of it that's not what happened we have a rich documentary record and it's very instructive we should think about it and be intellectually honest about it the us didn't go to war in order to conquer vietnam in fact it didn't care if vietnam dropped off the planet i mean it didn't care you know it but it went to where for good reasons you would think people in the movement would understand and you know it was kind of always pretty clear but we have a rich documentary record in fact i've had it since about 19 since the pentagon papers they went to war for the usual reasons the mafia principle which is the dominant principle in world affairs you know the godfather does not accept disobedience it's dangerous if one country gets away with disobedience no matter how tiny it is somebody else will get the idea and you know they'll be disobedient freezing your whole system erodes that's basically that one of the dominant principles in world affairs and vietnam was a case in point you know they were afraid that vietnamese nationalism would be successful you'd have successful economic development it would like to use kissinger's terminology would be a virus that would spread contagion so it spread to thailand you know malaya malaysia and go on to indonesia now you're in real trouble indonesia has real resources pretty soon maybe ultimately japan which john dower asia historian john dower called the super domino japan would accommodate was the word that was used to an independent east and southeast asia it would become its technological and military center which would mean that the united states would have lost the specific phase of the first or second world war well you know 1950 they weren't ready to lose the second world war so you got to stop you got a virus it's spreading contagion there's a cure destroy the virus and inoculate the potential victims it was done south vietnam was pretty much destroyed even by 1965 and the rest of indochina not long afterwards never be a model for independent development the surrounding countries were inoculated by vicious dictatorships the most important was indonesia really rich in 1965 came the suharto coup greeted with total euphoria in the united states you know killed maybe a million people destroyed the only mass popular organization you know opened the country up to the west uh no more accommodation you know no more contagion in fact george bundy who's not a total fool and later he was national security advisor for kennedy and johnson later years in retrospect he said you know in respect we should have stopped the war in 65. he was right vietnam was already essentially destroyed no virus uh indonesia the big prize is inoculated you've got a vicious military dictatorship uh our kind of guy as clinton called him uh so you know japan's safe you know being our size so what's the point of destroying the rest of the place was a waste of time okay i think the the anti-war movement should understand that because that's a pattern that is followed over and over again it is a dominant principle of international affairs it makes perfect sense it's kind of interesting it it's sometimes ridiculed like the domino theory who believes that uh yeah everybody believes it because it's true the world's mostly run like the mafia and if you don't understand that you're not going to understand the next thing that happens in the world in fact that's part of the reason for the incredible antagonism to iran why iran i mean there's a terrible government there's a lot of terrible governments like saudi arabia's lot worse well they were disobedient they're not going to let them get away with it in fact it's you know it's it's even said it says wow they took hostages how can we let them go with that disobedience you know cuba is a striking example i mean for decades the majority of the population has been in favor of normalizing relations with cuba okay disregarding the population is normal the business world is in favor of it has been for a long time big sectors energy agribusiness pharmaceuticals you know really powerful sectors but we can't do it we've got to keep punishing them because they were disobedient and you don't get away with that when you encounter what you do on a incredibly regular basis as this discussion reveals the extent of horror how do you get through all that and go right back to work again actually going back to work is one of the cures of it if you can do if you just if you can't there's nothing you can think of doing then it just collapse maybe decide to give up or you just go into a deep depression but if you can keep you know if you keep working that's cure there's an advantage there for you no i mean i don't mean just time and access and resources i mean you're in a position to feel like when you write when you speak even if it's not having a gigantic effect and it's not transforming everything right away it's perfectly plausible in fact you'd have to be a bit delusional to think it was having no impact there are a lot of other people who will feel that what they're going to do is going to have zero impact and they get crushed i mean the fact of the matter is realistically i know that there's very little impact but it's for me it gives me something to do gives me something to you know feel that i'm say doing the right thing if it reaches some people okay good but it's the same is true of you know any organizer you organize local people to in a community to say get a traffic light where kids cross the street let's see that achieves something it empowers people then they go on to the next thing there's a difference between a person who works in a soup cushion and he can clearly see the impact it's not changing the whole world but it's having a dramatic effect often a bigger effect than leftists have on other people's human lives and in fact that's a reasonable question you know why should somebody in the united states not give their time and their energy to soup kitchens to helping the poor to doing something of that character as compared to trying to build a movement that's going to change the whole system it's the case of a soup kitchen versus organizing the community to get a traffic light organizing an anti-war movement something on the larger scale well let's take a small case trying to organize the community to get a traffic light now that not only has an advantage kids can cross the street but it empowers people it can get them to understand yeah i can do things it's not hopeless i can go on well that's uh i do work in a soup kitchen is great but doesn't have that effect agreed i understood but you can see how the choice between social welfare et cetera work and anti-war work anti-capitalist work becomes a difficult choice for people i think that the left is very disdainful and too quick to dismiss people who make a different choice than they make yeah that's true i mean i don't i certainly don't just name people who work in soup kitchens you know like uh one of my daughters works for oxfam yeah you know it's kind of what it is you know you're trying to set up but instantly the oxfam projects that she works for at least are designed to be like they're getting a traffic light the idea of the project is not just you know i'm going to come in and build a well and you can have it it's to try to get the communities to get started in doing something about their own lives that's hard that's the goal okay over the years you've obviously been subject to intense malicious scrutiny um to people attacking you for all kinds of of things um they attribute views to you that you don't hold or they spin views that you do hold in a manner that has absolutely nothing to do with the way you hold them uh and so on you know i get a lot i mean tonight when i get home let's do them one of the time i have a couple hundred letters and it comes all the time people ask good questions they say you know i read this and that about you what do you say and so i say fine i'll look at it in fact i the attacks are of interest in a number of respects for one thing there's sometimes true correct ones okay so i learned something it's extremely rare i should say but there are cases where you said something the wrong way or maybe i made a mistake fine i learned and then i corrected but you have to ask yourself am i getting my head blown off by a elite battalion trained in fort bragg well that's what happens in u.s domains is it happening to me no okay so people you know lie and slander and vilify them it's not exactly the worst thing that happens but i'm not so much worried about you i'm not trying to deal with you here i'm dealing with again the people who read it and are deterred from relating to ideas because of it you've been slammed about cambodia paul pot etc what were your actual views obviously you can't go through hundreds of pages but your actual views about cambodia and pop hot um and why do you believe they elicited the attacks first of all i've been quite interested in this i mean i didn't write anything myself in those days i was writing with ed herman there has been a huge literature trying to show something wrong with it i mean it's literally the case that nobody has found a misplaced comma i mean there's nothing in the stuff you wrote about yeah it was exactly i mean it must be the best stuff that's ever written because anything you write you know there's got to be some mistakes i mean you read the professional journals now the last paragraph of every review of the scholarly monograph lists the errors which are always there you know literally nothing and the reason was explained quite early on i mean what we wrote about cambodia was carefully checked by some of the leading specialists in the field and they went through it you know they corrected some things you know changed some other things so first of all it's very unlikely that it would be mistakes secondly we didn't claim anything we claimed almost nothing we didn't take any position on it we just said look here's the data that's available here's what comes out of the doctrinal system let's compare them i mean the only way and i said we don't know what happened you know maybe the most in fact we said you know maybe the most extreme uh inventions it'll turn out to be correct that's not our question our question is let's compare what went in to what came out now the only way you can make a mistake on that is like a logical error okay we didn't commit elementary logical errors so in fact and there were no factual errors but we just took the data that was there and this was noticed right away by one of the leading cambodia historians david chandler right away wrote you know look nothing is going to stand no matter what's discovered because what you're claiming is so limited that no matter what's discovered later on it's never it's not going to affect what you said i mean to the extent that we took a position all at all which was a little limited we essentially repeated what u.s intelligence was saying and everyone agreed that they were the most knowledgeable source so yeah chances are there's never been errors and there haven't been uh now it's very very s remember there are two volumes that south end published uh political economy of human rights uh these two volumes almost entirely what they were concerned with was exactly this question how does the data that comes in relate to the interpretation that comes out okay uh almost the entire two volumes are about u.s crimes how does the data that we have about them relate to the what comes out which turns out to be apologetics and denial nobody has ever mentioned any of that in fact we had two major we did do a little of each side and we had two major examples there's a chapter devoted to cambodia which we went through in detail there was a chapter devoted to east timor which we went through in detail it's a very good comparison at two major atrocities same time same place both huge uh one was in the course of an invasion which is much worse nameless two more but the main difference between them was that in one case it was our responsibility and we could have stopped it right away in the other case it was somebody else's atrocity we could do nothing about it there hasn't i don't think there's been a word about the chapter on each teamwork the one that's vastly more important first of all it's our crime it's a huge crime uh and we could have stopped it and therefore it's silence i'm some words of apologetics and denial okay but i put aside the just stalinist types mostly it's just avoidance on cambodia there's been an intense effort to try to show there's nothing wrong with it well that tells you something what it tells you is an illustration of what we talked about before the actual practice of intellectuals gives you an extremely good criterion for what should be done by a person with elementary moral convictions namely the opposite of what always is done and here you have a really dramatic example of it and it come it's continues right to the present in fact just recently i happened to answer a couple of these things and in answering i pointed these things out and i also pointed out look if you say you're concerned about cambodians okay glad you're concerned about them how about being concerned about the new revelations that were just made which we talked about before about the scale the incredible scale of the u.s attack which is really incredible which in fact created the khmer rouge which you say you're upset about so might say something about that the answers are interesting not one word about it it's as if i didn't say it you know what comes out how come you're screaming about the khmer rouge you're not discriminated condemning the khmer rouge how can your apologies for genocide okay that's the reason why that makes sense you know like if you're you know you're caught with your hand in someone's pocket you don't change the subject and that's uh that's the response but if anyone has a criticism i'd be glad to hear it i've yet to see it and i think the reasons are transparent from things like this and it's not just these two cases it generalizes uh actually ed and i together and in fact separately have gone over many such examples you know thousands of pages of documentation by now also responding to the criticisms like in manufacturing consent or joint book which was 10 years after all the cambodia stuff we reviewed it and we reviewed what actually happened what was known at the time what had been discovered since the criticisms the nature of the criticisms we responded to them effect zero and nobody can even look at that uh either the people you know who are kind of like right inside the doctrinal system or the kind of decent people who you're talking about who want to understand they wouldn't look at our responses they wouldn't even know they exist the only thing anyone knows about that book is well it says there's a conspiracy theory in the press or something okay you already talked about the kennedy for which you get slammed routinely because you deny that he was killed by x y and z you talked about 9 11. so i won't ask you about that you've been slammed about the mideast called an anti-semite called a self-hating jew etc that was kind of interesting that's why i'm asking again what are your actual views and broadly and and why do you think they elicited the attacks that they do and what is your impression of the attacks are quite interesting they actually have a long history they actually go back to the bible the phrase self-hating jew it comes from the bible it comes from the book of kings uh you know the epitome of evil in the bible was king ahab you know remember that story from when you were in hebrew school king ahab was the evil king you know terrible king and so on uh he at one point he called the prophet elijah to him and asked elijah why are you a hater of israel okay what did he mean he mean that elijah was condemning the acts of the evil king and the king like every totalitarian identified himself with the culture the society you know everything so if elijah is condemning his crimes elijah must be a hater of israel well that's the origin of the phrase self-hating jew okay and it runs through history in fact in the modern period it's very explicit actually abba evan who was israeli the diplomat you know highly respected british accent you know he's the face to the world considering a leader-leading liberal humanist he once read an article less than 35 years ago in the american jewish press congressweekly american jewish congress weekly in which he told americans american jews what your task is they said your task is to show that critics of zionism he didn't mean zionism he meant critics of the state of israel are full of two categories uh anti-semites and neurotic self-hating jews okay it covers 100 of criticism so it's great uh and that's correct that's the way to cut out a hundred percent of criticism if it's from non-jews say anti-semitism if it's jews they're neurotic self-hating jews he actually mentioned two examples me of course and i have stoned i have stones a dedicated zionist you know made some cr but the two of us were self-hating jews because we were criticizing things okay that's uh evan gave the game away as king ahab had given the game away and plenty of people in between actually there's a kind of a counterpart to that which somehow nobody seems to notice and that's the concept anti-american what do you think the concept anti-american and its use is a criticism of people such as yourself this comes right we're back to king ahab it's a stan it's a straight totalitarian concept it was used it's used in totalitarian states like in the soviet union and the harshest criticism against dissidents was their anti-soviet okay so jose sahir of was anti-soviet because he could attack the crimes of the kremlin was he against the russian people was he against the russian culture it was the solzhenitsyn you know saying the russian people are awful quite the contrary it's a russian nationalist extreme russian nationalist but they were anti-russian because they were condemning the crimes of the state and totalitarian states do identify themselves it's part of the nature of totalitarianism uh with the society the culture you know the people and so on uh i know of only one democratic country more or less democratic country which has adopts this totalitarian concept that's the united states i suppose that somebody in say italy condemns berlusconi and they were called anti-italian people would collapse some laughter in the streets he's not an italian you know he's attacking beryl sconic but in a totalitarian culture like western intellectual culture if you attack the holy state you must be anti-american that's i don't know of any example other than you know things like king ahab or the soviet union or say the brazilian military dictatorship under the brazilian military dictatorship if you criticize torture you're anti-brazilian yeah it's a totalitarian concept what's quite interesting about the united states and england and a large part of europe is that this totalitarian concept is accepted uncritically with regard to the united states i mean there are even books by people you know considered liberal scholars and paul hollander at the umass a respected scholar called the anti-americans who are the anti-americans well you run through the list it's people who criticize government policy okay if you're a deeply committed totalitarian so deeply you can't even see it yeah that's andy america

Channel: David Balcarras

Views: 10,289

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Id: _Xf5H00ACws

Length: 266min 33sec (15993 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 15 2022