Noam Chomsky: The Stony Brook Interviews Part One

[Music] Noam Chomsky is a world-renowned political activist writer and professor of linguistics at MIT the New York Times Book Review said of him judged in terms of the power range and novelty and influence of his thought Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive to which he adds yeah nobody ever quotes the next sentence how can he write such terrible things about the u.s. foreign policy or something like that that that edition kind of made your day didn't it oh yeah it made me feel it wasn't doing something wrong tell me a little bit about your background you grew up in Philadelphia your parents were Hebrew teachers I believe it was a basically first-generation immigrant family they were very much immersed in the local Jewish community Hebrew education this is the 1930s so it's early Zionism pre-state Zionism that was the midea my own life was soon became my own life but that was the background that I came out of and you went to camp as I recall you later on when I was a young teenager 11 12 we went to Hebrew speaking camps and then I first as a camper then later is counselor help you were proficient in Hebrew very early and reasonably proficient but it's matter of measuring but yes I could get by and I read read very easily had read a lot of I grew up immersed in Hebrew literature Bible and so on in Hebrew you got part of I guess your political education on a street corner in New York in a sense you had an uncle who this is again the 1930s and early forties so the whole family was mostly unemployed unemployed seamstresses working people and so on but there are a few vet jobs and one uncle had a severe disability and he was able to get a newsstand under one of the New Deal type programs that were around in those days so the newsstand was the place which supported half the family but he was also very he himself had never gone through school but he was very well educated more so than almost anybody I met and the newsstand became a center for a lot of emigres intellectuals from Europe who would hang around there and evenings and have fascinating discussions and a lot of fun to just be serving newspapers and listening so you would might jump on the train from Phil as soon as I was old enough to take the train by myself at 12 or so I head off to New York soon as I had a chance stay with my relatives who were a very lively bunch of Jewish working-class left all involved in intellectual culture so a mixture of strange Marxist groups and the Budapest string quartet and so on and so forth and although very few of them had had anything in the way of formal education except very elementary it didn't matter and then I spent my time wandering up and down something that's long since disappeared but the fourth Avenue below Union Square used to be full of little secondhand bookstores again a lot of European exiles would have their own particular slant you know Spanish anarchism or some other thing that was fascinating to they're very eager to talk to some young person coming in was that usual so got special treatment and picked up a lot a lot of literature too in fact when I started writing about these things years later used a lot of primary documentation that I'd picked up around that time which wasn't available elsewhere what kind of stuff they talk about the newsstand there was a lot of many of the anti grades were happened to be psychiatrists like German Jewish psychiatrist so there's a lot of Freud Steckle that sort of thing and then every variety of left-wing politics you can think of these were very lively days and political discussion was common and just part of everybody's life and how did you discover linguistics as you were field through politics actually yeah this is back in Philadelphia met zellig harris I was about I guess 16 or 17 and pretty bored with college I was thinking of dropping out but I happened to meet him through political contacts he himself was was a very influential figure among young intellectuals mostly Jewish but not completely much more so than is known in write much but many people passed through his influence who many of them well-known and I was one of the younger ones and he was his interests were sort of independent left sort of anti-bolshevik left and what was then called Zionism now it would be called anti-zionism commitment to a future by national Jewish Arab working-class based community in what was in Palestine which was part of the nines movement at the time now it would be considered different and I was already interested in that so meeting him was a exciting became an influence I later discovered he was professor of linguistics at at Penn and in fact one of the leading figures in the world got drawn into his courses and back into college right you have come to change your views about Israel Israeli politics over the years not that much still believe pretty much what a now of course it's different now than when I was 12 years old but I basically the same point of view I'm in these circumstances have changed but the my own position hasn't changed very much what is your position and how the circumstance has changed well remember that was pre state right and so of course everything changed when the state was established although I maintain my involvement and interest if I came pretty close to living there my wife and I spent some time on a kibbutz we might have gone back it was questioned but I was opposed to the establishment of a Jewish state which again was part of the dynasty at the time not a huge part but there was a element of it the thought of Jewish state is a bad mistake I thought so then still thinks it a Jewish state as opposed to a democratic state it the two are inconsistent I mean people can try whatever manipulation they like but if the United States were a Christian state in anything but symbolism it wouldn't be a democratic state I mean taking Sunday office okay but if there's real discriminatory legislation and practice that distinguished Christians from non-christians or whites from non-whites to that extent it would be a flawed democracy almost by definition and that's intrinsic in in the form of the Jewish state that was established I mean the high court in Israel actually declared it to be the state of the Jewish people in Israel in the Diaspora so my state but not the state of a Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel and this shows itself in all kinds of ways but it became much more all of these problems became far more exacerbated after 1967 when the military occupation began it's now in its 36th year and then all sorts of things happened I mean in 1971 Israel really had to make a what turned out to be a fateful decision they received an offer from Egypt through the UN mediator Gunnar tre to have a you've offered full peace treaty if Israel would withdraw just from Egyptian territory not nothing about the Palestinians no West Bank it was discussed internally in Israel in the now we know it from released cabinet records but then in the Hebrew press they knew that it was a possibility of peace and integration into the region the choice was that or expansion which means permanent confrontation dependence crucial dependence on the United States and they chose the latter course and a lot of things have followed from that which are in my view very harmful to the society and extremely dangerous and leading to the constant threat of very serious war plus 35 years of persecution of an oppressed population that has changed things enormously do you see any end to that yeah very simple and in fact everyone in the world knows what it is and has known for years the end is a diplomatic set Ani it gets more remote the longer you delay it but the end has been for since the 1970s a political settlement on the internationally recognized border that pre pre-war border pre June 67 with mutual and minor territorial adjustments and other arrangements about other matters the crucial matter is territorial that's been the international consensus since the mid-1970s the US has unilaterally blocked it and still does and as long as that continues there won't be a political zone what about Jerusalem Jerusalem you can finesse one way or another I mean theoretically it's both under the original UN resolutions are supposed to be internationalized city okay that's not going to happen but Jewish and Arab neighborhoods could be except mostly Jewish mostly Arab neighborhoods could be separated two capitals could be set up side-by-side but the Palestinian one would have to have access to the Palestinian state that's the crucial issue and many people have pointed out I think correctly that the Jerusalem is a problem you could probably settle in 15 minutes the main problems are the territorial boundaries as we speak the White House has announced that it will declare an end to the war in Iraq tomorrow in your opinion what was that war all that well we can be certain about one thing the White House made it very clear that nothing it said could be taken seriously so we know that the reasons they gave can't be the reasons the way we know that is because they are contradicted every day I mean one day the single question as they put it is Iraq's weapons of mass destruction if they get rid of the weapons of mass destruction it's all over the next day it turned out that didn't make any difference what they did about their weapons we were going to we had to impose it on regime what's called regime changing and the third day it was some other stories so we can put aside the official explanations they made it clear to us that they're not to be taken seriously so then we have to speculate what was it about and I think it's some pretty clear plausible explanations I mean first of all there's a background issue which doesn't account for the timing of the war but it's always in the background and that is that Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world it's always been clear that one way or another the US would regain control over them or seek to do so it does dominate the US does dominate the Gulf energy producing region which is by far the largest and richest in the world and will be for another couple of generations that's been policy since the Second World War the Iraq was kind of an anomaly and that it broke out of it and it would be an effort to get it back in that was certain what about the timing well the timing is kind of striking if you look at the propaganda about invasion of Iraq it really begins last September I mean it was sort of simmering in the background but in September that's when Condoleezza Rice told us about the you know the mushroom cloud and the massive government propaganda disseminated uncritically by the media was produced about Iraq being a threat to our survival and intimations that Iraq was behind the September 11th attacks and was planning new ones and that showed up very quickly in the polls by the end of September of majority of the population actually believed that Iraq was a serious threat to u.s. security and over the months the number of people who believed that Iraq was involved in the September 11th attacks has reached something like 50 percent probably there's nobody in the world who believes anything like this including CIA but it did come to be public opinion and those opinions are very strongly correlated with support for the war not surprisingly but why September well couple other things happen September one thing that happened was it was the opening of the midterm election campaign and as Karl Rove campaign manager had already informed Republican activists they cannot go into the campaign with social and economic issues being prominent or they'll get smashed they have to be security issues which will lead people to they hope correctly to suppress their concerns about jobs pensions and Enron and so on in favor of safety which will flock the power and it worked barely the Rove has already said the confer to the next the same for the presidential campaign and in fact that ran right through the 80s when the same people were running Washington pushing the panic button every year or something or other the other thing that happened which I think is even more significant is that they announced the national security strategy in September which calls for it sent plenty of shutters around the world including the u.s. foreign policy elite this was a substantial change in official policy there are precedents but it's never been official policy before there was a policy of openly announced intention to rule the world by force and to prevent any potential challenge to that domination it's called pre-emptive war but it's not pre-emptive it's preventive and even that's an exaggeration we'll just tack anyone is in the way well when you announce a doctrine you have to illustrate otherwise nobody takes it seriously to illustrate the doctrine of preventive war you have to pick the appropriate target first of all it has to be weak and defenseless there's no point attacking anybody who can fight back that's ridiculous so has to be weak and defenseless on the other hand that can't be say you know Burundi because that's worthless who wants it has to be weak defenseless and important okay that spells Iraq and that was a perfect petri dish is the New York Times called a test case for to illustrate the new norm of preventive war to get the world understand we mean and I think those factors probably account for the time in the background is the long term interest but as I say you can't these have to be speculations because there's no official information it means anything it's all self contradictory what do you expect will follow in Iraq do you expect democracy to blossom they're a special kind of democracy we have a hundred years of experience in our backyard to go by the US has dominated Central America and the Caribbean for a century it's had plenty of influence in other places and it has tolerated even foster democracy but on a condition the Democratic decision has to conform the US policy if country's democratic choices go in opposition to US policy the government's overthrown either by coup or invasion or economic strangulation or something about and in fact this is extremely explicit in policy formation it takes discipline not to see it so for example in the case of Cuba the u.s. international terrorist attack on Cuba and that's what it is I began within months after Castro's takeover was very sharply escalated by the Kennedy administration we now have the internal documents that discuss describe what they had in mind then it's the same as everywhere else bottom I ran everywhere what the state is that the very existence of the Castro regime is successful defiance of US policies going back 150 years policies are that the region has to be subordinated to us power and this is successful defiance of that doesn't matter what they do they've got to conform the wars in Central America in the 1980s were to impose a form of democracy which would be quote a leading specialist top-down forms of democracy in which traditional elites mean who have been associated with the United States retained power Jim quoting Thomas for others it's a leading historian but also writes from the inside he was part of reagan's so-called democracy enhancement programs in the State Department and that's a correct characterization and that's what will happen in Iraq I mean if the majority the population happens to be Shia suppose they call for a you know Islamic state to link to Iran United States and never tolerate that fact has already said - you can have a democracy as long as you do what we say you have felt that politics are driven by the economic interests of what you call the privileged elite you tell me about that and who these people are first of all that's not my opinion that's the opinion of a hundred percent of people who work on foreign affairs it's an opinion with which you agree I'm it's almost a truism it's true of every country not just the United States I mean there's an internal distribution of power in every country you know it's not that everybody is equal and the internal distribution of power reflects itself in decision-making in the state system in different ways I mean if a country has a powerful union movement for example a labor contribution to policy United States doesn't have that we have basically business parties and there's a there's a concentrated sector of economic power corporate sector linked to linked closely to government and they tend to set the basic framework for policy choices it's not mechanical again deduce that this or that policy is going to come out but it's a very powerful framework from which there's very little deviation actually the media don't even tolerate any discussion of anything beyond it except very much of the margins even if the population happens I mean there are many striking cases where the population is pretty strongly opposed to policy but if there's a split between a lead opinion and popular opinion the these issues just don't even show up in elections I mean international economic arrangements are a striking example the population is almost put by substantial majorities opposed to most of the arrangement there's near elite consensus as a result they just don't show up except very marginally in a political debate and political campaigns and other things actually what I said about the Middle East is another example roughly I think about two-thirds of the population has it supports the general international consensus that I mentioned but the USA lead opinion does not as a result the issue just doesn't come up the writer Tom Wolfe calls this the old cabal theory and implies that it's kind of nutty I guess that sort of criticism if you think it's nutty for people with wealth and power to use their influence about as nutty is the fact that the Sun rises every morning couple of years statements I will quote now the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor saved tens of millions of lives how did that happen it's not supportive it it's just saying you cannot evaluate an action by looking at the range of consequences actually probably in India alone it saved tens of millions of lives also kicking the British yeah one of the results of the jet wasn't the intention of the bombing of Pearl Harbor but if you look at the events that unfolded one of the things that happened is that the Europeans mostly left Asia not easily but so the French fought a brutal war the Dutch fought a war they finally left and the effect of that in Asia was dramatic I mean if you look at the demographic patterns and say India there haven't been any major famine since the British left there were terrible famines before in fact India you know they barely developed during the British period hundreds a year it had been the commercial and one of the commercial and industrial centers of the world when the British took it over the British turned it into an impoverished agricultural society with a wealthy elite and some infrastructure you know based on their dominance but there's a miserable situation if people like neighbor who is an Anglophile described the British is like the Nazis after independence it's not a wonderful place by any means but at least the massive famine stopped and some development picked up and it's much the same throughout Asia I said so an indirect consequence of the Japanese aggression and violence happened to be the liberation of a good deal of Asia that's incidentally why plenty of Asian nationalists supported the Japanese for example sukarno and Indonesia support of the Japanese all the way through is anti-fascist but supported the Japanese because they were going to kick the Dutch up and it's the same throughout so you know actions have all kinds of consequences but you cannot justify Japanese atrocities an aggression on the basis of the fact that inadvertent consequences happen to lead the deliberation of a page that was the context in which that comment was made and it's I don't think there's any doubt of the historical accuracy of the comment the US bombing in Afghanistan was silent genocide no what I said is that if they that the assumptions they were making were that that could well be a consequence remember the bombing of Afghanistan was taken on the assumption that it might well lead put millions of people at risk of starvation that assumption was very widespread you can read it and Harvard's a major International Journal international security The New York Times for example estimated after a month that the number of people at risk of starvation had risen by 50% from 5 million to seven-and-a-half million and in fact right after September 11th even before the bombing of the US ordered Pakistan to terminate food supplies that were keeping a good part of the population at the edge of survival so that policy under the assumptions in which the policy was being conducted could well have led to silent genocide that's one of the reasons why rational people should oppose policies like that you said that if the Nuremberg principles were applied every post World War two president would be indictable probably true can we run run down them real fast what Eisenhower do it you would indict him for Eisenhower overthrew the conservative Nationalist government of Iran with the military coup he overthrew the first and last democratic government in Guatemala by military coup and invasion leading to years of in Iran it led to 25 years of brutal dictatorship finally overthrown in 79 in Guatemala led to massive atrocities which are still continuing that's after almost 50 years in Indonesia this wasn't known until recently but he conducted the major clandestine terror operation of the post-war period up until Cuban Nicaragua in an effort to break up Indonesia's strip off the outer islands where most of the resources are and undermine the what was then considered as a threat of Indonesian democracy Indonesia was too free and open it was allowing a political party of the poor to participate they were gaining a lot of ground so that the Eisenhower supported and helped instigate a military rebellion in the outer islands this is just for starters these are all indictable offences owned by Kennedy Kennedy was one of the worst Kennedy first of all invaded South Vietnam during the Eisenhower administration they had blocked a political settlement in 1954 and instituted a kind of a Latin American style terror state which had killed maybe 60 or 70 thousand people by at the end of the Eisenhower period and had instigated a response reaction Kennedy recognized that it couldn't be controlled internally so he simply invaded in 1962 about a third of the bombing missions who were carried out by the US Air Force in South u.s. planes with South Vietnamese insignia the u.s. pilot are the author he authorized napalm he began the use of chemical weapons to destroy food crops they began programs which drove millions of people into what amount of the concentration camps that's aggression in the case of Cuba it was just a massive campaign of international terrorism which almost led to the destruction of the world led to the missile crisis and we can continue again these are all indictable offences Johnson well Johnson expanded the war and into China to the point where ended up probably leaving three or four million people dead he invaded the Dominican Republic to block what looked like a potential democratic revolution there supported the Israeli occupation in its early stages again we can go around the world but make you take them takes a quarter I'll get there but Nixon's next next thing we don't even have to talk about we can we can skip that one okay but Ford then Ford well for it was only there for a short time but long enough to endorse the Indonesian invasion of East Timor which became about as close to genocide as anything in the modern period they pretended to oppose it but secretly supported effect not so secretly the u.s. immediately after the invasion the u.s. did join the rest of the world in formally condemning it at the Security Council but ambassador Moynihan was kind enough to explain to us in his words that his instructions were to render the United Nations utterly ineffective in any actions it might take to counter the Indonesian and great invasion and he says proudly that he did this with considerable success his next sentence says in the next few months it seems that about sixty thousand people were killed and then he goes off to the next topic that's the first few months went on to probably hundreds of thousands Sigma formally the u.s. announced the boycott of weapons but secretly it increased the supply of weapons including counterinsurgency equipment so that the Indonesians could consummate the invasion that's just a short period in office but that's indictable seriously in fact that's a major war crime Carter Carter increased as the Indonesian atrocities were increasing they peaked in 1978 Carter's flow of weapons to Indonesia increased when Congress imposed a human rights restrictions by then was a human rights movement in Congress to block the flow of advanced weaponry to Indonesia Carter arranged through Mondale Vice President to get Israel to send us Skyhawks to Indonesia to enable Indonesia to complete what turned out to be near Jenna's killing may be quarter the population or something in the in the Middle East Carter just won the Nobel Prize his great achievement was the Camp David agreements the Camp David agreements are presented as a diplomatic triumph for the United States in fact they were a diplomatic catastrophe at Camp David the United States and Israel accepted finally Egypt 1971 offer which they had then read us it rejected at the time except that now that was worse from the us-israeli point of view because it included the Palestinians in order to accept get Israel to accept Egypt's 1971 offer after a major war in atrocities and so on Carter raised aid military and other aid Israel to more than fifty percent of total aid worldwide Israel used it it once in exactly the way they said they were going to do as every sane person knew as an opportunity to attack their northern neighbor first in 1978 then in 1982 and to increase integration of the occupied territories and that's for starters we can continue Reagan I don't think we have to talk about that one either I mean Reagan is the first president to have been condemned by the International Court of Justice for what they called the unlawful use of force meaning international terrorism in the war against Nicaragua again that's just for starters they also the Security Council endorsed it in two resolutions both of which were vetoed by the United States Bush one well we can begin with the invasion of Panama the invasion of Panama which according to the Panamanians killed about 3,000 people since it's never investigated know if that's true or not this was done in order to kidnap a disobedient thug who had been supported by the United States right through his worst atrocities Noriega Noriega who was brought to Florida and tried for crimes that he committed mostly on the CIA payroll okay that's aggression we could go into the details of the war in Iraq but there were plainly opportunities for they might not have worked we don't know but there were opportunities for diplomatic settlement which the Bush administration refused to consider and incidentally the press would not report with a single exception in Long Island Newsday which did report the whole story throughout accurately and is the only newspaper in the country to have done so the Bush administration then did it to act and the attack was carried out and in a manner which is criminal under the laws of war they attacked infrastructure and if you attack New York City and you destroy the electrical system our system the sewage systems and so on that amounts to biological warfare and that's the nature of the attack then came a sanctions regime which it's mostly Clinton that began with Bush which is by conservative estimates killed hundreds of thousands of people while strengthening Saddam Hussein that takes us off to Clinton which that's the beginning that's by no means the end to clem through it well we can run through that one case of Isis all right but there plenty of others Bush - let's take scoring with Clinton okay I'm one of Clinton's minor s with minor escapades very minor with sending a couple of cruise missiles to the Sudan to destroy what they knew to be a pharmaceutical plant there was no intelligence failure according to the only estimates we have from the German ambassador and the director of Regional Director of Near East foundation does field work and Sudan both of them estimates several tens of thousands of deaths from one cruising synthetic pretty serious somebody did that to us we'd regarded as bad news and again we can continue during in the Middle East for example the Clinton began by declaring past UN resolutions the words of his administration obsolete and anachronistic because we're finished with that no more international law then comes Apollo a period called a peace process except that during the peace process Israeli us at Israeli settlement which means settlement paid for by the US taxpayer and supported by US military aid and diplomacy continually increased the most extreme year was Clinton's last year the highest level of settlement the highest since 1992 meanwhile the territories were canonized broken up into small regions with infrastructure projects and new settlement I don't know what you call that but it's under military occupation and if anyone else was doing it we'd call it a worker and again we can continue wish to I don't think we have to discuss your call okay how does well I want to get back to one thing he said news day apparently got off the reservation is somehow what happened there had a no idea but one particularly one reporter knew Troy's kept reporting everything was happening I have a guess I mean what was going on was that he was reporting leaks from the government the government the US State Department was leaking reports from August August 90 right up to through December planning for the war leaking report saying that Iraq was making offers that the State Department regarded as serious and negotiable maybe not acceptable but negotiable now you know no one in the state department leaks reports to a suburban newspaper what I assume was happening was that they were leaking into the New York Times which was refusing to print them and then they leaked them the Newsday which appears on every newsstand in New York City with a big full front-page headlines saying RAC offers this and that I mean can you think of any other explanation if you were in the State Department would you leak documents to Newsday well but it's a it's a part of an immense cooperation those day times merely location and somehow that newspaper alone and this one reporter and Fay who I don't know but he was doing a very good job that kept reporting but and what typically happened is that Newsday would report it big front-page story and a couple of days later in The Times and the sort of back pages you'd see a phrase saying well reports claim that the Iraq made an offer but the White House denies it so very few people in the country knew about this we've got a few minutes left before we're going to open this for questions from me from the people here in the studio you've said either the general population will take control of our destiny or there will be no destiny for anyone to control why is that so I think we think we are in a situation with I mean the human species has developed a capacity to destroy itself and everything else that's been true since the Second World War and we are edging very close to the possibility of that happening it's come very close in the past I mean during the Cuban Missile Crisis which Arthur Schlesinger described as the most dangerous moment in human history we just learned last October how dangerous it was last October it was revealed at the retrospective conference of participants and that American Russian and Cuban that the world was literally one word away from terminal nuclear war Russian submarine commanders turns out had nuclear-tipped missiles and they were under attack by American destroyers at the edge of Kennedy's quarantine zone they assumed the nuclear war was going on two of the commanders ordered the missiles sent that would have led to a devastating response picking up Moscow in comes New York and were over one commander countermanded that was a consequence of a international terrorist war aimed at regime change those notions are right in the headlines and that's we're coming very close to that now I mean the preventive war doctrine last September it's just the instructing people in the world that you better develop weapons of mass destruction or a means of terrorism in order to deter the United States or secondly or take another domain nobody really understands in any detail what's going on with a climate that's a complicated issue but there's a near consensus among scientists that were playing with fire could be it's kind of like Afghanistan you you're risking the possibility of very severe destruction if anything goes wrong these are sort of nonlinear processes I mean a slight change could have a big effect you know what's going to happen you know maybe in Ice Age in Europe or some other thing well you know we're very near the edge in nuclear weapons development and other weapons of mass destruction and policies that are creating international chaos in destroying possibly destroying an environment in which decent survival is possible nobody you can't none of this is predictable it's just all too close for comfort and it things are tending in that direction I mean and it's been it's it's not particularly new it takes a the history of Europe now for hundreds of years the Europe was the most savage place in the world the main activity of Europeans was slaughtering each other meanwhile on the side conquering most of the world in 1945 they called it off why well very straightforward reason it was understood by French and Germans and British that the next time they play the centuries-old game of slaughtering each other some be the end of the world because they had developed means of destruction so enormous that you just can't do it anymore so now Europe is a peaceful region but unless that extends to the world same problems arise what's the good news the good news is that there's lots of good news part of it is that as a result of the activism of the last 40 years which has been extensive the United States is a much more civilized country than it was in the past and the same has happened all over good parts of the world there's now extensive other there are all kinds of things that we didn't even exist before women's rights minority rights an environmental movement anti-nuclear movements international solidarity movements global justice movements and none of us existed 40 or 45 years ago most of it is post 1960s that started at all they kind of took off it's changed hasn't changed institutions but it has changed consciousness of awareness and it's true of a large part of the world actually much of the initiative for these developments is coming from the south and there's a good reason why the world Social Forum meets in Brazil not in Paris or New York that's because that's where the leading edge of the activism is for significant social change throughout much of the south the north is joined to an extent and these are hopeful possibilities for popular movements reversing a course that's a very dangerous one on that note of optimism we'll take questions now from people here in the audience I noticed that you mentioned that when US government tries to pick up a target to attack they usually pick up a weak defenseless and important target so since the Iraqi issue has now has been Rena announced to be officially a end and also it is also said as a zero several possible targets that US government my pick up so one example might be and the the North Korea but it is recently it recently it has been said that the US Army stationed in North Korea have retreated to to to Japan sorry excuse fish in South Korea I also sorry in South Korea sorry has has retreated to Japan but it seems that not it seems that the war will break out I mean according to some people's belief but it seems that North Korea is a country with almost no resources but it's also quite defensive and it has it is said that has nuclear weapons so I wonder whether you have any opinion on this issue and what kind of benefits will be brought to America if you know the war breaks well first of all the visit about attacking defenseless enemies I actually happen to be paraphrasing a leaked intelligence document from the bush one administration when they came into office like every administration they call for an intelligence survey of the world usually we don't find out about it for 30-40 years until it gets Declassified but in this case someone leaked a paragraph from it and it was published by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times her column is considered a kind of gossip column so people don't read it very carefully but she actually did publish in 1990 or so the paragraph that was leaked from that document and what it said is that in the case of confrontation with much weaker enemy which it's tacitly assumed that the only ones you're going to attack in the case of confrontations with much weaker enemies of the United States must defeat them decisively and rapidly because otherwise political support will erode it's not the 1960s when Kennedy could carry out a war for years and Johnson could escalate it with no protest now you got to build up the enemy to look like a massive force and then destroy him decisively and rapidly and you got to pick a much weaker one and that's a sensible you may not like it but it's a rational doctrine and if you look at the Wars of the 90s that's what they are the North Korea case is a complicated one the what the United States has been telling the world loud and clear for the last couple of months is that if you want to prevent us from attacking you you'd better have a deterrent I'm an Iraq had no deterrent so there we in smash it North Korea had a deterrent not nuclear weapons incidentally massed artillery they have massed artillery aimed that Seoul and that the American forces there and unless the Pentagon can figure out a way to take them out with precision guided munitions before they're used it could just be devastating actually the predictions in the Clinton years from the Pentagon were that if the US was to go to worthy as one general put it they better have a hundred thousand body bags ready so North Korea has a deterrent which is conventional nuclear weapons they may have a couple of years from now but that's not the issue now and that held off an attack well why is North Korea important you're completely right as no resources it's one of the poorest most most horrifying countries in the world but it's right in the middle of a crucial area this whole region is a rapidly developing economic region it has tremendous resources in Siberia you know lots of gas and oil and other resources has huge countries that are industrialized and need the resources particularly Japan and South Korea but now China too which is now a resource importer and there's a good reason to expect that that whole region is going to go off in its own independent direction the United States does not want that it wants that region to be subordinated the u.s. power and North Koreans are right in the middle of if there's going to be pipelines from you know Siberia through with South Korea and off to Japan that's where they're going to go so it itself has no material significance but its position in one of the most rapidly developing regions of the world definitely does I appreciate your emphasis is on hope as whereas activism is being a source of hope and as a academic and training and a political organizer in the last two years I've I've experienced an inertia in the academic class so to speak that I've never experienced before and I've been organizing for a number of years including the first Gulf War and so the first part of the question is why do you think it is that at absolutely the most critical time the most you know the mask has been removed in a lot of sense of this of this push an expansion of empire so to speak that that's the time that the such extreme inertia has set in and that people feel so impotent and then the second part of the question is how do you recommend breaking through that particularly an academic class because they have such resources and I'm wondering if something like the French based attack organization may be somewhat of a model and I just want to get your opinion on that well if first of all your age is significant the academic world has never been a source of a rarely been a source of activism it usually comes from somewhere else there's a brief period in which it was true in the late 60s late 60s not in the earlier period when parts of the academic world these students incidentally very few faculty did become actively engaged in elite universities and elsewhere then it kind of died down in the 1980s happening an extremely activist period but it was not coming from the academic world it was coming more from churches in the Midwest and places like that the Central America solidarity movement was extremely significant didn't get a lot of attention because it was not coming from a lead centers but this is the first time in the history of imperialism hundreds of years that people from the Imperial country actually went to live with the victims to try to help them and protect them I mean nobody in France went to live in Algeria during the Algerian war living in Algerian village or ever the Vietnam War was never even thought about and the whole history of European and US imperialism never happened that happened on a very substantial scale in the 1980s that's the reason why you now have volunteers in many parts of the world including these really occupied territories so all an outgrowth of this but the academic world is almost completely not involved same is true in the 1990s hasn't been the academic world I like the global justice movements which are the biggest ones that they didn't commit I mean there's students involved you know couple of faculty here and there but it's mostly coming from elsewhere I didn't mean to imply that actually I didn't apply to academic we haven't be in the academic world so rightly we should be concerned about what goes on there you know you and I aren't going to organize Steelworkers but we can do things where we live so that's just the right question and what can change it is what's always done in the past you know people working hard to educate to organize to raise issues and we have tremendous privileges on most parts of the world people try to do things like this they face torture assassination rather we don't face anything you know we're completely free we have a legacy of freedom that's unparalleled we have enormous resources and privileges get every opportunity we can think of what's lacking is will I said one of the things that's common in a kind of a youth culture student culture like the academic world is a very short attention span you know you figure things have to be done soon and if they don't work in a week you know we quit like I went to a demonstration and nothing happened okay now I'm going to quit if you want anything to change it's got a it means work over a long time lots of defeats occasional victories ultimately you get somewhere you think of any popular movement has ever done anything yeah abolitionism women's rights anything you think of that's why it works that was what was different in the working-class culture that I grew up in as a kid these came from movements that thought you're gonna have to work hard for a long time to try to achieve something and that's yes that's what happens it's not going to be any quick victories but there are plenty of opportunities and just have to keep attack oh yeah well attack is an interesting group and it's done important things it's fairly elite outfit but it's one of the groups that was instrumental in setting up the world Social Forum and they're pretty narrowly focused on a few crucial issues like one of their big issues is Tobin tax you know tax on financial interactions which is probably a good idea there's other possibilities like it and it's it's been a very influential and important group and it's starting in the United States incidentally so they're subgroups here it's international based in France and it's the kind of thing that could be part of a serious u.s. organizing effort but only part I think yes sir given human rights violations by corporations I was wondering how you make your purchasing decisions and if there are any products that you don't purchase well plenty of things I don't purchase but not really for that reason I mean these are questions of tactics I mean do you affect Human Rights but let's take coca-cola which is a big thing around here Anderson Coca Cola is has just been it's narrowly scraped by a district court case in Florida that was brought by the Steel Workers in support of Colombian workers in a subsidiary of a coca-cola plant which is one of those vicious anti-union plants almost anywhere and the particular case was a union activist who was murdered by paramilitaries in the plant and the steel workers who are pressing these human rights cases for Colombians they can't do it themselves are using provisions of American law which do exist and have sometimes been applied and they've brought a case in Florida which got to the district court and they sort of have a half victory the district court severed coca-cola from the case but kept the subsidiary well you know Severine coca-cola was a technicality so does that mean you should stop buying coca-cola well if you stop buying coca-cola is that going to help union activists in Colombia that's the question you have to ask these are and you know I don't think there's a simple answer like if you stop my cocoa let's not have any effect if there was a massive boycott of it they'd notice it in the corporate headquarters and and might do something like for example Nike and reap Ceylon Reebok or something the guys who make sneakers and things like that have modified somewhat they're horrendous human rights practices in plants in Asia as a result of pressure must have been coming from students and that yeah that had an effect but these are questions you just have to answer in terms of their likely consequences for people who are suffering there's no point making gestures sosser Noam Chomsky thank you very much okay you

Channel: Stony Brook University

Views: 134,019

Rating: 4.8772621 out of 5

Keywords: Noam Chomsky, Stony Brook, linguistics

Id: oUUkwmTmYqM

Length: 60min 8sec (3608 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/danecarney]

Glad Chomsky is getting love.

Join us over at /r/chomsky

or if you're feeling brave

/r/libertariansocialism or /r/Anarchism

[u/Maox]

The awesome mr. Chomsky. May you live forever.

[u/yskoty]

I am having a hard time justifying the trial of Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.

They were both kind of harmless, weren't they?

[u/loyalone]

Such an insightful interview, I backed it up and watched the whole hour. Level-headed and with a prodigious memory to boot. Excellent.

[u/leif777]

I love this man. His ideas, wisdom and awareness of what's happening in the world have always made an impression on me.... but my god he's boring. I watched 5 minutes and already felt my eyelids falling.