Noam Chomsky: The Stony Brook Interviews Part Three

hello my name is Jack Chen I'm a historian at New York University and I'm delighted to be interviewing Noam Chomsky today we will be discussing Asian American and Pacific Islander issues both in terms of the growing numbers of asian-americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States and many of them are at our college campuses but also especially focusing on issues of race its relationship to foreign policy intercultural kinds of questions and also questions of philosophy and education so so know I was you know I thought it'd be useful that maybe contextualize a little bit you know I'm sure at MIT but certainly at NYU and places like Stony Brook here there are a lot of asian-american students and many of them are coming as you know the children of recent immigrants Korean Americans have a term for 1.5 hours 1.5 generation and it's my understanding that also you're you you could be I don't know if you would consider yourself that way but in many ways you're the child of immigrants and you spoke did you speak Yiddish and parents refused to let us speak you okay that's for different reasons however that's because there was a in the Jewish immigrant community that was kind of a cult or Kampf going on at the time between Yiddish diaspora oriented and Hebrew have been Palestine oriented around my parents were on that side of course there was other whole groups that just wanted to drop it all you know right right so you spoke Hebrew then my when I was I didn't actually speak it but it was in a Hebrew culture okay yeah learned it right right well one of the interesting questions about being a 1.5 or is that people have some insight about more than one culture they're immersed in a family culture and also community oftentimes a community culture which has its food ways languages still immersed in that kind of very different oftentimes immigrant you know variance and then they're also engaged with various aspects of kind of dominant US culture and so it's a part of what I think is very interesting now about Asian Americans who are in this country is that they're kind of negotiating that Korean Americans in particular I've talked about being caught between cultures but it seems to me that that's also a resource of special insight really critical insight about the cultural difference and and how cultures operates and what the norms of different cultures are I'm wondering if that's something that that depends over much how its treated I mean it can be a way of enriching a society in a culture or or it can be abandoned many immigrant communities have tried to suppress and abandon their traditional routes and Americanized themselves and I remember that very well and childhood in fact went in both directions my parents were really transplanted immigrant community happened to be here but my generation was trying to Americanize itself in every way could you was there something of an idea of an American dream and within the other matter of learning baseball statistics and making sure you were as if like the other kids you know and even more more so than they were at the same time keeping to you know going hebrew school in the afternoon and so on and so forth so it's kind of two parallel universes which was pretty common of jewish kids back in the 30s in the 40s right i'm wondering if that's unplugged the reason for that was there was plenty of anti-semitism it was rife so you just wanted to he sort of wanted to keep your identity not too visible so the when and you wanted to kind of become american in terms of identifying identifying with baseball like the part of the kids on the street there I kind of wanted to share with you maybe a few people that I've been working with and because I think their experiences in some ways embody the tension of being caught between different cultures and also clearly what happens in Asia has affected them deeply here but it's also a process of discovering what those meanings are last night at the event I met a man who is in his 50s he's Filipino America his father was in the Philippines of supportive Marcos he himself was drafted during the Vietnam War and fought in the war and started dealing with the fact that he wasn't a kind of a mainstream American in the sense that soldiers were American soldiers are starting to threaten him in : racist names so he he was telling me that he not only had to kind of watch out who was in front of them but also watch behind his back that's one story the other story is a PhD student of mine who's Vietnamese and she was just finishing up a PhD a couple years ago when it was discovered that she had ovarian cancer and it turns out that a lot of Vietnamese children who came over and she says she's South Vietnamese yeah could be chemical warfare where as affected by a dachshunds yeah and that it's effective the children even though they may have been quite young when they left in a profound no there's still new cases going on yeah from the children born well after the chemical warfare was terminated actually there's extensive studies of it but they can't be recorded here or they won't be they aren't reported at least many of them done by American public health specialists it was just a conference and I know I a couple of months ago in which a leading US researcher who's concerned with dioxin did report an extensive study that they done comparing the accent it's only in South Vietnam but they didn't use it in North Vietnam so kind of ugly but they have a control population the he just compared the levels of dioxin with levels of spring and of course it coincided closely we also found that dioxin levels were hundreds of times as high as what's permitted here in heavy spraying areas actually Columbia University just published a unit in the epidemiological Center I just published a study in Nature you know the British science Journal a couple of weeks ago in which they discovered that the actual use of these chemicals was about 50 percent higher than what was reported so and there's extensive studies of the effects there's new cases coming along it's kind of ended here there's virtually no mention of it which is you know you don't pay attention to your own crimes right you know it's what's interesting about these two examples but also there are many more that we could go on and on is that these are people who have been deeply affected by war violence u.s. foreign policy when they come here they're also racialized in very particular ways they oftentimes are from our coasts or South Vietnamese and came you know with the support of the US but then in this country they're they're kind of treated in though they're both and especially the fill of the image because goes back a century but the Philippines were very deeply colonized I'm to the extent that sense of identity was lost in many respects and they have to kind of recover what they have to learn what happened to them Viet Nam's more complex because or reason many different currents and so on but I'm gonna take a even sport for Marco's I'm in the US it was a brutal corrupt dictator the reagan-bush administration not only supported him but expressed what they called their love for him and there is they admired his love for democracy George Bush Senior and so on and that went on up to the practically that day when the military turned against him I mean there was a what they called people's power movement which kind of spread over much of the country and but the military was really powerful was present at one point was about it was around March 1984 if I remember the military turned against him and the Reagan administration instantly turned against it and they said yeah we support the democratizing forces but so and then they became a team Marcus so people like that are caught in a very complicated situation in which they grew up with the support of the United States supporting a dictator and part of the dictatorial system but then became quickly on the other side with policy shifted almost overnight and of course the racial element is just constant about what cetera the Vietnamese case is complex if this is a South Vietnamese woman she was proud you know South Vietnam was split there was a u.s. client regime with its own supporters and there was a popular movement that was opposing it in the south so it's kind of like France during the German occupation I mean Vichy France at planting of supporters I was running the country pretty much by itself with the Germans in the background the resistance had plenty of supporters and in fact after the war there were pretty serious reprisals thousands of people killed so that's that's pretty common in countries that are colonized part of them I think the challenge of Asian American Studies and that perspective that brings to let's say American Studies in American history is that you have people who have migrated here who come out of these experiences and obviously people don't necessarily critically reflect on their experiences some of them are escaping and just kind of trying to assimilate in a culture it as quickly as possible but in their backgrounds and it was interesting about this Filipino American man is that he didn't really think about his identity even after having been in Vietnam and having had the experiences he had until he had grandchildren and then he began thinking about what was he gonna tell his grandchildren what what identities well what did we know about Philippines well such as not much right because it was wiped out during a colonial experience virtually went to I mean it was kept and some circles of course but for much of the population it was just expressed many of the Filipinos that I work with talked about the absence of presence the absence of presence and part of the challenge of doing the kind of educational and historical work they do is to try to try to make something tangible and real because it's all been wiped out the archives are gone the stories are kind of suppressed people don't talk that's true everywhere men take say Korea as South Korea's becoming democratized it's also bringing up memories of things that happened earlier which had been suppressed like the Jeju Island Massacre which was never discussed for years but now it's a big issue on the island the conference that every year they're trying to admit spreading through the population what happened none of these issues it gets suppressed for a long time actually I noticed this number of places I happened in Europe I happened to have gone to I did go to both Spain and Greece shortly after the dictatorships were overthrown and young people just had no idea what the background was I mean if he years later it's beginning to come out but if you talked about you know what happened in Barcelona and 1939 I mean I remember vividly but only people my age knew Sam agrees talked about the Greek Civil War people my age remembered but hadn't talked about it for years because she just couldn't talk about those things and their children didn't you know so you have to kind of recover a history which is not that far back in these cases saimin yeah one of my students was taking one of our courses and was reading a history book and and there's a reference to it I think was a Bruce Cummings history and Chiodo was mentioned and she suddenly realized that because her family was from Jericho and her grandfather had disappeared and died at a certain point then that was what had happened is that you know it's a very powerful insight but the family itself didn't talk about it no they didn't look enough Justin yeah but I mean I remembered from my own childhood my parents never took that Eastern Europe actually my mother was too young but my father was there till he was 17 but it was just one of those things you didn't talk about so part of the the kind of irony or difficulty of being a migrant in this country is that on the one hand you have that family experience often times but then it's also too oftentimes erased or ignore and these are all different circumstances in the Korean Filipino Spanish Greek case I mean it was suppressed in the home country under dictatorships military rule of the fascist governments and so on which may adds an extra layer of difficulty to recovering it has to be recovered in the home country which is not so easy to fix you you write about the necessity to develop a critical comprehension for comprehension of reality I guess part of what what's interesting about the Asian American experience is that the experiences are not self-evident but as people begin to look into their own family histories and their own backgrounds this is where is is that kind of what you mean by the kind of work well it's yeah and it's pretty it's there are a lot of specific problems in the asian-american case and that you know in a complicated ways an Asia has been different parts of Asia depending on what year it is are demonized in the in the United States to an extreme extent and this goes way back it course varies depends who the Allies are knew the enemies are but it's kind of a generalized demonization of Asians which isn't differentiated much in the popular culture even though it may be in policy which just affects everyone on the one hand will be a demonization of the bad Asians but then there's always some kind of group whether it's like Chinese or Chapman Japanese Americans are Chinese Americans from one moment to the next or let's say in south vietnam and those were collaborators and therefore the good names but you know i think in the popular in the general popular culture these differentiation joint clear to people in fact it's important to understand that the United States itself is an extremely insular country I mean most people don't know anything about the outside world and they can't distinguish who you're for and who you're against I mean I remember take a recent case one of the major Wars in the 1980s was nicaragua's that they issue all over the newspapers you couldn't miss it everyone knew it's a well my wife and I were went down number of times and Erica we had friends who people who have college degrees you know educated people who assumed that we were visiting the Contras the reason is that the u.s. supports governments and they know we're these kind of crazy types of funny ideas so we must be visiting the gorillas you know this is the lead issue and then newspapers and they know which side the US government was on just imagine if people who don't even you know barely know where Asia is they're trying to sort out who are the friends and who are the enemies more recently there are a lot of Asian American students on campuses the Stern School of Business at NYU for example is 50 60 % asian-americans among their students and the representation is that from Asia or from you know Asian Americans Asian Americans many of them one point fibers yes you know and there's a popular representation especially among neoconservatives of Asian Americans as kind of the motto minority used as a way just point to poor african-americans and Latinos as well these are examples of a minority and they've helped themselves etc etc and you know how would I mean how would you understand that in the global context that I mean there are striking differences they they didn't come from the same experience as Latinos and blacks the and they tent up it's kind of reminiscent of the Jewish minorities tend to be education oriented hard-working quiet obedient and you don't pay attention to splits within the community so you know who goes down to the poor neighborhoods where Asian Americans live but the ones who make it to NYU do come from a education oriented upward oriented community so they can be you know held as you say as a kind of weapon against others why don't you do if they do it that's which puts them in an especially difficult position for one thing it's not representative of the Asian American community well many of them also come from backgrounds that's in Korea where the the parents actually enjoyed kind of american-style education as it was instituted after the war in in South Korea same with Japan same with Taiwan other places and so many ways they're already very comfortable with kind of western-style education and oftentimes when we came to this country they they sacrificed quite a bit for their children because they were at a higher professional level and then they end up operating a greengrocer in the case of many Korean Americans all right your child goes to NYU right now but the child goes to NYU and it puts a lot of pressure as you can imagine on the children too because the parents are expressing a well through sacrificing themselves for the children the children then feel that they need to honor their parents and that love at the same time they feel the need to become a part of American culture stricken just strikeout to get some freedom from that kind of authority many of these parents are fairly authoritarian coming from authoritarian governments and cultures and cultures yeah yeah yeah so what would you say I mean what would you say to some because if they'll people that live their lives I don't give a dice to my own children not if I did they'd be smart enough not to listen to it well how I mean maybe I should ask it a different way which is if they're if they're struggling to try to understand some of that themselves many of them will kind of work it out in terms of this personal you know kind of animosity or rebellion against their parents but it seems to me that they've really they've really come out of a larger historical moment post-war put post-world war two Asia wars in Asia and they've got a difficult relationship with this country and this culture in many ways yeah that's could turn out to be more difficult because they the conflicts are simmering and could blow up again I mean the potential us-china conflict is right beneath the surface u.s. planners regard China as a serious potential enemy there's concern that the whole Northeast Asia region might strike out on its own it's a rich developing the region and those are likely to be they're gonna live with those problems very likely they may take a more serious form so I better figure out ways of resolving some economists are projecting that in 2020 Chinese economy will be the same size as the US economy if it continues to grow obviously with the SARS instantly that's so sorry I actually I think one should see is reflecting another sort of hidden problem in China and that is that the since the reforms are you know the sort of market reforms have been taking place the a lot of the socials of the sport system has collapsed so the health system is proved on actually was recently a study done by a Harvard University group and Harvard Medical School and the Beijing University wants some University their medical school trying to see if they could give a realistic and analysis of growth rates in China if they took into account the loss of support systems so if you lose your health support system and you have to deal with it yourself that's a cost and it growth declines if you take that in so they try it's a tricky study but they tried to do an estimate and you know their figures were not impressive I mean it by their analysis Chinese growth rates were very low if you took into account the collapse of pension system support system health systems and so on and I I strongly you know China so secretly can't really figure out what's going on very well and the statistics are probably very dubious but it's very likely I suspect that the SARS concerns have to do with the collapse of a preventive health system I mean whatever one thinks about Maoist China it had pretty successful health outcomes actually there's it's interesting the way this is dealt with here the the main person who's studied the economists have studied the famines and social policy and their effects as a march ascent one being Nobel Prize for this work the very important work half of his work is known the other half which is in the same papers is not known what his main studies he and his colleague jean dres compared China and India which is good comparison I mean they're both colonized became independent same time late 40s and they were you know different countries large Pakistan similar in many ways levels of development so on well he he one of his main contributions was studying the main that terrible Chinese famine in 1958 60 when maybe 20 million people died big you know terrible famine and he treats that as a political crime basically an ideological crime it's not that the senator wanted to kill people it's that they didn't get any information totalitarian society you don't get a flow of information up and back and simply didn't know what was happening and the critical commentary and they couldn't do anything about in India he points out which is a capitalist democratic society they did get information so there were flows of information up and back and criticism and so on in India never suffered any such famines after the British were kicked out there are plenty of them before but since independence hadn't had a major famine and this is the well-known part of March ascends work shows how awful the Communist story take a look at the same papers and the other half of the paper a dozen different analysis it compares mortality rates in India and China since independence well in China they went way down because they instituted rural health programs and barefoot doctors and preventive medicine for the huge overwhelmingly population in India they did they followed capitalist principles you know do anything for people to do it on the wrong well turns out that the death rates in India declined much more slowly and if you look at the gap and well I'll just quote their own conclusion what they say is every eight years India put as many skeletons in its closet as China did during its years of shame meaning during the period that they studied 1947 the 1979 that's a hundred million extra deaths in India well that's pretty serious and that's also they treat that as an ideological crime to comes from government policies you know you could have carried out preventive medicine and rural health care and so on but they didn't or that half of this is unknown unreported when Sen got his Nobel Prize I don't see a single mention of it and it's hard to miss it's in the same papers you know the same books but it doesn't fit the requirement so that's our ideological crime or I can fit our ideological requirements anyway going back to China that system has been lost and in fact their study Senate dress goes a little beyond seventy nine and they say that at the very beginning of the reform period seventy nine the death rate started the decline slow you know whether that continues I don't know but if these facts are taken into account get a rather different picture and I strongly suspect that the Czar's have that epidemic has to be looked at in that context um there's a concern that if it spreads to the countryside where the health support systems of virtually collapsed that could be a catastrophe yeah part of which are pointing out is that usual indicators of economic development don't take into account people's well-being health care and there is an effort was done by ohok and ascend and others to and it's now part of the UN program to construct an annual Human Development Index which is different from the growth index and that it's takes into account a few things like I think literacy infant mortality and maybe one or two other things and if countries are ranked in human development it looks quite different from the economic growth the growth is a very funny notion you know there's much to do with most of the population and effect take Chinese growth the Chinese China's growth statistics are very high but to be serious about it you have to ask how much of it is foreign owned growth right and it turns out if you look at the real growth areas of China plenty of its foreign investment overseas Chinese Japanese us others it's also very urban as opposed to more that's very very leaves that most of the population there's like 900 million people out there who may be devastated if the big question now in the world trade system is whether China is going to agree to open its to open its economy to agricultural imports from the United States in Europe well these are highly subsidized technologically advanced agribusiness exports which no peasant society can possibly compete with they want the subsidies they don't support and so on so he'll be wiped out right but that means hundreds of millions of people will be you know tested through what happens to them they'll become dependent on these other words just for the economy does what about the producers and the peasant agriculture happens to be highly productive and very effective but it cannot compete with subsidized high tech agribusiness that's very possible the same things happening in Mexico right the and in fact all over the world you know peasant communities are being devastated by the fact that they can't although they may be highly productive and they are in fact very often when scientific agriculture is it's called comes in to some third-world area that production actually declines because peasant agriculture which is the product of centuries or millennia of development the study you know selection I mean thinking they're developing and seeds and so on and so forth turns out to be really productive I mean people know you know this seems you plant under this rock because the Sun hits in the afternoon and so on and so forth that's all gone when you have scientific usually monocrop agriculture furthermore peasant the peasant agriculture tradition though it's very rich is unknown the reason it's unknown and so is it's a women's culture because her mother and the daughter so you know in the right in the society people don't know what it is the daughter knows what it is because their mother taught her know and it develops over long periods extremely rich and extremely fragile if you eliminated it's gone well there's also the move of let's say us corporations to take let's say certain varieties of basmati rice from local and the petitions and foot to modify them slightly force them back under subsidized exports which destroys the peasant society actually sometimes it's more brutal than that I was in southern Colombia not long ago where in fact chemical warfare is going on they call it fumigation but it's just another form of chemical warfare now what it's just doing is destroying peasant communities I mean it's driving peasants off the land these again are rich at traditional peasant communities with highly complicated and rich agriculture but it's an extremely fragile system one generation is enough to kill it it's closely connected to the in Colombia it turns out very rich biodiversity so it's all integrated with that with the via diversity is also being destroyed by the chemical warfare and other operations and you know you drive the peasants off the land by what's called fumigation they joined them several million people rotting in urban slums mining companies come in and strip-mine the mountains once the these are indigenous people come see knows afro-american afro-colombians once they are away that mining companies can come in freely the drilling companies come in you can put a dams you know flooding big areas for hydroelectric power for you know for medical free export zones foreign industries and the peasant society is gone the lot of the biodiversity is destroyed you end up with you know violent a tremendous violence as you'd expect 20 political assassinations a day by now and then as far as the agricultural areas are concerned what either the alternative ranches for you know cattle raising or anything or else monocrop agro-export using the months out the genetically modified seeds which will go them somewhere no and the creation of shanty towns in an extended or well you know if you go after the urban areas and so in fact the people it's it's it's like many countries and the people most of the lot of the the wealthier part of the population is completely unaware I mean I've had Colombian students who learned about Colombia when they came here and they heard people you know like me you know who's giving talks about and they went back it's oh yeah that's the other corner of town I mean you know it's plenty of people in downtown Manhattan why's that you know what's going on at a mile away right what do we know about the homeless but it's not just a home was the way people live I mean I've you know walk through parts of Manhattan which look like that some of the worst parts of the third world you just don't see him it doesn't the same in Boston same everywhere on my own children you know didn't see really a poor person in a serious sense till we happen to take him to Tijuana once and they were kind of shocked that you know people lived like this well in fact they live like this just a couple of miles away from where we live but who sees that right we recently were doing some teachings around in Indonesia and looking at the obviously Indonesia is where the largest is the largest Islamic you know nation in the world but also it's clearly a kind of a an ongoing hotspot in terms of US conglomerate and global conglomerate interests so there's gas and oil there's also the natural resources of the forestry and their indigenous which is a devastate and it's being destroyed actually but most by Asian exporters Thai others are just wiping out the forest illegally you know for their woods for the woman in teak wood something like that it's illegal but know by now Indonesia has laws about it but nobody's enforcing them and that can have out that's kind of like the destruction of the Amazon you know it's very dangerous they're being sold at pier 1 and other places like that in the name of kind of being able to have middle class access to liquor but there's a kind of a background there which is also it's it's amazing that it's well striking that it's not known here I mean the the United States relations to Indonesia are pretty complex Indonesia was a central focus of u.s. tension back in the late 1940s in fact Planning Commission school of the major issue in Asia in 1958 this is kind of a nice public information but nobody knows that the u.s. carried out the the Eisenhower administration who carried out the largest clandestine subversive operation in post-war history to try to destroy Indonesia to break it up to separate the outer islands they supported a military role to strip the outer islands away from Indonesia the outer islands were most of the wealthy resources the reason was that the Indonesian government was becoming too independent was pillar of the non-aligned movement which was faded and also to democratic the Indonesian government the sort of an autocracy was allowing a political party of the poorer to function and it was picking up support if you look at that now be classic declassified US records they were very concerned about that they thought they were going to get dominant support within a quasi democratic political system so therefore that system had to be destroyed and there were there was an attempt in 1958 to split it up by force that didn't work u.s. then turned the supporting the generals by 1965 there was a military coup support the coup which killed and nobody knows but maybe a million people in a couple of months you know hundreds of thousands certainly a huge massacre a CIA called it the one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century comparable to Stalin and Hitler it was greeted with complete it was reported accurately pretty accurately I was greeted with total euphoria I mean the Time magazine had a an issue she had on the front cover or something like boiling blood baths and then it just reveled in this wonderful massacre of hundreds of thousands of people I mean it mostly landless peasants destroyed the one political party mass based political party and opened the country to foreign robbery foreign investment after that General Suharto who ran it compiled one of the most grotesque human rights records in the world he was held here as a wonderful person the Clinton administration described him as our kind of guy they invaded East Timor with enormous US support Carter administration and since wiped out maybe a third of the population they're pretty much depressed you know I mean figure it out if you looked but almost nobody knows and that goes right on until 1999 finally the u.s. Suharto lost his usefulness he began dragging his feet on IMF orders and he was sort of losing control of the population there was popular revolt brewing a lot of it by students actually a lot of it using the Internet so one of the first internet revolutions because they could communicate around the you know the official system by 1998 the US was giving up on support though they got a phone call from Madeline Albright Secretary of State saying the u.s. believes it's time for a democratic transition four hours later he resigned no it's not caused an effect but it does reflect the power relations try to find some comment you're asking why they hadn't had a Democrat Rick Tripp democratic tradition since 1958 well no that's part of history wiped out why did why do you phoria about one of the biggest massacres and it's in the 20th century which is it's only entirely open you know it's a well but you know all of that and what it means is gone so when you thought about Indonesia yes a lot of complicated things and it's a little like the Philippines a lot of Indonesia nurse no no that this is exactly it because there were hundred and hundred thousand political prisoners you know the major writers in the country were in prison and they couldn't nobody could talk about it you know it's and it's you know you have to recover your own history and historical understanding and put it in the context the world affairs which is not so simple yeah a part of the pattern of Asians in the US has been when the u.s. is involved in a foreign policy intervention of one kind or another at them and in some cases it's people who were suppressed and actually are important intellectuals you know coming here but in any case arriving here and their children settling here and arriving here and then their children are really cut off from any kind of understanding well they were cut off in their own countries because of the repressive regimes sometimes really brutal ones when they come here they find that history's going they have to recover it but just like young students here if they want to understand anything about US history they're going to have to discover it it's not going to be taught to them in schools right we only have about five minutes left but I thought it'd be useful to talk about one told me a little bit in this context because in many ways he's an example of that he has a very successful kind of model minority in a certain sense who who who came as a foreign student married here had children here became a naturalized citizen became quite successful loving mathematics really worked on nuclear arms you know in Los Alamos but then what happened to him in some ways I think it's been quite a rude awakening for a lot of professionals asian-americans in this country so yeah you know these racist another factors often intermingled with political internet international political conflict are right below the surface doesn't take much for them to emerge I mean oh look there I wouldn't be if the let's take a hypothetical situation closer to me personally if the United States turned against Israel which it could there could be a major wave of anti-semitism in the United States hasn't existed for maybe 30 years but 40 years but it could come back it's Jeff all these things are barely below the surface well when the US spy plane got shot over China yeah all of a sudden in this country there are boycotts of Walmart because they're selling goods made from China and boycotts of Chinese restaurants and on suppose that China does begin to take what looks like an independent course there's a lot of concern I mean the US military planning is oriented towards a potential Chinese threat so what's called missile defense which is nothing to do with defense but it's understood by both the Chinese and by the u.s. to be a first strike weapon aimed at China not anybody else yeah and of course part of concern I mean even if let's say Chinese Americans were pro US and and didn't ever hear of notes what does pro u.s. mean I mean in fact I'm pro US but against the US government you know it's a depends what you mean think US is right the population is it the culture of the society state policy and it's a very interesting concept so it's really a stoat a latarian roots this whole concept of anti-american or pro u.s. and so on it is presupposes that the society the culture and its people should be identified with state policy and that's something that should be dismantled you know so we're you a system I don't like to use okay yeah yeah you know there are a lot of Asian Americans who really come out of more conservative backgrounds and they're supporting us point policy and but they find the contradiction when they're here in terms of their being entirely vulnerable to to racism but also feeling quite vulnerable I mean many Chinese Americans believe that if there was a war with China or China was declared an axis of evil be and they would have interned yeah just like the japanese-americans yeah yeah I'm you know I'm gonna duplicate it but you know the hysteria over China has been extreme the Red Chinese were the super demons in the 1950s what kind of fantasies concocted about what they're planning to do to Americans you know tournament the drug addict so that particular thing was particularly ironic because it's the West that churned China into drug addicts by force but that's been forgotten now they were fantasies about them going to turn us into drug addicts and that could easily come back just like these stories about Hispanic narco traffickers were stimulated and built up in the late eighties mostly for domestic and international political reasons it doesn't take long some of these populations very susceptible to that kind of propaganda that's it's worth bearing in mind that for whatever reason I don't know what the reason is reason speculate but the United States happens to be a very frightened society and has been for a long time I mean actually goes back to colonial history but in the modern period it's dramatic I mean I remember my own children in school background like early sixties being taught to hide under desks tuck and cover yeah protect themselves from atom bombs which are going to come from China probably share someplace there's no other I don't think there's any other country in the world with any kind of such lunacy took place but it's a strain that runs right through the culture and it's always barely below the surface it's a large part of the gun culture is based on that I mean playing people really think they need guns to protect themselves from and you should see who they're protecting themselves from other parts of the country where people are protecting themselves from the United Nations which is sending black helicopters over to carry out their plans of the genocide of Americans or aliens no this fear of aliens and of course communists whoever the current enemy happens to be but these are strains that are just beneath the surface and they can show up in very ugly ways right ok we're going to need to wrap up this segment but let it open up for questions and and comments so No name is Charles Ehlinger I want to ask if you could expand on two things in China one being I understand that while is the rapid growth it's going to investors and the communist party operatives but not so much to the peasants to the extent that I've been told that there have been some physical uprisings in the country and that it might actually be a forbearer of a revolution this is according to a group called China study in New York City and then the other question would be I'll move into Afghanistan and it seems to be people say we're trying to control oil and perhaps other resources in that area where does China fit in as far as its needs for oil does it have its own support or will it be possibly a problem with America or older control of that area well what's going on in the interior of China people really don't know much about but there have been reports there is there have been you know some speculation that China might go back to a period of mass peasant revolts mass peasant revolts against the central authority that's a large part of Chinese history you know sort of quite big ones it's conceivable because the peasant population is in a serious situation a lot of people being driven off the land already they're becoming highly exploited labor and very ugly circumstances in the growth areas the industrial areas which are split the Chinese growth has benefited a large part of the population but it is also devastate it's a very large part - and how this is gonna play out nobody knows the big effect is likely if they open themselves up to Agra ex-work from the West the United States and Europe that could lead to a very serious problem and this decline of support services could be pretty severe - so I don't think these speculations are wild we don't know that they could be happening actually China has been carrying out quite repressive policies in many areas in this gets to Afghanistan including the Muslim areas in the in western China where there were connections to things happening in Central Asia even people moving up and back and that repression which is pretty severe has been supported by the United States since number 11th on September 11th gave a kind of a give a free rein to repressive governments all around the world to become more repressive so Russia and Chechnya China and Western China with authorization from Washington though they call it counterterrorism but that actually is a link I mean China was involved in Afghanistan China and Iran were involved in 70s against the domestic more or less by the late seventies Russian backed government as part of their whole you know international games even before the u.s. got in serious is sort of like late seventies and the connections have continued China has great interests in Central Asia naturally borders on them and the the the energy sources are a crucial issue the US has always since the Second World War committed itself to controlling Middle East oil because it's the main resource in the world and it's kind of a leader of world control on the other hand the eastern Siberia has a substantial mainly gas but also oil resources which China needs and so to South Korea that's a large part of the North Korean problem is that it's right in the middle of all of this these areas Russia because of its eastern Siberian resources China a big developing society with resources of its own Japan and South Korea huge industrial countries they're all integrated and they could the resources of the area could you'll independent a degree of independence maybe high independence then comes the question of who picks up but you know the Central Asian resources which are not on the scale of the Persian Gulf but are substantial so yes this is these are major concerns planners and could be large parts of future evolving policy it certainly as far as Afghanistan is concerned the US didn't go in there because it wants oil there's nothing much in Afghanistan you know they could use a pipeline but it's a secondary issue I think too much it was made of that the u.s. does want military bases there and also in Central Asia but that's because of Central Asia and the Persian Gulf it seems a common theme in an oppressive situation whether it's in a family or whether in a society is the the power of silence certainly in a family unit if there's some type of abuse going on or whatever there's that strong network of keeping people quiet and then it spills out could you talk about the power of silence a little bit is that from humaneness is that from a societal thing where does that come from well it certainly is pervasive I mean the domestic abuse issue is remarkable example of it I mean I I didn't myself annoying much about it until very recently what happened to have learned about it and I've just been shocked by what I've discovered I mean in my own town which is you know professional educated relatively wealthy town everybody's it turns out I often wondered what the police do in that town there's nothing to accept chase lost cats or prevent the black kids from coming in in a dilapidated car there kind of I got word or police but it turns out that they have two or three cases a week where they're actually called to you know by a 911 call that gets them to a home for a domestic abuse cases I mean never guess that this could have happened here and yes it's silence its silence within families the inside silence among friends have a close friend who happens to be a radical woman lawyer who works in a radical law office a lot of it on feminist issues they one of her colleagues was coming in bruges and they suspected that some problems taking place we said nothing she was killed right in the middle of the most you know sophisticated conscious area and I tell you I can remember that from childhood too we said I was in the immigrant community we happened to be the only Jewish family in a mostly Irish and German Catholic neighborhood was the 1930s very anti-semitic this street life for myself and my younger brother two Jewish boys was a tricky issue you know because the anti-semitism was extreme we never told their parents about it I don't think that our parents ever knew till their till they died and they never knew what life was like in our own neighborhood you just didn't talk to your parents about those things and they didn't talk to you about things and and this is inside families you know closely knit families when you go beyond well you know the things we've been talking about silence about the crimes stories that aren't ideologically acceptable and so on it's overwhelming in fact one of the well as you know when the women's movement began in serious a serious way in the late sixties early seventies a lot of it was just telling the truth about ourselves you know let's face the truth about our own lives because we've been silent about it we talked about it's just accept it as the norm if you bring out what actually what your life is actually like to yourself it's can be revolutionary we we only have just a minute left unfortunately but one of the quotes that you refer to as John Dewey in your miss education book and I'll just read it the ultimate aim of production is not production of goals or goods I'm sorry but the production of free human beings associated with one another in terms of equality could you just maybe end with a few comments about that well John Dewey it was the leading American social philosopher was also by our standards pretty radical I mean he I think his position is correct that Bertrand Russell took very similar positions and yes a decent education ought to be creating free independent creative human beings it doesn't have to be developing them has to be allowing them to follow those natural instincts there's a natural among children the educational system has to beat it out of them and make them obedient and insubordinate and so on but a decent educational system would be would allow these natural aspects of human nature to flourish and encourage them and it would be part of developing a free and democratic society of real participation but of course that runs counter to elite interests the worth remembering that the United States was not founded to be a Democratic Society and elites do not want it to be a Democratic Society it's supposed to be what political scientists sometimes call a polyarchy system basically of a league decision and public gratification and if you had a the kind of educational system that do he spent his life committed to you wouldn't be able to sustain that people would become active involved engaged and would try to create a truly functioning democratic society which would as do we also pointed out require industrial democracy that means democratizing production in commerce and so on which means eliminating the whole structure of capitalist hierarchy those positions were he's very mainstream Main Street America but radical from the point of view of prevailing doctrine and I think he's quite right about that in fact they're just to go to politics or do he also pointed out that until that's done unless that's done politics will remain what he called the shadow cast by business over society and the educational system will be a system of indoctrination and control I was lucky as a kid to be sent to a do at school and I was quite quite an exciting experience on that note we have to wrap up but thank you very much

Channel: Stony Brook University

Views: 68,442

Keywords: Noam Chomsky, Stony Brook, linguistics

Id: ML1iSu54Qts

Length: 59min 9sec (3549 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2009