Being an American working in America, writing to convince Americans of his point of view must really be like having to tunnel through hard wood. Chomsky is one of a small band of individuals fighting a whole industry. And that makes him not only brilliant, but heroic.
Some years ago, in a poignant interview with James Peck, Chomsky spoke about his memory of the day Hiroshima was bombed. He was sixteen years old:
I remember that I literally couldn’t talk to anybody. There was nobody. I just walked off by myself. I was at a summer camp at the time, and I walked off into the woods and stayed alone for a couple of hours when I heard about it. I could never talk to anyone about it and never understood anyone’s reaction. I felt completely isolated.32
That isolation produced one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time.
When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky’s work will survive. It will point a cool, incriminating finger at a merciless, Machiavellian empire as cruel, self-righteous, and hypocritical as the ones it has replaced. (The only difference is that it is armed with technology that can visit the kind of devastation on the world that history has never known and the human race cannot begin to imagine.)
As a could’ve been gook, and who knows, perhaps a potential gook, hardly a day goes by when I don’t find myself thinking—for one reason or another—“Chomsky Zindabad.”
Written as an introduction to the new edition of Noam Chomsky’s For Reasons of State (New York: New Press, 2003).
CONFRONTING EMPIRE
I’ve been asked to speak about “how to confront empire.” It’s a huge question, and I have no easy answers.
When we speak of confronting empire, we need to identify what empire means. Does it mean the US government (and its European satellites), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that?
In many countries, empire has sprouted other subsidiary heads, some dangerous byproducts—nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism, and, of course, terrorism. All these march arm in arm with the project of corporate globalization.
Let me illustrate what I mean. India—the world’s biggest democracy—is currently at the forefront of the corporate globalization project. Its “market” of one billion people is being pried open by the WTO. Corporatization and privatization are being welcomed by the government and the Indian elite.
It is not a coincidence that the prime minister, the home minister, the disinvestment minister—the men who signed the deal with Enron in India, the men who are selling the country’s infrastructure to corporate multinationals, the men who want to privatize water, electricity, oil, coal, steel, health, education, and telecommunication—are all members or admirers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing, ultra-nationalist Hindu guild which has openly admired Hitler and his methods.
The dismantling of democracy is proceeding with the speed and efficiency of a Structural Adjustment Program. While the project of corporate globalization rips through people’s lives in India, massive privatization and labor “reforms” are pushing people off their land and out of their jobs. Hundreds of impoverished farmers are committing suicide by consuming pesticide.1
Reports of starvation deaths are coming in from all over the country.2
While the elite journeys to its imaginary destination somewhere near the top of the world, the dispossessed are spiraling downward into crime and chaos. This climate of frustration and national disillusionment is the perfect breeding ground, history tells us, for fascism.
The two arms of the Indian government have evolved the perfect pincer action. While one arm is busy selling India off in chunks, the other, to divert attention, is orchestrating a howling, baying chorus of Hindu nationalism and religious fascism. It is conducting nuclear tests, rewriting history books, burning churches, and demolishing mosques. Censorship, surveillance, the suspension of civil liberties and human rights, the questioning of who is an Indian citizen and who is not, particularly with regard to religious minorities, are all becoming common practice now.
Last March, in the state of Gujarat, two thousand Muslims were butchered in a state-sponsored pogrom. Muslim women were specially targeted. They were stripped, and gang-raped, before being burned alive. Arsonists burned and looted shops, homes, textile mills, and mosques.3
More than a hundred fifty thousand Muslims have been driven from their homes. The economic base of the Muslim community has been devastated.
While Gujarat burned, the Indian Prime Minister was on MTV promoting his new poems. In December 2002, the government that orchestrated the killing was voted back into office with a comfortable majority.4 Nobody has been punished for the genocide. Narendra Modi, architect of the pogrom, proud member of the RSS, has embarked on his second term as the chief minister of Gujarat. If he were Saddam Hussein, of course each atrocity would have been on CNN. But since he’s not—and since the Indian “market” is open to global investors—the massacre is not even an embarrassing inconvenience.
There are more than one hundred million Muslims in India. A time bomb is ticking in our ancient land.
All this to say that it is a myth that the free market breaks down national barriers. The free market does not threaten national sovereignty, it undermines democracy.
As the disparity between the rich and the poor grows, the fight to corner resources is intensifying. To push through their “sweetheart deals,” to corporatize the crops we grow, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the dreams we dream, corporate globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies.
Corporate globalization—or shall we call it by its name?— Imperialism—needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice.
Meanwhile, the countries of the North harden their borders and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. After all, they have to make sure that it’s only money, goods, patents, and services that are globalized. Not the free movement of people. Not a respect for human rights. Not international treaties on racial discrimination or chemical and nuclear weapons or greenhouse gas emissions or climate change or—god forbid—justice.
So this—all this—is empire. This loyal confederation, this obscene accumulation of power, this greatly increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who have to suffer them.
Our fight, our goal, our vision of another world must be to eliminate that distance.
So how do we resist empire?
The good news is that we’re not doing too badly. There have been major victories. Here in Latin America you have had so many—in Bolivia, you have Cochabamba.5 In Peru, there was the uprising in Arequipa.6 In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez is holding on, despite the US government’s best efforts.7
And the world’s gaze is on the people of Argentina, who are trying to refashion a country from the ashes of the havoc wrought by the IMF.8
In India the movement against corporate globalization is gathering momentum and is poised to become the only real political force to counter religious fascism.
As for corporate globalization’s glittering ambassadors— Enron, Bechtel, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen—where were they last year, and where are they now?
And of course here in Brazil we must ask: Who was the president last year, and who is it now?
Still, many of us have dark moments of hopelessness and despair. We know that under the spreading canopy of the war on terror, the men in suits are hard at work.
While bombs rain down on us and cruise missiles skid across the skies, we know that contracts are being signed, patents are being registered, oil pipelines are being laid, natural resources are being plundered, water is being privatized, and George Bush is planning to go to war against Iraq.
If we look at this conflict as a straightforwa
rd eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between empire and those of us who are resisting it, it might seem that we are losing.
But there is another way of looking at it. We, all of us gathered here, have, each in our own way, laid siege to empire.
We may not have stopped it in its tracks—yet—but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world’s stage in all its brutish, iniquitous nakedness.
Empire may well go to war, but it’s out in the open now—too ugly to behold its own reflection. Too ugly even to rally its own people. It won’t be long before the majority of American people become our allies.
In Washington, a quarter of a million people marched against the war on Iraq.9 Each month, the protest is gathering momentum.
Before September 11, 2001, America had a secret history. Secret especially from its own people. But now America’s secrets are history, and its history is public knowledge. It’s street talk.
Today, we know that every argument that is being used to escalate the war against Iraq is a lie. The most ludicrous of them being the US government’s deep commitment to bring democracy to Iraq.
Killing people to save them from dictatorship or ideological corruption is, of course, an old US government sport. Here in Latin America, you know that better than most.
Nobody doubts that Saddam Hussein is a ruthless dictator, a murderer (whose worst excesses were supported by the governments of the United States and Great Britain). There’s no doubt that Iraqis would be better off without him.
But, then, the whole world would be better off without a certain Mr. Bush. In fact, he is far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein.
So should we bomb Bush out of the White House?
It’s more than clear that Bush is determined to go to war against Iraq, regardless of the facts—and regardless of international public opinion.
In its recruitment drive for allies, the United States is prepared to invent facts.
The charade with weapons inspectors is the US government’s offensive, insulting concession to some twisted form of international etiquette. It’s like leaving the “doggie door” open for last-minute “allies” or maybe the United Nations to crawl through.
But for all intents and purposes, the new war against Iraq has begun.
What can we do?
We can hone our memory, we can learn from our history. We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar.
We can turn the war on Iraq into a fishbowl of the US government’s excesses.
We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair—and their allies—for the cowardly baby killers, water poisoners, and pusillanimous long-distance bombers that they are.
We can reinvent civil disobedience in a million different ways. In other words, we can come up with a million ways of becoming a collective pain in the ass.
When George Bush says “You’re either with us, or you are with the terrorists,” we can say “No thank you.” We can let him know that the people of the world do not need to choose between a Malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs.
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling—their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
First presented at the closing rally of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 27, 2003.
PEACE IS WAR: THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE OF BREAKING NEWS
There’s been a delicious debate in the Indian press of late. A prominent English daily announced that it would sell space on page 3 (its gossip section) to anyone who was willing to pay to be featured. (The inference is that the rest of the news in the paper is in some way unsponsored, unsullied, “pure news.”) The announcement provoked a series of responses—most of them outraged that the proud tradition of impartial journalism could sink to such depths. Personally, I was delighted. For a major mainstream newspaper to introduce the notion of “paid-for” news is a giant step forward in the project of educating a largely credulous public about how the mass media operates. Once the idea of “paid-for” news has been mooted, once it’s been ushered through the portals of popular imagination, it won’t be hard for people to work out that if gossip columns in newspapers can be auctioned, why not the rest of the column space? After all, in this age of the “market” when everything’s up for sale—rivers, forests, freedom, democracy, and justice—what’s special about news? Sponsored News—what a delectable idea! “This report is brought to you by …” There could be a state-regulated sliding scale for rates (headlines, page 1, page 2, sports section, and so on). Or, on second thought, we could leave that to be regulated by the “free market”—as it is now. Why change a winning formula?
The debate about whether mass-circulation newspapers and commercial TV channels are finely plotted ideological conspiracies or apolitical, benign anarchies that bumble along as best they can is an old one and needs no elaboration. After the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, the US mainstream media’s blatant performance as the government’s mouthpiece was the butt of some pretty black humor in the rest of the world. It brought the myth of the free press in America crashing down. But before we gloat, the Indian mass media behaved no differently during the Pokhran nuclear tests and the Kargil War. There was no bumbling and very little was benign in the shameful coverage of the December 13 attack on the Indian Parliament and the trial of S. A. R. Geelani, who has been sentenced to death after having been the subject of a media trial fueled by a campaign of nationalist hysteria and outright lies. On a more everyday basis: Would anybody who depends on the Indian mass media for information know that eighty thousand people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, most of them Muslim, most of them by Indian security forces?1 Most Indians would be outraged if it were suggested to them that the killings and “disappearances” in the Kashmir valley put India on a par with any banana republic.
Modern democracies have been around long enough for neoliberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy—the “independent” judiciary, the “free” press, the parliament—and molding them to their purpose. The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.
To control a democracy, it is becoming more and more vital to control the media. The principal media outlets in America are owned by six major companies.2 The six largest cable companies have 80 percent of cable television subscribers.3 Even Internet websites are being colonized by giant media corporations.4
It’s a mistake to think that the corporate media supports the neoliberal project. It is the neoliberal project. It is the nexus, the confluence, the convergence, the union, the chosen medium of those who have power and money. As the project of corporate globalization increases the disparity between the rich and the poor, as the world grows more and more restive, corporations on the prowl for sweetheart deals need repressive governments to quell the mutinies in the servants’ quarters. And governments, of course, need corporations. This mutual dependence spawns a sort of corporate nationalism, or, more accurately, a corporate/nationalism—if you can imagine such a thing. Corporate/nationalism has become the unwavering anthem of the mass media.
One of our main tasks is to expose the complex mess of cables that connect power to money to the supposedly “neutral” free press.
In the la
st couple of years, New Media has embarked on just such an enterprise. It has descended on Old Media like an annoying swarm of bees buzzing around an old buffalo, going where it goes, stopping where it stops, commenting on and critiquing its every move. New Media has managed not to transform but to create the possibility of transforming conventional mass media from the sophisticated propaganda machine into a vast CD-ROM. Picture it: The old buffalo is the text, the bees are the hyperlinks that deconstruct it. Click a bee, get the inside story.
Basically, for the lucky few who have access to the Internet, the mass media has been contextualized and shown up for what it really is—an elaborate boardroom bulletin that reports and analyzes the concerns of powerful people. For the bees it’s a phenomenal achievement. For the buffalo, obviously, it’s not much fun.
For the bees (the nice, lefty ones) it’s a significant victory but by no means a conquest. Because it’s still the annoyed buffalo stumbling across the plains, lurching from crisis to crisis, from war to war, who sets the pace. It’s still the buffalo that decides which particular crisis will be the main course on the menu and what’s for dessert. So here we are today, the buffalo and the bees—on the verge of a war that could redraw the political map of the world and alter the course of history. As the United States gears up to attack Iraq, the US government’s lies are being amplified, its reheated doctrine of preemptive strike talked up, its war machine deployed. There is still no sign of Iraq’s so-called arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
Even before the next phase of the war—the American occupation of Iraq—has begun (the war itself is thirteen years old), thanks to the busy bees the extent and scale, the speed and strength of the mobilization against the war has been unprecedented in history. On February 15, 2003, in an extraordinary display of public morality, millions of people took to the streets in hundreds of cities across the world to protest against the invasion of Iraq.5 If the US government and its allies choose to ignore this and continue with their plans to invade and occupy Iraq, it could bring about a serious predicament in the modern world’s understanding of democracy.
My Seditious Heart Page 25