by Noam Chomsky
Actually, Bush, technically speaking, is not really President—because he refused to take the Oath of Office. I don’t know how many of you noticed this, but the wording of the Oath of Office is written in the Constitution, so you can’t fool around with it—and Bush refused to read it. The Oath of Office says something about, “I promise to do this, that, and the other thing,” and Bush added the words, “so help me God.” Well, that’s illegal: he’s not President, if anybody cares. 36
ALL: All right! Yeah!
Happy? Yeah, let’s impeach him.
I mean, it wasn’t because Bush is religious—Bush knows where the nearest church is … because he has to show up there every once in a while. Or take Reagan: what does it mean to say he was a Born Again Christian? It means somebody told him he’s a Born Again Christian. In Bush’s case, though, I presume he’s totally secular, he just knows that by now you’ve got to make a nod to this huge fundamentalist constituency—and since you’re not going to offer them anything they really want, you offer them symbolic things, like saying “so help me God” or something like that.
But the point is, if things ever really come to a crunch in the United States, this massive part of the population—I think it’s something like a third of the adult population by now—could be the basis for some kind of a fascist movement, readily. For example, if the country sinks deeply into a recession, a depoliticized population could very easily be mobilized into thinking it’s somebody else’s fault: “Why are our lives collapsing? There have to be bad guys out there doing something for things to be going so badly”—and the bad guys can be Jews, or homosexuals, or blacks, or Communists, whatever you pick. If you can whip people into irrational frenzies like that, they can be extremely dangerous: that’s what 1930s Fascism came from, and something like that could very easily happen here.
“The Real Anti-Semitism”
MAN: Do you know about the connections between the Republican Party and the neo-Nazis which were revealed a few months ago—and could you talk a bit about what might be the significance of that in this context?
That was sort of an interesting phenomenon; it’s hard to know exactly how seriously to take it, but it’s certainly very real. I don’t know how many of you followed what happened with the Nazis in the Bush campaign around last August—do you know about that stuff?
There’s this part of the Bush campaign called the “Ethnic Outreach Committee,” which tries to organize ethnic minorities; obviously that doesn’t mean blacks or Hispanics, it means Ukrainians, Poles, that sort of business. And it turned out that it was being run by a bunch of East European Nazis, Ukrainian Nazis, hysterical anti-Semites, Romanians who came out of the Iron Guard, and so on. Well, finally this got exposed; some of the people were reshuffled, some were put into other positions in the Republican Party—but it all just passed over very quietly. The Democrats never even raised the issue during the election campaign. 37
You might ask, why? How come the Democrats never even raised the issue? Well, I think there was a very good reason for that: I think the Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League basically called them off. The point is, these organizations don’t ultimately care about anti-Semitism, what they care about is opposition to the policies of Israel—in fact, opposition to their own hawkish version of the policies of Israel. They’re Israeli government lobbies, essentially, and they understood that these Nazis in the Bush campaign were quite pro-Israel, so what do they care? The New Republic, which is sort of an organ for these groups, had a very interesting editorial on it. It was about anti-Semitism, and it referred to the fact that this committee was being run by anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, Nazis and so on, and then it said: yes, that’s all true, but this is just “antique and anemic” anti-Semitism. Nazism is just “antique and anemic” anti-Semitism, not terribly important, we shouldn’t get too upset about it. And then it said: the real anti-Semitism that we ought to be worried about is in the Democratic Party, which is filled with “Jew-haters”—that was the phrase they used. And part of the proof is, the Democrats were actually willing to debate a resolution calling for Palestinian self-determination at their National Convention, so therefore they’re “Jew-haters” and that’s the “real” anti-Semitism in America. (That was in fact the title of a book by the Director of the A.D.L., Nathan Perlmutter.) 38 Well, the Democrats got the message that they weren’t going to win any points with this, so they never raised a peep about it.
Incidentally, this is only one of the things that happened at that time—there’s another story which got even less publicity, and is even more revealing. The Department of Education has a program of grants that it dispenses to fund projects initiated by local school systems, and for the last four or five years the school board in Brookline, Massachusetts, has been trying to get funding for a project on the Holocaust which always gets very favorably reviewed, but is always turned down. Again in 1988—also right before the election—the federal reviewing committee had to deal with their proposal. As usual it got very favorable reviews, but instead of just turning it down, this time the government simply eliminated the entire program category under which it was being submitted. Well, at that point some information began to surface as to why the project kept getting turned down—and it turned out that it was being refused every year because of letters the Department was getting from people like Phyllis Schlafly [a right-wing activist] attacking it for being unfair because it didn’t give adequate space to Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members. Besides, they said, it’s kind of brainwashing children, and turning them against things like the Holocaust, it’s just more of this neo-liberal tampering with people’s thoughts. Parts of these letters actually got published in the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. 39
Well, you’d have thought there’d be an uproar. A program on the Holocaust gets turned down by the government, by the Reagan administration, because it doesn’t give enough space to Nazis and Klan members? Not a peep, not a peep. And the point is, Phyllis Schlafly and that whole gang are adequately pro-Israel—and therefore it doesn’t matter what they think. They can be in favor of the Klan, they can be in favor of the Nazis, they can say you shouldn’t be allowed to teach the Holocaust, it doesn’t matter, as long as they remain sufficiently supportive of hawkish Israeli policies. As long as they meet that qualification, it’s fine, they can say whatever they want.
Ronald Reagan and the Future of Democracy
WOMAN: You mentioned Reagan—I’ve heard you say his administration was the first time the United States didn’t really have a President. Would you enlarge on that, and tell us what your thoughts are on the future of that kind of government?
I think it has a big future, myself—in fact, I think the Reagan administration was sort of a peek into the future. It’s a very natural move. Imagine yourself working in some public relations office where your job is to help corporations make sure that the annoying public does not get in the way of policy-making. Here’s a brilliant thought that nobody ever had before, so far as I know: let’s make elections completely symbolic activities. The population can keep voting, we’ll give them all the business, they’ll have electoral campaigns, all the hoopla, two candidates, eight candidates—but the people they’re voting for will then just be expected to read off a teleprompter and they won’t be expected to know anything except what somebody tells them, and maybe not even that.
I mean, when you read off a teleprompter—I’ve done it actually—it’s a very odd experience: it’s like the words go into your eyes and out your mouth, and they don’t pass through your mind in between. And when Reagan does it, they have it set up so there are two or three of them around, so his head can keep moving and it appears as though he’s looking around at the audience, but really he’s just switching from one teleprompter to another. Well, if you can get people to vote for something like that, you’ve basically done it—you’ve removed them from decision-making. It won’t work unless you have an obedient media which will fall over themsel
ves with what a wonderful, charismatic figure he is—you know, “the most popular President in history,” “he’s creating a revolution,” “the most amazing thing since ice cream,” and “how can we criticize him, everybody loves him?” And you have to pretend that nobody’s laughing, and so on. But if you can do that, then you’d have gone a very long way towards marginalizing the public. And I think we probably got there in the 1980s—pretty close to there, anyway.
In all of the books that have come out by people in the Reagan administration, it’s been extremely difficult to hide the fact that Reagan didn’t have the foggiest idea what was going on. 40 Whenever he wasn’t properly programmed, the things that would come out of his mouth were kind of like—they weren’t lies really, they were kind of like the babbling of a child. If a child babbles, it’s not lies, it’s just sort of on some other plane. To be able to lie, you have to have a certain degree of competence, you have to know what truth is. And there didn’t seem to be any indication that that was the case here. So in fact, all of the fuss in the Iran-contra hearings about “did Reagan know or didn’t he know” [about the National Security Council’s illegal dealings with Iran and the Nicaraguan contras], or “did he remember or didn’t he remember?” I personally regarded as a cover-up. What’s the difference? He didn’t know if nobody told him, and he didn’t remember if he forgot. And who cares? He wasn’t supposed to know. Reagan’s whole career was reading lines written for him by rich folk. First it was as a spokesman for General Electric, then it was for somebody else, and he just continued to the White House: he read the lines written for him by the rich folk, he did it for eight years, they paid him nicely, he apparently enjoyed it, he seems to have been quite cheerful there, had a good time. He could sleep late. And they liked it, the paymasters thought it was fine, they bought a nice home for him, put him out to pasture.
It’s very striking how he disappeared. For eight years, the public relations industry and the media had been claiming that this guy revolutionized America—you know, the “Reagan Revolution,” this fantastic charismatic figure that everybody loved, he just changed our lives. Okay, then he finished his job, they told him to go home—that’s the end. No reporter would even dream of going out to see Reagan after that to ask him his opinion on anything—because everybody knows he has no opinion on anything. And they knew it all along. In the Oliver North trial, for example, stuff came out about Reagan telling—I don’t like to use the word “lie,” because, as I say, you have to have a competence to lie—but Reagan producing false statements to Congress, let’s put it that way. The press didn’t even care: okay, so Reagan lied to Congress, let’s go on to the next thing. The point is, his job was done, so therefore he became irrelevant. Sure, they’ll trot him out at the next Republican Convention so everybody can applaud, but that’s it.
In a way it was like royalty. I mean, the imperial family in England plays a real role in depoliticizing the place, and Reagan reminded me a bit of that. 41 For instance, every session of Parliament in England opens with the Queen reading a message written by the ruling political party, and everybody pretends to take it seriously. But in another part of your brain, you don’t ask, “Did the Queen believe what she was saying?” or, “Did she understand what she was saying?” or “Will she remember what she was saying?” or, “Did she lie to the Parliament?” Those are just not relevant questions—because the Queen’s job is to be royalty, and to be revered, and to be admired, and to be the model woman that everybody’s supposed to be like. It’s kind of like playing a game in the political system, even though people there do in fact take it seriously in a sense—like they care if the Princess Diana is having a spat with Something-Or-Other, they think about it, and they talk about it, and so on. But of course, at some other level of their intelligence, they know that it has nothing to do with life.
Well, the British have it sort of institutionalized, and you don’t vote for Queen. But suppose you could get to the point where elections in England were not for Prime Minister and Parliament, but instead people voted for Queen, and then things ran the way they do now, except the Prime Minister is just appointed by the banks and the corporations. And in the election campaign you’d ask, “Who’s got the nicest hairdo?” you’d ask, “Who can say things nicer?” “Who’s got the best smile?” Well, then you’d have gone a long way towards the desired goal of maintaining the formal functioning of the system, but eliminating the substance from it. And that’s pretty much what we had with Reagan, I think.
Now, I don’t know whether Reagan was contrived for that purpose or whether it just worked out that way, but once having seen it in operation, I expect that people will learn from it. And in fact, I think you could see signs of it in the 1988 election as well. I mean, everybody—the media and everyone else—agreed that there were no real issues in the campaign: the only issue was whether Dukakis was going to figure out a way of ducking all the slime that was being thrown at him. That’s about the only thing anybody was voting about, did he duck or didn’t he duck? That’s like saying, “Don’t bother voting.”
MAN: But doesn’t it make any difference who wins? I mean, suppose they gave us Ollie North as President?
Yeah, look, I don’t want to say that it makes no difference. The figure who’s there makes some difference—but the less difference it makes, the more you’ve marginalized the public.
WOMAN: Do you vote?
Do I? Well, differentially. I mean, I almost always vote for lower-level candidates, like school committee representatives and things like that—because there it makes a difference, in fact. But as you get more and more remote from popular control, it makes less and less of a difference. When you get to the House of Representatives—well, it’s sort of academic in my case, because I live in one of these single-member districts where the same guy always wins, so it doesn’t really matter whether you vote or not. When you get to Senator, it begins to become pretty symbolic anyway. At the level of President, half the time I don’t even bother—I think those are usually very subtle judgments. I mean, it’s a difficult judgment to try to figure out whether Nixon or Humphrey is going to end the Vietnam War sooner [in 1968], that’s an extremely subtle judgment to make; I actually didn’t vote on that one, because I figured Nixon probably would. I did vote against Reagan, because I thought the guys around Reagan were extremely dangerous—Reagan himself was irrelevant, but the people in his administration were real killers and torturers, and they were just making people suffer too much, so I thought that might make a difference. But these are usually not very easy judgments to make, in my opinion.
WOMAN: What do you think stopped the impeachment drive against Reagan after the Iran-contra scandal?
It would just embarrass the hell out of everybody—I mean, nobody in power wants that much disruption for something like that. Look, why don’t they bring every American President to trial for war crimes? There are things on which there is a complete consensus in the elite culture: the United States is permitted to carry out war crimes, it’s permitted to attack other countries, it’s permitted to ignore international law. On those things there’s a complete consensus, so why should they impeach the President for doing everything he’s supposed to do?
In fact, you can ask all kinds of questions like that. For instance, at the time of the Nuremberg trials [of Nazi war criminals after World War II], there was a lot of very pompous rhetoric on the part of the Western prosecutors about how this was not just going to be “victor’s justice”: it’s not just that we won the war and they lost, we’re establishing principles which are going to apply to us too. Well, by the principles of the Nuremberg trials, every single American President since then would have been hanged. Has anyone ever been brought to trial? Has this point even been raised? It’s not a difficult point to demonstrate. 42
Actually, the Nuremberg trials are worth thinking about. The Nazis were something unique, granted. But if you take a look at the Nuremberg trials, they were very cynical. The operational c
riterion for what counted as a war crime at Nuremberg was a criminal act that the West didn’t do: in other words, it was considered a legitimate defense if you could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing. That’s actually true. So part of the defense of the German submarine commander Admiral Doenitz was to call an American submarine commander, Admiral Nimitz, to testify that the Americans did the same thing—that’s a defense. Bombing of urban areas was not considered a war crime at Nuremberg; reason is, the West did more of it than the Germans. And this is all stated straight out—like if you read the book by Telford Taylor, the American prosecutor at the trials, this is the way he describes it; he’s very positive about the whole thing. 43 If the West had done it, it wasn’t a crime; it was only a crime if the Germans had done it and we hadn’t. I mean, it’s true there were plenty of such things, but still there’s something pretty cynical about it.
In fact, even worse than the Nuremberg trials were the Tokyo trials [of Japanese war criminals]: by the standards of the Tokyo trials, not just every American President, but everyone would be hanged [at Tokyo, those who failed to take affirmative steps to prevent war crimes or to dissociate themselves from the government were executed]. General Yamashita was an extreme case: he was hanged because during the American conquest of the Philippines, troops that were technically under his command, although he had already lost all contact with them, carried out crimes—therefore he was hanged. Ask yourself who’s going to survive that one. Here’s a guy who was hanged because troops he had no contact with whatsoever, but which theoretically in some order of battle had to do with his units, committed atrocities. If those same principles apply to us, who’s going to survive? And that was just one case, I think we killed about a thousand people in the Tokyo trials—they were really grotesque. 44