by Noam Chomsky
WOMAN: Gore Vidal refers to us as “the proud victors of Grenada.”
Yeah, that’s when Reagan got up and said, “We’re standing tall again.” 38 We’re laughing—but remember, people didn’t laugh at the time. The Grenada invasion was considered a big shot in the arm: we’re standing tall, they’re not going to push us around anymore, all hundred thousand of them, We overcame their nutmeg.
The U.S. and the U.N.
MAN: Noam, do you see any positive role that the U.N. can play, for instance sending U.N. peacekeeping forces to places instead of U.S. intervention forces?
Well, the U.N. can only play a positive role if the great powers let it play a positive role. So where the great powers more or less agree on something and they just need a mechanism to effect it, the U.N. is useful. But if the great powers are opposed—like, say the United States is opposed to something—okay, then it just doesn’t happen.
MAN: What about if the U.N. didn’t have a Security Council, or didn’t give veto power to the five permanent Security Council members? [The U.N. Security Council has 15 seats, 5 of which are permanently assigned to the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China, and for “substantive” Security Council resolutions to go into effect none of the 5 permanent members can have voted against them; unlike the General Assembly, the Security Council has enforcement powers.]
It couldn’t happen—because the great powers will not allow any interference with their affairs. Take the United States, which has been by far the leader in vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions since the 1970s: if we don’t like what the U.N. is doing, the U.N. can go down the tubes—we just ignore them, and that ends the matter. 39 You don’t kid around with an eight-hundred-pound gorilla, you know.
In fact, it’s quite interesting to trace the changes in the U.S. attitude towards the U.N. over the years. In the late 1940s, the United States just ran it completely—international relations of power were such that the U.S. just gave the orders and everybody followed, because the rest of the world was smashed up and starving after the Second World War. And at the time, everybody here loved the U.N., because it always went along with us: every way we told countries to vote, they voted. Actually, when I was a graduate student around 1950, major social scientists, people like Margaret Mead, were trying to explain why the Russians were always saying “no” at the U.N.—because here was the United States putting through these resolutions and everybody was voting “yes,” then the Russians would stand up and say “no.” So of course they went to the experts, the social scientists, to figure it out. And what they came up with was something we used to call “diaperology”; the conclusion was, the reason the Russians always say “no” at the U.N. is because they raise their infants with swaddling clothes [bandages wrapped around newborn babies to restrain and quiet them]. Literally—they raise their infants with swaddling clothes in Russia, so Russians end up very negative, and by the time they make it to the U.N. all they want to do is say “no” all the time. That was literally proposed, people took it seriously, there were articles in the journals about it, and so on. 40
Well, over the years, U.S. power over the U.N. began to drop—at least relatively speaking. A lot of Third World countries entered the U.N., especially in the 1960s as a result of decolonization, so there was a lot more independence—and the U.N. just got out of control, we couldn’t order it around as much anymore. And as that happened, you could just trace the U.S. attitude towards the U.N. getting more and more negative. For instance, they started using this phrase which I’m sure you’ve heard, “the tyranny of the majority.” What’s the tyranny of the majority? It’s what’s known as “democracy” elsewhere, but when we happen to be in the minority, it becomes “the tyranny of the majority.” And starting around 1970, the United States began vetoing everything that came up: resolutions on South Africa, on Israel, on disarmament—you pick it, the United States was vetoing it. And the Soviet Union was voting right along with the mainstream. 41 Okay, all of a sudden it turns out that the U.N. is a total disaster.
I’ll never forget one article about this in the New York Times Magazine, by their U.N. correspondent, Richard Bernstein. He went through this whole business about how the entire world votes against the United States all the time. He wasn’t asking, “How do they raise American children?” What he asked was, “Why is the world out of step?” Literally: “What’s the matter with the world, it’s all out of step, it doesn’t understand—what is it with the world?” Then he began looking for defects in the world. I’m not exaggerating, that’s exactly what it was like—and all of this stuff is done without any self-consciousness, it’s just said straight. 42
It’s the same with the World Court [the popular name for the International Court of Justice, the judicial organ of the U.N.]. When the World Court issued an explicit decision against the United States in June 1986 ordering—ordering—the United States to terminate what it called “unlawful use of force” and illegal economic warfare against Nicaragua, we just said to heck with it, we ignored them. The week after, Congress increased U.S. aid to the contras by another hundred million dollars. 43 Again, the commentary across the board in the U.S.—the New York Times, the Washington Post, big international law experts—was unanimous: the World Court has discredited itself by passing this judgment, so obviously we don’t have to pay any attention to it. 44 It just discredits the World Court to criticize the United States—that’s like a truism here. Then right after that, when the U.N. Security Council called on all states to observe international law—not referring to the United States, but obliquely referring to this World Court decision—and it was vetoed by the United States (11 to 1, with 3 abstentions); and when the General Assembly also passed the same resolution, the first time 94 to 3 (Israel, El Salvador, and the United States), the next time 94 to 2 (Israel and the United States)—the press wouldn’t even report it. 45 Well, that’s what it means to be a great power: you do whatever you feel like.
And by now, the United States is practically strangling the U.N.—we’re by far its biggest debtor nation. In fact, the U.N. can barely function because the United States won’t pay its bills. 46 And parts of the U.N. that we don’t like, like U.N.E.S.C.O. [the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization]—because it’s working for the Third World—we practically put them out of business.
The United States launched a huge propaganda campaign against U.N.E.S.C.O, in the 1970s and Eighties—it was full of outrageous lies, totally fabricated, but nevertheless it sufficed to essentially eliminate the Third World orientation of U.N.E.S.C.O. and make it stop doing things it was doing around the Third World, like improving literacy and health care and so on. 47 But that’s just the reality of what the U.N. is going to face when it pursues policies that are not in the interests of the great powers—it can just go down the drain, the United States won’t permit it.
WOMAN: But why is it that the press won’t report any of these things?
Well, it’s because the press has a job: its job is to keep people from understanding the world, and to keep them indoctrinated. Therefore it won’t report things like this—and again, that follows pretty logically from the nature of the press institutions themselves. In fact, the way that the U.S. press covers United Nations votes gives a very good illustration of how it works. So for example, when the U.N. has a vote denouncing the ongoing Russian invasion of Afghanistan in November 1987, that they put on the front page. But when the U.N. has a vote in the same session, in fact within a few days, calling on all states to observe international law—this very muted resolution after the World Court decision, it didn’t even mention the United States directly—then they won’t put it on the front page, in fact they won’t put it anywhere. 48
Or take the summit when the Soviet Union and the United States signed the I.N.F. [Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces] treaty, in December 1987. Right at that time, there was a tremendous amount of media attention focused on arms treaties. Well, the line that the U
.S. media constantly presented was, “Reagan the Peacemaker”—you know, “Reagan leading us to a new age,” “First arms control treaty [to abolish a class of weapons systems],” and so on. That was the standard picture across the whole American press. Okay, that very month, the U.N. General Assembly had passed a series of disarmament resolutions—but if you want to know the details of them, you’ll have to look them up in my book Necessary Illusions, because it’s about the only place you can find them in print in the United States. The General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the banning of all weapons in outer space, Star Wars—it went through 154 to 1, the U.S. was the 1. They passed a resolution against the development of new weapons of mass destruction; it was 135 to 1. They passed one calling for a nuclear test freeze; it was 137 to 3, the United States picked up England and France on that one. And so it went.
Do you think any of that made the newspapers in the United States? No, because that’s just the wrong story. 49 The story is “Reagan the Peacemaker,” not “The United States is alone in the world, isolated in the world in attempting to maintain the arms race”—that’s not the story. And in fact, when the New York Times did its summary report on what had happened at the U.N. that year, you can bet your life that none of this stuff was included—there wasn’t one word. 50
And the point is, if you want to be a “responsible” journalist, you have to understand what’s important, and what’s important is things that work for the cause—U.S. corporate power, that’s the cause. And you will not stay in the press very long unless you’ve internalized and come to understand these values virtually intuitively—because there’s a whole elaborate process of filtering and selection in the institutions to eliminate people who don’t understand them and to help advance people who do. That’s how you can get commentators in the New York Times asking questions like “What’s wrong with the world?” when the U.S. is standing alone against every other country, and not even batting an eyelash. And of course, it’s also part of the way the propaganda system keeps everyone else from understanding the elementary realities too.
Business, Apartheid, and Racism
WOMAN: Professor Chomsky, one issue where I’ve noticed that activists get kind of a good press in the United States—and it seems out of synch with what we usually see—is coverage of people protesting South African apartheid [official system of racial segregation and white supremacy, the legal basis for which was largely repealed in 1990–91]. I’m wondering if you have any ideas why coverage of that might he a hit more positive.
I think you’re right: anti-apartheid movements in the United States do get a pretty good press—so when some mayor or something demonstrates against South Africa, there’s usually kind of a favorable report on it. And I think the main reason is that Western corporations themselves are basically anti-apartheid by this point, so that’s going to tend to be reflected in the media coverage.
See, South Africa has been going through an internal economic transformation, from a society based on extractive industry to one based on industrial production—and that transformation has changed the nature of international interests in South Africa. As long as South Africa was primarily a society whose wealth was based on extracting diamonds, gold, uranium and so on, what you needed were large numbers of slaves, basically—people who would go down into the mines and work for a couple years, then die and be replaced by others. So you needed an illiterate, subdued population of workers, with families getting just enough income to produce more slaves, but not much more than that—then either you sent them down into the mines, or you turned them into mercenaries in the army and so on to help control the others. That was traditional South Africa. But as South Africa changes to an industrial society, those needs also are beginning to change: now you don’t need slaves primarily, what you need is a docile, partially educated workforce.
Something similar happened in the United States during our industrial revolution, actually. Mass public education first was introduced in the United States in the nineteenth century as a way of training the largely rural workforce here for industry—in fact, the general population in the United States largely was opposed to public education, because it meant taking kids off the farms where they belonged and where they worked with their families, and forcing them into this setting in which they were basically being trained to become industrial workers. 51 That was part of the whole transformation of American society in the nineteenth century, and that transformation now is taking place for the black population in South Africa—which means for about 85 percent of the people there. So the white South African elites, and international investors generally, now need a workforce that is trained for industry, not just slaves for the mines. And that means they need people who can follow instructions, and read diagrams, and be managers and foremen, things like that—so slavery just is not the right system for the country anymore, they need to move towards something more like what we have in the United States. And it’s pretty much for that reason that the West has become anti-apartheid, and that the media will therefore tend to give anti-apartheid movements a decent press.
I mean, usually political demonstrations get very negative reporting in the United States, no matter what they’re for, because they show people they can do things, that they don’t just have to be passive and isolated—and you’re not supposed to have that lesson, you’re supposed to think that you’re powerless and can’t do anything. So any kind of public protest typically won’t be covered here, except maybe locally, and usually it will get very negative reporting; when it’s protest against the policies of a favored U.S. ally, it always will. But in the case of South Africa, the reporting is quite supportive: so if people go into corporate shareholder meetings or something and make a fuss about disinvestment [withdrawing investments from South Africa to pressure its government], generally they’ll get a favorable press these days.
Of course, it’s not that what they’re doing is wrong—what they’re doing is right. But they should understand that the reason they’re getting a reasonably favorable press right now is that, by this point, business regards them as its troops—corporate executives don’t really want apartheid in South Africa anymore. It’s like the reason that business was willing to support the Civil Rights Movement in the United States: American business had no use for Southern apartheid, in fact it was bad for business.
See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist—it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super-exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist—just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic—there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all of the junk that’s produced—that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.
So in this respect, I think you can expect that anti-apartheid moves will be reasonably well supported by the mainstream institutions in the United States. And over the long term, I suspect that apartheid in South Africa will break down—just for functional reasons. Of course, it’s going to be really rough, because white privilege in South Africa is extreme, and the situation of blacks is grotesque. But over time, I assume that the apartheid system will erode—and I think we should press very hard to make that happen: like, one doesn’t turn against the Civil Rights Movement because you realize that business interests are in favor of it. That’s kind of not the point.
Winning the Vietnam War
WOMAN: Mr. Chomsky, what’s really going on in Vietnam—
is it just the horrible dictatorship it’s portrayed to be, and do you see any prospects at all for social or economic recovery there?
Well, Vietnam’s a pretty tight and autocratic place—but it was obvious that it was going to be that way. Don’t forget, what we did to that country practically wiped it out. You have to bear in mind what happened there. Nobody here cares, so nobody studies it carefully, but over the course of the Indochina wars the number of people killed was maybe four million or more. [“Indochina” was the French colony comprising the area of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos; the United States attacked each of those countries in the 1960s and Seventies.] Tens of millions of others were displaced from their homes. Large parts of the country were simply destroyed. There are still thousands and thousands of deaths every year because of our use of chemical weapons—children are born with birth defects, and cancers, and tumors, deformities. I mean, Vietnam suffered the kind of fate there’s nothing to compare to in European history back to the Black Plague. It’ll be a century before they can recover—if then. 52