Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  In fact, by about 1970, my own view, and I wrote this at the time, was that either nothing in the region would survive—which was a possibility—or else the only thing that would survive would be North Vietnam, which is a harsh, orthodox Marxist-Leninist regime. And the reason why only North Vietnam would have survived is because under conditions of tremendous violence, the only thing that survives is the toughest people. 53

  See, libertarian structures are not very resilient—they can easily be wiped out by violence, whereas tough authoritarian structures can often survive that violence; in fact, one of the effects of violence is to magnify the power of authoritarian groups. For example, suppose we came under physical attack here—suppose a bunch of gangsters came and wanted to kill us, and we had to find a way to survive. I suspect that what we would do (at least what I would do) is to look for whoever around here is the toughest bastard, and put them in charge—because they’d be the most likely to help us survive. That’s what you do if you want to survive a hostile attack: you subject yourself to power and authority, and to people who know how to fight. That’s in fact the result of a hostile attack: the ones left in command at the end are the elements who were capable of surviving, and usually they survived because they’re very violent. Well, our attack on Vietnam was extraordinarily violent, and the more constructive National Liberation Front in South Vietnam just couldn’t survive it, but the tough authoritarian regime of the North could—so it took over.

  And because the pressures on them have never let up since the war, if there ever were any possibilities for recovery afterwards, the United States has ensured that Vietnam could never do anything with them. Because U.S. policy since the war has been to make Vietnam suffer as much as possible, and to keep them isolated from the rest of the world: it’s what’s called “bleeding Vietnam.” 54 The Chinese leadership is much more frank about it than we are—for example, Deng Xiaoping [China’s dominant political figure until the 1990s] says straight out that the reason for supporting Pol Pot in Cambodia is that he’s Vietnam’s enemy, and he’ll help us make Vietnam suffer as much as possible. We’re not quite as open about it, but we take basically the same position—and for only slightly different reasons. China wants Vietnam to suffer because they’re an ideological competitor, and they don’t like having an independent state like that on their border; the United States wants them to suffer because we’re trying to increase the difficulty of economic reconstruction in Southeast Asia—so we’ll support Pol Pot through allies like China and Thailand, in order to “bleed” Vietnam more effectively. 55 [Pol Pot was the Cambodian Khmer Rouge Party leader responsible for a mass slaughter in that country in the mid-1970s.]

  I mean, remember what the Vietnam War was fought for, after all. The Vietnam War was fought to prevent Vietnam from becoming a successful model of economic and social development for the Third World. And we don’t want to lose the war, Washington doesn’t want to lose the war. So far we’ve won: Vietnam is no model for development, it’s a model for destruction. But if the Vietnamese could ever pull themselves together somehow, Vietnam could again become such a model—and that’s no good, we always have to prevent that. 56

  The extent of the sadism on this is extraordinary, in fact. For example, India tried to send a hundred buffalo to Vietnam, because the buffalo herds there had been virtually wiped out—Vietnam’s a peasant society, remember, so buffalo mean tractors, fertilizer, and so on; the United States threatened to cut off “Food for Peace” aid to India if they did it. We tried to block Mennonites from sending wheat to Vietnam. We’ve effectively cut off all foreign aid to them over the past twenty years, by pressuring other countries not to give them anything. 57 And the only purpose of all these things has been to make Vietnam suffer as much as possible, and to prevent them from ever developing—and they’ve just been unable to deal with it. Whatever minuscule hopes they might have had have been eliminated, because they’ve made error after error in terms of economic reconstruction. I mean, in the last couple years, they’ve tried to fool around with liberalizing markets to attract foreign investors and so on, but it’s pretty hard to envision any positive scenario for them.

  Look, to try to deal with economic problems in general is not so simple—the United States is doing a rotten job of it, with all the advantages in the world. And to deal with problems of economic reconstruction under conditions of total devastation, and lack of resources, and imposed isolation from the world—that’s very, very hard. I mean, economic development in the West was a very brutal process, and that was under pretty good conditions. For example, the American colonies in the eighteenth century were objectively better off than most Third World countries today—that’s in absolute terms, not relative terms, meaning you had to work less to feed yourself, things like that. 58 And economic development here still was very brutal, even with those enormous advantages. And remember, that was with all of the resources in the world still around to be robbed—nobody has that anymore, they’ve all been robbed already. So there are just real, qualitative differences in the problems of Third World development today—and the Vietnamese have problems far beyond that, problems they simply cannot overcome at this point, as far as I can see.

  [Editors’ Note: Official U.S. relations with Vietnam changed in February 1994, as American businesses pressured the government to allow them to join foreign-based corporations that were violating the embargo and making profits off Vietnam. 59]

  “Genocide”: the United States and Pol Pot

  MAN: You said that we support Pol Pot in Cambodia through our allies. Isn’t there a chance that there could be another genocide there if the Khmer Rouge gets back in power? I’m terrified of that possibility.

  Yeah, it’s dangerous. What will happen there depends on whether the West continues to support them …

  MAN: But we may be heading for another genocide.

  Well, look, the business about “genocide” you’ve got to be a little careful about. Pol Pot was obviously a major mass murderer, but it’s not clear that Pol Pot killed very many more people—or even more people—than the United States killed in Cambodia in the first half of the 1970s. We only talk about “genocide” when other people do the killing. [The U.S. bombed and invaded Cambodia beginning in 1969, and supported anti-Parliamentary right-wing forces in a civil war there which lasted until 1975; Pol Pot ruled the country between 1975 and ’78.]

  So there’s a lot of uncertainty about just what the scale was of the Pol Pot massacre, but the best scholarly work in existence today estimates the deaths in Cambodia from all causes during the Pol Pot period in the hundreds of thousands, maybe as much as a million. 60 Well, just take a look at the killing in Cambodia that happened in the first half of the decade from 1970 to 1975—which is the period that we’re responsible for: it was also in the hundreds of thousands. 61

  Furthermore, if you really want to be serious about it—let’s say a million people died in the Pol Pot years, let’s take a higher number—it’s worth bearing in mind that when the United States stopped its attacks on inner Cambodia in 1975, American and other Western officials predicted that in the aftermath, about a million more Cambodians would die just from the effects of the American war. 62 At the time that the United States withdrew from Cambodia, people were dying from starvation in the city of Phnom Penh alone—forget the rest of the country—at the rate of 100,000 a year. 63 The last U.S. A.I.D. [Agency for International Development] mission in Cambodia predicted that there would have to be two years of slave labor and starvation before the country could even begin to get moving again. 64 So while the number of deaths you should attribute to the United States during the Pol Pot period isn’t a simple calculation to make, obviously it’s a lot—when you wipe out a country’s agricultural system and drive a million people out of their homes and into a city as refugees, yeah, a lot of people are going to die. And the responsibility for their deaths is not with the regime that took over afterwards, it’s with the people who made it that way.r />
  And in fact, there’s an even more subtle point to be made—but not an insignificant one. That is: why did Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge carry out their massacre in the first place? Well, there’s pretty good evidence that the Khmer Rouge forces took power primarily because they were the only ones who were tough enough bastards to survive the U.S. attacks. And given the destructive psychological effects of the American bombings on the peasant population there, some sort of violent outpouring was fairly predictable—and there was a big element of just plain peasant revenge in what happened. 65 So the U.S. bombings hit a real peak of ferocity in around 1973, and that’s the same period in which the Pol Pot group started gaining power. The American bombardment was certainly a significant factor, possibly the critical factor, in building up peasant support for the Khmer Rouge in the first place; before that, they had been a pretty marginal element. Okay, if we were honest about the term “genocide,” we would divide up the deaths in the Pol Pot period into a major part which is our responsibility, which is the responsibility of the United States.

  Heroes and Anti-Heroes

  MAN: Noam, I have to say, I’m getting a little depressed by all of this negative information—we need it, there’s no question about it, but we also need a certain degree of empowerment. So let me just ask you, who are your heroes?

  Well, let me first just make a remark about the “empowerment” point, which comes up again and again. I never know exactly how to respond to it—because it’s just the wrong question. The point is, there are lots of opportunities to do things, and if people do something with them, changes will happen. No matter how you look at it, it seems to me that’s always what it comes down to.

  MAN: Well, I guess I’m asking about your heroes so that you’ll he a little bit more specific about some of these “opportunities.” For example, who do you really admire when it comes to activism?

  Well, my heroes are people who were working with S.N.C.C. [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a Civil Rights Movement organization] in the South—people who day after day faced very harsh conditions and suffered badly, some of them were even killed. They’ll never enter into history, but I knew some of them, I saw some of them—they’re heroes. Draft resisters during the Vietnam War I think are heroes. Plenty of people in the Third World are heroes: if you ever have the chance to go to a place where people are really struggling—like the West Bank, Nicaragua, Laos—there’s an awful lot of heroism, just an awful lot of heroism. Among sort of middle-class organizers, there are three or four people I know who would get the Nobel Peace Prize if it meant anything, which of course it doesn’t, in fact it’s kind of an insult to get it—take a look at who it goes to. 66 If you look around, there are people like that: if you want heroes, you can find them. You’re not going to find them among anybody whose name is mentioned in the newspapers—if they’re there, you know probably they’re not heroes, they’re anti-heroes.

  I mean, there are plenty of people who when some popular movement gets going are willing to stand up and say, “I’m your leader”—the Eugene McCarthy phenomenon. Eugene McCarthy [a contender for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1968] is a perfect example of it. I remember John Kenneth Galbraith [American economist] once saying, “McCarthy’s the real hero of the Vietnam War opposition,” and American liberalism always writes about him as a great hero. 67 Well, if you take a look at McCarthy’s history, you can understand why. During the hard years of building up the anti-war movement, nobody ever heard of Eugene McCarthy. There were some people in Congress involved in opposing the war, but it wasn’t McCarthy; in fact, it wasn’t even McGovern, if you want to know the truth—it was Wayne Morse, Ernest Gruening, Gaylord Nelson, maybe a couple of others, but certainly not McCarthy. In fact, you never even heard of Eugene McCarthy until around the time of the Tet Offensive [in January 1968]. Around the time of the Tet Offensive, corporate America turned against the war, there was a huge mass popular movement out there, and Eugene McCarthy figured that he could get some personal power out of it, so he announced himself as “Your Leader.” He didn’t really say anything—if you look back, you don’t even know which side he was on, if you read the words—but somehow he managed to put across the impression that he was this big anti-war leader.

  He won the New Hampshire primary in ’68 and went to the Democratic National Convention. At the Democratic Convention, lots and lots of young people showed up to work on his campaign—you know, “Clean for Gene” and so on—and they got battered bloody by the Chicago police [in a police riot with anti-war demonstrators]. McCarthy didn’t bat an eyelash, he never even came down to talk to them. He didn’t win at the 1968 Convention, so he disappeared. He had a lot of prestige at that point—totally undeserved—but he had a lot of prestige as the self-elected spokesman of the anti-war movement, and if he’d cared even marginally about anything he was saying, he would have used that undeserved status to work against the war. But he quit: the power game was over, it was more fun to write poetry and talk about baseball, so that’s what he did. And that’s why he’s a liberal hero—because he’s a total fraud. I mean, you couldn’t have a more clear example of a total fraud.

  Well, those are the kind of “heroes” that the culture is going to set up for you—the kind who show up when there are points to be gotten and power to be gotten, and who try to exploit popular movements for their own personal power-trips, and therefore marginalize the popular movements. Then if things don’t work out for them, they go on and do something else: that’s a “hero.” Or you know, after you get shot, after you’re killed, like Martin Luther King, then you can become a hero—but not while you’re alive. Remember, despite all of the mythology today, Martin Luther King was strongly opposed while he was alive: the Kennedy administration really disliked him, they tried to block him in every possible way. I mean, eventually the Civil Rights Movement became powerful enough that they had to pretend that they liked him, so there was sort of a period of popularity for King when he was seen to be focusing on extremely narrow issues, like racist sheriffs in the South and so on. But as soon as he turned to broader issues, whether it was the Vietnam War, or planning the Poor People’s Campaign [a 1968 encampment and protest march on Washington], or other things like that, he became a total pariah, and was actively opposed. 68

  I. F. Stone is another case like that. I. F. Stone is a great hero of the press—they all talk about, “Boy, if we only had more people like Izzy Stone” and so on. But if you take a look at the actual record, it’s kind of revealing; I did it once. Up until 1971, Izzy Stone was a total outcast, his name wasn’t even mentioned—and the reason is, he was publishing his radical news weekly [I. F Stone’s Weekly]. There were a lot of journalists ripping it off, but this guy was a Communist, so you don’t ever want to mention him. Then in 1971, he couldn’t continue putting out the Weekly anymore because he and his wife were getting too old, so they stopped publishing it—and within a year he won the George Polk Award, there were films being made about him, he was being hailed everywhere as the great maverick reporter who proved what a terrific press we had, “if only we had more people like him,” and so on. Everybody just plays along with the farce, everybody plays along.

  “Anti-Intellectualism”

  WOMAN: Noam, I’ve noticed that in general there’s a strong strain of anti-intellectualism in American society.

  When you say there’s “anti-intellectualism,” what exactly does that mean? Does it mean people think Henry Kissinger shouldn’t be allowed to be National Security Advisor?

  WOMAN: Well, I feel there’s a sense in which you’re looked down on if you deal with ideas. Like, I’ll go back and tell the people I work with that I spent the whole weekend listening to someone talk about foreign policy, and they won’t look at that in a positive way.

  Yeah, because you should have been out making money, or watching sports or something. But see, I don’t call that “anti-intellectual,” that’s just being de-politicized—what’s especi
ally “intellectual” about being concerned with the world? If we had functioning labor unions, the working class would be concerned with the world. In fact, they are in many places—Salvadoran peasants are concerned with the world, they’re not “intellectuals.”

  These are funny words, actually. I mean, the way it’s used, being an “intellectual” has virtually nothing to do with working with your mind: those are two different things. My suspicion is that plenty of people in the crafts, auto mechanics and so on, probably do as much or more intellectual work as plenty of people in universities. There are big areas in academia where what’s called “scholarly” work is just clerical work, and I don’t think clerical work’s more challenging mentally than fixing an automobile engine—in fact, I think the opposite: I can do clerical work, I can never figure out how to fix an automobile engine.

  So if by “intellectual” you mean people who are using their minds, then it’s all over the society. If by “intellectual” you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts, and framing ideas for people in power, and telling everyone what they should believe, and so on, well, yeah, that’s different. Those people are called “intellectuals”—but they’re really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population should be anti-intellectual in that respect, I think that’s a healthy reaction.

  In fact, if you compare the United States with France—or with most of Europe, for that matter—I think one of the healthy things about the United States is precisely this: there’s very little respect for intellectuals as such. And there shouldn’t be. What’s there to respect? I mean, in France if you’re part of the intellectual elite and you cough, there’s a front-page story in Le Monde. That’s one of the reasons why French intellectual culture is so farcical—it’s like Hollywood. You’re in front of the television cameras all the time, and you’ve got to keep doing something new so they’ll keep focusing on you and not on the guy at the next table, and people don’t have ideas that are that good, so they have to come up with crazy stuff, and the intellectuals get all pompous and self-important. So I remember during the Vietnam War, there’d be these big international campaigns to protest the war, and a number of times I was asked to co-sign letters with, say, Jean-Paul Sartre [French philosopher]. Well, we’d co-sign some statement, and in France it was front-page news; here, nobody even mentioned it. And the French thought that was scandalous; I thought it was terrific—why the hell should anybody mention it? What difference does it make if two guys who happen to have some name recognition got together and signed a statement? Why should that be of any particular interest to anybody? So I think the American reaction is much healthier in this respect.