Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  So dispelling the illusions is just a part of organizing and acting. It’s not something that you do in a seminar, or in your living room—not that you can’t do it there, but it’s just a different kind of activity. Like, if you have some illusions about classical Greece, let’s say, then you can probably do it in the library, to some extent at least. But if you’re trying to dispel illusions about a live, ongoing social process that’s changing all the time, and that you only get to see little pieces of—that’s really not the way to do it. You do it through interactions with other people, and by functioning in some kind of community of concern, and of commitment, and of activism.

  MAN: If I were to hold a meeting in my community and invite someone to speak about the kinds of things we’ve been discussing this weekend, though, I’d probably get a very small turnout.

  Yeah, that’s okay. Look, the peace movement in the Sixties became a huge mass movement, with tens of millions of people involved: it began with people doing just what you said, inviting somebody to come and talk in their living rooms. I mean, I remember it, because I did that for a couple of years. The world has just changed tremendously since then. Now I’m booked up two or more years in advance, I get huge audiences, sophisticated audiences, people who’ve thought about things, they’re active, I learn from them. It’s not long ago that I was getting invited to somebody’s living room to talk to two or three neighbors who were ready to lynch me, or to some church where there’d be four people, including some guy who sort of wandered in because he didn’t know what to do, and two people who wanted to kill you, and the organizer—that’s not long ago, that’s 1964. And when you’re talking about other issues, like large-scale social change, well, it’s still like 1964 in that respect. But things can change—and sometimes they change very fast.

  Take the Civil Rights Movement in the United States: over a ten-year period, it was just a sea-change. Or take the feminist movement, which a lot of you are involved in: the changes came very fast. It went from being virtually nothing, a little nit-picking about activist groups having the women licking the stamps, and within a couple years it was a major movement, swept the country. When the time is right, things happen fast. They don’t happen without any basis—things have to have been happening for a long period. But then they can crystallize at the right time, and often become very significant.

  WOMAN: Although—I do a lot of political work in my community, and after a while it does begin to feel like preaching to the converted. It’s very frustrating.

  It sure is. Activism is very frustrating. But you also do get achievements: you bring a couple people in, and they begin to do things, and sooner or later it can lead to very large-scale change. We know that.

  I mean, the old American Communist Party—make any criticisms you want about it, Stalinist, anything else—the fact is, there were some very strong things about it. One thing is, there were a lot of people who were just committed: they were going to show up when you needed somebody to turn the mimeograph machine, because they were committed that that’s the way to get somewhere. And they were willing to work, they were going to work for changes with other people in their communities, whose lives they wanted to improve and help. And don’t forget, they were the people who were fighting for civil rights in the days when it was no joke, when it wasn’t a matter of going down to Selma on a big march, it was a matter of being alone in the South in places where you could very easily get killed—that was mostly the American Communist Party. Everybody who dumps on the Communist Party might remember these things.

  And also, don’t forget, a lot of the destruction that you see in the world happens because people are constantly organizing, and advancing, and progressing, and taking things over, and struggling against their oppression. I mean, the fact that all of these atrocities have been going on in Central America in the 1980s is a sign of progress, you know. Up until around the late 1970s, nobody here even commented on Central America. Why? Because it was all under control, it was pure atrocities, nobody was fighting back—so therefore no one here even paid attention to it. It only became an issue in the 1980s because there was a great deal of very successful organizing there: they did overthrow the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, there were huge peasant unions being formed for the first time in El Salvador and Guatemala, there was just a lot of extremely effective organizing taking place. So then the death squads came, and the U.S. trainers came, and people like you and me had to pay our taxes to have those people murdered. But they still have not yet eradicated it. Despite all the terror in Guatemala—you could even call it something like genocide—the working-class unions are reconstituting, they’re still there. And crucially, in the 1980s that activism induced a solidarity movement in the United States which has interacted very constructively with the people there: that’s an extremely important change, a dramatic change. So when we talk about what governments are up to, of course everything looks bleak. But look around—there are all kinds of other things happening, and that’s what you do.

  4

  Colloquy

  Based primarily on discussions at Fort Collins,

  Colorado, April 10, 1990.

  The Totalitarian Strain

  MAN: There’s been a plethora of books recently by dissidents critiquing the media—yours and Ed Herman’s, and Ben Bagdikian’s, Michael Parenti’s, Mark Hertsgaard’s—but as I heard Alexander Cockburn say a couple days ago, “It’s still one nation under Time/Warner”: there’s all of this literature that’s available, but there really hasn’t been much of a dent in the structure. 1

  Where would there be a dent? Suppose you had a thousand books: would that change the fact that Time and Warner Communications can form a conglomerate? All of this literature is not tied up with any form—any form, I mean, not five people—of social organization that is trying to undermine the corporate structure of the media. This work all is just an effort to educate people so they’re better able to protect themselves from the propaganda system. And there I think there has been an effect: a lot of people are attuned to propaganda in a way they weren’t before. But none of this can be conceived of as an attempt to change the corporate structure directly—there isn’t even a proposal about that in any one of these books. Take Ben Bagdikian’s book, or the first chapter of Ed’s and my book: they don’t suggest how we might change corporate capitalism, that’s a completely different topic. They just say, as long as you have corporate capitalism, here’s what the media are going to look like.

  WOMAN: Are you going to do an article on what happened in Central America recently—the Nicaraguan elections [of 1990, in which the Sandinista Party lost to the U.S.-supported candidate, Violeta Chamorro]?

  I am—not on the elections themselves, on the U.S. reaction to the elections. 2 Nicaragua’s for them to write about, I write about the United States.

  But the reaction of the media here was pretty astonishing. The most remarkable feature was the unanimity. I mean, there was an absolutely unanimous reaction across the entire mainstream spectrum, from Anthony Lewis and Mary McGrory over to George Will and whatever other right-wing lunatic there is. In fact, about the only difference between the so-called “liberals” and “conservatives” was that the liberals pointed to the fact that the Nicaraguan people essentially voted with a gun to their heads and then said, “The election was free and fair, uncoerced, a miracle of democracy,” whereas the conservatives didn’t bother saying the people voted with a gun to their heads, they just said it was a miracle of democracy. 3

  Some of it was comical. For instance, the New York Times had a column by David Shipler, a liberal journalist, which said, yeah, the embargo’s killing them, the contras are killing them, they know we’re going to continue the embargo unless they vote for our candidate. Headline: “Victory For U.S. Fair Play.” 4 The Boston Globe, which is a very liberal newspaper—it’s the outer limit in the mainstream—had a headline: “Rallying to Chamorro.” The theme was, okay, now all the people who love Nicaraguans, li
ke we’ve all done all these years, must rally to Chamorro. 5 Well, say it was 1964, after Goldwater lost the Presidential race here two to one—can you imagine anybody saying, “Okay, now every Goldwater voter must ‘rally to Johnson’ ”? That’s straight out of Stalinist Russia. You don’t “rally to the leader” in a democracy—you do whatever you feel like doing. But the idea that you’ve got to rally behind der Führer is quite acceptable in the American liberal press.

  In fact, it’s interesting that the media themselves even recognized the unanimity. So for example, the New York Times had an article by Elaine Sciolino surveying the U.S. reaction, and the headline was, “Americans United in Joy, But Divided Over Policy.” 6 And the division over policy turns out to be the question: who gets credit for having achieved this magnificent result? See, that’s where you get a liberal/conservative split: “did the contras help or hurt?” Is it better to do it the way it’s done in El Salvador—leave women hanging from trees with their skin flayed off and bleeding to death, leave thousands of corpses beheaded by the roadside so that everybody else will get the point—or should you do what Senator Alan Cranston suggested in 1986, to pick a dove: let them “fester in their own juices,” through economic strangulation and other means? 7 Well, the fact is, the right wing wins on that one: the contras obviously helped. But the idea that everyone was “United in Joy” over the result, that was considered perfectly legitimate. In other words, we’re straight totalitarians: everyone is united, we all march on command, there isn’t one word of dissidence tolerated. Phrases like “United in Joy” are the kinds of things you might see in the North Korean press, maybe. But it’s interesting, American elites pride themselves on being dedicated totalitarians, they think that’s the way we ought to be—we ought to be the worst totalitarian culture in the world, in which everyone agrees.

  Look, anyone can see, a ten-year-old could see, that an election carried out under conditions where a monstrous superpower is saying, “Vote for our candidate or starve to death,” is obviously not free. I mean, if some unimaginable superpower were to threaten us, saying, “We’re going to reduce you to the level of Ethiopia unless you vote for our candidate,” and then people here voted for their candidate, you’d have to be some kind of crazy Nazi or something to say that it was a free election. But in the United States, everyone says it—we’re all “United in Joy.” That’s an interesting fact about the United States, actually—what it shows is how deeply totalitarian the culture really is. In fact, it would be very hard to mimic this even in a well-run totalitarian state, but here it passes without anybody even noticing it, because it’s all so deeply ingrained. In any country that had even a memory of what democracy means, if you saw that everyone was “United in Joy,” the article would say, “There’s something really wrong with this country.” Nobody can be “United in Joy” over anything. Pick the topic, it just can’t be that people are “United in Joy” about it—unless it’s Albania, then yeah, sure, you’ve got the guns pointed at you, you’re “United in Joy.” But in the United States, nobody even sees that there’s anything odd about it.

  WOMAN: There was a breakthrough, though—the Wall Street Journal on its front page ran an article written by a man from The Nation [a left-leaning magazine] saying that we ought to be ashamed of what happened in Nicaragua.

  That wasn’t on the front page, that was on the Op-Ed page—and that was Alex Cockburn, who’s the Wall Street Journal’s once-a-month gesture to “some other voice.” Sure, I mean, when I say the unity was a hundred percent, I know of precisely two exceptions in the mainstream press in the United States. Obviously I haven’t read everything in the mainstream press, but I’ve looked at quite a lot, and I’ve been in touch with people all around the country who’ve been looking, and I found only two exceptions: one was Alex Cockburn in the Wall Street Journal, and the other was an editor I know at the Boston Globe, Randolph Ryan, who managed to put something about this in an editorial. 8 So the two of them were able to say what any eight-year-old would see right off—and as far as I know, that’s it for the American press.

  As a matter of fact, it was the same in the coverage before the elections. I, and probably you, and a lot of other people were following the media very closely just to see if there would be one phrase, just a phrase, anywhere in the mainstream media, that said that a Sandinista Party victory might be the best thing for Nicaragua—I haven’t found a phrase. I mean, even journalists who believe it couldn’t say it. Now, obviously the issue is contentious—it was contentious in Nicaragua—but here it’s not, here you have to have 100 percent unanimity.

  Furthermore, it was also assumed automatically, across the board, that Chamorro was the democratic candidate—and nobody ever gave you a reason why she was the democratic candidate. I mean, what are her democratic credentials? That’s not anything you even have to argue in the United States: Washington says she’s the democratic candidate, and American business says she’s the democratic candidate, so that settles it—for American intellectuals, there are no further questions to ask. And the interesting thing is, again, nobody even sees that there’s anything odd about this. Like, nobody writes an Op-Ed saying, “Isn’t it strange? Just because Washington and the business community tell us she’s the democratic candidate, does that mean that we have to repeat it and not look for some reason, find out what her democratic credentials are?” It wouldn’t occur to anybody: the intellectual community in the United States is so disciplined they simply don’t ask those questions.

  A Lithuania Hypothetical

  MAN: Dr. Chomsky, I just want to ask a question on this topic: Daniel Ortega [Nicaraguan President, Sandinista Party] was in power for how long? a decade?

  Yes.

  MAN: And yet he lost the election.

  Why “And yet”?

  MAN: Well, he had control of that country for ten years.

  What does it mean, “He had control of it”?

  MAN: He controlled the press.

  He did not. In fact, Nicaragua is the only country I know of in history that allowed a major opposition press [La Prensa] to operate while it was being attacked—a press which was calling for the overthrow of the government by violence, which was identifying with the foreign-run mercenary army attacking the country, and which was funded, partly openly and partly covertly (though everybody knew), by the foreign power attacking the country [i.e. the U.S.]. That’s never happened before in history—the United States would never tolerate anything like that for one second. Furthermore, and quite apart from that, large parts of Nicaragua were flooded, and in fact dominated, by U.S. propaganda. Remember, there are large areas of Nicaragua where what people know is what they hear over the radio, and the United States ran major radio and television stations in Honduras and Costa Rica which dominated the information flow in large sectors of the Nicaraguan countryside. 9

  In fact, the level of freedom of the press in Nicaragua in the last ten years just broke new libertarian standards: there’s never been anything even remotely comparable to it in history. Try to find a case.

  MAN: But given ten years in power, it seemed rather remarkable that Ortega wasn’t able to hold on to that mandate.

  Really? Well let me ask you how remarkable it is. Suppose the Soviet Union were to play the game the way we do. Lithuania just declared independence, right [in March 1990]? Let’s suppose that the Soviet Union were capable of doing what we did in Nicaragua. So: it would organize a terrorist army to attack Lithuania; it would train it to attack “soft targets,” civilian targets; it would try to kill large numbers of health workers, teachers, farmers, and so on. 10 Meanwhile, it would impose an embargo—suppose it were able to do this—and block trade, block export and import, it would pressure international institutions to stop providing any assistance. 11 Of course, to make the analogy accurate, we’d have to assume that Lithuania begins at a level much lower than what it actually is.

  Okay, now suppose that after ten years of this, Lithuania has been reduced to the l
evel of Ethiopia, alright? And suppose that then there’s an election, and Moscow says: “Look, we’re going to continue this, all of it, unless you vote for the Communist Party.” And now suppose that the Lithuanians do vote for the Communist Party. Would you find that remarkable?

  MAN: I don’t think Nicaragua was reduced to the level of Ethiopia.

  Oh yeah, they were. They were reduced to the level of—well, maybe Haiti. 12 But just answer my question: would you find that remarkable?

  MAN: Under those circumstances, I guess I wouldn’t.

  Okay, but then why do you find it remarkable when it happened in Nicaragua?

  MAN: Well, I don’t have access to all the facts you do.

  You have every fact I told you—every fact I told you, you knew. Every fact I told you, you can find on the front pages of the New York Times. It’s just that when you hear the White House announce, “We’re going to continue with the embargo unless Chamorro wins,” you have to be able to think enough so you conclude, well, these people are voting with a gun to their heads. 13 If you can’t think that far, it doesn’t matter what the newspapers say. And the beauty of a really well-indoctrinated intellectual class is they can’t think that far. They can think that far easily in the case of Lithuania, but they can’t think that far in the case of the United States, even though the actual situation is the hypothetical one that I described. So often the information is there, in a sense—it’s just that it’s not there, because people are so indoctrinated that they simply don’t see it.