Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  The extent of this is really astonishing, actually. Just to give you one example of it, back in the early 1980s, when South End Press [a radical American publishing collective] was first coming along, it was publishing some books which could have been very useful for Palestinians. So one of the books it published was a very good war diary about the 1982 Lebanon war, written by a well-known Israeli military officer who was one of the founders of the Israeli army actually, a guy named Dov Yermiya, who’s a very respected guy and a decent human being—and he was absolutely horrified by what was going on during Israel’s attack on Lebanon. So he wrote a war diary which was published in Hebrew and was very different from anything you ever heard here in the mainstream, giving an accurate picture of what was going on, which was massive atrocities. 88 Well, obviously no publisher in the United States was going to touch it, but South End did publish it in English translation—and of course, it never got reviewed, no library would pick it up, nobody knows it exists, and so on; I had a book on the Middle East which was the same story, and there were a couple others like that.

  Well, there was an approach to the P.L.O. about all of this—and incidentally, the P.L.O. had tons of money. I mean, part of their problem was that they were way too rich for their own good: they had a ton of money because the rich Arab states were trying to buy them off so they wouldn’t cause them any trouble. So you know, Arafat was able to broker billion-dollar loans to Hungary, and all this kind of crazy business. But anyway, the P.L.O. had tons of money, and there was a proposal to try to get them just to purchase books—like, say, Yermiya’s book—and send them to libraries so the book would be in American public libraries: it was nothing more than that.

  Okay, it got up to the P.L.O. leadership, and they refused. Or rather, they would agree to do it only if the book was published with a P.L.O. imprint on it, saying, you know, “Published with the support of the P.L.O.” Well, you can guess what it would mean if you published a book in the United States with that imprint on it—so that was the end of that idea. But just to do something like buying books which never would be reviewed and putting them in libraries which aren’t going to buy them on their own, as a way to maybe help Palestinians in refugee camps who are being smashed to pieces in Beirut [the Lebanese city that was the focus of Israel’s attack]—that they wouldn’t do. And in fact, that’s just symbolic: they would do nothing that would help to build up support for the really suffering people who they were supposed to represent—just because they were playing a different game. Their game was, “We’re going to make a deal with Kissinger or Nixon, or some rich guy in a back room, and then our problems will be over.” Well, of course that will never work.

  Actually, the corruption of the P.L.O. has just infuriated Palestinians in the Territories, I should say. I was in the Territories back in 1988 or so, and when you went into, say, the old city of Nablus, or villages, and talked to organizers or activists, their hatred and contempt of the P.L.O. was just extraordinary. They were very bitter about it—about the robbery and the corruption and everything else—but they just said: look, it’s the best we’ve got, that’s our international image, you want to talk diplomacy you’ve got to talk to them.

  However, by about 1992 or ’93 even that kind of grudging acceptance had begun to collapse. There was a lot of opposition to the Arafat leadership in the Territories—and in the refugee camps in Lebanon, there were open calls for his resignation, calls for democratizing the P.L.O., and so on. The Israeli press knew all about it—they cover the Territories pretty well—and certainly Israeli intelligence knew about it, because they’ve got the place honeycombed. So there were articles by doves in the Israeli press around the summer of 1993 or so, saying: now’s a good time to deal with the P.L.O., because they’re going to give away everything—since their support is so weak inside the Occupied Territories, the last chance the P.L.O. leadership has to hang on to power is to be our agents, Israeli agents. Israeli doves wrote articles about that, and of course the Israeli government knew it. 89

  Well, okay, that whole phenomenon led to the Oslo Agreements—and now where the P.L.O. leadership fits in is just as part of the standard Third World model: they are the ruling Third World elite. So take a classic case, look at the history of India for a couple hundred years under the British Empire: the country was run by Indians, not by British—the bureaucrats who actually ran things were Indians, the soldiers who beat people up and smashed their heads were Indians. There was an Indian leadership which became very rich and privileged by being the agents of the British imperial system—and it’s the same thing everywhere else. So for example, if you look at Southern Africa in the more recent period, the most brutal atrocities were carried out by black soldiers, who were basically mercenaries for the white racist South African regime. And every Third World country is like that. Whatever you want to call it, the whole American sort of “neocolonial system”—El Salvador, Brazil, the Philippines, and so on—is not run by Americans. The U.S. may be in the background, and when things get out of hand you may send in the American army or something—but basically it’s all being run by local agents of the imperial power, whose internal power depends on their support from the outside, but who very much enrich themselves by their client ruler status. Alright, that’s the standard colonial relationship, and the P.L.O. is intending to play that role.

  So they have a huge security force—nobody really knows how big it is, because it’s secret, but they may have thirty or forty thousand men enlisted. They surely have one of the highest densities of police per capita in the world, if not the highest. They work very closely with the Israeli secret services and the Israeli army. They’re very brutal. 90 And they’re making a ton of money. So you go to places like Gaza which are just collapsing, there are people starving in the streets—and there’s also a ton of construction, new fancy restaurants, hotels, a lot of Palestinian investors going in and making plenty of money: it’s the standard Third World pattern, that’s the way the whole Third World is organized. And you see it everywhere these days—Eastern Europe is becoming that way too right now. I mean, about a year ago the per capita purchasing rate of Mercedes-Benzes in Moscow was higher than it was in New York, because there is tremendous wealth. Meanwhile, half a million more people are dying every year in Russia than in the 1980s; mortality for men has gone down seven or eight years on average in the last few years; and on and on. 91

  Okay, that’s the Third World. And that’s the way the P.L.O. leadership sees its future—and with some justice too, you know, because otherwise they probably would have been kicked out. So now that’s their role, to oversee all of this, and they’ll put up with any humiliation, it doesn’t matter what. I mean, you look at the terms of the peace treaty, it was just gratuitous humiliation. But the P.L.O. is perfectly happy to take it. And they’ll get rich, they’ll have the guns, and they’ll be the equivalent of the elite in India, or Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, or any other place that you see in the Third World.

  The Nation-State System

  WOMAN: Noam, the problems you describe in the world sound almost chronic to me—systematic underdevelopment and exploitation in the Third World, proliferation of nuclear weapons, the growing environmental crisis. What means of social organization do you think would be necessary for us to overcome these things?

  Well, in my view what would ultimately be necessary would be a breakdown of the nation-state system—because I think that’s not a viable system. It’s not necessarily the natural form of human organization; in fact, it’s a European invention pretty much. The modern nation-state system basically developed in Europe since the medieval period, and it was extremely difficult for it to develop: Europe has a very bloody history, an extremely savage and bloody history, with constant massive wars and so on, and that was all part of an effort to establish the nation-state system. It has virtually no relation to the way people live, or to their associations, or anything else particularly, so it had to be established by force. And it was estab
lished by centuries of bloody warfare. That warfare ended in 1945—and the only reason it ended is because the next war was going to destroy everything. So it ended in 1945—we hope; if it didn’t, it will destroy everything.

  The nation-state system was exported to the rest of the world through European colonization. Europeans were barbarians basically, savages: very advanced technologically, and advanced in methods of warfare, but not culturally or anything else particularly. And when they spread over the rest of the world, it was like a plague—they just destroyed everything in front of them, it was kind of like Genghis Khan or something. They fought differently, they fought much more brutally, they had better technology—and they essentially wiped everything else out. 92

  The American continent’s a good example. How come everybody around here has a white face, and not a red face? Well, it’s because the people with the white faces were savages, and they killed the people with red faces. When the British and other colonists came to this continent, they simply destroyed everything—and pretty much the same thing happened everywhere else in the world. You go back to about the sixteenth century and the populations of Africa and Europe were approximately comparable; a couple centuries later, the population of Europe was far higher, maybe four times as high. Why did that change? Well, you know, those were the effects of European colonization. 93

  So the process of colonization was extraordinarily destructive, and it in turn imposed the European nation-state system on the world, kind of a reflection of internal European society, which of course was always extremely hierarchical and unequal and brutal. And if that system continues, I suppose it will continue to be hierarchical and unequal and brutal.

  So I think other forms of social organization have to be developed—and those forms are not too difficult to imagine. I mean, the United Nations was an attempt to do something about it, but it didn’t work, because the superpowers won’t let it work. International law is the same story. International law is a method by which you might regulate the aggressive and destructive tendencies of the nation-state—the trouble is, international law doesn’t have a police force: there are no Martians around to enforce it. So international law will only work if the powers subjected to it are willing to accept it, and the United States is not willing to accept it. If the World Court condemns us, we simply disregard it, it’s not our problem—we’re above the law, we’re a lawless state. 94 And as long as the major powers in the world are lawless and violent, and are unwilling to enter into international arrangements or other kinds of mechanisms which would constrain force and violence, there’s very little hope for human survival, I would think.

  Now, my own feeling—I mean, big story—is that the reasons for all of this have to do with the way that power is concentrated inside the particular societies; that’s the source of this extreme violence in the world. Remember that every existing social system has a vast disparity of power internally. Take the United States: the United States was not founded on the principle that “the people” ought to rule—that’s freshman Civics, it’s not what happened in history. If you look back at the actual record, you’ll find that the principles of the American Founding Fathers were quite different.

  Keep in mind, all of the Founding Fathers hated democracy—Thomas Jefferson was a partial exception, but only partial. For the most part, they hated democracy. The principles of the Founding Fathers were rather nicely expressed by John Jay, the head of the Constitutional Convention and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His favorite maxim was, “The people who own the country ought to govern it”—that’s the principle on which the United States was founded. 95 The major framer of the Constitution, James Madison, emphasized very clearly in the debates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that the whole system must be designed, as he put it, “to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority”—that’s the primary purpose of the government, he said. 96

  Now, Madison had kind of a theory behind that, which was that the “minority of the opulent” would be elevated Enlightenment gentlemen, who would act like some kind of ancient Roman republicans of his imagination—benevolent philosophers who would use their opulence to benefit everybody in the country. But he himself quickly recognized that that was a serious delusion, and within about ten years he was bitterly denouncing what he called the “daring depravity of the times” as “the minority of the opulent” were using their power to smash everyone else in the face.

  In fact, still in the eighteenth century, Madison made some insightful comments about the interactions between state power and private power. He said, we’ve designed a system in which the “stock-jobbers” (what we would today call investors) are simply using state power for their own ends—we thought we were going to create a system which would put enlightened gentlemen in control so that they would protect everyone from the tyranny of the majority, but instead what we’ve got is gangsters in control using state power for their own benefit. 97

  Well, that’s the way the system was originally designed in the United States—and over the next two centuries, that basic design hasn’t changed a lot. The “minority of the opulent,” who share a very definite class interest, still have control of the government institutions, both the parliament and the Executive, while the general population remains highly dispersed, separated, and as Madison also recommended, fragmented so that people will not be able to unite together to identify and press their interests. 98 And the principle that “The people who own the country ought to govern it” continues to be the dominant feature of American politics.

  Alright, it’s not a very big secret who owns the country: you look at the “Fortune 500” every year and you figure out pretty well who owns the country. The country is basically owned by a network of conglomerates that control production and investment and banking and so on, and are tightly inter-linked and very highly concentrated—they own the country. And the principle of American democracy is that they also ought to govern it. And to a very large extent, they do. Now, whenever you have a concentration of power like that, you can be certain that the people who have the power are going to try to maximize it—and they’re going to maximize it at the expense of others, both in their own country and abroad. And that’s just an unviable system, I think.

  Let’s put international violence aside for a minute and take environmental issues, which people are finally beginning to look at. Well, it’s been obvious for centuries that capitalism is going to self-destruct: that’s just inherent in the logic of system—because to the extent that a system is capitalist, that means maximizing short-term profit and not being concerned with long-term effects. In fact, the motto of capitalism was, “private vices, public benefits”—somehow it’s gonna work out. Well, it doesn’t work out, and it’s never going to work out: if you’re maximizing short-term profits without concern for the long-term effects, you are going to destroy the environment, for one thing. I mean, you can pretend up to a certain point that the world has infinite resources and that it’s an infinite wastebasket—but at some point you’re going to run into the reality, which is that that isn’t true.

  Well, we’re running into that reality now—and it’s very profound. Take something like combustion: anything you burn, no matter what it is, is increasing the greenhouse effect—and this was known to scientists decades ago, they knew exactly what was happening. 99 But in a capitalist system, you don’t care about long-term effects like that, what you have to care about is tomorrow’s profits. So the greenhouse effect has been building for years, and there’s no known technological fix on the horizon—there may not be any answer to this, it could be so serious that there’s no remedy. That’s possible, and then human beings will turn out to have been a lethal mutation, which maybe destroys a lot of life with us. Or it could be that there’s some way of fixing it, or some ameliorating way—nobody knows.

  But just keep in mind what we’re dealing with: the predictable effect of an increase in the world’s temperature through
the greenhouse effect will be to raise the sea level, and if the sea level begins to rise a few feet, it’s not clear that human civilization can continue. A lot of the agricultural lands, for example, are alluvial—they’re near the seas. Industrial centers, like New York City, could be inundated. The climate is going to change, so the agricultural-producing areas of the United States could become dust-bowls. And when these changes start to be recognized, they’re going to set into motion social conflict of a sort that we can’t even imagine—I mean, if it turns out that agricultural areas in the United States are becoming unviable and that Siberia is becoming the next great agricultural producer, do you think that American planners are going to allow the Russians to use it? We’ll conquer it, even if we have to destroy the world in a nuclear war to do it. That’s the way they think, and have always thought. And those conflicts are going to be growing up all over the world—you can’t even predict what they’ll be like.

  Alright, right now we do not have the forms of internal democracy or international organization which will allow us even to begin to cope with these sorts of problems. The very concept of social planning, of rational planning for human concerns—that’s regarded as virtually subversive. And that’s the only thing that could possibly save people: rational social planning, carried out by accountable people representing the whole population rather than business elites. Democracy, in other words—that’s a concept we don’t have.