Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  But the country is very disturbed. You can see it in polls, and you can certainly see it traveling around—and I travel around a lot. There’s complete disaffection about everything. People don’t trust anyone, they think everyone’s lying to them, everyone’s working for somebody else. The whole civil society has completely broken down. And when you talk about the mood of people—well, whether it’s on right-wing talk radio, or among students, or just among the general population, you get a very good reception these days for the kinds of things I talk about. But it’s scary—because if you came and told people, “Clinton’s organizing a U.N. army with aliens to come and carry out genocide, you’d better go to the hills,” you’d get the same favorable response. That’s the problem—you’d get the same favorable response. I mean, you can go to the most reactionary parts of the country, or anywhere else, and a thousand people will show up to listen, and they’ll be really excited about what you’re saying—no matter what it is. That’s the trouble: it’s no matter what it is. Because people are so disillusioned by this point that they will believe almost anything.

  Take these guys in what are called the “militias”—I mean, obviously they’re not militias in the Second Amendment sense: “militias” are things raised by states, these are just paramilitary organizations. 100 But if you look at who’s involved in them, they are people from a sector of the population that has really gotten it in the neck in the last twenty years: they’re high school graduates, mostly white males, a segment of the society that has really taken a beating. I mean, median real wages in the United States have dropped about 20 percent since 1973—that’s a substantial cut. 101 Their wives now have to go to work just to put food on the table. Often their families have broken up. Their kids are running wild, but there’s no social support system anywhere to help them deal with that. They don’t read the “Fortune 500” and put together an analysis of what’s really going on in the world, all they’ve had rammed into their heads is, “The federal government’s your enemy.” If you come to them with a political framework that could lead to some kind of productive change, it’s all just another power-play as far as they’re concerned—and with some justice: everything else they’ve been told is a crock, so why should they believe you? You tell them to read declassified National Security Council documents, or to look at things in the business press that would really mean something to them—I mean, a lot of people don’t even read. We should bear in mind how illiterate the society’s become. It’s tough.

  So these groups certainly represent something: they’re a response to sharply worsening conditions. I mean, they’re called “right-wing,” but in my view they’re sort of independent of politics—there could be people on the left in there too. All of this is not so different from people believing conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination, or about the Trilateral Commission [an elite think-tank], or the C.I.A. and all the rest of that stuff—the things that are just tearing the left to shreds.

  Or take this guy called the “Unabomber” [a serial mail-bomb killer who espoused an anti-industrial worldview]. When I read his manifesto, I thought, if I don’t know him, I know his friends—they’re the kind of people I run into on the left all the time. They’re demoralized, they’re fed up, they’re desperate, but they don’t have a constructive response to all the problems we’ve got to face. Then again, the L.A. riots [in 1992] also weren’t a constructive response. In fact, all these reactions, from the “militias,” to conspiracy theories, to the Unabomber, to the L.A. riots, they’re all the result of a kind of collapse of civil society in the United States. The vestiges of an integrated, socially cohesive, functioning society, with some kind of solidarity and continuity to it, have just been destroyed here. It’s hard to imagine a better way to demoralize people than to have them watch T.V. for seven hours a day—but that’s pretty much what people have been reduced to by now.

  In fact, all of these things really illustrate the difference between completely demoralized societies like ours and societies that are still kind of hanging together, like in a lot of the Third World. I mean, in absolute terms the Mayan Indians in Chiapas, Mexico [who organized the Zapatista rebellion in 1994], are much poorer than the people in South Central Los Angeles, or in Michigan or Montana—much poorer. But they have a civil society that hasn’t been totally eliminated the way the working-class culture we used to have in the United States was. Chiapas is one of the most impoverished areas of the Hemisphere, but because there’s still a lively, vibrant society there, with a cultural tradition of freedom and social organization, the Mayan Indian peasants were able to respond in a highly constructive way—they organized the Chiapas rebellion, they have programs and positions, they have public support, it’s been going somewhere. South Central Los Angeles, on the other hand, was just a riot: it was the reaction of a completely demoralized, devastated, poor working-class population, with nothing at all to bring it together. All the people could do there was mindless lashing out, just go steal from the stores. The only effect of that is, we’ll build more jails.

  So to answer your question, I think it’s very much up in the air what’s going to happen in the United States. See, there’s an experiment going on. The experiment is: can you marginalize a large part of the population, regard them as superfluous because they’re not helping you make those dazzling profits—and can you set up a world in which production is carried out by the most oppressed people, with the fewest rights, in the most flexible labor markets, for the happiness of the rich people of the world? Can you do that? Can you get women in China to work locked into factories where they’re burned to death in fires, producing toys that are sold in stores in New York and Boston so that rich people can buy them for their children at Christmas? 102 Can you have an economy where everything works like that—production by the most impoverished and exploited, for the richest and most privileged, internationally? And with large parts of the general population just marginalized because they don’t contribute to the system—in Colombia, murdered, in New York, locked up in prison. Can you do that? Well, nobody knows the answer to that question. You ask, could it lead to a civil war? It definitely could, it could lead to uprisings, revolts.

  The Verge of Fascism

  And there are other things to worry about too, like the fact that the United States is such an extremely fundamentalist country—and also such an unusually frightened one. I mean, we became kind of a laughingstock to the rest of the world during the 1980s: every time Reagan would announce some Libyan terrorist action or something, the entire tourism industry in Europe would collapse, because everybody in the United States was afraid to go to Europe—where they’re about a hundred times as safe as in any American city—for fear there might be some Arab lurking around the corners there trying to kill them. That’s literally the case, it became a real joke around the world—and it’s just another sign of how much extreme irrationality and fear there is in the U.S. population.

  And that’s a very dangerous phenomenon—because that kind of deep irrationality can readily be whipped up by demagogues, you know, Newt Gingriches. These guys can whip up fear, hatred, they can appeal to fundamentalist urges—and that’s been scaring most of the world for a while, I should say. For example, if you recall the Republican National Convention in 1992, it opened with a “God and Country” rally, which was televised and seen around the world. In Europe particularly it really sent chills up people’s spines—because they remember Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, at least older people do, and it had something of that tone. Well, the Republicans were able to insulate the Convention from it that time around and keep most of that stuff confined to the first night, but in the future they might not be able to do that—in the future those people might take the Convention over, in which case we’d be very close to some American version of fascism; it may not be Hitler Germany, but it’ll be bad enough.

  It’s in fact a very similar situation: Germany in the 1930s was maybe the most civilized and advanced count
ry in the world, though with plenty of problems, and it was quite possible there to whip up hatred and fear, to mobilize people, and in fact to carry out what from their point of view was social development—with consequences that you’re familiar with. Yeah, why are we different? We’ve got the same genes, and the conditions in the culture which might be a part of the background for it certainly already exist.

  Actually, I think that the United States has been in kind of a pre-fascist mood for years—and we’ve been very lucky that every leader who’s come along has been a crook. See, people should always be very much in favor of corruption—I’m not kidding about that. Corruption’s a very good thing, because it undermines power. I mean, if we get some Jim Bakker coming along—you know, this preacher who was caught sleeping with everybody and defrauding his followers—those guys are fine: all they want is money and sex and ripping people off, so they’re never going to cause much trouble. Or take Nixon, say: an obvious crook, he’s ultimately not going to cause that much of a problem. But if somebody shows up who’s kind of a Hitler-type—just wants power, no corruption, straight, makes it all sound appealing, and says, “We want power”—well, then we’ll all be in very bad trouble. Now, we haven’t had the right person yet in the United States, but sooner or later somebody’s going to fill that position—and if so, it will be highly dangerous.

  On the other hand, though, I think you can also imagine things going quite differently. The situation just is very pliable at this point in the United States. I mean, these same guys who are blowing up Oklahoma City government buildings [in 1995] could be doing what they would have been doing sixty years ago, which is organizing the C.I.O.—the same guys. It really just depends on whether people start doing something about it. And there are also other things here that are very healthy as well, and can be built on. For instance, there’s a streak of independence and opposition to authority in the United States which probably is unique in the world. Obviously it can show up in anti-social ways, like running around with assault rifles and so on. But it can show up in very healthy ways too, and the trick is to make it show up in the healthy ways, like opposition to illegitimate authority.

  So you know, it’s complicated. Could there be a civil war? It could be very unpleasant. A lot of very ugly things could happen, they’re not inconceivable. But they’re also not inevitable.

  WOMAN: I’ve often beard you end talks by saying basically, “We can’t give up hope.” But do you really see any hope—for the future of democracy, or for the United States, or for the people in the Third World?

  Well, I’ll quote my friend Mike Albert [co-editor of Z Magazine], who was listening to one of my gloomy disquisitions and said: “You know, what you’re describing is an organizer’s dream.” And I think that’s true. The country is in a state where people are disillusioned, frightened, skeptical, angry, don’t trust anything, want something better, know that everything’s rotten. That’s a perfect place for organizers to come and say, “Okay, let’s do something about it. If they could do something about it in the hills of El Salvador, we can certainly do something about it here.” And I think he’s right: it just depends whether you decide it’s time to start doing something about it.

  The Future of History

  WOMAN: But what do you think personally, Noam—will the general population of the United States remain marginalized for the rest of history, or do you actually feel that there’s going to be a movement to prevent that?

  Look, I really don’t know, but I think we can predict one thing with fair certainty: if the U.S. public remains marginalized, there isn’t going to be much history left to worry about. We’re not living in the eighteenth century anymore. The problems may be sort of similar, but they’re quite different in scale, and the problems now have to do with human survival. So if the general population in the most powerful country in the world remains marginalized, we aren’t going to have to worry very much about history, because there isn’t going to be any. And that’s not very far away at this point.

  Take Central America, which is the region where we have the most control—we’ve been controlling things there for a hundred years, so it really tells us what we are. It’s quite possible that much of Central America will become uninhabitable in another couple decades. For instance, Nicaragua’s losing its water supply. Why? The reason is, in the aftermath of the American attacks of the 1980s, people are starving, and they’re doing the only thing they can do—they go up into the hills to cut wood and try to find some land to work, they do whatever they can do to survive. Well, that eliminates the forest cover, streams start drying up, the land can’t absorb water, lakes are drying up, and on top of it all, there happens to have been a drought. So Nicaragua’s water supply may disappear—and as the pressures continue, it may become a desert. The same could be true of Haiti. 103

  Haiti, in fact, is a parable of Western savagery. That was one of the first places Columbus landed, and he thought it was a paradise—it was the richest place in the world, and also probably the most densely populated place in the world. And in fact, it remained that way: France is a rich country in large measure because it stole Haiti’s resources, and even early in the twentieth century, before Woodrow Wilson sent the U.S. Marines to invade and wreck the country in 1915, American scholarship and government studies on Haiti were still describing it as a major resource center—it just happened to be an extremely rich place. 104 Well, take a look if you fly into Haiti today. The island consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic—the Dominican Republic we’ve also brutalized, but Haiti much more so—and you can just see it if you look down from the plane: on one side it’s brown, on the other side it’s sort of semi-green. The brown side is Haiti, the richest place in the world. It may not last another couple decades—literally it may become uninhabitable.

  Well, that’s extending elsewhere now, and it involves us too. The rich and the powerful are going to survive longer, but the effects are very real—and they’re getting worse very quickly as more and more people get marginalized because they play no role in profit-making, which is considered the only human value. Well, the environmental problems are simply much more significant in scale than anything else in the past. And there’s a fair possibility—certainly a possibility high enough so that no rational person would exclude it—that within a couple hundred years the world’s water-level will have risen to the point that most of human life will have been destroyed. Alright, if we don’t start to do something about that now, it’s not impossible that that’ll happen. In fact, it’s even likely.

  So whatever I happen to think, that’s irrelevant. The answer to your question is: if you remain marginalized, there’s not going to be much history to worry about. Whether people will react or not, who knows? You know? Everyone’s got to decide.