by Noam Chomsky
The general lessons of history are clear enough. The legacy of war is faced by the losers. We have thousands of years of pretty consistent records about this. The powerful are too emotionally exhausted, or too overcome with self-adulation, to have any role or responsibility, though for them to portray themselves as suffering victims is an unusual form of moral cowardice. It’s a good step beyond the “sacralization of war” and the new forms that it has taken with the rise of the secular religions of the modern era, including our own.
Another lesson of history is that it’s very easy to see the other fellow’s crimes and to express heartfelt anguish and outrage about them, which may well be justified—it may even lead to help for the victims, which is all to the good, as, for example, when the Soviet tyranny assisted victims of American crimes, as indeed it did. But by the most elementary moral standards, that performance is not very impressive. The very minimum of moral decency would be a willingness to shine the spotlight on oneself with candor and truth. That’s the minimum. Proceeding beyond this bare minimum, elementary decency would require action for the benefit of the victims, and for the future victims who doubtless lie ahead if the causes of the crimes are not honestly and effectively addressed. Among these causes are the institutional structures that remain unchanged and from which the policies flow, and also the cultural attitudes and the doctrinal systems that support them and that lead to things of the kind that I have been talking about. These are matters that I think should concern us very deeply, and should be at the core of an educational program in a free society from early childhood and on through adult life.
12
Millennium Greetings
Year 2000 opened with familiar refrains, amplified by the numerology: a chorus of self-adulation, somber ruminations about the incomprehensible evil of our enemies, and the usual recourse to selective amnesia to smooth the way. A few illustrations follow, which may suggest the kind of evaluation that might have appeared, were different values to prevail in the intellectual culture.
Let’s begin with the familiar litany about the monsters we have confronted through the century and finally slain, a ritual that at least has the merit of roots in reality. Their awesome crimes are recorded in the newly translated Black Book of Communism by French scholar Stephane Courtois and others, the subject of shocked reviews as the new millennium opened. The most serious, at least of those I have seen, is by political philosopher Alan Ryan, a distinguished academic scholar and social democratic commentator, in the year’s first issue of the New York Times Book Review.1
The Black Book at last breaks “the silence over the horrors of Communism,” Ryan writes, “the silence of people who are simply baffled by the spectacle of so much absolutely futile, pointless, and inexplicable suffering.” The revelations of the book will doubtless come as a surprise to those who have somehow managed to remain unaware of the stream of bitter denunciations and detailed revelations of the “horrors of Communism” that I have been reading since childhood, notably in the literature of the left for the past 80 years, not to speak of the steady flow in newspapers and journals, film, libraries overflowing with books that range from fiction to scholarship—all unable to lift the veil of silence. But put that aside.
The Black Book, Ryan writes, is in the style of a “recording angel.” It is a relentless “criminal indictment” for the murder of 100 million people, “the body count of a colossal, wholly failed social, economic, political, and psychological experiment.” The total evil, unredeemed by even a hint of achievement anywhere, makes a mockery of “the observation that you can’t make an omelet without broken eggs.”
The vision of our own fundamental (if admittedly sometimes flawed) goodness in contrast to the incomprehensible monstrosity of the enemy—the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” (John F. Kennedy) dedicated to “total obliteration” of any shred of decency in the world (Robert McNamara)—recapitulates in close detail the imagery of the past half century (actually, well beyond, though friends and enemies rapidly shift, to the present). Apart from a huge published literature and the commercial media, it is captured vividly in the internal document NSC 68 of 1950, widely recognized as the founding document of the Cold War but rarely quoted, perhaps out of embarrassment at the frenzied and hysterical rhetoric of the respected statesmen Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze.2
The picture has always been an extremely useful one. Renewed once again today, it allows us to erase the record of hideous atrocities compiled by “our side” in past years. After all, these errors count as nothing when compared with the ultimate evil of the enemy. However grand the crime, it was “necessary” to confront the forces of darkness, now finally recognized for what they were. With only the faintest of regrets, we can therefore continue on our historical course, or perhaps even rise to more lofty heights in pursuing what is called, without irony, “America’s mission,” though as New York Times correspondent Michael Wines reminded us in the afterglow of the humanitarian triumph in Kosovo, we must not overlook some “deeply sobering lessons”: “the deep ideological divide between an idealistic New World bent on ending inhumanity and an Old World equally fatalistic about unending conflict.”3 The enemy was the incarnation of total evil, but even our friends have a long way to go before they ascend to our dizzying heights. Nonetheless, we can march forward, “clean of hands and pure of heart,” as befits a nation under God. And crucially, we can dismiss with ridicule any foolish inquiry into the institutional roots of the crimes of the state-corporate system, mere trivia that in no way tarnish the image of Good versus Evil, and that teach no lessons, “deeply sobering” or not, about what lies ahead—a convenient posture, for reasons too obvious to elaborate.
“Criminal Indictment” and Self-Adulation
Like others, Ryan reasonably selects as Exhibit A of the criminal indictment the Chinese famines of 1958–61, with a death toll of 25 to 40 million, he reports, a sizeable chunk of the 100 million corpses the “recording angels” attribute to “Communism”(whatever that is, but let us use the conventional term). The same shocking crime is featured a few weeks later in the same journal as the ultimate proof of the absolute evil of the enemy. The crime is incomprehensible to us, John Burns writes, if we view Mao “through the prism of our own values”; we can then only be awed and bewildered that Mao “brought about the deaths of more of his own people than any other leader in history” by inducing the famine, and other crimes—awful, but not approaching this unthinkable defiance of the cherished values we uphold.4
The terrible atrocity fully merits the harsh condemnation it has received for many years, renewed here. It is, furthermore, proper to attribute the famine to Communism. That conclusion was established most authoritatively in the work of economist Amartya Sen, whose comparison of the Chinese famine to the record of democratic India received particular attention when he won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.5
Writing in the early 1980s, Sen observed that India had suffered no such famine since liberating itself from British rule. He attributed the India-China difference in the post-World War II period to India’s “political system of adversarial journalism and opposition,” while in contrast, China’s totalitarian regime suffered from “misinformation” that undercut a serious response to the famine, and there was “little political pressure” from opposition groups and an informed public.6
The example stands as a damning “criminal indictment” of totalitarian Communism, exactly as Ryan, Burns, and the authors of the Black Book stress, along with innumerable others before them. But before closing the book on the indictment, we might want to tum to the other half of Sen’s India-China comparison, which somehow never seems to surface, despite its central role in Sen’s core argument and the great emphasis he placed on it.
India and China had “similarities [that] were quite striking,” including death rates, when development planning began 50 years ago, Sen and his associate Jean Drèze observe, “but there is little doubt that as far as morbidity, mortality,
and longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive lead over India,” as in education and other social indicators. From 1949 to 1979, “China . . . achieved a remarkable transition in health and nutrition,” while “no comparable transformation has occurred in India.” As a result, as of 1979, “the life of the average Chinese has tended to be much more secure than that of the average Indian.”7 If India had adopted China’s social programs, “there would have been about 3.8 million fewer deaths a year around the middle 1980s.” “That indicates that every eight years or so more people in addition die in India—in comparison with Chinese mortality rates—than the total number that died in the gigantic Chinese famine (even though it was the biggest famine in the world in this century).” “India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame,” 1958-61.8
In both cases, the outcomes have to do with the “ideological predispositions” of the political systems, Drèze and Sen observe: for China, relatively equitable distribution of medical resources, including rural health services, public distribution of food, and other programs oriented to the needs of the vast majority of the population, all lacking in India. “China’s remarkable achievements in matters of life and death cannot in any way be ascribed to a strategy of ‘growth-mediated’ security”; growth rates were comparable to India. It is, rather, in “support-led security”—social programs—that “the Chinese efforts have been quite spectacular,” with corresponding achievements. Recall that these are the programs of “a colossal, wholly failed social, economic, political, and psychological experiment,” an experiment with no redeeming features when viewed “through the prism of our own values.”
China’s “remarkable achievements in raising life expectancy and quality of life to levels that are quite unusual for poor countries” came to an end in 1979, when “the downward trend in mortality [in China was] at least halted, and possibly reversed.”9 The reversal in 1979 is directly traceable to the market reforms instituted that year.10 These led to a “general crisis in health services.” The standard neoliberal formulas required “severe financial stringency,” which undermined the “rural medical and health care” that were components of the communal agriculture system. The effects of the destruction of this “pillar of support for China’s innovative and extensive rural medical services” were “particularly severe on women and female children.” From 1979, there was “a steady decline in the female-male ratio in the population” and a decline of two years in female life expectancy, after steady growth in the pre-reform period.11
Sen’s conclusion is that “countries tend to reap as they sow in the field of investment in health and quality of life.”12 Half of that well-established conclusion passes through the filters of Western ideology—the half that can be exploited to sustain the fairly typical stance of privileged sectors, intellectuals included, through the centuries: awe and shock at the incomprehensible evil of official enemies, and admiration for our own wonderful selves.
Overcoming amnesia, suppose we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its reviewers to the full story, not just the doctrinally acceptable half. We therefore conclude that in India the democratic capitalist “experiment” since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the “colossal, wholly failed . . . experiment” of Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone.
The “criminal indictment” of the “democratic capitalist experiment” becomes harsher still if we tum to its effects after the fall of Communism: the increase of “skeletons in the cupboard,” particularly female skeletons, in China, as a result of the neoliberal reforms; and millions of corpses in Russia, as Russia followed the confident prescription of the World Bank that “countries that liberalize rapidly and extensively turn around more quickly [than those that do not],”13 returning to something like what it had been before World War I, a picture familiar throughout the “Third World.” But “you can’t make an omelet without broken eggs,” as Stalin would have said, and as we are reminded by those who survey selected outcomes with shock and dismay.14
The indictment becomes far harsher if we consider the vast areas that remained under Western tutelage, yielding a truly “colossal” record of skeletons and “absolutely futile, pointless, and inexplicable suffering.”15 It becomes harsher still if we consider the effects of the neoliberal reforms imposed under the conditionalities of the “Washington consensus,” justified in the name of a “debt burden”—an ideological construction, not a simple economic fact.16 To take one example, three Africa specialists point out that these reforms “helped to precipitate a catastrophe in which virtually all economic, social, educational, and public health gains made in the 1960s and 1970s have been wiped out,”17 with a human cost that is incalculable—at least, not calculated.
The indictment takes on further force when we add to the account the devastation caused by the direct assaults of Western power and its clients during the same years. The record need not be reviewed here, though it seems to be as unknown to respectable opinion as were the crimes of Communism before the appearance of the Black Book.
The authors of the Black Book, Ryan observes, did not shrink from confronting the “great question”: “the relative immorality of communism and Nazism.” Although “the body count tips the scales against communism,” Ryan concludes that Nazism nevertheless sinks to the lower depths of immorality. Unasked is another “great question” posed by “the body count” when ideologically serviceable amnesia is overcome.
To make myself clear, I am not expressing my judgments; rather those that follow, clearly and unequivocally, from the principles that are employed to establish preferred truths—or that would follow, if doctrinal filters could be removed.
On the self-adulation, a virtual tidal wave in the final year of the millennium,18 perhaps it is enough to recall Mark Twain’s remark about one of the great military heroes of the mass slaughter campaign in the Philippines that opened the glorious century behind us: he is “satire incarnated”; no satirical rendition can “reach perfection” because he “occupies that summit himself.” The reference reminds us of another aspect of our magnificence, apart from efficiency in massacre and destruction and a capacity for self-glorification that would drive any satirist to despair: our willingness to face up honestly to our crimes, a tribute to the flourishing free market of ideas. The bitter anti-imperialist essays of one of America’s leading writers were not suppressed, as in totalitarian states; they are freely available to the general public, with a delay of only some 90 years.
In fairness, it should be mentioned that the chorus of self-adulation that closed the millennium was disrupted by some discordant notes. Questions were raised about the consistency of our adherence to the guiding principles: the “new doctrine” that “universal standards of human rights were putting at least some limits on sovereignty,” as illustrated by Kosovo and East Timor—the latter an interesting example, since there was no issue of sovereignty, except for those who accord Indonesia the right of conquest authorized by the guardian of international morality.
These topics were brought forth in the major think-piece on the topic in the New York Times Week in Review, a front-page article by Craig Whitney.19 He concluded that the “new doctrine” that the world “thought was emerging” may be failing its “harshest test”: the vicious Russian assault on Grozny.20
Apparently Whitney was not convinced by the explanation offered by President Clinton four days earlier: our hands are tied because “a sanctions regime has to be imposed by the United Nations,” where it would be blocked by the Russian veto.21 Clinton’s dilemma was illustrated shortly before, when, by a vote of 155 to 2 (US and Israel), the UN once again called for an end to Washington’s sanctions against Cuba.22 The Cuba sanctions are not the only ones that somehow escape Clinton’s dilemma. More than half the people in the world are subject to unilateral coercive sanctions
imposed by the US, according to a recent UN commission established in response to a 1997 resolution of the General Assembly condemning “unilateral coercive economic measures against developing countries that were not authorized by relevant organs of the UN or were inconsistent with the principles of international law, . . . and that contravened the basic principles of the multilateral trading system.”23 The UN Commission on Human Rights also condemned such measures in April 1999. The European Union as well condemned “unilateral coercive economic measures that violate international law.” In response, the US agreed that multilateral sanctions are preferable, but reserved for itself the right “to act unilaterally if important national interests or core values are at issue,” as in the punishment of the people of Cuba for refusing to bend to Washington’s will.24