by John Pilger
I have corresponded with Noam Chomsky for years, but had not met him until recently. In 1989 I went to hear him speak in a packed hall in Battersea in London and, to my surprise, found not an accomplished orator but a gentle, self-effacing man with an endearing dash of anarchy about him. He could barely be heard past the third row and was much concerned with responding to the convoluted interruption of a heckler. His commitment to the principle of free expression, ‘the voice of all the people being heard’, has often got him into difficulty; the man haranguing him, and whose right to be heard Chomsky defended, had neo-fascist views. He struck me as a humane and thoroughly moral man; and I liked him.
Certainly, his gentleness belies the hell-raiser, reminding me of Norman Mailer’s description of him in his book, The Armies of the Night (they shared a prison cell in 1967 following the march on the Pentagon), as ‘a slim, sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity’.12 He is also very funny; his use of farce and irony, often miscast as sarcasm, allows him to turn officialspeak around.
When we met, I asked him about this, specifically the power of common political shorthand like ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’.
He said, ‘In educated circles they’re taken very seriously. No journalist, no intellectual, no writer can simply express the truth about the Vietnam war that the United States attacked South Vietnam. That isn’t being moderate . . . In the 1930s, the American government described Hitler as a moderate, standing between the extremists of the left and right; therefore we had to support him. Mussolini was a moderate. In the mid-1980s Saddam Hussein was a moderate, contributing “stability” to the region. General Suharto of Indonesia is described regularly as a moderate. From 1965, when he came to power, slaughtering maybe 700,000 people, the New York Times and other journals described him as the leader of the Indonesian moderates.’
I said, ‘But they often describe you as an extremist.’
‘Sure, I am an extremist, because a moderate is anyone who supports Western power and an extremist is anyone who objects to it. Take for example, George Kennan [the post-war American Cold War strategist]. He was one of the leading architects of the modern world and is at the soft or dovish end of the US planning spectrum. When he was head of the policy planning staff he quite explicitly said – in internal documents, not publicly of course – that we must put aside vague and idealistic slogans about human rights, democratisation and the raising of living standards and deal in straight power concepts if we want to maintain the disparity between our enormous wealth and the poverty of everyone else. But it’s rare that someone is that honest.’
I said, ‘You’ve had some spectacular rows. Arthur Schlesinger accused you of betraying the intellectual tradition.’
‘That’s true, I agree with him. The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.’
I reminded him that he had accused Schlesinger and other liberals of being a ‘secular priesthood’ in league with the US government in some vicious policies abroad. Could that ever be substantiated?
‘Well yes, I’ve documented it. Actually the term “secular priesthood” I borrowed from Isaiah Berlin who applied it to the Russian commissar class; and of course we have one, too. “Commissar” is an accurate and useful term. In any country there is the dominance of the respected and respectable intellectuals who serve external power. We may honour Soviet dissidents but internally they were not honoured; they were reviled. The people who were honoured were the commissars, and this goes back in history. The people who were honoured in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert, and so on. If a British intellectual writes vulgar apologetics for US government atrocities, that’s no different from the vulgar apologetics of any American intellectual for Stalin.’
I said, ‘Your books are almost never reviewed in the American mainstream press and you’re never asked to write for them. Have they made you, in established circles, a non-person?’
‘Oh sure. In fact, if that wasn’t the case I would wonder what I was doing wrong . . . Take the city where I live, Boston. The Boston Globe is probably the most liberal newspaper in the United States. I have many friends in the Globe. They not only can’t review my books, they can’t list them in a listing of books by local authors! In fact, the book review editor has said that none of my books would be reviewed and no book by South End Press, the local collective, would ever be reviewed as long as they were publishing anything of mine.’
I said that his attacks were mainly aimed at the United States and he often referred to the ‘dark side of America’. And yet he acknowledged that America was probably the freest society in history. Wasn’t there a fundamental contradiction there?
‘No. The United States is, in fact, the freest society in the world. The level of freedom and protection of freedom of speech has no parallel anywhere. This was not a gift; it’s not because it was written in the Constitution. Up to the 1920s, the United States was very repressive, probably more so than England. The great breakthrough was in 1964 when the law of seditious libel was eliminated. This, in effect, made it a crime to condemn authority. It was finally declared unconstitutional in the course of the civil rights struggle. Only popular struggle protects freedom.’
‘But if America is the freest society on earth, where is the systematic oppression you so often attack?’
‘Britain was one of the freest countries in the world in the nineteenth century and had a horrendous record of atrocities. There’s simply no correlation between internal freedom and external violence. In fact, things are even more complex in the United States, which probably has the most sophisticated system of doctrinaire management in the world. You see, the basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalised.
‘The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd. And it’s the responsible men who have to make decisions and to protect society from the trampling and rage of the bewildered herd. Now since it’s a democracy they – the herd, that is – are permitted occasionally to lend their weight to one or another member of the responsible class. That’s called an election.’
I mentioned the incident at Battersea Town Hall when he defended the right of a neo-fascist to heckle him. ‘Does that right extend to everybody?’ I asked him.
‘Yes. If we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.’
‘But does a racist speaking in an ethnic community, using provocative, violent language, have that same right?’
‘Sure. Let’s take an actual case. There is a largely Jewish town in Illinois with plenty of Holocaust survivors. A group of Nazis asked to have a march – very provocative. The American Civil Liberties Union defended their right and I agreed.’
I asked him if he would support the right of ‘free speech’ for those calling for the death of Salman Rushdie.
‘To speak, yes . . . [but] you have to ask whether it’s incitement to imminent violent action. There’s no precise litmus test that tells you where to draw the line. [With Rushdie] I agree we’re getting near the border. I mean if we got to the point where someone said, “Shoot!” and there’s Rushdie standing over there, that’s not protected [free speech]. If it’s somebody making a speech saying I think he ought to be killed, I don’t think they ought to be stopped from making that speech. Now how exactly you make these decisions is a subtle matter, but it seems to me protection of the right of freedom of speech is extremely important.’
Chomsky clearly pays a personal price for his dissidence. ‘It makes me infuriated,’ he has said. ‘I get angry. I’m a pretty mild guy. I don’t throw plates around, but internally I am seething all the time . . . A lot of my friends have burned out and I can understand that. It’s very wearing and it’s very frustrating.’
I asked him how he kept going. ‘I don’t think you should underestimate the compensations. The United States is a very different country than it was thirty years ago. It’s a much more civilised country, outside of educated circles . . . Today we have to revive the understanding of the eighteenth and nineteenth century that autocratic control of the economic system is intolerable. There’s a major attack on democracy going on in the world [with] a kind of world government being established which involves the IMF and the World Bank and the GATT. This has to be understood . . . and it has to be struggled against.’
June 1990 – December 1992
OLIVER STONE
FIVE YEARS AFTER the assassination of John Kennedy, I had dinner in New Orleans with Jim Garrison, then the city’s district attorney. Garrison had gathered enough evidence to persuade three judges and a grand jury to indict a New Orleans businessman called Clay Shaw for conspiring with at least two others to murder the president.
Garrison’s case contradicted the findings of the official Warren Commission, which in 1964 handed down twenty-six volumes of patently inconclusive reassurance that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accredited assassin, had acted alone. The Commission’s report has since been largely discredited, not least by Congress, whose House Assassinations Committee in 1978 found, after a year-long investigation, that ‘President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.’
This is what Garrison concluded a decade earlier. He was a lone voice then, and a courageous one. Established forces, including Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson, had backed the Warren Commission; and Garrison himself was a prominent public official in a conservative southern city whose burghers did not mourn Kennedy. His life was threatened as a matter of routine; yet he was respected as an investigator; and he was incorruptible.
Garrison believed that Oswald was telling the truth when he announced to the world’s press, shortly before his own assassination in the Dallas police headquarters, that he was a ‘patsy’. ‘Actually,’ Garrison told me, ‘Oswald was a decoy who never knew the true nature of his job. He never expected to die. There were about seven men involved in an old-fashioned ambush of the president. Shots came from the three directions and the assassination team didn’t leave the scene until well after they had done the job. They were fanatical anti-Castro Cubans and other far-right elements with connections to the Central Intelligence Agency.’
Garrison’s theory was that Kennedy had been working for a peaceful détente with Castro and the Soviet Union and had been already thinking ahead to an American withdrawal from Vietnam. Carl Oglesby, whose lobby group successfully urged the setting up of the Congressional Select Committee on Assassinations, recently wrote that Garrison, now a judge, believed that Kennedy was killed and Oswald framed ‘by a right-wing “parallel government” seemingly much like “the Enterprise” discovered in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and currently being rediscovered in the emerging BCCI scandal’.13
Twenty-eight years after Kennedy was shot, Jim Garrison is back on the American stage: put there by the Hollywood director Oliver Stone, whose latest film, JFK, is based on Garrison’s 1988 memoir, On the Trail of the Assassins.14 Even before he had finished filming, Stone found himself under attack. The established press, which greeted the Warren Commission’s report and barely acknowledged the congressional findings that undermined it, let fly at Stone on the basis of a leaked first-draft script, and less.
Stone’s film, raged the Chicago Tribune, was an insult to ‘decency’ itself. Indeed, there comes a point ‘at which intellectual myopia becomes morally repugnant. Mr Stone’s new movie proves that he has passed that point.’15 The writer had not seen even the script.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the ‘JFK knocking business has thus far consumed 1.2 million words’. It has filled 27 columns in the New York Times alone. It has produced a Big Brother cover on Newsweek warning the world ‘not to trust this movie’.16 Stone has been accused of almost everything bar mother molestation: he has a war neurosis, he is homophobic, he has ‘fascist yearnings’.17
The few who have defended the film have themselves been attacked. Pat Dowell, film critic of the Washingtonian magazine, wrote one laudatory paragraph and ended up having to resign after her editor killed it ‘on principle’. ‘My job’, said the principled editor, ‘is to protect the magazine’s reputation.’ These are the words that threatened his magazine’s reputation: ‘If you didn’t already doubt the Warren Commission report, you will after seeing Oliver Stone’s brilliantly crafted indictment of history as an official story. Is it the truth? Stone says you be the judge.’18
In the Washington Post, the reporter who covered the Warren Commission, George Lardner, was given a page to mock Stone and Garrison. Referring to Garrison’s suggestion that as many as five or six shots might have been fired at Kennedy, Lardner wrote, ‘Is this the Kennedy assassination or the Charge of the Light Brigade?’19 The Congressional Assassinations Committee found that at least four shots and perhaps as many as six were fired. Two-thirds of the eye-witnesses reported a number of shots that came from in front of Kennedy and not from behind, where Oswald was hiding.
When I first went to Dallas in 1968, I interviewed five people who clearly remembered hearing shots that came from the bridge under which Kennedy’s motorcade was about to pass. The trajectory of a bullet was still engraved in the pavement in Dealey Plaza; it could not have been fired by Oswald from behind.
One of the witnesses I spoke to was Roger Craig, a Dallas deputy sheriff on duty in Dealey Plaza as Kennedy’s motorcade approached. He said that not only did the shots come from in front of Kennedy, but he saw Oswald getting into a waiting station wagon in Dealey Plaza fifteen minutes after the shooting. Craig later identified Oswald at Dallas police headquarters. He said Oswald remarked, ‘Everybody will know who I am now.’ According to the Warren Commission, Oswald was nowhere near the police station when Craig saw him. After he repeated his evidence to Garrison, Craig was shot at in a Dallas parking lot. When I met him, he and his family were being constantly followed and watched. He was subsequently ‘retired’ from the Dallas police.
That was five years after the assassination, during which an estimated 35 to 47 people connected with it had died in unbelievable circumstances. Two Dallas reporters, who were at a meeting with nightclub owner Jack Ruby the night before he killed Oswald, died violently: one when a revolver ‘went off’ in a police station, the other by a ‘karate chop’ in the shower at his Dallas apartment. The columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, the only journalist to have a private interview with Jack Ruby during his trial, was found dead in her New York apartment after telling friends that she was going to Washington ‘to bust the whole thing open’. A CIA agent, who had also told friends he could no longer keep quiet about the assassination, was found shot in the back in his Washington apartment. David Ferrie, a pilot, was found dead in his New Orleans home with two suicide notes beside him. Four days earlier Ferrie had told reporters that Garrison had him ‘pegged as the get-away pilot in an elaborate plot to kill Kennedy’.
Midlothian is down the road from Dallas. When I met Penn Jones, the editor of the Midlothian Mirror, his offices had just been fire-bombed. Every week Penn Jones devoted space in his paper to evidence that the Warren Commission had ignored or dismissed out of hand. He showed me a pirated copy of the ‘Zapruder film’, shot by Abraham Zapruder, a passerby in Dealey Plaza, and the only detailed record of Kennedy being shot. It shows Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connolly, who was seated in front of Kennedy, clearly being struck by separate bullets – once again, contradicting the Warren Commission. Time-Life bought the film for $25,000 but refused to release it for public viewing until Garrison subpoenaed it.
Garrison’s efforts to build a case were frequently sabotaged. The extradition of witnesses from other states was refused; the FBI refused to co-operate. Garrison failed to convict Clay Shaw, because he could not prove Shaw’s CIA connection. In 1975, a year after Shaw died, a
senior CIA officer, Victor Marchetti, claimed that both Shaw and Ferrie had worked for the CIA, and that the CIA had secretly backed Shaw against Garrison, who had been right all along.20
Perhaps this cannot now be proved; and Shaw, after all, was acquitted by a jury. But whether or not Garrison’s version of events is ‘correct’, none of the evidence he assembled deserves the orchestrated disclaimers that JFK has attracted.
Having now seen JFK, I understand the nature and gravity of Oliver Stone’s crime. He has built a convincing version of the conspiracy to kill John Kennedy, and the conspiracy to cover it up. Worse, he is in danger of persuading the masses, especially the young who don’t remember where they were on the assassination day. Worse still, he has told them through America’s principal propaganda medium, Hollywood, and they are packing in to see his film. It is, wrote Andrew Kopkind in the Nation, an ‘historic achievement’.21
You get a flavour of the achievement and the heresy from several of Stone’s attackers, notably those who miss the irony of their own words. A Washington Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer, reminded his readers that ‘early in the days of glasnost, a formerly suppressed anti-Stalinist movie, Repentance, caused a sensation when shown in Moscow. It helped begin a revolution in political consciousness that ultimately brought down the Soviet Union. That is what happens in a serious political culture.’
What he is saying is that the custodians of American Stalinism can rest easy: that although ‘JFK’s message is at least as disturbing as that of Repentance . . . it is received by a citizenry so overwhelmed with cultural messages, and so anaesthetised to them, that a message as explosive as Stone’s might raise an eyebrow, but never a fist.’ Therefore: ‘The shallowness of our political culture has a saving grace.’22