Power Systems

by Noam Chomsky

  That’s only one of a series of events which actually, from Israel’s own strategic point of view, are not very brilliant. The Turkish-Israeli military strategic, trade, and commercial relationship has been pretty significant. Again, we don’t really know the details, but for years Israel has cooperated with Turkey on military training and used its airspace for preparations for possible aggression in the Middle East.24 If they sacrifice that, it’s serious.

  The Kurds are possibly the largest single ethnic group in the world without a nation-state. They have gained some semi-autonomy in northern Iraq? How viable is that?

  It’s fragile. There’s a lot of repression and corruption in northern Iraq. Furthermore, their economy is not really viable. They’re landlocked. If they don’t have significant support from the outside, they can’t be sustained for long. They’re also surrounded by enemies, Iran on one side, Turkey on the other, and Arab Iraq as well. There’s a connection to Syria, but that doesn’t help much. So the Kurdish region in the north of Iraq exists by the tolerance of the great powers, primarily the United States, which could be withdrawn.

  The United States has repeatedly sold the Kurds out over the years.25 It sold them out to Saddam Hussein in the 1970s and again in the 1980s. During Saddam Hussein’s atrocities against the Kurds, the U.S. government tried to silence them. The Reagan administration tried to blame the atrocities on Iran. The Kurds have an old saying, which goes something like, “Our only friends are the mountains,” meaning we can’t rely on outsiders for support. If you look at their history, they have plenty of reason to believe that.

  One of the few American journalists to have really worked in the area, Kevin McKiernan, once described a mountain in northern Iraq called Mount Qandil. He said it has two sides: on one side there are terrorists, on the other side there are freedom fighters.26 They’re exactly the same people: they’re Kurdish nationalists. But one side faces Turkey, so they’re terrorists. The other side faces Iran, so they’re freedom fighters.

  I was just about to ask you about Iran. The bellicose talk about Iran seems to ebb and flow like the tide. Every few months we hear new reports of a potential U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran.

  The rhetoric stays high. On the other hand, as far as evidence is available, the U.S. and Israeli intelligence and top military commands are not eager to be involved in a military campaign against Iran.27 However, when you ratchet up the tension, something can happen, if only by accident. It’s happened many times in the past. You can easily think of scenarios. There might be a confrontation between a small Iranian vessel carrying missiles and an American aircraft carrier. Who knows where that would lead?

  And Iran is likely to retaliate pretty soon for the war now taking place against it. Because there already is a war on Iran. When you assassinate scientists and tighten sanctions to the point where they’re purposely and openly strangling the economy, that’s aggression.28 It amounts to a blockade. In fact, high U.S. military officials consider those measures aggression if they’re conducted against the United States. There was an analysis a couple of years ago that came out from a group of top international military thinkers, including two retired NATO generals, discussing strategic issues, defining threats to the United States that we would regard as aggression. One of them was the use of financial institutions to harm the U.S. economy.29 That’s aggression. We can respond with force. They also added that we shouldn’t refrain from the first use of nuclear weapons.30 Generalize those principles and Iran might react. If the Iranian leadership concludes that they have nothing more to lose—their economy is being strangled, their political control is going to be destroyed—they might go for broke.

  Information like the U.S. support for Saddam Hussein throughout the Iran-Iraq War has gone down Orwell’s memory hole.31 It reminds me of a comment you made about historical amnesia. You said, “Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.”32

  If you don’t recognize your own crimes, there’s no impediment to continuing them. There’s a pretty dramatic example of that right at this moment. This happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the war against South Vietnam. Forgetting the fiftieth anniversary of the launching of one of the major atrocities in post–Second World War history is pretty severe. But almost nobody has noticed it. I don’t think we’ll hear a word about it. And, yes, that opens the way to further aggression.

  One topic that often comes up in the media and among policy makers is the instability of Pakistan and the vulnerability of its nuclear arsenal.

  Here in the United States the discussion is uniformly about how Pakistan can’t be trusted and is not a reliable ally. Suppose that the Russians had said in the 1980s, “Pakistan is not a reliable ally. We have to do something about it.” That’s when Pakistan was the center of the U.S. support for arming and training of the mujahideen, the guerrillas who were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. The major experts on Pakistan, including mainstream military historians and South Asian experts, say the attitude of Pakistanis toward the Taliban today is pretty similar to their attitude toward the mujahideen in the 1980s.33 They don’t like them, they want them to stay out of their hair, but they regard them as fighting a war against a foreign invader. So there’s apparently overwhelming opposition in Pakistan to the pressure to take part in an American war against people who they regard as defending their country.34

  The United States is constantly carrying out military attacks in Pakistan. There was another one yesterday. A drone killed an alleged al-Qaeda leader who was supposedly planning actions against the United States.35 Who knows? But the Pakistanis certainly don’t like it. They don’t like being bombed, no matter where it is, even if it’s in the tribal areas. They’re very bitter about the invasion and assassination of bin Laden, rightly so. And, in fact, the Pashtun population, which crosses the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, has never accepted the Durand Line, the British-imposed boundary that cuts right through their territory.

  Established in 1893.

  In fact, no independent Afghan government ever accepted it. But we’re demanding that Pakistan block any Pashtun effort to overturn what they have never accepted and Afghanistan has never accepted. We’re driving Pakistanis to a very dangerous position. One of the interesting WikiLeaks exposures was from Anne W. Patterson, the American ambassador in Pakistan, who supports U.S. policy in Pakistan but pointed out that it carries with it the danger of “destabilizing the Pakistani state,” maybe even leading to a coup, which could bring about the leaking of radioactive materials into the jihadi networks.36 The jihadists are not the dominant force in Pakistan, but they’re present, and have been since the radical Islamization during the Reagan years. Reagan and Saudi Arabia were supporting the worst dictator in Pakistan’s history, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. One of his primary goals was to bring about a radical Islamization of the country, establishing madrassas all over the place. That’s where the Taliban come from.

  So yes, there is a radical Islamic element in Pakistan, and it’s almost certainly engaged in some fashion in the vast nuclear industry. It’s conceivable that under pressure you might find leakage of nuclear materials to jihadi hands, which could lead to a dirty bomb in London or New York. It’s likely.

  6

  Mental Slavery

  CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS (JANUARY 20, 2012)

  Bob Marley, the famous reggae singer from Jamaica, sang a popular lyric: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.”1 That’s a theme that you’ve returned to quite a bit in your work.

  I should know that song. Yes, it’s true. When people wanted enough freedom that they couldn’t be enslaved or killed or repressed, new modes of control naturally developed to try to impose forms of mental slavery so they would accept a framework of indoctrination and wouldn’t raise any questions. If you can trap people into not noticing, let alone questioning,
crucial doctrines, they’re enslaved. They’ll essentially follow orders as if there was a gun pointed at them.

  In some of your talks, when people ask you what to do in response to the problems you discuss, I have heard you tell people they could start by turning off their television set.

  Television drums certain fixed boundaries of thought into your head, which certainly dulls the mind. The doctrines are not formally stated. It’s not the Catholic Church: “You have to believe this. You have to read this every day, say this every day.” It’s just presupposed. You presuppose a framework, and then people just come to accept it.

  A decent propaganda system does not announce its principles or intentions. This is one of the reasons the old Soviet system was relatively in effective, as far as we know. If you tell people, “This is what you have to think,” then they understand: this is what power wants us to think. And then they may find a way out of it. It’s harder to extricate yourself from a system of unstated presuppositions than it is from explicitly stated doctrine. That’s the way a good propaganda system will operate.

  Our propaganda system is highly sophisticated. The actors substantially understand what they’re doing, it seems. Take the 2008 presidential election, which, like all elections, was a public relations extravaganza. The advertising industry was very conscious of its role. In fact, shortly after the election, Advertising Age gave the annual prize for best marketing campaign of the year to the Obama campaign, which the PR industry organized.2 There was actually discussion in the business press afterward over this achievement.3 There was euphoria in the business community. This will change the style in corporate boardrooms. We know how to delude people better than we did before. No one had any illusions, apparently, about the candidate winning on the basis of his policies or his intentions. It was just a good marketing campaign, better than John McCain’s.

  In an image-dominated culture, I wonder about the future of books. And I’m asking this of someone who reads voraciously. Your reading habits are legendary. We’re sitting in your office, surrounded by piles and piles of books. How do you get through all this stuff?

  Unfortunately, I don’t. This is the urgent pile. There are many more stacks elsewhere. But one of the painful experiences which I try to avoid as much as possible is to calculate how much time it would take, if I read constantly, to go through them. And reading a book doesn’t just mean turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. There’s no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.

  I suspect that will disappear. You see various signs of it. There has been a shift in my own classes over the past ten or twenty years. Whereas I once could make casual literary references and people more or less knew what I was talking about, this is less and less true. I can see from correspondence that people are constantly asking questions about something they saw on YouTube but not about an article or a book. They very often rightly ask, “You said so-and-so. What’s the evidence for it?” In fact, in an article I wrote the same week as that talk, there might have been footnotes and discussion, but it doesn’t occur to them to look for that.

  What does that mean for an intellectual culture, then?

  It’s going to degrade the intellectual culture. It can’t help but do so. It’s a mixed story. Take, say, electronic books. They have advantages. You have half a dozen books you can read on an airplane trip. On the other hand, when I read a book I care about, I want to make comments in the margins, I want to underline things. I want to make notes on the flyleaf. Otherwise I don’t even know what to go back to. You can’t do that the same way with an electronic book. Words just pass into your eyes. Maybe they don’t even stay in your brain.

  The same is true of the Internet. Access to the Internet is a great thing. A huge amount of material is available. On the other hand, it’s evanescent. Unless you know what you’re looking for, and you store it properly and put it into context, it’s as if you never saw it. There’s no point in having a lot of data available unless you can make some sense out of it. And that takes thought, reflection, inquiry. I think these capacities are being degraded to an extent. You can’t measure it, but I have a sense that’s true.

  What do you think about Twitter? You have one hundred and forty characters to express something.

  Yes. Bev Stohl, who works with me at MIT, told me about it. I get a ton of e-mail. Increasingly, the messages I receive have been one-sentence queries or comments, sometimes so brief that they’re in the subject line of the e-mail. Bev pointed out to me that those are the length of Twitter messages. If you look at them, they have a fairly consistent character. They give the impression of being something that someone just thought of. You’re walking down the street, a thought comes to you, you tweet it. If you thought for two minutes, or if you had made the slight effort involved in looking up the topic, you wouldn’t have sent it. In fact, it has reached the point that sometimes I just send a form letter saying I can’t respond to a one-line question.

  Getting back to books, your lectures are replete with references to information that you learned in books, for example, something about Martin Luther King that Taylor Branch wrote or something about the U.S. labor movement by David Montgomery. You’re able to bring this reading knowledge into the intellectual formulations you then present.

  Anybody can do it. It’s not a special talent. But you have to be willing to think about what you’re reading. You can be led down a false track. You can be deluded. The same is true in the sciences. You can be pursuing some idea that you really think is exciting, work hard on it, get what looks like an explanation, and then you find out you were going in the wrong direction and you have to backtrack. You can learn from that, too. But if you don’t stop to think, reflect, and find a context, it’s wasted effort. You might as well not be reading.

  I was struck in a talk in New York that you mentioned E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.4 Was that the last novel you read?

  I think the last novel I read was by the Icelandic Nobel Prize laureate Halldór Laxness. I was in Iceland. Somebody lent me one of his novels, and I read it on the plane back. It’s great. When I was in England about a year ago, a friend gave me A Case of Exploding Mangoes, a Pakistani novel by Mohammed Hanif.5 It was very good. I can’t read as much fiction as I’d like.

  States around the world, from China to Syria to the United States, are becoming increasingly nervous about the Internet and social media. Calls for control and censorship of the Internet are increasing.

  Right now there is a big battle going on among the titans of industry over new proposed legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act. The movie industry, the record industry, and other big operators want to restrain what they call piracy, people taking their products without payment or agreement. But there are other big corporations that are pushing back. Wikipedia shut down for a day in protest.6 Google, one of the biggest corporations in the world, also protested.7

  Every rich and developed country carried out piracy. During its period of rapid growth, the United States stole more efficient advanced British technology. Britain did the same with countries that it was crushing: Ireland, the Low Countries, Belgium, India. It’s what we accuse China of doing today, following in our footsteps.

  The trade agreements imposed by the rich and powerful level very heavy penalties against piracy. So-called intellectual property rights are built into the World Trade Organization rules and other trade agreements, with very stringent requirements. One of the most important examples is the protection given to the pharmaceutical industry. So, for example, there are guidelines to prevent countries with pharmaceutical industries, like India, from producing cheap drugs that will be available to the general population, undercutting the profits of major international corporations.

  The phar
maceutical companies argue they need the profits for new research and development. Otherwise there won’t be new drugs. The movie and record industries say they need massive profits to support creative artists. These arguments have a superficial plausibility until you look into the issue closely. The economist Dean Baker has shown pretty conclusively that these are not persuasive arguments. So, say, with pharmaceutical research and development, according to his calculations, which look pretty reasonable to me, if the pharmaceutical companies were forced on the market and the entire research and development cost were picked up by the public, there would be a huge saving to the public, because most of the work is done under public auspices anyway, at universities, the National Institutes of Health.8 The pharmaceutical companies pick it up at the sort of tail end and do the testing, the marketing, the packaging. So yes, they make a contribution, but a lot of their effort is put into making copycat drugs. You just shift a molecule so you can sell something.

  With regard to creative artists, Baker also has some suggestions that seem sensible to me. Namely, they should be publicly funded.9 That’s basically what happens with, say, classical music or opera. If you could extend that, you wouldn’t need intellectual property rights and the piracy issue would disappear.