Boss Hog
TRIBE Member
Guerrilla of the Week
Editor's Pick, December 8, 2003
Europeans have philosopher stars. They smoke Gauloises, they cavort with arty fashion models and artists who cut up cows, they wear Armani, they write long, incomprehensible treatises from prison cells about the transcendental apparatus and the dialectic of empire. Here in the U.S. we have one rumpled 74-year-old linguistics professor who looks like your boring uncle who collects model trains.
His name is Noam Chomsky, and he's having something of a renaissance, despite the fact the mainstream American media won't touch him a ten-foot mic pole.
In some ways, you can't blame the network programmers. Despite his prolific body of work, Chomsky is far from ready-for-primetime, he wears the same blue sweater everyday, he speaks in a barely audible grumble, he insists on packing as much detail and historical context into every answer to make any sort of 10 second soundbite a total impossibility, and most importantly (to his detriment) he holds the media itself as accountable for the crimes of the American empire as the perpetrators themselves. Not exactly the most attractive guest for a morning talk show.
But despite the lack of media exposure, Chomsky is at the top of his game. His slim book entitled "9/11" has sold more than half a million copies. He blew away a 30,000 person stadium full of cheering anti-corporate globalization activists at last year's World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Millions of college students revere him as their hero. His new book, "Hegemony and Survival: America's Quest for Global Domination" has just been released, and the response has been heady. The influential New Yorker magazine recently ran a 15 page in-depth profile on his life and ideas, and The New York Times Magazine just ran a controversial interview that among other things insinuated he was a "self-hating Jew." Bono calls him the "Elvis of Academia." He must be doing something right.
The foundation of Chomsky's moral universe is the belief that intentions and rhetoric have no meaning outside of actions. In other words, you can talk all the bullshit you want about democracy, but when you're blowing up children, you're a fascist. Chomsky puts special emphasis on the role of the intellectual to hold those in power to the fire. That most western intellectuals fail miserably in this task is not surprising to Chomsky. In fact, little fazes him. Even being called a "terrorist lover."
Not long after 9/11, he made the mortal sin of pointing out that in the big scheme of things 3,000 American deaths, while horrible and tragic, was nothing really out of the ordinary when compared to the death and destruction that regularly is inflicted on Third World nations, often by the U.S. itself. This, not surprisingly, didn't go over well. Chomsky was attacked as an "Al Qaeda apologist." The wounds were too raw for that sort of cold historical analysis.
That the U.S. invaded Iraq largely on the exploitation of the American public's post-9/11 fears shows those wounds still haven't healed.
Having recently returned from Iraq, we headed up to Cambridge to interview the graying anarcho-syndicalist for GNN's upcoming book and film project.
The following is an excerpt from that conversation:
GNN: Bush is pushing hard to sell to the world that we're in Iraq to bring democracy? Is this a myth?
Noam Chomsky: After the invasion it became embarrassingly clear that they are not going to find weapons of mass destruction, the rhetoric began to shift and bringing democracy became the great achievement. In early November, Bush made a speech that got wonderful applause in the west, in the U.S. and England, mostly ridiculed elsewhere, saying now we're engaged in a new mission in the world, we made some mistakes in the past, now we're going to be struggling to bring democracy everywhere.
There were also reactions in Iraq. There was a poll shortly after asking people why they thought United States came to Iraq. And some people did agree with this, actually one percent in the poll.
Throughout most of the region, and in places like Latin America, the reaction was mostly ridicule. For several reasons: for one thing this sort of change of course - we did some bad things in the past now we're going to wonderful, this doctrine is in vogue every two or three years.
Furthermore, it's uniform in the history of aggression and imperialism. If you look at Hitler or Stalin, Japanese fascists, they all used that kind of terminology, certainly the British Empire used that kind of language, and others. So it basically carries no information. It is kind of the routine reflexive terminology, freedom, democracy justification that Stalin even introduced with what he called People's Democracy. No one takes it seriously, you look at the practice.
You have to be pretty dumb not to notice that the countries that were praised in Bush's speech for their progress towards democracy [Algeria, Morocco, Yemen] were the ones that are following orders and the ones that were condemned were the ones that aren't following orders. This is completely independent of any steps towards democracy, human rights and so on.
GNN: Do you believe that America is an empire? We like to think of ourselves as a free republic, is there a myth about ourselves that rubs against the empire notion?
Chomsky: Personally, I don't particularly use the word empire. It doesn't really matter. It has all kinds of connotations like having administrators running the country, and so on. There are all sorts of forms of imperial domination. The U.S. from its origins has had imperial ambitions and has implemented them. Why are you and I sitting here? There were people here after all. Well, when the English colonists came they wiped them out, or drove them out, and then expanded over the continent over millions of people. Sometimes we made treaties with them, but we violated the treaties and kicked them out anyway.
That's the way the continent was conquered, half of Mexico was conquered, Cuba was "liberated" from Spain, in fact the U.S. intervened in 1898 to prevent Cuba from liberating itself from Spain to insure that it would be a colony in effect as it was until 1959. Since then, the U.S. has been carrying out a large-scale war of terrorism and economic strangulation. Cuba liberated itself - that's not allowed.
Hawaii was stolen from its population by violence and guile, the U.S. invaded the Philippines because President McKinley told us he got a message from God saying we have do this, and that makes it OK. A couple of hundred-thousand people were slaughtered, and to this day the country remains basically subjugated.
Other mechanisms are used so in the backyard, as its called, in Central America and the Caribbean you just have to follow orders or else, or you get repression, invasion, strangulation, destruction, including by the people now in Washington, who are some of the worst gangsters.
It's kind of interesting. The heads of the war on terror are the same people in the administration that declared a "war on terror" back in 1981. On the diplomatic side at the UN who have John Negroponte who was at that time the U.S. ambassador to Honduras who was overseeing torture and violence in Honduras, but more importantly this is where the bases were for the U.S.-run mercenary forces that were attacking Nicaragua. And that's what the U.S. was condemned for by the World Court, to stop and to pay reparations. But of course the U.S. disregarded it. Now without any flicker of an eyelash, he is running the diplomatic side of the war on terror.
The military side of the war against terror, you have Donald Rumsfeld, who was Reagan's emissary to the Middle East who was sent to restore relations with our friend Saddam Hussein knowing perfectly well he was a complete monster and he was using chemical weapons. Iraq was taken off the list of terrorist states in 1982 so the U.S. could then provide him with arms, aid, establish relations and so, and since there was an empty stop on the list of terrorist states they introduced Cuba, as a terrorist state at the time.
It goes right down the list. Elliot Abrams who was responsible for Latin America, was a major sponsor of state terrorism and atrocities, and, in fact, was convicted of misdemeanors for lying to Congress, but got a presidential pardon. He's now back in charge of Middle East Affairs on the National Security Council.
You don't know whether to laugh or cry.
And educated opinion is so disciplined so astonishingly disciplined that all of this passes without comment, that that's wrong. You can go on and on. Look at Colin Powell, he's the "moderate." What's his record as a moderate? I mean he was national security advisor in the last couple of years of the Reagan administration when the administration was successfully evading a congressional ban against supporting South Africa, they were finding ways around it because they didn't want to accept it. They declared Nelson Mandela's African National Congress to be one of the more notorious terrorist organizations in the world - that's on Colin Powell's watch.
They were also supporting massive South African atrocities in Angola and Mozambique which were killing hundreds of thousands of people - that's "moderation."
Paul Wolfowitz at the time was ambassador to Indonesia praising the monstrous Suharto, before that he was in charge of high up in the State Department office of Asian affairs where he was overseeing support for Marcos, a vicious, brutal, corrupt dictator who the U.S. supported almost up to the very last minute until he was overthrown by the army.
Now there's a kind of revisionist history being constructed that the U.S. was really working behind the scenes to achieve these results but try to find some record of it and it's exactly the opposite. And it's completely consistent. It doesn't matter. One of the beautiful things about this doctrine of change of course which is evoked every two or three years, is you can wipe out the past.
There is nothing exceptional about this. This is the way power systems behave. They like to think of themselves as mythologies.
GNN: What is it about the paradigm of the media that makes it so afraid to deconstruct them as you do?
Chomsky: For the most part educated intellectuals are subservient to power, and there is nothing new to that. You can go back to classical Greece and the Bible and you find the same story.
Take the Bible, we're all supposed to be very Bible worshipping. There were people in the Bible who we would call intellectuals, then they called them a word that is translated as "prophets," but they weren't prophesizing anything. They were basically intellectuals, they were giving geo-political analysis, they were calling for moral behavior, treating orphans and women properly and so on. They were public intellectuals criticizing power and calling for moral behavior and they also predicting that the efforts of the kings trying to extend their power would led to destruction - all the things that critical intellectuals are supposed to do. How were they treated? Where they praised? No, they were imprisoned, driven into the desert, despised.
Hundreds of years later they were honored. Not then.
The ones that were honored were the flatterers who courted the king, and praised those in power.
Those intellectuals are now called false prophets.
http://www.guerrillanews.com/human_rights/doc3566.html
Editor's Pick, December 8, 2003
Europeans have philosopher stars. They smoke Gauloises, they cavort with arty fashion models and artists who cut up cows, they wear Armani, they write long, incomprehensible treatises from prison cells about the transcendental apparatus and the dialectic of empire. Here in the U.S. we have one rumpled 74-year-old linguistics professor who looks like your boring uncle who collects model trains.
His name is Noam Chomsky, and he's having something of a renaissance, despite the fact the mainstream American media won't touch him a ten-foot mic pole.
In some ways, you can't blame the network programmers. Despite his prolific body of work, Chomsky is far from ready-for-primetime, he wears the same blue sweater everyday, he speaks in a barely audible grumble, he insists on packing as much detail and historical context into every answer to make any sort of 10 second soundbite a total impossibility, and most importantly (to his detriment) he holds the media itself as accountable for the crimes of the American empire as the perpetrators themselves. Not exactly the most attractive guest for a morning talk show.
But despite the lack of media exposure, Chomsky is at the top of his game. His slim book entitled "9/11" has sold more than half a million copies. He blew away a 30,000 person stadium full of cheering anti-corporate globalization activists at last year's World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Millions of college students revere him as their hero. His new book, "Hegemony and Survival: America's Quest for Global Domination" has just been released, and the response has been heady. The influential New Yorker magazine recently ran a 15 page in-depth profile on his life and ideas, and The New York Times Magazine just ran a controversial interview that among other things insinuated he was a "self-hating Jew." Bono calls him the "Elvis of Academia." He must be doing something right.
The foundation of Chomsky's moral universe is the belief that intentions and rhetoric have no meaning outside of actions. In other words, you can talk all the bullshit you want about democracy, but when you're blowing up children, you're a fascist. Chomsky puts special emphasis on the role of the intellectual to hold those in power to the fire. That most western intellectuals fail miserably in this task is not surprising to Chomsky. In fact, little fazes him. Even being called a "terrorist lover."
Not long after 9/11, he made the mortal sin of pointing out that in the big scheme of things 3,000 American deaths, while horrible and tragic, was nothing really out of the ordinary when compared to the death and destruction that regularly is inflicted on Third World nations, often by the U.S. itself. This, not surprisingly, didn't go over well. Chomsky was attacked as an "Al Qaeda apologist." The wounds were too raw for that sort of cold historical analysis.
That the U.S. invaded Iraq largely on the exploitation of the American public's post-9/11 fears shows those wounds still haven't healed.
Having recently returned from Iraq, we headed up to Cambridge to interview the graying anarcho-syndicalist for GNN's upcoming book and film project.
The following is an excerpt from that conversation:
GNN: Bush is pushing hard to sell to the world that we're in Iraq to bring democracy? Is this a myth?
Noam Chomsky: After the invasion it became embarrassingly clear that they are not going to find weapons of mass destruction, the rhetoric began to shift and bringing democracy became the great achievement. In early November, Bush made a speech that got wonderful applause in the west, in the U.S. and England, mostly ridiculed elsewhere, saying now we're engaged in a new mission in the world, we made some mistakes in the past, now we're going to be struggling to bring democracy everywhere.
There were also reactions in Iraq. There was a poll shortly after asking people why they thought United States came to Iraq. And some people did agree with this, actually one percent in the poll.
Throughout most of the region, and in places like Latin America, the reaction was mostly ridicule. For several reasons: for one thing this sort of change of course - we did some bad things in the past now we're going to wonderful, this doctrine is in vogue every two or three years.
Furthermore, it's uniform in the history of aggression and imperialism. If you look at Hitler or Stalin, Japanese fascists, they all used that kind of terminology, certainly the British Empire used that kind of language, and others. So it basically carries no information. It is kind of the routine reflexive terminology, freedom, democracy justification that Stalin even introduced with what he called People's Democracy. No one takes it seriously, you look at the practice.
You have to be pretty dumb not to notice that the countries that were praised in Bush's speech for their progress towards democracy [Algeria, Morocco, Yemen] were the ones that are following orders and the ones that were condemned were the ones that aren't following orders. This is completely independent of any steps towards democracy, human rights and so on.
GNN: Do you believe that America is an empire? We like to think of ourselves as a free republic, is there a myth about ourselves that rubs against the empire notion?
Chomsky: Personally, I don't particularly use the word empire. It doesn't really matter. It has all kinds of connotations like having administrators running the country, and so on. There are all sorts of forms of imperial domination. The U.S. from its origins has had imperial ambitions and has implemented them. Why are you and I sitting here? There were people here after all. Well, when the English colonists came they wiped them out, or drove them out, and then expanded over the continent over millions of people. Sometimes we made treaties with them, but we violated the treaties and kicked them out anyway.
That's the way the continent was conquered, half of Mexico was conquered, Cuba was "liberated" from Spain, in fact the U.S. intervened in 1898 to prevent Cuba from liberating itself from Spain to insure that it would be a colony in effect as it was until 1959. Since then, the U.S. has been carrying out a large-scale war of terrorism and economic strangulation. Cuba liberated itself - that's not allowed.
Hawaii was stolen from its population by violence and guile, the U.S. invaded the Philippines because President McKinley told us he got a message from God saying we have do this, and that makes it OK. A couple of hundred-thousand people were slaughtered, and to this day the country remains basically subjugated.
Other mechanisms are used so in the backyard, as its called, in Central America and the Caribbean you just have to follow orders or else, or you get repression, invasion, strangulation, destruction, including by the people now in Washington, who are some of the worst gangsters.
It's kind of interesting. The heads of the war on terror are the same people in the administration that declared a "war on terror" back in 1981. On the diplomatic side at the UN who have John Negroponte who was at that time the U.S. ambassador to Honduras who was overseeing torture and violence in Honduras, but more importantly this is where the bases were for the U.S.-run mercenary forces that were attacking Nicaragua. And that's what the U.S. was condemned for by the World Court, to stop and to pay reparations. But of course the U.S. disregarded it. Now without any flicker of an eyelash, he is running the diplomatic side of the war on terror.
The military side of the war against terror, you have Donald Rumsfeld, who was Reagan's emissary to the Middle East who was sent to restore relations with our friend Saddam Hussein knowing perfectly well he was a complete monster and he was using chemical weapons. Iraq was taken off the list of terrorist states in 1982 so the U.S. could then provide him with arms, aid, establish relations and so, and since there was an empty stop on the list of terrorist states they introduced Cuba, as a terrorist state at the time.
It goes right down the list. Elliot Abrams who was responsible for Latin America, was a major sponsor of state terrorism and atrocities, and, in fact, was convicted of misdemeanors for lying to Congress, but got a presidential pardon. He's now back in charge of Middle East Affairs on the National Security Council.
You don't know whether to laugh or cry.
And educated opinion is so disciplined so astonishingly disciplined that all of this passes without comment, that that's wrong. You can go on and on. Look at Colin Powell, he's the "moderate." What's his record as a moderate? I mean he was national security advisor in the last couple of years of the Reagan administration when the administration was successfully evading a congressional ban against supporting South Africa, they were finding ways around it because they didn't want to accept it. They declared Nelson Mandela's African National Congress to be one of the more notorious terrorist organizations in the world - that's on Colin Powell's watch.
They were also supporting massive South African atrocities in Angola and Mozambique which were killing hundreds of thousands of people - that's "moderation."
Paul Wolfowitz at the time was ambassador to Indonesia praising the monstrous Suharto, before that he was in charge of high up in the State Department office of Asian affairs where he was overseeing support for Marcos, a vicious, brutal, corrupt dictator who the U.S. supported almost up to the very last minute until he was overthrown by the army.
Now there's a kind of revisionist history being constructed that the U.S. was really working behind the scenes to achieve these results but try to find some record of it and it's exactly the opposite. And it's completely consistent. It doesn't matter. One of the beautiful things about this doctrine of change of course which is evoked every two or three years, is you can wipe out the past.
There is nothing exceptional about this. This is the way power systems behave. They like to think of themselves as mythologies.
GNN: What is it about the paradigm of the media that makes it so afraid to deconstruct them as you do?
Chomsky: For the most part educated intellectuals are subservient to power, and there is nothing new to that. You can go back to classical Greece and the Bible and you find the same story.
Take the Bible, we're all supposed to be very Bible worshipping. There were people in the Bible who we would call intellectuals, then they called them a word that is translated as "prophets," but they weren't prophesizing anything. They were basically intellectuals, they were giving geo-political analysis, they were calling for moral behavior, treating orphans and women properly and so on. They were public intellectuals criticizing power and calling for moral behavior and they also predicting that the efforts of the kings trying to extend their power would led to destruction - all the things that critical intellectuals are supposed to do. How were they treated? Where they praised? No, they were imprisoned, driven into the desert, despised.
Hundreds of years later they were honored. Not then.
The ones that were honored were the flatterers who courted the king, and praised those in power.
Those intellectuals are now called false prophets.
http://www.guerrillanews.com/human_rights/doc3566.html
