Newsletter Numéro
26 12
mars
2005
Noam Chomsky(*)
*[Noam
Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT, has been affiliated with CEIMSA since
its origins at Stendhal University during the fall semester 2000. While unable to accept our invitation
to attend the first international colloquium, he very generously aided us in
making contact with specialists like Edward Herman, Richard Du
Boff, Michael Albert and other renown scholars who
rearranged their busy schedules in order to attend this important conference in
Grenoble that attracted more than 1200 people to
Stendhal University campus on 11-12 January 2002. At the end of that same year,
in December 2002, CEIMSA sponsored a student trip to Geneva to hear Chomsky
speak at The International
Council on Human Rights Policy. The article below was first
published as chapter 1 in Hegemony or
Survival, America’s Quest for Global Dominance (Metropolitan Books, 2003).]
Priorities
and Prospects
A few years ago, one of the great figures of
contemporary biology, Ernst Mayr, published some
reflections on the likelihood of success in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.1
He considered the prospects very low. His reasoning had to do with the adaptive
value of what we call "higher intelligence," meaning the particular
human form of intellectual organization. Mayr
estimated the number of species since the origin of life at about fifty
billion, only one of which "achieved the kind of intelligence needed to
establish a civilization." It did so very recently, perhaps 100,000 years
ago. It is generally assumed that only one small breeding group survived, of
which we are all descendants.
Mayr
speculated that the human form of intellectual organization may not be favored by selection. The history of life on Earth, he
wrote, refutes the claim that "it is
better to be smart than to be stupid," at least judging by biological
success: beetles and bacteria, for example, are vastly more successful than
humans in terms of survival. He also made the rather somber
observation that "the average life expectancy of a species is about
100,000 years."
We are entering a period of human history that may
provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid.
The most hopeful prospect is that the question will not be answered: if it receives a definite answer, that answer can
only be that humans were a kind of "biological error, using their allotted
100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else.
The species has surely developed the capacity to do
just that, and a hypothetical extraterrestrial observer might well conclude
that humans have demonstrated that capacity throughout their history,
dramatically in the past few hundred years, with an assault on the environment
that sustains life, on the diversity of more complex organisms, and with cold
and calculated savagery, on each other as well.
TWO SUPERPOWERS
The year 2003 opened with many indications that
concerns about human survival are all too realistic. To mention just a few
examples, in the early fall of 2002 it was learned that a possibly terminal
nuclear war was barely avoided forty years earlier. Immediately after this
startling discovery, the Bush administration blocked UN efforts to ban the
militarization of space, a serious threat to survival. The administration also
terminated international negotiations to prevent biological warfare and moved
to ensure the inevitability of an attack on
Iraq
, despite
popular Opposition that was without historical precedent.
Aid organizations with extensive experience in
Iraq
and
studies by respected medical organizations warned that the planned invasion might
precipitate a humanitarian catastrophe. The warnings were ignored by
Washington
and
evoked little media interest. A high-level US task force concluded that attacks
with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) within the United States are
"likely," and would become more so in the event of war with Iraq.
Numerous specialists and intelligence agencies issued similar warnings, adding
that
Washington
's
belligerence, not only with regard to
Iraq
, was
increasing the long-term threat of international terrorism and proliferation
of WMD. These warnings too were dismissed.
In September 2002 the Bush administration announced
its National Security Strategy, which declared the right to resort to force to
eliminate any perceived challenge to
US
global
hegemony, which is to be permanent. The new grand strategy aroused deep concern
worldwide, even within the foreign policy elite at home. Also in September, a
propaganda campaign was launched to depict Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat
to the
United States
and to insinuate that he was responsible for the 9-11 atrocities and was
planning others. The campaign, timed to the onset of the midterm congressional
elections, was highly successful in shifting attitudes. It soon drove American
public opinion off the global spectrum and helped the administration achieve
electoral aims and establish
Iraq
as a
proper test case for the newly announced doctrine of resort to force at will.
President Bush and his associates also persisted in
undermining international efforts to reduce threats to the environment that are
recognized to be severe, with pretexts that barely concealed their devotion to
narrow sectors of private power. The administration's Climate Change Science
Program (CCSP), wrote Science magazine
editor Donald Kennedy, is a travesty that "included no recommendations
for emission limitation or other forms of mitigation," contenting itself
with "voluntary reduction targets, which, even if met, would allow US
emission rates to continue to grow at around 14% per decade." The CCSP did
not even consider the likelihood, suggested by "a growing body of
evidence," that the short-term warming changes it ignores "will
trigger an abrupt nonlinear process," producing dramatic temperature
changes that could carry extreme risks for the
United States
,
Europe
,
and other temperate zones. The Bush administration's "contemptuous pass on
multilateral engagement with the global warming problem," Kennedy
continued, is the "stance that began the long continuing process of
eroding its friend-ships in
Europe
,"
leading to "smoldering resentment."2
By October 2002 it was becoming hard to ignore the
fact that the world was "more concerned about the unbridled use of American
power than ... about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein," and "as
intent on limiting the giant's power as ,.. in taking
away the despot's weapons."3
World concerns mounted in the months that followed, as the giant made Clear its intent to attack
Iraq
even if
the UN inspections it reluctantly tolerated failed to unearth weapons that
would provide a pretext. By December, support for
Washington
's war
plans scarcely reached 10 percent almost anywhere outside the
US
,
according to international polls. Two months later, after enormous worldwide
protests, the press reported that "there may still be two Superpower5
on the planet: the
United States
and world
public Opinion" ("the
United States
"
here meaning state power, not the public or even elite Opinion).4
By early 2003, studies revealed that fear of the
United States
had
reached remarkable heights throughout the world, along with distrust of the
political leadership. Dismissal of elementary human rights and needs was
matched by a display of contempt for democracy for which no parallel comes
easily to mind, accompanied by professions of sincere dedication to human
rights and democracy. The unfolding events should be deeply disturbing to those
who have concerns about the world they are leaving to their grandchildren.
Though Bush planners are at an extreme end of the
traditional US Policy spectrum, their programs and doctrines have many precursors,
both in
US
history and among earlier aspirants to global power. More ominously, their
decisions may not be irrational within the framework of prevailing ideology and
the institutions that embody it. There is ample historical precedent for the
willingness of leaders to threaten or resort to violence in the face of
significant risk of catastrophe. But the stakes are far higher today. The
choice between hegemony and survival has rarely, if ever, been so starkly
posed.
Let us try to unravel some of the many strands that
enter into this complex tapestry, focusing attention on the world power that
proclaims global hegemony. Its actions and guiding doctrines must be a primary
concern for everyone on the planet, particularly, of course, for Americans.
Many enjoy unusual advantages and freedom, hence the ability to shape the
future, and should face with care the responsibilities that are the
immediate corollary of such privilege.
ENEMY TERRITORY
Those who want to face their responsibilities with a
genuine commitment to democracy and freedom -even to decent survival- should
recognize the barriers that stand in the way. In violent states these are not
concealed. In more democratic societies barriers are more subtle. While methods
differ sharply from more brutal to more free societies, the goals are in many
ways similar: to ensure that the "great beast," as Alexander Hamilton
called the people, does not stray from its proper confines.
Controlling the general population has always been a
dominant concern of power and privilege, particularly since the first modern
democratic revolution in seventeenth-century
England
. The
self-described "men of best quality" were appalled as a "giddy
multitude of beasts in men's shapes" rejected the basic framework of the
civil conflict raging in England between king and Parliament, and called for
government "by countrymen like ourselves, that know our wants," not
by "knights and gentlemen that make us laws, that are chosen for fear and
do but oppress us, and do not know the people's sores." The men of best
quality recognized that if the people are so
"depraved and corrupt as to "confer places of power and trust upon
wicked and undeserving men, they forfeit their power in this behalf unto those
that are good, though but a few." Almost three centuries later, Wilsonian idealism, as it is standardly
termed, adopted a rather similar stance. Abroad, it is
Washington
's responsibility
to ensure that government is in the hands of "the good, though but a
few." At home, it is necessary to safeguard a system of elite
decision-making and public ratification -"polyarchy,"
in the terminology of political science -not democracy.5
As president, Woodrow Wilson himself did not shrink
from severely repressive policies even within the
United States
, but such
measures are not normally available in places where popular struggles have won
a substantial measure of freedom and rights. By Wilson's day it was widely
recognized by elite sectors in the US and Britain that within their societies,
coercion was a tool of diminishing utility, and that it would be necessary to devise new
means to tame the beast, primarily through control of opinion and attitude.
Huge industries have since developed devoted to these ends.
Wilson
's own view was that an elite of gentlemen with "elevated ideals" must
be empowered to preserve "stability and righteousness."6 Leading public
intellectuals agreed. "The public must be put in its place," Walter Lippmann declared in his progressive essays on democracy.
That goal could be achieved in part through "the manufacture of
consent," a "self-conscious art and regular organ of popular
government." This "revolution" in the "practice of
democracy" should enable a "specialized class" to manage the
"common interests" that "very largely elude public opinion
entirely." In essence, the Leninist ideal. Lippmann had observed the revolution in the practice of
democracy firsthand as a member of
Wilson
's Committee on Public
Information, which was established to coordinate wartime propaganda and
achieved great success in whipping the population into war fever.
The
"responsible men" who are the proper decision-makers, Lippmann continued, must "live free of the trampling
and the roar of a bewildered herd." These "ignorant and meddlesome
outsiders" are to be "spectators," not "participants."
The herd does have a "function": to trample periodically in support
of one or another element of the leadership class in an election. Unstated is
that the responsible men gain that status not by virtue of any special talent
or knowledge but by willing subordination to the systems of actual power and
loyalty to their operative principles-crucially, that basic decisions over
social and economic life are to be kept within institutions with top-down
authoritarian control, while the participation of the beast is to be limited to
a diminished public arena.
Just how
diminished the public arena should be is a matter of debate. Neoliberal initiatives of the past thirty years have been
designed to restrict it, leaving basic decision-making within largely
unaccountable private tyrannies, linked closely to one another and to a few
powerful states. Democracy can then survive, but in sharply reduced form. The
Reagan-Bush sectors have taken an extreme position in this regard, but the
policy spectrum is fairly narrow. Some argue that it scarcely exists at all,
mocking the pundits who "actually make a living contrasting the finer
points of the sitcoms on NBC with those broadcast on CBS" during election
campaigns: "Through tacit agreement the two major parties approach the
contest for the presidency [as] political kabuki [in which] the players know
their roles and everyone sticks to the script," "striking poses"
that cannot be taken seriously.7
If the
public escapes its marginalization and passivity, we face a "crisis of
democracy" that must be overcome, liberal intellectuals explain, in part
through measures to discipline the institutions responsible for "the
indoctrination of the young"-schools, universities, churches, and the
like-and perhaps even through government control of the media, if
self-censorship does not suffice.8
In taking
these views, contemporary intellectuals are drawing on good constitutional
sources. James Madison held that power must be delegated to "the wealth of
the nation," "the more capable set of men," who understand that
the role of government is "to protect the minority of the opulent against
the majority." Precapitalist in his worldview,
Madison
had faith that the "enlightened
Statesman" and "benevolent philosopher" who were to exercise
power would "discern the true interest of their country" and guard
the public interest against the "mischief" of democratic majorities.
The mischief would be avoided,
Madison
hoped, under the system of
fragmentation he devised. In later years he came to fear that severe problems
would arise with the likely increase of those who "will labor under all
the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its
benefits." A good deal of modern history reflects these conflicts over who
will make decisions, and how.
Recognition
that control of opinion is the foundation of government, from the most
despotic to the most free, goes back at least to David Hume, but a
qualification should be added. It is far more important in the more free
societies, where obedience cannot be maintained by the lash. It is only natural
that the modern institutions of thought control-frankly called propaganda
before the word became unfashionable because of totalitarian
associations-should have originated in the most free Societies.
Britain
Pioneered with its Ministry of
Information, which undertook "to direct the thought of most of the
world."
Wilson
followed Soon after with his
Committee on Public Information. Its propaganda successes inspired progressive
democratic theorists and the modern public-relations industry. Leading
participants in the CPI, like Lippmann and Edward Bernays, quite explicitly drew from these achievements of
thought control, which Bernays called "the
engineering of consent, ... the very essence of the
democratic process." The term Propaganda
became an entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica
in 1922 and in the Encyclopedia of
Social Sciences a decade later, with Harold Lasswell's
scholarly endorsement of the new techniques for controlling the public mind.
The methods of the pioneers were particularly significant, Randal Marlin writes
in his history of propaganda, because of their "widespread imitation... by
Nazi Germany,
South Africa
, the
Soviet Union
, and the US Pentagon,"
though the achievements of the PR industry dwarf them all.9
Problems of
domestic control become Particularly Severe when the governing authorities
carry out policies that are opposed by the general population. in those cases, the political leadership may be tempted to
follow the path of the Reagan administration, which established an Office of
Public Diplomacy to manufacture consent for its murderous Policies in
Central America
. One high government official
described its Operation Truth as "a huge psychological operation of the
kind the military conducts to influence a population in denied or enemy terntory" -a frank characterization of pervasive
attitudes toward the domestic Population.10
ENEMY TERRITORY ABROAD
While the
enemy at home often has to be controlled by intensive Propaganda, beyond the
borders more direct means are available. The leaders of the current Bush
administration -mostly recycled from more reactionary sectors of the
Bush-Reagan I administrations- provided Sufficiently clear illustrations during
their earlier stints in office. When the traditional regime of violence and
repression was challenged by the Church and other miscreants in the Central
American domains of
US
power, the Reagan administration
responded with a "war on terror," declared as soon as it took office
in 1981. Not surprisingly, the
US
initiative instantly became a terrorist
war-a campaign of slaughter, torture, and barbarism-that soon extended to other
regions of the world as well.
In one
country,
Nicaragua
,
Washington
had lost control of the armed
forces that had traditionally subdued the region's population, one of the
bitter legacies of Wilsonian idealism. The US-backed
Somoza dictatorship was overthrown by the Sandinista rebels, and the murderous
National Guard was dismantled. Therefore
Nicaragua
had to be subjected to a campaign
of international terrorism that left the country in ruins. Even the
psychological effects of
Washington
's terrorist war are severe. The
spirit of exuberance, vitality, and optimism that followed the overthrow of the
dictatorship could not long survive as the reigning superpower intervened to
dash the hopes that a grim history might finally take a different course.
In the
other Central American countries targeted by the Reaganite
"war on terror," forces equipped and trained by the
United States
maintained control. Without an
army to defend the population against the terrorists -that is, the security
forces themselves- atrocities were even worse. The record of murder, torture,
and devastation was extensively reported by human rights organizations, church
groups, Latin American scholars, and many others, but it remained little known
to citizens of the state that bore prime responsibility, and was quickly
effaced.11
By the
mid-1980s, the US-backed state terrorist campaigns had created societies
"affected by terror and panic . . . collective intimidation and
generalized fear," in the words of a leading Church-based Salvadoran human
rights organization: the population had “internalized acceptance”
of "the daily and frequent use of violent means" and "the frequent
appearance of tortured bodies." Returning from a brief visit to his
native
Guatemala
, journalist Julio Godoy wrote that "one is tempted to believe that some
people in the White House worship Aztec gods-with the offering of Central
American blood." He had fled a year earlier when his newspaper, La Epoca, was blown up by state terrorists, an
operation that aroused no interest in the
United States
: attention was carefully focused
on the misdeeds of the official enemy, real no doubt but hardly detectable
given the scale of US-backed state terror in the region. The White House, Godoy wrote, installed and supported forces in
Central America
that could "easily compete
against Nicolae Ceausescu's Securitate
for the World Cruelty Prize."12
After the
terrorist commanders had achieved their goals, the consequences were reviewed
at a conference in San Salvador of Jesuits and lay associates, who had more
than enough personal experience to draw on, quite apart from what they had
observed through the grisly decade of the 1980s. The conference concluded that
it does not suffice to focus on the terror alone. it is no less important
"to explore... what weight the culture of terror has had in domesticating
the expectations of the majority," preventing them from considering
"alternatives to the demands of the powerful."13 Not only in
Central America
.
Destroying
hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal
democracy is allowed -even preferred, if only for public-relations purposes. In
more honest circles, much of this is conceded. Of course, it is understood much
more profoundly by the beasts in men's shapes who endure the consequences of
challenging the imperatives of stability and order.
These are
all matters that the second superpower, world public opinion, should make every
effort to understand if it hopes to escape the containment to which it is
subjected and to take seriously the ideals of justice and freedom that come
easily to the lips but are harder to defend and advance.
_______
NOTES
1. Mayr, Bioastronomy News 7, no.3 (1995).
2. Donald Kennedy, Science 299, 21
March 2003.
3. Howard LaFranchi,
Christian Science Monitor, 30 October 2002.
4. Patrick Tyler, New York Times, 17
February 2003.
5. For sources on Wilsonian
idealism and the seventeenth century, see my Deterring
Democracy (Verso, 1991; extended edition,
Hill & Wang, 1992), chapter 12, and my
Profit over People (Seven
Stories, 1999), chapter 2. For a more extensive discussion and
contemporary
scholarly sources, see my "Consent without Consent," Cleveland State Law
Review 44, no.4 (1996). Minor changes
(punctuation, etc.) are introduced here for ease of
reading.
6. Cited by David Foglesong,
America's Secret War Against
Bokhevism (North Carolina,
1995), p.28.
7. Andrew Bacevich, American Empire (Harvard, 2003), pp.
200ff.
8. M. J. Crozier,
S. P. Huntington, and J. Watanuki, The
Crisis of Democracy (New York
University, 1975), report to
the Trilateral Commission.
9. Randal
Marlin, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (Broadview, 2002).
10. For a discussion of this vast
disinformation campaign, see my Culture of Terrorism
(South End, 1988) and Necessary
Illusions (South End, 1989), which draw particularly
on the important but mostly neglected
expose's by Alfonso Chardy
of the Miami Herald
and later official sources.
11. On the narrow limits of permitted
discussion, see my Necessary Illusions. For case
studies over a wider range, see Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 1988;
updated edition 2002).
12. Latin American Documentation (LADOC), Torture
in Latin
America (Lima, Peru), 1987.
Julio Godoy,
Nation, 5 March 1990.
13. Juan Hernandez Pico, Envio
(Managua, Nicaragua), March 1994.
___________
Newsletter n°1
Newsletter n°2
Newsletter n°3
Newsletter n°4
Newsletter n°5
Newsletter n°6
Newsletter n°7
Newsletter n°8
Newsletter n°9
Newsletter n°10
Newsletter n°11
Newsletter n°12
Newsletter n°13
Newsletter n°14
Newsletter n°15
Newsletter n°16
Newsletter n°17
Newsletter n°18
Newsletter n°19
Newsletter n°20
Newsletter n°21
Newsletter n°22
Newsletter n°23
Newsletter n°24
Newsletter n°25
Newsletter n°26
Newsletter n°27
Newsletter n°28
Newsletter n°29
Newsletter n°30
Newsletter n°31
Newsletter n°32
Newsletter n°33
Newsletter n°34
Newsletter n°35
Newsletter n°36
Newsletter n°37
Newsletter n°38
Newsletter n°39
Newsletter n°40
Newsletter n°41
Newsletter n°42
Newsletter n°43
Newsletter n°44
Newsletter n°45
Newsletter n°46
Newsletter n°47
Newsletter n°48
Newsletter n°49
Newsletter n°50
Newsletter n°51
Newsletter n°52
Newsletter n°53
Newsletter n°54
Newsletter n°55
Newsletter n°56