THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW NOAM CHOMSKY

...These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding...

...Certainly people would like to think there's somebody up there who knows what he's doing...

...Q: There was a hope, at least in the 1960s, that people in the capitalist world could learn something from the Third World...

...These concepts belong to the history of organized religion...

...There are areas where you need specialized knowledge...

...Adherence to the party line confers the right to act in ways that would properly be regarded as scandalous on the part of any critic of received orthodoxies...

...Do they understand the reality they are obfuscating...

...When I refer to Nazi crimes or Soviet atrocities, for example, I know that I will not be called upon to back up what I say, but a detailed scholarly apparatus is necessary if I say anything critical of one of the Holy States—the United States or Israel...

...That is virtually unthinkable here...

...CHOMSKY: Well, because in subjects that really don't have a great deal of intellectual depth, that are not living intellectual disciplines that confront problems and try to overcome them, what you can do is accept the faith and repeat it...

...Take the Vietnam war...

...Those areas of inquiry that have to do with problems of immediate human concern do not happen to be particularly profound or inaccessible to the ordinary person lacking any special training who takes the trouble to learn something about them...

...My experience in this respect is not at all unique...

...It's in this context that we can understand the Kissinger phenomenon...

...THE PROGRESSIVE Interview Noam Chomsky An American dissident BY JIM PECK Noam Chomsky, Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is widely regarded as the world's foremost authority in the field of structural linguistics...

...The industrializing societies of Europe and the United States were not faced with a hostile environment in which the major resources had already been preempted...

...One device is to develop a star system, an array of figures who are often media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives and control international affairs...

...The right to lie in the service of power is guarded with considerable vigor and passion...

...They were confronted with all kinds of problems that we do not face, even apart from the problems of foreign attack and domestic national consolidation...

...When there is some reference to what I or other critics have said, it often seems that the commentators are barely aware of Jim Peck is the editor of "The Chomsky Reader, "to be published this summer by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc...

...The consequence of accurate critical analysis will be to buttress these efforts, contributing to suffering and oppression...

...Let's hope the ship has a captain, in other words...

...On the one hand, these integrate the work force into the system...

...It's not enough just to mouth slogans...

...Q: You have spoken—in some places you call it a "Cartesian common sense"—of the common-sense capacities of the people...

...We should not be worshiping at shrines, but learning what we can from people who had something serious to say, or who did something valuable in their lives, while trying to overcome the inevitable errors and flaws...

...What do you mean by common sense...

...Hence the sacred right to lie is likely to be preserved without too serious a threat...

...CHOMSKY: That's correct...

...There is no such event in official history, though there clearly was in the real world...

...He played that role quite elegantly...

...My books on contemporaiy issues are generally reviewed quite widely in Canada, England, Australia, and elsewhere, but only sporadically here...

...What we do, the very acts we perform, will be exploited where possible for those ends...

...These countries could become subsidiaries of Western capitalism...

...The problems are still there, but at least they are on the agenda...

...What does this say about how our society operates...

...I also find easy access to national TV and radio outside the United States, as well as journals...

...Q: You've written that Henry Kissinger's memoirs "give the impression of a middle-level manager who has learned to conceal vacuity with pretentious verbiage...

...And when there are references, I think they are notable for their almost total lack of even a pretense of rational argument or concern for evidence...

...To take apart the system of illusions and deception which functions to prevent understanding of contemporary reality— that's not a task that requires extraordinary skill or understanding...

...Now it seems to me that some intellectual skill and capacity for understanding and for accumulating evidence and gaining information and thinking through problems could be used— would be used—under different systems of governance which involve popular participation in important decision-making, in areas that really matter to human life...

...There's the authoritarian state-capitalist model of South Korea, or the authoritarian state-socialist model...

...This means that you have to establish the pretense that the participants of that elite know what they are doing and have the kind of understanding and access to information that is denied the rest of us, so that we poor slobs ought to just watch, not interfere...

...Thus, a standard charge against American dissidents or even American liberals is that they claim that the United States is the sole source of evil in the world, or other similar idiocies...

...And the anarchists will then be revolutionaries trying to overcome these new kinds of oppression and unfairness and constraint that we weren't aware of before...

...I don't want to deny that there are outright liars, just brazen propagandists...

...But I don't think that's the norm...

...Too much public awareness might lead to a demand that standards of integrity should be met, which would certainly save a lot of forests from destruction, and would send many a reputation tumbling...

...The question is, how do these tendencies play themselves out...

...Looking back over the past, that's pretty much what has happened...

...CHOMSKY: Yes...

...But the fact that such concepts persist and are taken seriously is a sign of the intellectual inadequacy of the traditions, and probably hampers their further development...

...that there's no God-given necessity to have hierarchical structure of authority in the work place of a kind that we would call fascist in the political domain...

...Q: I think there was the wish on the part of some to see a genuinely humane alternative society...

...People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that...

...CHOMSKY: I never thought the Third World liberation movements of the 1960s were likely to provide any useful lessons for Western socialists...

...Commentary on public affairs in the mainstream literature is often shallow and uninformed...

...They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do...

...Other recent books include Turning the Tide: U.S...

...These are telephone conversations...

...They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday, and so on...

...Do they understand the social processes they mystify...

...Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace (South End Press, 1985), and The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (South End Press, 1983...

...Q: How many of the books you wrote over the years have been reviewed in the major professional journals...

...CHOMSKY: Well, let me give an example...

...And many felt that this is what the North Vietnamese, the state-socialist bureaucrats, would create, which was highly unlikely, particularly as the war progressed with mounting terror and destruction...

...One of these acts is accurate criticism, accurate critical analysis of authoritarian state socialism in North Vietnam or in Cuba or in other countries that the United States is trying to undermine and subvert...

...Within peace-movement groups, I tried to dissociate opposition to the American war from support for state socialism in Vietnam, but it was not easy to undertake serious opposition to imperial aggression, with the very real personal cost that this entailed, on such a basis...

...American dissidents have to face the fact that they are living in a state with enormous power, used for murderous and destructive ends...

...This becomes evident whenever anyone takes the trouble to demonstrate that charges against some official enemy are inaccurate or, sometimes, pure invention...

...Take the most optimistic assumptions: What we can expect is that in some new and better form of society in which certain oppressive structures have been overcome, we will simply discover new problems that haven't been obvious before...

...Since the mid-1960s, he has also been one of America's leading political dissidents, particularly in his outspoken criticism of U.S...

...Ever since I've had any political awareness," he says, "I've felt either alone or part of a tiny minority...

...Suppose we could somehow manage to conduct this inquiry and discussion without contributing to the designs of imperialist power...

...My attitude toward the American war in Vietnam was based on the principle that aggression is wrong, including the aggression of the United States against South Vietnam...

...Why do such individuals gain such extraordinary reputations, given what you say about his actual abilities...

...It's still trying to win it, and in many ways it is winning...

...But how can you identify yourself as a Marxist, or a Freudian, or an X-ist, whoever X may be...

...Though I've been highly critical of Israeli policy, I've been asked to write in the mainstream Israeli press...

...That's true...

...Even apart from such colossal man-made disasters, what really are the prospects for development in Third World societies that are at a lower level of development today than were the industrializing societies of Europe and the United States in the Eighteenth Century...

...Some did, but others were reluctant because they were highly critical of the regime that was to emerge, as I was...

...You doubt that he has any subtle "conceptual framework" or global design...

...Any living person, no matter how gifted, will make some contributions intermingled with error and partial understanding...

...And the question is, to what extent can self-conscious working-class groups struggle against this and try to turn these efforts into something else...

...CHOMSKY: Well, anarchism isn't a doctrine...

...They might lead to class harmony, suppression of industrial strife, acceptance of lower wages and higher profits...

...As a result, it's just beyond the pale...

...Since we don't participate, we don't control, and we don't even think about questions of crucial importance, we hope somebody who has some competence is paying attention...

...These are really important things to think about...

...The critic typically has little access to the media, and the personal consequences for the critic are sufficiently annoying to deter many from taking this course, particularly because some journals—The New Republic, for example—sink to the ultimate level of dishonesty and cowardice, regularly refusing even the right of response to slanders they publish...

...But then serious questions arise as to what one can do, say, in Indochina, in a society that has been so severely, almost lethally, damaged by destructive war and by a legacy of colonialism with horrifying effects, virtually unknown in the West...

...Q: What do you think of speaking in terms of a Marxist or Freudian tradition...

...Evidence is unnecessary, argument beside the point...

...Q: You have said that most intellectuals end up obfuscating reality...

...From the point of view of the capitalists themselves or the managerial elite or the state management, of course, any such forms of worker participation would be used to the extent possible as a technique of subordinating the work force...

...policy toward the Third World...

...Now it is a live issue which has reached a general level of consciousness and concern...

...There's only a small number of people in American academic circles who could even hear those words...

...Maybe there is, but it requires some real work and thought to show that...

...CHOMSKY: It's a complicated matter...

...They felt they were not simply opposing the American war but defending the North Vietnamese vision of a future society...

...CHOMSKY: Well, in this country I don't recall offhand any case, ever...

...I know I do...

...I'm sure just about everyone exploits these privileges...

...Q: Are there any particular movements toward building alternative structures today within Western capitalist societies that you find hopeful...

...I have found all sorts of strange illusions about what, say, my attitude was toward the Vietnam war, because elite intellectuals often simply cannot perceive that one could have the opinions that I do hold...

...They can't tolerate too much cognitive dissonance...

...They raise the question whether development is even possible in the Third World...

...Just take our own lifetimes: sexism, for example...

...I'm sure they are using their common sense and intellectual skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere...

...I think there's also a selective process in the academic professions and journalism—that is, people who are independent-minded and cannot be trusted to be obedient don't make it, by and large...

...CHOMSKY: I suspect this is rather common...

...This interview is excerpted, by permission, from "The Chomsky Reader...

...And, in fact, even a specialized knowledge in these areas is not beyond the reach of people who happen to be interested...

...I suppose the reason is largely that this work is critical not only of the United States and U.S...

...the same is true commonly for critics of U.S...

...It was clear by the end of the 1960s that the United States had achieved its primary objectives...

...Q: And yet one to which many intellectuals have been drawn...

...policy and ideology...

...policy but more crucially of the role of intellectuals in the United States...

...Copyright © 1987 by Noam Chomsky...

...Honest people will have to face the fact that they are morally responsible for the predictable human consequences of their acts...

...Q: Are experts and intellectuals afraid of people who could apply the intelligence of sport to their own areas of competency in foreign affairs, social sciences, and so on...

...And others will enter our awareness if the ones we now face are addressed...

...Q: Intellectuals are often deeply involved with "traditions"— the "Marxist tradition," the "Freudian tradition...

...People know a tremendous amount...

...Rejecting the cliches and easy assumptions of both Left and Right, Chomsky calls himself a libertarian and anarchist...

...CHOMSKY: Most people are not liars...

...But many things can be understood quite well without a very far-reaching, specialized knowledge...

...you can find them in journalism and in the academic professions as well...

...It requires the kind of normal skepticism and willingness to apply one's analytical skills that almost all normal people have and can exercise...

...Twenty years ago, it was not in the consciousness of most people as a form of oppression...

...This was a major victory for U.S...

...We do not confront the problem of developing an industrial society under the onerous conditions that hold throughout most of the Third World...

...Do you think that is so today...

...Not very pretty, in many respects...

...This freedom from the requirements of evidence or even rationality is quite a convenience, as any informed reader of the media and journals of opinion, or even much of the scholarly literature, will quickly discover...

...In fact, the American movement tended to become quite pro-North Vietnamese—segments of it, at least...

...That's one reason why I think he was so attractive to the people who actually have power...

...I don't mean to suggest that this is a fair characterization of the work of those individuals who call themselves "Marxists" or "Freudians...

...One of the ways it's winning is by imposing conditions which will bring out the repressive elements that were present in the Vietnamese communist movement...

...Should an honest Russian dissident, for example, publicly denounce the atrocities and oppressive character of the Afghan resistance, knowing that such accurate criticism will be exploited in support of Soviet aggression...

...The United States has never terminated its effort to win the war in Vietnam...

...It just happens that they exercise them in analyzing what the New England Patriots ought to do next Sunday instead of questions that really matter for human life, their own included...

...The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world...

...The same is true pretty much of the media...

...The convention is that such charges are entirely legitimate when the target is someone who does not march in the appropriate parades, and they are therefore produced without even a pretense of evidence...

...But is there really a libertarian model of development that's meaningful...

...They wouldn't know what I'm referring to when I talk about American aggression in South Vietnam...

...I think this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense...

...aggression...

...CHOMSKY: Our society is not really based on public participation in decision-making in any significant sense...

...It seems difficult for elite intellectuals to believe that my opposition to the American attack against South Vietnam was based on the same principle that led me to oppose the Russian invasions of Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan...

...His ignorance and foolishness really are a phenomenon, but he did have a marvelous talent, namely of playing the role of the philosopher who understands profound things in ways that are beyond the capacity of the ordinary person...

...Chomsky's Pirates and Emperors: International Terrorism in the Real World was published last year by Claremont Research and Publications...

...I think that's a factor...

...Everyone who writes or speaks about these matters knows how much you can get away with as long as you keep close to received doctrine...

...They are not unique to the United States...

...That's just the kind of person they need...

...On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality which is beyond belief...

...It can lead to that...

...On the other hand, they also have the possibility of developing the awareness and understanding that it is perfectly possible for workers to manage without authoritarian structures...

...Apart from the Soviet bloc, where I am under a total ban (including even linguistics), the United States is probably the country where I have least access to the media or journals of opinion...

...war were therefore in the position of, in effect, helping to defend the only surviving resistance in Vietnam, which happened to be highly authoritarian state-socialist groups...

...It had effectively destroyed the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and the Pathet Lao in Laos, ensuring that only the harshest and most authoritarian elements in Indochina would survive, if any would...

...CHOMSKY: I think it's a bad idea...

...In fact, power is very highly concentrated in small interpenetrating elites, ultimately based on ownership of the private economy in large measure, but also on related ideological and political and managerial elites...

...What other models of development are there...

...For example, it's cheap and easy to say that these are repressive state-socialist societies...

...Principled opponents of the U.S...

...Take the moves toward workers' self-management that you can detect with a sufficiently powerful microscope in Europe, and sometimes here...

...Honest libertarians should recognize these facts...

...What does it mean in a society like ours...

...Now, I don't think that was a reason for not opposing the American war in Vietnam, but it was a reason why many anarchists could not throw themselves into that struggle with the energy and sympathy that they might have...

...In this sense, they serve as a device for socializing the work force within the existing system of oppression...

...The whole concept of Marxist or Freudian or anything like that is very odd...

...Rather, it is a system of elite decision and periodic public ratification...

...It's at most a historical tendency, a tendency of thought and action which has many different ways of developing and progressing and which, I would think, will continue as a permanent strand of human history...

...The norm is obedience, adoption of uncritical attitudes, taking the easy path of self-deception...

...We have a good deal of experience with the consequences of that option...

...They're often filtered out along the way...

...It's a crazy idea, a kind of idolatry...

...It makes life easy, and permits expression of a good deal of nonsense or ignorant bias with impunity, also sheer slander...

...I'm not suggesting a kind of anti-intellectualism...

...When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports...

...But also, it is an important feature of the ideological system to impose on people the feeling that they really are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues: They'd better leave it to the captain...

...That would be to treat the person as a God to be revered, not a human being whose contributions are to be assimilated and transcended...

...that bosses are not needed...

...We try to understand and improve on their contributions and eliminate the errors...

...what the argument is, or what position is actually being formulated...

...Anyone who points out that some charge against Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, or some other official enemy is dubious or false will immediately be labeled an apologist for real or alleged crimes, a useful technique to ensure that rational standards will not be imposed...

...Is one of the aspects of the anarchist an uneasiness with any doctrine...

...Q: You once wrote that if by some quirk of history the advanced Western powers should actually decide to genuinely give assistance to Third World countries, it wouldn't be all that easy to know what should be done or how to do it...

...These dilemmas are hard to deal with...