new Chomsky book
Hochiminh11
Share this if you can.
http://www.churchofchomsky.org/and_terror.html
Shel Scott
And keener insight.
And more respect.
--
): "I may make you feel, but I can't make you think" :(
(: Off the monitor, through the modem, nothing but net :)
Ivan Gowch
==>hochi...@aol.com (Hochiminh11) wrote:
==>>Hey, here's some FREE must-read chapters out of Noam
==>>Chomsky's latest book. Share this if you can.
==>>http://www.churchofchomsky.org/and_terror.html
==>>
==>Great comedy value, but Dennis Miller has more credibility.
==>And keener insight.
==>And more respect.
Wadda maroon.
Trust me on this:
Noam Chomsky will be read and revered long
after Dennis Miller has vanished without a trace.
Which, considering the quality of his comedy,
should be any day now.
Cy Coe
Miller's funny, but I much prefer P.J. O'Rourke. He's a humourist
with a sharp mind and good ideas.
Cy
Dave Simpson
> Noam Chomsky will be read and revered long
> after Dennis Miller has vanished without a trace.
P.T. Barnum continues to be proven correct: "There's a sucker born
every minute." Each year's new young crop of ignorant kids is Chomsky
fodder.
> Which, considering the quality of his comedy,
> should be any day now.
Miller has more lasting power at any time than the likes of Al
Franken. Far more sensible, less stupid and poor behavior, too.
Dave Simpson
KartoffelKanone
Dave Simpson <david_l...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:23e7f86e.0306...@posting.google.com...
> Ivan Gowch wrote:
>
> > Noam Chomsky will be read and revered long
> > after Dennis Miller has vanished without a trace.
>
> P.T. Barnum continues to be proven correct: "There's a sucker born
> every minute." Each year's new young crop of ignorant kids is Chomsky
> fodder.
Oh, yeah you hate the truth, don't you bitch. Chomsky is still a light of
truth 20 years after first reading him. Do yourself a favor and pick up a
book before laying down a blanket criticism that sounds as though it has
been lifted word-for-word from some cheap neocon radio pimp like Rush
Limbaugh or Micheal Savage.
It will do you good to develope your mind, instead of being a usenet parrot.
> > Which, considering the quality of his comedy,
> > should be any day now.
>
> Miller has more lasting power at any time than the likes of Al
> Franken. Far more sensible, less stupid and poor behavior, too.
Shouldn't talk about stupid, when you are so ignorant yourself.
Dave Simpson
> Oh, yeah you hate the truth, don't you bitch.
Another sucker, and proud of it -- pathetic.
Dave Simpson
KartoffelKanone
Have you read any?
Perhaps before you engage in "Deterring Democracy" to defend your "Necessary
Illusions" about "What Uncle Sam Really Wants", you should consider "World
Orders, Old and New" "Manufacturing Consent" for "The Common Good"?
V
DS is part of the can't-think-for-myself-because-i'm-a-dumb-fuck club along
with TP and ET.
sdgreen
=============================================================
This guy Chomsky is clearly on drugs and needs serious help. Perhaps
dear Noam should retire to North Korea!
Bill Van
wrote:
No, but seriously, Stephen. Which part of that Chomsky speech didn't you
understand?
First things first, actually. Did you read it? Did you understand any of
it? Details, please. Which part made you think he might be on drugs?
John Corman
>In article <3EEEA3A8...@shaw.ca>, sdgreen <sd.g...@shaw.ca>
>wrote:
>> This guy Chomsky is clearly on drugs and needs serious help. Perhaps
>> dear Noam should retire to North Korea!
>>
>
>No, but seriously, Stephen. Which part of that Chomsky speech didn't you
>understand?
>
>First things first, actually. Did you read it? Did you understand any of
>it? Details, please. Which part made you think he might be on drugs?
========================================================
How about where this character states:
"Well, how do you improve the investment climate in a Third-World
country? One of the best ways is to murder union organizers and
peasant leaders, to torture priests, to massacre peasants, to
undermine social programs, and so on. That does have a way of
improving the investment climate."
That can only come from a drug abuser, in my honest opinion.
John Corman
Bill Van
John Corman <jcorman@xyzxyz_shaw.ca> wrote:
Like Stephen, you seem to be unwilling to explain what you're objecting
to.
Are you missing the sarcasm in Chomsky's tone, perchance? Do you think
he's advocating these things, or do you think he is sarcastically
describing what the U.S. actually did in places like El Salvador,
Honduras, Guatemala, and many others -- in order to make them safe for
U.S. capital?
Do you find it the least bit ironic that when a leftist actually poses
substantial arguments with examples to back up his claims, the best the
ignorant right can do is accuse him of being on drugs, an accusation
with no substance whatsoever?
bill
Ivan Gowch
[snip]
==>Are you missing the sarcasm in Chomsky's tone, perchance? Do you think
==>he's advocating these things, or do you think he is sarcastically
==>describing what the U.S. actually did in places like El Salvador,
==>Honduras, Guatemala, and many others -- in order to make them safe for
==>U.S. capital?
==>
==>Do you find it the least bit ironic that when a leftist actually poses
==>substantial arguments with examples to back up his claims, the best the
==>ignorant right can do is accuse him of being on drugs, an accusation
==>with no substance whatsoever?
Nicely put.
KartoffelKanone
E. Barry Bruyea <cre...@waves.org> wrote in message
news:r5g0fv0va8atamns0...@4ax.com...
> tactics he sarcastically quotes are those used by most far left
> governments today; not to 'improve' the investment climate, but to
> improve control.
They may or may not. That doesn't make what he says untrue. The point is
there are no shortage of critics of Cuba, Cuba, and Cuba. As for Venezuela,
the ELECTED leftist govt there was temporarily ousted by US led and
financed campaign.
See, even when you talk about the leftist govts, you run into the US
attempting to subvert democracy in those countries.
To get back to the point of criticism, it takes far more courage to go after
US interests that are profitting from genocide and theft and more murder in
North, Central and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia.
You would have everyone ignore this and join the chorus going after the safe
targets? The fact of the US being the biggest supporter of terrorism in the
world cannot be ignored by honest people. Don't be surprized that they are
being called on it.
>
KartoffelKanone
> conspiracy plot to go on the record. You guys should get some new
> tactics.
Yeah, and the US had nothing to do with Allende in Chile either, right? You
really should try reading books.
Or at least learn to use Google.
http://english.pravda.ru/diplomatic/2002/05/16/28807.html
http://www.narconews.com/threedays.html
Narco News has learned that the CIA headquarters for organizing,
distributing said cash, and engineering the attempted coup d'etat, was the
office known as the MIL GROUP. That's the name by which the US Military
Liason staff in Embassies - "usually a repository for fixers and grafters
pitching Department of Defense sponsored weapons sales to third world
satrapies," as one source colorfully explained to Narco News - had,
according to another well-placed source, greatly increased its staff size in
the weeks prior to the attempted coup.
I'm not a 'leftist', by the way.
Ivan Gowch
<cre...@waves.org> wrote:
[snip]
==>>> Chomsky's sarcasm noted. So is the irony, considering all of the
==>>> tactics he sarcastically quotes are those used by most far left
==>>> governments today; not to 'improve' the investment climate, but to
==>>> improve control.
==>>
==>>They may or may not. That doesn't make what he says untrue. The point is
==>>there are no shortage of critics of Cuba, Cuba, and Cuba. As for Venezuela,
==>>the ELECTED leftist govt there was temporarily ousted by US led and
==>>financed campaign.
==>Absolutely no evidence for that allegation. Just one more leftist
==>conspiracy plot to go on the record. You guys should get some new
==>tactics.
Don't be an even bigger fool than you
usually are, Bruyea.
You know as well as we that nothing happens
in this hemisphere that the U.S. government
doesn't have its dirty little fingers in.
Neither the coup plotters who temporarily
overthrew Venezuela's *democratically elected*
government, nor the business types who
organized the failed general strike, would have
acted had they not been assured that the fascist
state they wanted to set up would have U.S. support.
That's business as usual for the United Snakes, which
has repeatedly done this sort of thing for 100 years
or so.
Your moronic, "leftist conspiracy" comment makes one
wonder if you are actually on the CIA payroll, or just
one more brainwashed neo-con asshole, cheerleading
another U.S. attack on democracy.
KartoffelKanone
> On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 10:34:54 -0700, "KartoffelKanone"
> in regards Allende; I've read the evidence in many articles and books.
> Now, what evidence have you got in regards Venezuela? Or is your
> non-sequitur your only defense? You clowns are priceless.
Well the Narconews link goes into it quite a bit. I'll repost it now. Also
the CBC 'Passionate Eye' did a program on it as well.
http://www.narconews.com/threedays.html
Shel Scott
> Wadda maroon.
>
Keen insight there, sport.
Shel Scott
> Miller has more lasting power at any time than the likes of Al
>Franken.
>
Shel Scott
>Perhaps before you engage in "Deterring Democracy" to defend your
>"Necessary Illusions" about "What Uncle Sam Really Wants", you
>should consider "World Orders, Old and New" "Manufacturing
>Consent" for "The Common Good"?
>
From the tone of your postings here it would appear you're beyond
hope.
Shel Scott
>Are you missing the sarcasm in Chomsky's tone, perchance? Do you think
>he's advocating these things, or do you think he is sarcastically
>describing what the U.S. actually did in places like El Salvador,
>
is so far off base on the reasons for it as to make him a joke.
Shel Scott
>They may or may not. That doesn't make what he says untrue. The
>point is there are no shortage of critics of Cuba, Cuba, and Cuba.
>
As if there are no critics of U. S., U. S., and U. S....
Shel Scott
>Yeah, and the US had nothing to do with Allende in Chile either, right?
>
Spain and Soviet "advisors" to make Chile a prime target for economic
liberation. Too bad the U. S. didn't have more control over the
situation.
Shel Scott
> Your moronic, "leftist conspiracy" comment makes one
> wonder if you are actually on the CIA payroll, or just
> one more brainwashed neo-con asshole, cheerleading
> another U.S. attack on democracy.
>
wonder if you are actually on the KGB payroll, or just
one more brainwashed neo-lib asshole, cheerleading
another attack on the U. S.
Bill Van
Shel Scott <WellDone> wrote:
> Bill Van <bil...@canada.com> wrote:
> >Are you missing the sarcasm in Chomsky's tone, perchance? Do you think
> >he's advocating these things, or do you think he is sarcastically
> >describing what the U.S. actually did in places like El Salvador,
> >
> Chomsky has no clue what the US did in places like El Salvador, and he
> is so far off base on the reasons for it as to make him a joke.
Sure he does.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_ElSalvador.html
http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/centralamerica/ElSalvad
or.html
http://www.fair.org/media-beat/011206.htm
http://www.zpub.com/un/chomsky.html
and many, many more that even you can find with a little searching.
The man has actually researched the subject. I take it you haven't, or
if you have, that you have chosen not to share the fruits of your labor
with us in the mistaken belief that your unsupported denial constitutes
an adequate argument.
bill
Shel Scott
> Shel Scott <WellDone> wrote:
>> Chomsky has no clue what the US did in places like El Salvador, and
>> he is so far off base on the reasons for it as to make him a joke.
>
>Sure he does.
No, he does not. You're mistaking the fact that he has a lot to SAY
about El Salvador for him actually having a clue. How amusing that
you think an academic masturbator's ideological diatribes are factual.
>and many, many more that even you can find with a little searching.
>
The man insists there was no Soviet presence in Central America.
The man is an idiot.
>The man has actually researched the subject.
>
Yes, because he has nothing better to do; it's sad, though, that with
all that time on his hands he remains so far off base as to be a joke.
>I take it you haven't,
>
That's because you're a fool of Chomsky, whose "analysis" remains such
a joke that the market in America for his braindead rants is all but
dead.
>or if you have, that you have chosen not to share the fruits of your labor
>with us in the mistaken belief that your unsupported denial constitutes
>an adequate argument.
>
How hilarious that you regard Chomsky's ill logic and linguistic
tricks as "support" or "argument". The man is a freakin' geek!
1) U. S. companies invest in El Salvador.
2) Marxists, with the support of the Soviets, take over, intending to
base their country's economy on said investment. Note that there was
no real interest in El Salvador before said U. S. based investment.
3) The experiment fails, to the surprise of nobody except the hard
left.
The above pattern has repeated in Central and South America, over and
over and over.
Note that certain assholes from El Salvador's Marxist gov't (they
called themselves "Sandinista" or some such nonsense) to this day
remain comfortable in mansions they confiscated from others at
gunpoint.
sdgreen
=======================================================================
and of course that is what the significance of Marxist and Socialist
follwers are:
" Collectivists of the many" for the "benifit of the very few" ---
something like Unions.
John Corman
> John Corman <jcorman@xyzxyz_shaw.ca> wrote:
>> How about where this character states:
>>
>> "Well, how do you improve the investment climate in a Third-World
>> country? One of the best ways is to murder union organizers and
>> peasant leaders, to torture priests, to massacre peasants, to
>> undermine social programs, and so on. That does have a way of
>> improving the investment climate."
>>
>> That can only come from a drug abuser, in my honest opinion.
>Like Stephen, you seem to be unwilling to explain what you're objecting
>to.
>
>Are you missing the sarcasm in Chomsky's tone, perchance? Do you think
>he's advocating these things, or do you think he is sarcastically
>describing what the U.S. actually did in places like El Salvador,
>Honduras, Guatemala, and many others -- in order to make them safe for
>U.S. capital?
So, what he was actually saying was that Some Americans thought that;
"to murder union organizers and peasant leaders, to torture priests,
to massacre peasants, to undermine social programs, and so on"----
would improve the investment climate.
Again, an indication of too many drugs ingested, imho.
John Corman
Shel Scott
>Shel Scott wrote:
>> Note that certain assholes from El Salvador's Marxist gov't (they
>> called themselves "Sandinista" or some such nonsense) to this day
>> remain comfortable in mansions they confiscated from others at
>> gunpoint.
>
>follwers are:
>" Collectivists of the many" for the "benifit of the very few" ---
>something like Unions.
>
set up a "worker's paradise" there. U. S. efforts to counteract these
attempts are all Chomsky can see, though.
KartoffelKanone
Shel Scott <WellDone> wrote in message
news:ecq6fvgfsisanocaj...@4ax.com...
> "KartoffelKanone" <xl...@operamail.com> wrote:
> >Yeah, and the US had nothing to do with Allende in Chile either, right?
> >
> The soft-headed left in Chile combined with Marxist agitators from
> Spain and Soviet "advisors" to make Chile a prime target for economic
> liberation. Too bad the U. S. didn't have more control over the
> situation.
Riiiight... economic liberation by the IMF and the World Bank. Structural
Adjustment Programs(SAP, as in SAP the life from) are just wonderfully
liberating. As in liberating the wealth from the people of the countries by
trans-national corporations.
Now I see why you don't like Chomskys' revelations, you are apparently a
fascist. Or you are simply ignorant of the facts, and too stupid to read a
book.
"Economic Liberation"... oh boy... use the CIA to remove a legitimately
elected leader... and call it liberation....
Shame on you, fascist.
KartoffelKanone
Shel Scott <WellDone> wrote in message
> "KartoffelKanone" <xl...@operamail.com> wrote:
> >Perhaps before you engage in "Deterring Democracy" to defend your
> >"Necessary Illusions" about "What Uncle Sam Really Wants", you
> >should consider "World Orders, Old and New" "Manufacturing
> >Consent" for "The Common Good"?
> >
> If only you could understand the way you've been misled by Chomsky.
> From the tone of your postings here it would appear you're beyond
> hope.
I feel sorry for the ignorant, and strive to educate them.
Someone who does not read books, however, is beyond hope.
The quotes above are book titles. Print off the list, go to your library or
bookstore and ask for them. If you have the intellectual capacity to read
them, then you can criticize Noam.
Until you do, no one wants to listen to an ignorant fascist fool.
KartoffelKanone
Shel Scott <WellDone> wrote in message
> "KartoffelKanone" <xl...@operamail.com> wrote:
> >They may or may not. That doesn't make what he says untrue. The
> >point is there are no shortage of critics of Cuba, Cuba, and Cuba.
> >
> That is not the point at all; it may be YOUR point, though.
> As if there are no critics of U. S., U. S., and U. S....
No you miss the point. Here is what Bruyea wrote:
"
Chomsky's sarcasm noted. So is the irony, considering all of the
tactics he sarcastically quotes are those used by most far left
governments today; not to 'improve' the investment climate, but to
improve control.
"
The point is where are all the far left governments? Cuba is about it.
Venezuela maybe.
Sorry about the critics of the US, but that is what happens when you keep
killing people around the world for money.
Being the worlds' biggest terror supporter makes people tend to criticize
you.
Shel Scott
>Riiiight... economic liberation by the IMF and the World Bank.
>
of it.
Shel Scott
which should have been fairly obvious. Fact is, we see far more
critics of the U. S. than we do of Cuba. Your snivelling about how
critics talk of "Cuba, Cuba, and Cuba" only shows your innate
foolishness. Besides, your point is bullshit! "Cuba is the only far
left government"? You're a fucking moron!
Shel Scott
>The point is where are all the far left governments?
>
doesn't make the gov't itself right wing). Germany. Russia. China.
Note the last four were against any attempts to rock their economic
boat in Iraq. Iraq - until a few weeks ago.
Look at a map and look up the nature of these and many other
governments. Oh, don't forget Brazil.
>Cuba is about it.
>
Far left, yes; "about it", you're a prize twit!
>Venezuela maybe.
>
Pretty stupidly run country, but "far left" is stretching it a bit.
>Sorry about the critics of the US, but that is what happens
>
Just WHAT happens, sport? Dolts like yourself tell us Cuba and
Venezuela are the only far left gov'ts in the world? LAUGHABLE!
>when you keep killing people around the world for money.
>
Your point is that there are only one or two far left gov'ts in the
world because the U. S. is "killing people around the world for
money"? Please explain your logic.
The sensible among us can see that France, Germany, Russia, and China
lead the world in "killing people for money". The U. S. is trying to
stop the killing.
>Being the worlds' biggest terror supporter makes people tend
>to criticize you.
>
Calling the U. S. "the worlds' biggest terror supporter" only helps us
see what complete morons infest the left nowadays.
KartoffelKanone
Shel Scott <WellDone> wrote in message
> "KartoffelKanone" <xl...@operamail.com> wrote:
> >Riiiight... economic liberation by the IMF and the World Bank.
> >
> I see you've had the lobotomy, and what's more... you're PROUD
> of it.
It is you who apparently does not know history, nor of the international
monetary bodies and their influence. Just another ignorant parrot fascist
cheerleader too lazy to pick up a book or do a google search.
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=%22noam+chomsky%22+imf+%22w
orld+bank%22&spell=1
KartoffelKanone
The World Bank, GATT and Free Trade
April 20, 1992
DB: In 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were both created. What function
do these two major financial entities play?
Their early role was in helping to carry through the reconstruction of the
state capitalist industrial societies that had been wrecked by the Second
World War. After that they shifted to what is called "development," which is
often a form of controlled underdevelopment in the Third World, which means
designing and supporting particular kinds of programs for the Third World.
At this point we move into controversy. Their effect, and you can argue
about their intention, is overwhelmingly to integrate the South, the old
colonial areas, into the global society dominated by concentrated sectors of
wealth within the North, the rich society.
DB: You know that old song, "Where Have All The Flowers Gone"? Well, where
have all the billions gone? The World Bank has lent tens of billions of
dollars. Who lent what to whom exactly? What did it do there?
You can't answer that simply. In the advanced industrial societies [that
money] helped carry out a reconstruction from postwar damage. In the Third
World [lending has] had mixed effects. It's had effects in changing the
nature of agriculture, developing infrastructure, steering projects towards
particular areas and away from other areas. It's been part of the long
process of trying to undercut import substitution and move toward export
oriented agriculture. By and large [World Bank loans have] been a subsidiary
to the policies of those who control it. The United States has an
overwhelming role in the financial institution because of its wealth and
power. And the United States and its immediate allies have designed programs
of what they called development throughout the world. The money may have
gone into anything from dams to agro-export producers to occasionally some
peasant project.
DB: The International Monetary Fund has been vilified in the Third World for
the draconian measures that it has imposed on those developing countries.
Take a Latin American country today. There is a huge debt crisis. Remember
that the Bretton Woods system basically broke down in the early 1970s. The
Bretton Woods system involved regulation of currencies, convertibility of
the dollar for gold, all sorts of other rules which essentially made the
United States an international banker. By 1970 or so the U.S. could no
longer sustain that. It was very advantageous to the United States in the
1950s and 1960s. It allowed enormous overseas investment by American
corporations. But by 1970 the U.S. was unable to sustain [the role of
international banker]. President Nixon dismantled the system in 1971. That
led to an enormous amount of unregulated currency floating around in
international channels. The world was awash with unregulated capital,
particularly after the rise in the oil prices. Bankers wanted to lend that
capital, and they did. They lent it primarily to Third World countries,
which means to elite elements. For example, Latin American dictatorships
would go on huge borrowing binges. The results were praised in the West as
"economic miracles," like the Brazilian "miracle" under the generals which
left that country saddled with huge indebtedness. When the 1980s came along,
U.S. interest rates went up and started pulling money toward the United
States and increasing interest payments on the debt. The Latin American
economies started going into free fall. Capital flowed out of them at a
rapid rate. They were unable to control their own internal wealthy classes.
The capital export from Latin America may not have been at the level of the
debt, but it probably wasn't very far below it. There was a flow of hundreds
of billions of dollars from south to north, partly debt service, which far
outweighs new aid by the late 1980s -- payment of interest on the debt, and
so on, and other forms of capital flight. By now, deeply impoverished
African countries are even exporting capital to the international lending
institutions.
The net effect of this is what some people jokingly call a program in which
the poor in the rich countries pay the rich in the poor countries. That's
approximately the way it comes out. Then the IMF comes along, run by the
wealthy countries, which have certain rules for the weak. They are that if
you have a high level of inflation and the currency isn't stable and various
other economic indicators aren't satisfied, then you impose extreme forms of
austerity: balance the budget, cut back services, control the currency, etc.
That's neoliberal free market economics. That's typically disastrous for the
general mass of the population. That's why the rich countries themselves
will never accept those rules unless they're forced to. For example, there
was a time in the late 1970s when Britain was forced to adopt certain IMF
rules because of its weakness. But no country rich or powerful enough would
ever do it, like the U.S., for example, which has incredible debt but
doesn't accept IMF "suggestions". We're too powerful to follow those rules.
Third World countries, which are much weaker, especially those which are
under the control of Western-oriented elites anyway, who often benefit by
it, do follow the rules and there's disaster for the population. That's why
you get vilification. The same thing is happening in Eastern Europe now. The
whole neoliberal free market story is basically designed for the benefit of
the people who are going to win the game. Nobody else follows those rules.
The West doesn't follow them either when it's not going to win. For example,
the World Bank estimates that right now protectionist measures imposed by
the rich countries cost the Third World more than twice as much as total aid
going from the North to the South -- and that "aid" is mostly a disguised
form of export promotion.
DB: To whom are the World Bank and the IMF accountable?
To the people who put the money in, which means a bunch of rich countries,
primarily the United States, which is the dominant element there. It's
mainly funded by the wealthy states, and the U.S. has the largest vote, so
that's who they're beholden to.
DB: Where does the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT, fit into
this economic picture? One commentator has called it the "economic teeth of
the new world order."
GATT is the international trading system, also set up in the 1940s. It's in
the news now because for the last several years the Uruguay Round of GATT
negotiations has been going on with an effort to achieve some new form of
freeing up international trade. Freeing up international trade in itself, in
a general sense, is not a bad thing. It's often a good thing. The point is,
nobody goes into that game, if they have the power, without ample protection
for their own internal needs. So for example every one of the Western
powers, including the United States, is entering the GATT negotiations with
a certain agenda, a mixture of liberalization and protectionism geared to
the particular strengths and weaknesses of that economy. When we speak of
"that economy" we mean the people in the dominant positions in it. So the
European Community wants high level protection for the aerospace industry
and agricultural production. The United States has a mixture of policies.
It's calling for liberalization and free trade in many areas. On the other
hand, it's also calling for enhanced protection in areas where the U.S. is
strong. Take so-called services like banking. The U.S. is calling for a
liberalization of services in the Third World, which would have the
instantaneous effect of swamping and overwhelming all Third World banks and
financial institutions by western ones, since they're so much richer and
more powerful. That would eliminate the possibility of any national
industrial development programs within the Third World. That's the kind of
liberalization that the U.S. is in favor of. It means that Third World
economies would be managed by western banks and those who run them and the
governments that are tied to them.
On the other hand, the U.S. is calling for more protection in other areas,
particularly intellectual property rights, which includes anything from pop
music to cinema to software to patents. Right now the U.S. is racing ahead
in patenting what may turn out to be parts of genes. The idea is to patent
the genes of corn, or for that matter humans, so that future biotechnology,
which will involve various kinds of genetic engineering, will be in the
hands of mainly U.S. private firms. They will control that field, and they
want to make sure it's protected. So they want long patent rights and so on.
That means that drugs, software, new technology, new agricultural forms, any
form of biotechnology that may involve health will be in the hands of Merck
Corporation and others like them who will make tens of billions of dollars
in profits. It means that India, which could duplicate a lot of this much
cheaper, duplicate Merck drugs at a fraction of the cost, will not be
permitted to do it. The U.S. also demands product rather than only process
patents, to insure, say, that India's pharmaceutical industry doesn't invent
a cheaper way to produce some drug -- a barrier to efficiency and
innovation, but a boon for profits. That's understandable on the part of the
rich. They want to control the future, naturally, and that means control
technology. The biotechnology aspect, the patenting of genes, has been
causing an international furor in the scientific world. It can have a huge
impact in the future. One shouldn't minimize it.
The U.S. (like others) also insists on a high level of protection for U.S.
shipping. Shipping between U.S. ports has to be in U.S. ships. If Alaskan
oil comes down to California, it has to be in U.S. ships. The U.S. insists
that anything involving U.S. goods be done to a very high percentage in U.S.
ships, which benefits the U.S. maritime industry.
Similarly, "defense" expenditures are not considered subsidies under GATT
rules. That's enormously important for the U.S., which spends more on its
military system than the rest of the world combined, as has always used that
as a cover for massive public subsidy to high-tech industry. The point is
that there is a mixture of protectionism and liberalization geared to the
interests of those who are designing the policies, which are the powerful
economic forces within the state in question. That's not a great surprise,
after all, but that's what GATT is all about, and that's what the
negotiations are about.
If the current GATT programs succeed, it's clear that they're tending
towards a world government ruled by a club of rich men who meet in their
organizations, like the G-7 meetings, the meetings of the seven richest
industrial countries, which have their own institutions, like the IMF and
the World Bank, which have a network of arrangements established in GATT and
which administer a system of what's sometimes been called "corporate
mercantilism." Remember that although this is called "liberalization" and
"free trade," there's a tremendous amount of managed trade internal to it.
So huge corporations which are often more powerful than many states carry
out controlled, managed trade internally. This means trade across borders,
too, because they're internationalized. They do planning of investments, of
production, of commercial interactions, manipulation of prices, and so on,
and they naturally manage it for their own interests. Corporate mercantilism
is fine. It's governments that are not allowed to get into the game. The
rich western powers don't have any objection at all to managed trade. They
just don't want it to be done by governments, because governments have a
dangerous feature that corporations don't have: governments may to some
extent fall under the influence of popular forces, usually to a limited
extent. But to some extent there's always that fear. There's no such fear in
corporations. They are immune from any form of public control or even
surveillance. Therefore they are much more acceptable management agents for
this mercantilist system being designed globally in the interests of the
rich. GATT plays its role in this.
DB: You mentioned the powerful economic forces. Increasingly those forces
transcend frontiers. There has been a massive internationalization of
capital and finance over the last few years. What are the implications of
that?
First of all, there's nothing novel about it. Back in the 1930s there were,
for example, notorious interconnections between, say, I.G. Farben in Germany
and Du Pont. In fact, big U.S. corporations were essentially producing for
the German war machine right up until the war and some even claim afterwards
in various devious ways. But there was a big change after the Second World
War. There was a big upsurge in the creation of multinational firms, even
beyond the traditional multinationals, for example, the energy corporations,
which always were highly internationalized. But it extended much beyond. The
Marshall Plan, for example, gave a big shot in the arm to the
internationalization of capital. It would designate some project in Belgium
where you could build a steel complex. It would then encourage bids from
American corporations, which would naturally win the bidding most of the
time. Marshall Plan funds were then used, as intended, to underlie the
expansion of U.S. investment through the rich areas, primarily in Europe.
That led to an explosion of international corporations. U.S. foreign
investment exploded in the 1950s and 1960s. Not long after came European
international capital. Britain had always been substantially involved in the
internationalization of capital. In recent years Japan has joined the game
and done plenty of foreign investing. This has increased through the 1980s.
There are a lot of reasons for this in the recent period. One is the one I
mentioned before, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, which led to an
enormous amount of unregulated internationalized wealth. Another was a
revolution in telecommunications, which makes it extremely easy to control
international operations in which production is done in one place and the
financing comes from somewhere else and you shift the dollars around. That
means you can have executive offices in a skyscraper in New York and
production facilities in Papua, New Guinea and fake banks in the Cayman
Islands which may be nothing more than a fax machine set up to evade
regulation. You can transfer funds around. You can control and manage
importing and exporting within the corporate empire through management
decisions. It can be scattered all over the world, with branch offices in
Zurich. That's had a lot of effect. Everyone knows that the U.S. share in
international trade has been declining in the last ten years. But in fact if
you look at the share in international trade of U.S.-based corporations, it
has not been declining. It may have been either stable or slightly
increasing. Everyone knows the U.S. is supposed to have a big trade deficit.
On the other hand, if you take into account the operations of overseas
producers that are part of U.S.-based corporations, and imports into the
United States that are actually transfers from U.S. corporations operating
abroad to the same U.S. corporations operating internally, if they import
parts for their own production, it probably levels out the trade deficit,
maybe even gives the U.S. a trade surplus.
The functioning institutions in the world system are increasingly corporate
empires. I say "increasingly" because national states, the rich states, at
least, retain substantial importance. They are instruments of integrated
corporate systems. And also increasing because it's an old phenomenon. It
goes back to the origins of capitalism. It is true that it has grown by
leaps and bounds in recent years.
DB: To continue with GATT: The Environmental News Network has said that GATT
will "open borders for businesses seeking lower labor costs and less
rigorous environmental regulation, thus blackmailing U.S workers to accept
deteriorating working conditions and lower wages or lose their jobs." Do you
think that's a fair assessment?
It's not even controversial. Of course it will have that effect. It's
already having that effect. Take the free-trade agreement with Canada. It's
actually working both ways. Canada has just objected to U.S. environmental
regulations on use of asbestos, claiming that that's interference with free
trade. Canada is an asbestos exporter, and they want the barriers lowered.
Perhaps they've already won on that, meaning that U.S. environmental
regulations on asbestos will have to decline. Sooner or later the U.S. is
probably going to object to the Canadian Health Service as an interference
with free trade because it means that Canadian-based corporations are freed
from the burden of paying parts of health costs that U.S. corporations have
to bear because of the grotesquely incompetent and highly bureaucratized
health system. Threats from U.S. insurance companies were enough to cause
Ontario to drop plans for a provincial auto insurance program that would
have reduced costs, but cut out the highly inefficient private
corporations -- an interference with free trade, they claimed, and won.
Canada has lost several hundred thousand jobs. There are various estimates,
but none are less than a quarter of a million jobs, to the United States,
manufacturing and similar type labor, because Canadian corporations would
much prefer to produce in the southeastern United States, where the
government enforces what are called "right-to-work laws," which means state
policy coerces labor to ensure that there will be no unionization. As a
result, working conditions are far inferior. Wages are less. Naturally,
corporations will move to such places. Even the threat to move serves to
discipline labor. In general, the effect of the free-trade agreements will
be to move to the lowest common denominator with regard to wages, and
environmental protection.
DB: So do you think that under the rubric of free trade that the Canadian
health care system would be seen as an unfair advantage that Canadians have?
It hasn't yet happened, but I would expect it. I expect that American
corporations sooner or later may decide that it would be a good idea to
undermine the Canadian Health Service by an argument of that sort. There are
a lot of calculations involved in that. One problem is that production is so
internationalized that Canadian corporations are often U.S. corporations.
DB: What did you make of the spectacle of the President of the United States
going to Japan with about a score of CEOs of major U.S. corporations and
essentially demanding a kind of "international affirmative action," as Jesse
Jackson has called it?
First of all, remember that the propaganda phrase was, "I'm going for jobs,
jobs, jobs." How much Bush cares about jobs you can see by looking at U.S.
policy towards American workers. So while he's talking about jobs, jobs,
jobs, the U.S. government is trying to set up the basis for maquiladora
industries in Central America to take away American jobs. The phrase means
"profits, profits, profits." That's what he was there for. It was kind of
stupid for the CEOs to come along. It left the United States as an object of
ridicule. But whether they were along or not, that's what the trip was for.
Everybody should have known that. The trip was to coerce Japan into
accepting managed trade, meaning what's called here "fair-trade practices,"
which means mercantilist arrangements between powerful states to violate
free-trade arrangements and ensure that their own powerful economic forces
get benefits. There's nothing novel about that. The Reagan administration
combined free-trade bombast with a highly protectionist record. Take control
over imports. Various kinds of control over imports amount to duties. They
practically doubled, from about twelve percent to about twenty-three
percent, during the Reagan years, through what are sometimes called
"voluntary arrangements," meaning "you do what we say or we'll close off
your market." The latest effort to get Japan to buy American auto parts is
just another part of the state-managed trade system that the rich always
insist upon while of course beating their breasts about free trade when you
can use it as a weapon against someone else.
DB: Is Japan powerful enough to resist?
That's an interesting question. No one really has answers to these
questions. The domestic and international economies are only very dimly
understood by anyone. So anything we say will sound a lot more confident
than it ought to be. My own suspicion has always been that the strength of
the Japanese economy has been overestimated, that it's much flimsier than is
alleged. For objective reasons. Japan is a resource-poor country, highly
dependent upon export for survival. In particular it depends very heavily on
the U.S. market. It's expanding into Asian markets, but that doesn't compare
with the U.S. market. The U.S. remains the richest country in the world.
Also, it's dependent, unlike the United States -- which has plenty of
internal resources and enough military power to control other sources of raw
materials -- on trade for resources and raw materials as well. Also, the
Japanese, when you look at the numbers, look very rich. But if you look at
the way people live, they don't look very rich. People are crammed into tiny
apartments. They live a highly coerced and submissive existence. If you
develop any reasonable quality of life standards, Japan would not rank very
high by many measures, although it ranks quite high in others, like health,
for example. So it's a mixed story. It think there are serious weaknesses in
that economy. I'm not all that surprised by the current recession and
financial crisis in Japan. They have such resources and capital. They'll
doubtless pull out of this one.
DB: Along with the Arab oil producing states and some portions of Europe,
Japan seems to be the only other area where there is excess capital
formation for investment.
There is a lot of excess capital, but it's not clear what it's going to look
like after this crisis has passed. A lot of it was based on very chancy
investments and a huge bubble in real estate which was highly inflated. But
it's still true. They have plenty of excess capital. In my opinion,
German-based Europe is a more likely prospect for a world economic leader in
the long term.
DB: You just said "crisis," which reminds me of something I've been hearing
as long as I can remember, and I am certain you have as well, the "current
crisis in capitalism." It seems to be an ongoing story. Is this particular
crisis any different?
There has been a global stagnation for about twenty years now. The growth
rates and the rise in productivity of the 1950s and 1960s are things of the
past. It leveled off around the early 1970s. Things like the breakdown of
the Bretton Woods system were symptomatic. Since then there has been a kind
of stagnation. It's not level across the globe. For example, for Africa it's
been a catastrophe. For Latin America it's been a catastrophe. In fact, for
most of the domains of the capitalist world it has been absolutely
catastrophic, including internally. Large parts of American and British
society have suffered severely, too. On the other hand, other sectors have
done quite well. The so-called newly industrializing countries of East Asia,
the ones in the Japanese orbit, like South Korea and Taiwan, didn't succumb
in the 1980s to the international crisis of capitalism as Latin America did.
Up until then their growth rates had been pretty comparable. But they
separated sharply in the 1980s, with the East Asian ones doing much better.
Again, nobody really knows the reasons for this, but one factor appears to
have been that, unlike Latin America, the East Asian countries don't make
any pretense of following free-market rules. Capital flight was a huge
problem in Latin America. The wealthy just sent their capital elsewhere, or
else it was just payment on debt. East Asian countries didn't do that. South
Korea has no capital flight problem because the state is powerful enough not
only to control labor, which is the norm, but also to control capital. You
can get the death penalty for capital flight. Other forms of state-corporate
managed industrial and financial development did protect them from this
global crisis of capitalism. Within the rich countries there were various
reactions. The United States and Britain are probably the ones that suffered
most from it, thanks to Reaganite and Thatcherite measures.
Whether you call this a crisis or not, it's not a well enough defined term
so you can answer the question. For a very large part, probably a
considerable majority, of the American work force, real wages have either
stagnated or maybe even declined for about a twenty-year period.
DB: The decline of major U.S. industries, such as auto, textiles,
electronics, etc., is well documented. It's not even a matter of discussion.
The fastest area of growth in jobs in the U.S. is in such areas as janitors,
waiters, truck drivers.
Actually, the fastest growing white collar profession is security guard.
DB: What does that tell you?
It means that there is a large superfluous population that has to be
controlled and a large number of rich people who have to be protected from
them.
DB: Is there any economic strategy or planning to create real jobs with
decent wages?
For U.S. workers? Why should there be?
DB: It would seem that elites would want to protect their position.
But their position does not rely primarily on U.S. labor. They do want to
have a domestic work force for services, but production is a different
matter.
DB: But if there's major economic dislocation in this country, unrest would
surely result and their position of power and strength would be threatened.
That depends on whether you can keep the public under control. For example,
the Washington Post reported on a study about black males in Washington,
D.C.
DB: Forty-six percent of all black males between 18 and 35 are incarcerated
in the District of Columbia.
I think they say at any particular moment about seventy percent of them are
somehow within the control of the justice system, on probation, etc. That's
a way of keeping people from bothering us: keep them in jail. If they're not
useful for wealth production they have to be controlled somehow. But it's
not clear that that's a threat to the elites in the Washington area. Or take
New York City, which is an absolute disaster. But you can walk around
wealthy sectors of downtown Manhattan that look very glitzy and cheery.
DB: Prison construction in the U.S. is one of the fastest growing
industries.
Yes. The U.S. has by far the highest per capita prison population in the
world. Even things like the drug epidemic are functional in a way. I'm not
claiming that the government starts it for this purpose. Things go on
because they have certain functions for elite groups that set policy. One
effect of the so-called "drug war," which has very little to do with
controlling drugs and a lot to do with controlling people, has been to
create a huge explosion in the prison population. Anybody who works with
prisons will tell you that a very substantial part of the prison population
is people who are in there for possession, not for harming anyone. That's a
technique of control. Whether it's an economical technique of control you
could argue. Look how much it costs to control people by putting them in
prison and having them on drugs and therefore not bothering you or having
them shooting and robbing each other in inner cities. How that compares with
other techniques of social control would be a hard question to answer.
However, to go back to your original question. If you were a wealthy
professional or corporate executive living in Westchester County, there are
certain things you want. You want a comfortable environment, a golf course,
to be able to go to the theater in downtown Manhattan. You want your
executive offices to be in good shape. You want fancy restaurants around.
You want to be able to leave your limousine somewhere without having it
broken into. You want good schools for your children. You want a powerful
army to protect your interests. You want a skilled work force insofar as you
need it. But much of what happens in this country is of no interest to you.
If most of the country goes down the tube, that's no big problem.
DB: I love your comment "'Ultimately' is a notion that does not occur in
capitalist planning." Why not?
First of all, there are no capitalist systems. If there were a capitalist
system it couldn't survive for more than a couple of weeks. The only
capitalist systems are the ones that are imposed on Third World countries
for the purpose of weakening them so that they'll collapse and be taken over
by the rich. But there are systems that are more or less capitalist. The
more capitalist they are, that is, the more competitive, and less planned
and integrated, the more they will tend towards short-term gains. That's
inherent in the system. To the extent that a system is competitive and
unplanned, those participating in it will be devoting their resources, both
intellectual and capital, to short-term gain, short-term profit, short-term
increase in market share. The reasons for that are pretty straightforward.
Let's imagine that there are three car companies: Ford, General Motors, and
Chrysler. Let's say they're really competitive. Then suppose that General
Motors decided to put its resources into dealing with problems of global
pollution or even trying to produce better cars ten years from now that
would be better than those of Ford and Chrysler. At the same time its
competitors Ford and Chrysler would be putting their resources into
increasing profits and market share tomorrow, next month, next year. During
that period, General Motors would be out of luck. They wouldn't have the
capital and the profits to carry out their plans. That's exactly why in
countries like Japan in the 1950s, the ministry that directed and organized
the Japanese economy, together with the big corporate conglomerates,
explicitly and openly decided to abandon free-market illusions and to carry
out national industrial planning aimed at Japanese development in "strategic
sectors" with high long-term potential. In newly developing industries, the
industries of the future, the startup costs can be quite considerable.
Profit doesn't come for some time. In a competitive, more capitalist
society, you're out of luck. But in a more managed society you can deal with
that. There are many well-known free-market inadequacies that typically lead
capitalist entrepreneurs to call upon the state to intervene for their
benefit. In Japan this led to a conscious decision to carry out substantial,
organized, planned interference with the market mechanism so that the
economy could prosper. Questions of pollution are perfect examples. If one
company tries to devote resources to effects on the environment, they will
simply be undercut by other companies which are not doing it. Therefore they
will not be in a position to compete in the market. These are matters which
are inherent in our capitalist systems. There were experiments with laissez
faire in Britain in the nineteenth century, when people actually took their
own rhetoric seriously. But they pretty quickly called it off. It's too
destructive.
DB: So you're saying that this class of managers is impervious to the
bridges literally collapsing on the homeless and tunnels bursting under the
city of Chicago?
Not because they're bad people, but because if they stopped being impervious
to it they wouldn't be managers any more. Suppose that the CEO of some big
corporation decides he's going to be a nice guy and devote his resources
from that corporation to the homeless people under the bridges that are
falling down or to global pollution.
DB: He's out of a job.
He's out of a job. That's inherent in the system. These are institutional
facts. If you want to watch this at its more extreme limits, you should take
a look at the World Bank plans on pollution. These recently surfaced. One of
my favorite issues of the New York Times must have been February 7, back in
the business section. There was a report called something like "Can
Capitalism Save the Ozone Layer?" Ozone being a metaphor for saving the
environment. The question was whether capitalism could save the environment.
That was a story by their financial correspondent Sylvia Nasser. The World
Bank had come out with a consensus report for the rich countries on a
position to take at the Rio conference in June on the global environment. It
was written by Lawrence Summers, the chief liberal economist from Harvard.
The idea is that the rich countries should take the position, led by the
World Bank, that the problem of pollution is that the poor countries, the
Third World, don't follow rational policies. "Rational" means market
policies. Many of them are resource and raw material producers, energy
producers, and they sometimes try to use their own resources for their own
development. That's irrational. That means that they're using resources for
themselves, often at below market rates, when there are more efficient
producers in the West who would use those resources more efficiently. That's
interference with the market. Also, these Third World countries often
introduce some measures to protect their own population from total
devastation and starvation, and that's an interference with the market. It's
an interference with rational market policies. The effect of this Third
World irrationality is to increase production in places where it shouldn't
be taking place, to increase development in places where it shouldn't be
going on, and that causes pollution. So if we could only convince those
Third World countries to behave rationally, that is, to give all their
resources to us and stop protecting their own populations, that would reduce
the pollution problem.
This document was produced with a straight face. It happened that on the
same day on the same page of the New York Times there was a little article,
unrelated, about a World Bank memo, an internal memo, that had leaked. It
had been published by the London Economist, a right-wing British Wall Street
Journal, but weekly. It was written by the same Lawrence Summers. The Times
had a brief, slightly apologetic summary of it, including an interview with
Summers in which he claimed it was intended to be sarcastic. The World Bank
memo added to what I have just said about Third World irrationality. It said
that any kind of production is going to involve pollution. So what you have
to do is to do it as rationally as possible, meaning with minimal cost. So
suppose we have a chemical factory producing carcinogenic gases that are
going into the environment. If we put that factory in Los Angeles, we can
calculate the number of people who will die of cancer in the next forty
years. We can even calculate the value of their lives in terms of income or
whatever. Suppose we put that factory in Sao Paulo or some even poorer area.
Many fewer people will die of cancer because they'll die anyway of something
else, and besides, their lives aren't worth as much by any rational measure.
So it makes sense to move all the polluting industries to places where poor
people die, not where rich people die. That's on simple economic grounds.
Combine that with the other document. What it says is that the Third World
should stop producing and protecting its own population because that's
irrational. We should send our polluting industries to them because that is
rational. Summers in this memo points out that you might have
counterarguments to this based on human rights and the right of people to a
certain quality of life. But he points out that if we allowed those
arguments to enter into our calculations, then just about everything the
World Bank does would be undermined. That's quite accurate. That's supposed
to be a reductio ad absurdum. Obviously we can't undermine everything the
World Bank does, so obviously we can't allow such considerations to enter.
We consider only economic rationality, of course geared to the interests of
the World Bank. That's what you do with pollution. Try to convince the Third
World to stop producing and to stop protecting their own population and to
accept our pollution. It's all perfectly explicable on rational economic
grounds. Any graduate student in economics can prove it to you.
DB: Apropos of this blindness of the planners: you have a fantasy ...
It's not blindness. I think it's very reasonable on their part.
DB: Within their framework.
Yes.
DB: You tell of a fantasy that involves the Wall Street Journal and the
greenhouse effect.
Someone asked me once and I simply said that if I had the talent, which I
don't, I would write a short story about the Wall Street Journal. I suppose
their offices are on the seventeenth floor of some New York skyscraper.
They're sitting there in that office putting out an issue of the Wall Street
Journal claiming once again that the greenhouse effect is just a fraud
invented by left fanatics. As the issue goes to press the water level would
have risen to that point and you could hear them gurgling as they start the
printer running. That's about what it's like.
DB: Let's talk about organized labor unions in the United States. Only
fifteen or sixteen percent of the total U.S. work force is now unionized,
far below, perhaps by half or even more, what it was decades ago. This is
the era of givebacks, benefits reductions, skipping, deferring or
eliminating raises. Does organized labor really have a positive, progressive
role to play?
It should, but it's in a very weakened state. It's been weak for a long
time, but it was smashed during the 1980s. It started with Reagan's success
in breaking the air-traffic controllers' strike, and it's continuing until
today. The UAW just lost a serious strike at Caterpillar. Their strategy has
been so overcome by class collaboration -- We nice guys work together with
management -- that when the crisis came at Caterpillar they were probably
unprepared. They were simply wiped out. At this point Caterpillar probably
won't even live up to the terms of the latest agreement. It seems to be
continuing to lock them out. These are serious blows to the labor movement,
and that means to American democracy, but they're much to the benefit of the
small sectors that are enriching themselves. Does labor have a part to play?
It depends on whether working people can get their act together and rebuild
the labor movement and turn it into a powerful force for both people's
rights and democracy as it once was. It's going to have to be rebuilt from
the bottom up. Labor's role has declined significantly since the 1940s.
They're not unaware of it. Doug Fraser, the former head of the UAW, pointed
out almost fifteen years ago that there has been a bitter, one-sided class
war led by American capitalists fighting against labor, while labor, meaning
labor bureaucrats, have been seduced by class-collaboration slogans. They're
not fighting a class war. The effect of a bitter, one-sided class war is
very evident.
DB: The New York Times, in talking about the economic woes, says "There is
little mystery about what caused the economic problems. The country is
suffering a hangover from the mergers, rampant speculation, overbuilding,
heavy borrowing and irresponsible government fiscal policy in the 1980s."
How well did the Times and its brethren in the media during this period of
economic dislocation and decline actually cover the events and give the
American people information that they could act upon?
The Times isn't in the business of giving the American people information
they can act upon. They hailed the Reagan revolution and its achievements.
There were sectors of the population that profited marvelously, including
the corporate sectors, of which the Times is a part. They couldn't fail to
see that there are social costs. You can't walk around New York City and not
see that there are severe social costs, so they probably saw it too. But
this was considered as a glorious period of success. There were people who
were upset about it. Take a look at, say, Mondale's funding in 1984: a lot
of it was from fiscal conservatives who were worried about the long-term
effects to their own interests of this kind of mad-dog Keynesianism, wild
crazed spending, and government stimulation of the economy through borrowing
that was going on through the Reagan years. People could see that that was
going to be very problematic for the economy. Take what's just happened in
Chicago. The estimates of the costs of fixing those leaks in the underground
tunnels might have been at the level of $10,000. They didn't fix them
because they wanted to save the $10,000 as part of the cutback in civic
services. The net effect will be a loss of maybe over a billion dollars or
more. That's a loss to private capital, too.
DB: But compared to the S&L bailout that's peanuts.
Yes, the S&L bailout is much bigger than that. Chicago is just one piece of
a growing disaster. Spending on infrastructure has declined radically in the
last ten years, and that's going to have its costs. What happened in Chicago
is going to happen all over the place.
DB: It can't help but affect even the elites. The area that was flooded ...
And it's hurting them in Chicago. Chicago businesses are suffering.
Insurance companies are going to suffer.
DB: They're not going to like that.
No, but there's not a lot that they can do about it except to accept more
long-term, integrated state corporate planning. There are other
possibilities, like democracy, but nobody's going to talk about that.
DB: Yeah, right. And maybe there will just be more slogans like
"belt-tightening" and "austerity" and "biting the bullet" as opposed to
genuine economic policy.
There is genuine economic policy, but it's geared to the short term economic
interests of the rich. It's very genuine. And there's plenty of state
intervention for that purpose. Take the Pentagon budget. That's massive
state intervention in the economy for the benefit of the rich. That's what
keeps the electronics industry going, for example.
Shel Scott <WellDone> wrote in message
news:qbshfv4qfj4h3li3e...@4ax.com...
Shel Scott
>> of it.
>
>It is you who apparently does not know history, nor of the international
>monetary bodies and their influence. Just another ignorant parrot fascist
>cheerleader too lazy to pick up a book or do a google search.
>
work. You're a lot of ignorant dipshits! Oh, and you likely don't
realize how stupid you look calling me a fascist; I'm no socialist...
Shel Scott
>http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/rab/rab-1.html
<snip>
Please don't pollute the ng with this ridiculous nonsense.
KartoffelKanone
Shel Scott <WellDone> wrote in message
> "KartoffelKanone" <xl...@operamail.com> wrote:
> >Shel Scott <WellDone> wrote
> >> I see you've had the lobotomy, and what's more... you're PROUD
> >> of it.
> >
> >It is you who apparently does not know history, nor of the international
> >monetary bodies and their influence. Just another ignorant parrot
fascist
> >cheerleader too lazy to pick up a book or do a google search.
> >
> I'm always amused how Chomskyites presume I haven't read the asshole's
> work.
Looking at your posts, it is obvious you have not read any Chomsky(or much
else), or you would not be so ignorant. What else are we to assume when you
seem unaware of the existense of the World Bank and IMF? I suppose now I'm
a conspiracy theorist for mentioning the key players in ripping off the
third world.
You're a lot of ignorant dipshits! Oh, and you likely don't
> realize how stupid you look calling me a fascist; I'm no socialist...
Well now, let's just have a look back at what you wrote....
"
The soft-headed left in Chile combined with Marxist agitators from
Spain and Soviet "advisors" to make Chile a prime target for economic
liberation. Too bad the U. S. didn't have more control over the
situation.
"
OK, so you justify dirty tricks and coups when someone you don't like is
elected. You back the CIA placed dictator Pinochet with his death squads.
I think you have Swastika print underwear.
Russil Wvong
> 1) U. S. companies invest in El Salvador.
> 2) Marxists, with the support of the Soviets, take over, intending to
> base their country's economy on said investment. Note that there was
> no real interest in El Salvador before said U. S. based investment.
> 3) The experiment fails, to the surprise of nobody except the hard
> left.
Er, don't you mean Nicaragua?
For Chomsky fans, I've put together a critical review of his writings:
http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/chomsky.html
A detailed analysis of his writings on Cambodia, by Bruce Sharp:
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm
The US has done plenty of terrible things -- there is no power without
guilt -- but I wouldn't rely on Chomsky for an honest assessment.
Russil Wvong
Vancouver, Canada
www.geocities.com/rwvong
KartoffelKanone
John Corman <jcorman@xyzxyz_shaw.ca> wrote in message
news:uribfvk02crgfpm98...@4ax.com...
No, man. It is the truth. If you knew a bit about history you would know
about the CIA doing just that as part of the "Low Intensity Conflict". Then
there is the School of the Americas where the death squads of El Salvador
and other US controlled banana republics get their training.
You know, it's funny how those with the smart-ass comments, are the most
ignorant. See: Shell Scot, the other pissed-off, but equally as impotent
and ignorant apologist for US fascist foreign policy.
You are pissed-off, yes. You are pissed-off at the person who tells the
truth. The painful truth that is in all the papers, if you were to look.
You are pissed off at the bringer of the painful truth, but you should be
pissed-off at the murder committed in the name of the USA.
Or are you one of those idiots that wonder why the US is hated around the
world?
You would rather be directed by the corporate media on what the world is
like, rather than getting to the substance(no not drugs smartass) of issues.
Because one man has the guts and the intellectual brilliance to bring US
terrorism to light, and it does not fit with what you where not told by the
media, he must be on drugs?
For fucks sake read a book, and stop being such a glib fool.
To get you started:
Chronology of U.S. Terrorism and Genocide of the Central American, South
American and Caribbean Peoples
http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/usgenocide/CrbnCnSthAmrc.h
tml
> John Corman
Shel Scott
>Shel Scott <WellDone> wrote:
>> 1) U. S. companies invest in El Salvador.
>> 2) Marxists, with the support of the Soviets, take over, intending to
>> base their country's economy on said investment. Note that there was
>> no real interest in El Salvador before said U. S. based investment.
>> 3) The experiment fails, to the surprise of nobody except the hard
>> left.
>
>Er, don't you mean Nicaragua?
>
El Salvador was targetted by Nicaragua -based guerrillas.
>For Chomsky fans, I've put together a critical review of his writings:
>http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/chomsky.html
>
>A detailed analysis of his writings on Cambodia, by Bruce Sharp:
>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm
>
>The US has done plenty of terrible things -- there is no power without
>guilt --
>
The problem I have with Chomsky is that his followers don't seem to
realize this is simply how things happen. The U. S. does nothing that
other countries don't do, they just do it better and usually with far
more concern for citizens than other countries show.
>but I wouldn't rely on Chomsky for an honest assessment.
>
Nor would I.
>Russil Wvong
>Vancouver, Canada
>www.geocities.com/rwvong
--
Shel Scott
>John Corman <jcorman@xyzxyz_shaw.ca> wrote:
>> So, what he was actually saying was that Some Americans thought that;
>> "to murder union organizers and peasant leaders, to torture priests,
>> to massacre peasants, to undermine social programs, and so on"----
>> would improve the investment climate.
>> Again, an indication of too many drugs ingested, imho.
>
>No, man. It is the truth. If you knew a bit about history you would know
>about the CIA doing just that as part of the "Low Intensity Conflict". Then
>there is the School of the Americas where the death squads of El Salvador
>and other US controlled banana republics get their training.
>
to tango.
>You know, it's funny how those with the smart-ass comments, are the most
>ignorant. See: Shell Scot, the other pissed-off, but equally as impotent
>and ignorant apologist for US fascist foreign policy.
>
Ho hum, another demented fruitcake who think Chomsky is the real truth
and the U. S. is "fascist". You have no clue what fascism is, do you?
>You are pissed-off, yes. You are pissed-off at the person who tells the
>truth. The painful truth that is in all the papers, if you were to look.
>
No "pissed off" at all, in fact amused that so many people think
Chomsky is the truth. Chomsky is insane!
>You are pissed off at the bringer of the painful truth, but you should be
>pissed-off at the murder committed in the name of the USA.
>
No more "pissed-off" than at murder committed in the name of every
other country. This is the error Chomskyites make; pretending only the
U. S. does this sort of thing. There are actually folks who think the
U. S. is the source of most of the world's problems. Pretty
lobotomized world view.
>Or are you one of those idiots that wonder why the US is hated
>around the world?
>
The US is loved around the world too. Pick and choose whose views you
prefer, but don't go thinking your personal preference defines the
world.
>You would rather be directed by the corporate media on what the world is
>like, rather than getting to the substance(no not drugs smartass) of issues.
>Because one man has the guts and the intellectual brilliance to bring US
>terrorism to light, and it does not fit with what you where not told by the
>media, he must be on drugs?
>
Chomsky is a raving lunatic whose childish and stunted perspective is
in and of itself a joke!
>For fucks sake read a book, and stop being such a glib fool.
>
Fuck you, you ignorant, officious moron. How gawdamn stupid you look
presuming none of us has read your idol's bullshit!
>To get you started:
>Chronology of U.S. Terrorism and Genocide of the Central American, South
>American and Caribbean Peoples
>http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/usgenocide/CrbnCnSthAmrc.h
>tml
>
Oh, yes, that's right, the U. S. committed "genocid" in Central and
South American and the Carribean. What a fucking clown you are!
Russil Wvong
> John Corman <jcorman@xyzxyz_shaw.ca> wrote:
> > So, what he was actually saying was that Some Americans thought that;
> >
> > "to murder union organizers and peasant leaders, to torture priests,
> > to massacre peasants, to undermine social programs, and so on"----
> > would improve the investment climate.
> >
> > Again, an indication of too many drugs ingested, imho.
>
> No, man. It is the truth. If you knew a bit about history you would know
> about the CIA doing just that as part of the "Low Intensity Conflict". Then
> there is the School of the Americas where the death squads of El Salvador
> and other US controlled banana republics get their training.
I think you might be missing the point that seems truly unbelievable.
The US trained Central American military officers in torture and summary
execution *in order to improve the investment climate*? This is part of
Chomsky's simplistic "all US foreign policy is driven by economic
motivations" theory.
It's sufficient to criticize the US for training people in the use of
torture and summary execution -- even if there was a Cold War on, with
Marxist guerrillas trying to overthrow governments in the US's backyard,
you have to draw the line *somewhere*, and I think the use of torture
crosses that line. It shouldn't be necessary to make up fantasy
theories about economic motivations.
For a discussion of economic explanations of imperialism, see
http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/chomsky.html#3.3
John Corman
wrote:
>> John Corman <jcorman@xyzxyz_shaw.ca> wrote:
>> > So, what he was actually saying was that Some Americans thought that;
>> >
>> > "to murder union organizers and peasant leaders, to torture priests,
>> > to massacre peasants, to undermine social programs, and so on"----
>> > would improve the investment climate.
>> >
>> > Again, an indication of too many drugs ingested, imho.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>"KartoffelKanone" <xl...@operamail.com> wrote:
>> No, man. It is the truth. If you knew a bit about history you would know
>> about the CIA doing just that as part of the "Low Intensity Conflict". Then
>> there is the School of the Americas where the death squads of El Salvador
>> and other US controlled banana republics get their training.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>I think you might be missing the point that seems truly unbelievable.
>The US trained Central American military officers in torture and summary
>execution *in order to improve the investment climate*? This is part of
>Chomsky's simplistic "all US foreign policy is driven by economic
>motivations" theory.
=========================================================
Thank you. It's not only Chomsky's childish interpretation of events,
it's, unfortunately, the interpretation of many in this group.
One of the constant irritating themes emanating from the Lefties in
these groups is that someone, some country, or some entity, is doing
what they're doing solely to fuck the "little people". Trust me,
these "fuckors" likely have too many problems with their own kids to
be worrying about how to make the lives of other parents miserable.
John Corman
Bill Van
russi...@yahoo.com (Russil Wvong) wrote:
> I think you might be missing the point that seems truly unbelievable.
> The US trained Central American military officers in torture and summary
> execution *in order to improve the investment climate*?
Think ironic understatement, Russil.
Would you feel better if Chomsky said they were doing it to protect
their sphere of influence from Marxists who might overthrow
U.S.-capital-friendly governments and replace them with nasty
left-leaning regimes that would nationalize U.S. companies, confiscate
their assets and demand a fair price for their resources?
Surely the U.S. didn't go to the trouble of training torturers and
executioners because some Central Americans were cheering for the wrong
baseball teams, or refused to brush their teeth after dinner. They did
it to prevent the overthrow of the client states that propped up the
economic system that made the U.S. at the time of the Cold War one of
the two most powerful countries in the world. I have no problem at all
seeing why the U.S. would go to considerable trouble to do that.
> This is part of
> Chomsky's simplistic "all US foreign policy is driven by economic
> motivations" theory.
Why is that simplistic, Russil? Not only was the U.S. defending its
economic sphere of influence, it was arguably striving simultaneously to
become the world's one and only dominant superpower. I can see how that
could motivate the U.S. to use extreme measures. Why can't you?
>
> It's sufficient to criticize the US for training people in the use of
> torture and summary execution -- even if there was a Cold War on, with
> Marxist guerrillas trying to overthrow governments in the US's backyard,
> you have to draw the line *somewhere*, and I think the use of torture
> crosses that line. It shouldn't be necessary to make up fantasy
> theories about economic motivations.
>
Well, we agree that torture and execution are bad things. But what was
motivating the U.S., in your view, if it wasn't what was sometimes
referred to as the defence of the free world, which on closer
examination always turned out to be the defence of capitalism and U.S.
economic influence?
bill
Russil Wvong
> Would you feel better if Chomsky said they were doing it to protect
> their sphere of influence from Marxists who might overthrow
> U.S.-capital-friendly governments and replace them with nasty
> left-leaning regimes that would nationalize U.S. companies, confiscate
> their assets and demand a fair price for their resources?
No. Again, read the reference I posted for an explanation of why
international politics is driven primarily by *power*, not *economics*:
http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/chomsky.html#3.3
> Well, we agree that torture and execution are bad things. But what was
> motivating the U.S., in your view --
Maintaining the status quo (referring to the international distribution
of power). Specifically, major international conflicts such as the
Cold War are best understood as struggles between those seeking to
maintain the status quo and those seeking to overthrow it (whether
it's the Soviet Union under Stalin, Germany under Hitler or Wilhelm II,
or France under Napoleon). The latter are often referred to as
revisionist states: they seek to revise the status quo.
What drives this struggle isn't economics, it's human nature, and
specifically the desire for power: It's human nature to feel keenly
the grievances and humiliations inflicted on oneself by others, while
disregarding those that you inflict on other people. Similarly, it's
human nature to resent and oppose others' desire to gain power over
you, while viewing one's own desire for power over others as natural
and just. Thus both sides *always* think they're the good guys.
See the alt.politics.international FAQ, specifically section 3:
http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/apifaq.html
If you have the time and patience to read books, I would strongly
recommend the following:
Hans Morgenthau, "Politics Among Nations." Papers on Canada's
foreign policy during the early Cold War describe this as the
bible of power politics for Canadian diplomats.
Louis Halle, "The Cold War as History." An even-handed
description of the Cold War from 1945 to 1962, with a
particularly vivid description of the fear and exhaustion
felt in Western Europe and the United States in the aftermath
of World War II.
I repeat: the US has done lots of terrible things. There is no
power without guilt. But if you're not familiar with the nature
of its major opponents during the 20th century, I would strongly
recommend the following:
William Shirer, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." I
picked this up because I was irritated by the ongoing
Holocaust-denial propaganda on USENET, and realized I didn't
know that much about Nazi Germany. It's pretty scary to
realize just how close Hitler came to winning the war.
John Toland, "The Rising Sun." The Pacific War from Japan's
point of view.
Robert Conquest, "The Great Terror." Describes the purges
in which Stalin killed millions of people.
Maurice Meisner, "Mao's China and After." A sympathetic
account, but doesn't shrink from describing the human toll
of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
Finally, I'd recommend Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in
America" for anyone who's interested in liberal democracy and
the US in particular, whether you seek to praise or condemn it.
Bill Van
russi...@yahoo.com (Russil Wvong) wrote:
> Bill Van <bil...@canada.com> wrote:
> > Would you feel better if Chomsky said they were doing it to protect
> > their sphere of influence from Marxists who might overthrow
> > U.S.-capital-friendly governments and replace them with nasty
> > left-leaning regimes that would nationalize U.S. companies, confiscate
> > their assets and demand a fair price for their resources?
>
> No. Again, read the reference I posted for an explanation of why
> international politics is driven primarily by *power*, not *economics*:
> http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/chomsky.html#3.3
I have read the reference. You've put a lot of work into it which I'm in
no position to duplicate. But it strikes me that you are reducing
"power" to an abstract concept, something that is pursued for its own
sake, without examining what it is used for. If you remove that layer of
abstraction and look at what it is that power is used to control, I
think you'll generally find the economic connections.
>
> > Well, we agree that torture and execution are bad things. But what was
> > motivating the U.S., in your view --
>
> Maintaining the status quo (referring to the international distribution
> of power). Specifically, major international conflicts such as the
> Cold War are best understood as struggles between those seeking to
> maintain the status quo and those seeking to overthrow it (whether
> it's the Soviet Union under Stalin, Germany under Hitler or Wilhelm II,
> or France under Napoleon). The latter are often referred to as
> revisionist states: they seek to revise the status quo.
Yes. And why were they seeking either to maintain or overthrow the
status quo? German nationalists thought they were being ruined
economically by the conditions of peace set by the victors after WWI.
The Soviets sought to wrest economic power from the capitalists on
behalf of the working classes (in theory at least). And so on. The
economic underpinnings are generally obvious and it seems to me you're
doing some awkward twisting to avoid seeing them.
>
> What drives this struggle isn't economics, it's human nature, and
> specifically the desire for power: It's human nature to feel keenly
> the grievances and humiliations inflicted on oneself by others, while
> disregarding those that you inflict on other people. Similarly, it's
> human nature to resent and oppose others' desire to gain power over
> you, while viewing one's own desire for power over others as natural
> and just. Thus both sides *always* think they're the good guys.
I have always found human nature to be a shifting thing that varies with
conditions. A simple example: people sometimes revolt against their
rulers and sometimes not. Whether they revolt is not determined by an
abstracted (again) human nature that operates in a vacuum, but by the
conditions in which they find themselves. Examine the conditions and you
can find out something about why people behave as they do. You can't do
with an abstracted notion of human nature.
>
> See the alt.politics.international FAQ, specifically section 3:
> http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/apifaq.html
>
> If you have the time and patience to read books, I would strongly
> recommend the following:
(snip)
>
I might have the patience but I do not have the time now nor do I expect
to have it any time soon.
> I repeat: the US has done lots of terrible things. There is no
> power without guilt. But if you're not familiar with the nature
> of its major opponents during the 20th century, I would strongly
> recommend the following:
(another fine book list snipped)
We should remember that Chomsky is not primarily a historian, but a
critic specifically of U.S. foreign policy during the past half century
or so -- essentially the period after the U.S. ended its partial
isolation from world affairs and began to assert itself as a world
economic and military power. I find his arguments that U.S. policy is
primarily driven by economics to be generally persuasive, from the Latin
American incursions where specific U.S. economic interests were
threatened to the Middle East, where it took over from Britain and
France in seeking to control the supply of oil on behalf of the
capitalist world.
On a slight tangent, I am disappointed to see you repeat, without much
examination, the attacks on Chomsky over his alleged position on
Cambodia. I had a reason to look into that situation a few years ago and
went back to his original statements to discover that practically the
first thing he did was to denounce the genocide that took place in
Cambodia. He then proceeded to compare that genocide with the roughly
simultaneous one in East Timor and criticized the U.S. for emphasizing
the one while ignoring and arguably encouraging the other, and arguing
that the difference was dictated by U.S. economic interests.
Critics then proceeded to accuse him of supporting the Cambodian
genocide, and I'm afraid the quotes on your Web site follow their lead.
bill
Shel Scott
>Would you feel better if Chomsky said they were doing it to protect
>their sphere of influence from Marxists who might overthrow
>U.S.-capital-friendly governments and replace them with nasty
>left-leaning regimes that would nationalize U.S. companies, confiscate
>their assets and demand a fair price for their resources?
>
until after the hundreds of millions of dollars of investment were in
place?
---
Confiscation of assets is a particularly lefty gov't action, as was
seen in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The peasant revolt (led
by Stalinists, though the left will not admit this) that formed the
"government" was fond of placing notices on places of business,
announcing that all assets had been confiscated by the state.
Those business owners were loathe to complain; since the confiscations
were "The Will of The People"(TM) it was an irrational act to dare to
oppose this state-claimed "Will".
Bill Van
Shel Scott <WellDone> wrote:
> Bill Van <bil...@canada.com> wrote:
> >Would you feel better if Chomsky said they were doing it to protect
> >their sphere of influence from Marxists who might overthrow
> >U.S.-capital-friendly governments and replace them with nasty
> >left-leaning regimes that would nationalize U.S. companies, confiscate
> >their assets and demand a fair price for their resources?
> >
> Tell us, Bill, why did those lefties wait to stage their revolution
> until after the hundreds of millions of dollars of investment were in
> place?
> ---
That might depend on the particular time and place you have in mind. But
in the Latin American context we were discussing, chances are pretty
good that the hundreds of millions of dollars of investment were the
very instruments of oppression that they were revolting against. You
know, where you grow bananas or sugar cane or mine some mineral or
other, and "hire" locals, at the point of a gun if necessary, pay them
starvation wages, employ them in unsafe situations, and then charge them
a small fortune for inadequate housing and food. That kind of investment
is worth revolting against.
bill
Russil Wvong
> ... It strikes me that you are reducing
> sake, without examining what it is used for. If you remove that layer of
> abstraction and look at what it is that power is used to control, I
> think you'll generally find the economic connections.
Perhaps I ought to discuss what I mean by "power." I mean *the ability
to impose one's will on others*, whether by military force, economic
incentives, religious or legal authority. As I said, power is always
morally questionable, because you're overriding someone else's will.
Power is what defines politics: politics is concerned with the
distribution and use of power. This is true whether we're talking
about international politics or domestic politics.
I'm not sure how far we'll get in talking about human nature, but I
would suggest that individuals are not motivated solely, or even
primarily, by the desire to maximize their wealth. Why does Paul
Martin want to be prime minister? Not to maximize his wealth,
that's for sure. It's not wealth that motivates his drive to
become prime minister; I would suggest that it's the desire for
*power*. It's human nature -- or simple egotism, if you like --
for each of us to believe that if *we* were the ones with the power,
we'd do a better job than the screwups who are currently running
things.
Now of course people may have aims beyond simply attaining power.
But in international politics, *you cannot accomplish anything --
even self-defense -- without power*. Therefore, regardless of
one's ultimate aims, the *immediate* aim of every state's foreign
policy is either to maintain one's power (*status quo*) or to
increase it (*revisionist*).
Moreover, in economics there's the idea of a win-win transaction,
in which both parties gain. This isn't the case in politics:
power is always relative, and so a gain for one party is a loss
for another. This is why conflict is an integral part of
politics.
This is why international politics is so ugly: it's because it's
about power.
You say that if you look at what power is used *for*, it's usually
for economic objectives. Let's take a look at some of your examples.
> German nationalists thought they were being ruined
> economically by the conditions of peace set by the victors after WWI.
This does *not* explain why Hitler launched World War II. German
reparations had already been renegotiated by the Dawes Plan (1924)
and the Young Plan (1929). The Lausanne Conference (1932) ended
Allied attempts to extract reparations from Germany. This all
happened *before* Hitler came to power in 1933.
> The Soviets sought to wrest economic power from the capitalists on
> behalf of the working classes (in theory at least).
In other words, the Soviet leaders sought *social justice*, not
economic gain. (The gap between their utopian objectives and their
actual methods demonstrates the relative insignificance of ends
compared to means -- *everyone* believes that their ends are noble.
I'm sure Hitler thought his ultimate objectives were noble.)
> > What drives this struggle isn't economics, it's human nature, and
> > specifically the desire for power: It's human nature to feel keenly
> > the grievances and humiliations inflicted on oneself by others, while
> > disregarding those that you inflict on other people. ...
>
> I have always found human nature to be a shifting thing that varies with
> conditions.
You don't agree with my characterization here? (I'd be interested
in hearing more about your view of human nature.)
> We should remember that Chomsky is not primarily a historian, but a
> critic specifically of U.S. foreign policy during the past half century
> or so -- essentially the period after the U.S. ended its partial
> isolation from world affairs and began to assert itself as a world
> economic and military power. I find his arguments that U.S. policy is
> primarily driven by economics to be generally persuasive, from the Latin
> American incursions where specific U.S. economic interests were
> threatened to the Middle East, where it took over from Britain and
> France in seeking to control the supply of oil on behalf of the
> capitalist world.
Frankly, I don't see how you separate the two roles. If he's making
an argument about what was driving US policy, he's making a historical
argument. Radical historians such as Robert Buzzanco are happy to
claim Chomsky as one of their own. If you're not willing to examine
his historical arguments critically -- in particular, by checking what
other historians have to say -- you're in danger of getting an extremely
distorted view of 20th-century history. (With respect to Latin American
history, I'd recommend checking "Modern Latin America", by Skidmore and
Smith; in the Middle East, "The Arab World Today", by Polk. Oh, wait,
never mind, you don't have time to read books.)
> On a slight tangent, I am disappointed to see you repeat, without much
> examination, the attacks on Chomsky over his alleged position on
> Cambodia. I had a reason to look into that situation a few years ago and
> went back to his original statements to discover that practically the
> first thing he did was to denounce the genocide that took place in
> Cambodia. He then proceeded to compare that genocide with the roughly
> simultaneous one in East Timor and criticized the U.S. for emphasizing
> the one while ignoring and arguably encouraging the other, and arguing
> that the difference was dictated by U.S. economic interests.
I'm afraid you may not have looked into it closely enough. His 1977
article (co-written with Edward Herman), "Distortions at Fourth Hand",
had nothing to do with East Timor. For a detailed discussion, see
Bruce Sharp's article "Averaging Wrong Answers: Noam Chomsky and
the Cambodia Controversy."
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm#chiii
From the article:
In later years, many of Chomsky's supporters have argued that the
point of his comments on Cambodia was to contrast the media
response to events in Cambodia with what were (according to
Chomsky) atrocities of similar scale in other countries, such as
East Timor. This, however, is not the argument advanced by Chomsky
and Herman in 1977; there is no mention of East Timor, or any other
comparable country, in "Distortions." The premise of the article
is straightforward: the media was distorting the truth.
> Critics then proceeded to accuse him of supporting the Cambodian
> genocide, and I'm afraid the quotes on your Web site follow their lead.
Er, there's only one quote, and it doesn't accuse Chomsky of supporting
the Cambodian genocide. Again, it's by Bruce Sharp.
Having reread Chomsky's comments on Cambodia, having heard him speak,
and having seen the documentary about the good professor, I have no
doubt that he is a man of honor and great integrity.
However, he knows nothing about Cambodia.
No... that isn't true. The truth is much worse. He knows just enough
about Cambodia to sound knowledgable to all of the people who really
don't know anything about Cambodia....
How could Chomsky have so seriously misjudged the nature of the
Khmer Rouge? One reason is what I would refer to as the "The Curse
of the Generalist." Chomsky writes about events all over the world.
Can one person really understand all of the intricacies of the
politics and history of any one country? Probably. But can one
person understand the intricacies of ten countries? fifty? two
hundred? No.
There are conflicting accounts of the history of any country and
any event. How can a person who does not have specialized knowledge
of a given country evaluate which of those accounts is accurate?
In Chomsky's case, he does not evaluate all sources and then
determine which stand up to logical inquiry. Rather, he examines
a handful of accounts until he finds one which matches his
predetermined idea of what the truth must be. He does not derive
his theories from the evidence. Instead, he selectively gathers
"evidence" which supports his theories and ignores the rest.
Bill Van
> Bill Van <bil...@canada.com> wrote:
> > ... It strikes me that you are reducing
> > "power" to an abstract concept, something that is pursued for its own
> > sake, without examining what it is used for. If you remove that layer of
> > abstraction and look at what it is that power is used to control, I
> > think you'll generally find the economic connections.
>
> Perhaps I ought to discuss what I mean by "power." I mean *the ability
> to impose one's will on others*, whether by military force, economic
> incentives, religious or legal authority. As I said, power is always
> morally questionable, because you're overriding someone else's will.
Always? There have been instances of politicians democratically elected
to carry out a certain mandate, who then proceed to do so, no more and
no less. What is morally questionable about that?
I'm sure I can think of other instances in which the exercise of power
is not morally questionable. A bureaucrat, say, who approves or
disapproves applications for anything at all, and makes his/her
decisions within whatever the rules are, and with as much compassion as
is reasonable in the circumstances. Or a member of the clergy who serves
his congregation selflessly, and with their best interests in mind.
Where's the moral questionability?
However, I could agree if you said that whenever power is exercised, it
behooves us to keep an eye on those who exercise it.
> Power is what defines politics: politics is concerned with the
> distribution and use of power. This is true whether we're talking
> about international politics or domestic politics.
Politics and power are certainly closely related, but I don't know that
power defines politics. The simplest definition of politics is the art
and science of government. Power enters into it but IMO does not
necessarily define it. There are politicians who strive for consensus
and serve the community, and neither seek nor acquire power beyond the
ability to carry out the community's wishes and/or the duties of office.
Your definitions do not account for them.
I'm a lifelong cynic, but if you believe that power is the only thing
that defines politics, your cynicism easily trumps mine.
>
> I'm not sure how far we'll get in talking about human nature, but I
> would suggest that individuals are not motivated solely, or even
> primarily, by the desire to maximize their wealth. Why does Paul
> Martin want to be prime minister? Not to maximize his wealth,
> that's for sure. It's not wealth that motivates his drive to
> become prime minister; I would suggest that it's the desire for
> *power*.
That may well be true in Paul Martin's case, but that does not make it
universal, nor even standard. I think people who seek political office,
or who acquire any kind of power, have varying motivations, some
stronger than others. But there is no rule that says lust for power has
to be chief among them in a given individual. My guess is that all
individuals who seek office tend to have a mix of motivations. Power may
or may not be one of them. Even if we agree that desire for power is a
common ingredient in the motivational mix, I see nothing that demands it
be the major ingredient, or present in any given individual.
> It's human nature -- or simple egotism, if you like --
> for each of us to believe that if *we* were the ones with the power,
> we'd do a better job than the screwups who are currently running
> things.
That is not to say all of us share that belief. I know very well there
are some things I do very well, and others that I do badly, and others
where I have no idea how I'd do. Holding power and running a government
falls into the third category. I have no ambition to be a politician, or
a boss or a manager, and except at the most superficial conversational
level, I do not believe that in most areas of human endeavour, I could
necessarily do a better job than anyone else.
Unless you refuse to believe I feel that way, and that there are others
like me, (and how would you prove *that*?) I think that defeats the
human nature argument. There is no particular set human nature, IMO.
Even the most basic tendencies that most of us share, such as survival
instincts, are neither exclusive to humans nor universal among humans if
you consider people who commit suicide and groups that follow clearly
anti-survival paths. I say it all depends on the individual, his/her
nature and nurture, and the conditions in which he/she finds
him/herself. If human nature was a fixed, definable thing, so would
human behavior be, and sociology would be a hard science.
>
> Now of course people may have aims beyond simply attaining power.
Scuse me, but you have not established that all of them have the
attainment of power among their aims. You have only asserted it.
> But in international politics, *you cannot accomplish anything --
> even self-defense -- without power*.
Oh, I don't know. You could use outstanding diplomacy, or sell your
resources or your UN votes to nations that do have power, or be very
good at picking winners and getting on their good side, or aligning
yourself with other low-powered nations, and generally be smarter than
the big, powerful guys. I suppose you could define all of that as part
of possessing power, i.e. the ability to impose your will.
However, I think the current example of the United States, clearly the
most powerful nation on earth, shows us that immense power and a
ruthless willingness to use it does not necessarily get you your own way
all the time, i.e. does not necessarily allow you to impose your will
with the desired results on, say, Iraq or even France.
> Therefore, regardless of
> one's ultimate aims, the *immediate* aim of every state's foreign
> policy is either to maintain one's power (*status quo*) or to
> increase it (*revisionist*).
It strikes me that you're trapping yourself in an analytical structure
that requires you to see every situation from that same perspective.
That is to say, I think you have a rather rigid model on your hands. It
doesn't prove that every instance involves winners and losers in the
pursuit of power. Rather, it requires you to look at every situation as
if that were the case.
>
> Moreover, in economics there's the idea of a win-win transaction,
> in which both parties gain. This isn't the case in politics:
> power is always relative, and so a gain for one party is a loss
> for another. This is why conflict is an integral part of
> politics.
I'm sure if I worked on it, I could think of political transactions in
which more than one party gains, or loses. But the claim that in
politics, you either win or lose every time, that there are never
win-win or loss-loss outcomes or mixed results, again strikes me as
unworkably rigid. A quick example off the top of my head: the federal
and B.C. Liberals, who are not necessarily natural allies, have made a
deal *not* to provide more than a minimum of aid and compensation to the
owners of 70,000 or so leaky condos. Both parties "win" because neither
has to shell out a bunch of money they'd rather use for other purposes.
Another: by striving for supremacy among Canadian right-of-centre
Canadian political parties, the PC Party and the CA are assuring only
that both of them lose.
>
> This is why international politics is so ugly: it's because it's
> about power.
I can agree that most international politics is about power. I am
extremely doubtful that you can say absolutely that all international
politics is about power, except with a circular definition that defines
as international politics only those interactions that *are* about
power. Mmmh.
>
> You say that if you look at what power is used *for*, it's usually
> for economic objectives. Let's take a look at some of your examples.
>
> > German nationalists thought they were being ruined
> > economically by the conditions of peace set by the victors after WWI.
>
> This does *not* explain why Hitler launched World War II. German
> reparations had already been renegotiated by the Dawes Plan (1924)
> and the Young Plan (1929). The Lausanne Conference (1932) ended
> Allied attempts to extract reparations from Germany. This all
> happened *before* Hitler came to power in 1933.
Sure, it wasn't exclusively about Germany's post-WWI economic plight,
although that was surely a big part of what made many victimized-feeling
Germans support the Nazis in the first place. It also involved extreme
nationalism, a lust for power that mutated into megalomania, a power
structure with a madman on top who was subject to no checks and
balances, a huge dose of xenophobia, and other ingredients.
> > The Soviets sought to wrest economic power from the capitalists on
> > behalf of the working classes (in theory at least).
>
> In other words, the Soviet leaders sought *social justice*, not
> economic gain. (The gap between their utopian objectives and their
> actual methods demonstrates the relative insignificance of ends
> compared to means -- *everyone* believes that their ends are noble.
> I'm sure Hitler thought his ultimate objectives were noble.)
Perhaps you're misunderstanding Marxism. The social justice they sought
consisted of economic gain. And the economic gain they sought added up
to social justice. It was clearly both, simultaneously, arising from an
ideology that combined both.
>
> > > What drives this struggle isn't economics, it's human nature, and
> > > specifically the desire for power: It's human nature to feel keenly
> > > the grievances and humiliations inflicted on oneself by others, while
> > > disregarding those that you inflict on other people. ...
> >
> > I have always found human nature to be a shifting thing that varies with
> > conditions.
>
> You don't agree with my characterization here? (I'd be interested
> in hearing more about your view of human nature.)
See above. I think that defining human nature as something universal and
immutable is a big mistake, and that any argument that relies on such a
definition is on shaky ground.
>
> > We should remember that Chomsky is not primarily a historian, but a
> > critic specifically of U.S. foreign policy during the past half century
> > or so -- essentially the period after the U.S. ended its partial
> > isolation from world affairs and began to assert itself as a world
> > economic and military power. I find his arguments that U.S. policy is
> > primarily driven by economics to be generally persuasive, from the Latin
> > American incursions where specific U.S. economic interests were
> > threatened to the Middle East, where it took over from Britain and
> > France in seeking to control the supply of oil on behalf of the
> > capitalist world.
>
> Frankly, I don't see how you separate the two roles. If he's making
> an argument about what was driving US policy, he's making a historical
> argument. Radical historians such as Robert Buzzanco are happy to
> claim Chomsky as one of their own.
Chomsky could be seen as an *amateur* historian. Professionally, he is
in linguistics. (Or was. For all I know he's retired from his old day
job.) He dabbles in history in order to support his assertions about
U.S. foreign policy. In the context of our discussion, you can define
him as a political activist, or a polemicist. Or a foreign policy
critic, for that matter. But he's not an academic historian and that
might explain the inconsistencies academic historians perceive in his
arguments. But I'm not sure you want to restrict debates such as the
ones Chomsky engages in to academic historians. As he states himself,
you don't have to be an accredited expert to hold and state opinions,
put forward arguments and generally take part in public discourse.
> If you're not willing to examine
> his historical arguments critically -- in particular, by checking what
> other historians have to say -- you're in danger of getting an extremely
> distorted view of 20th-century history. (With respect to Latin American
> history, I'd recommend checking "Modern Latin America", by Skidmore and
> Smith; in the Middle East, "The Arab World Today", by Polk. Oh, wait,
> never mind, you don't have time to read books.)
Now that's a patronizing cheap shot, Russil, and not up to the standard
of civil discourse you usually practise. This is a Usenet discussion and
I am not required to read eight or nine books (I think you're up to
about a dozen now over the last three posts or so) that you cite to
bolster your arguments. This is not a college course and you are not my
instructor. Perhaps you should work on boiling down your arguments to
the point where you don't need to back them up with an exhaustive
reading list. And if you can't do that, perhaps this is not the forum
for the kind of discussion you seek.
>
> > On a slight tangent, I am disappointed to see you repeat, without much
> > examination, the attacks on Chomsky over his alleged position on
> > Cambodia. I had a reason to look into that situation a few years ago and
> > went back to his original statements to discover that practically the
> > first thing he did was to denounce the genocide that took place in
> > Cambodia. He then proceeded to compare that genocide with the roughly
> > simultaneous one in East Timor and criticized the U.S. for emphasizing
> > the one while ignoring and arguably encouraging the other, and arguing
> > that the difference was dictated by U.S. economic interests.
>
> I'm afraid you may not have looked into it closely enough. His 1977
> article (co-written with Edward Herman), "Distortions at Fourth Hand",
> had nothing to do with East Timor. For a detailed discussion, see
> Bruce Sharp's article "Averaging Wrong Answers: Noam Chomsky and
> the Cambodia Controversy."
> http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm#chiii
You appear to be correct about East Timor being an after-thought.
This runs me out of time for the moment. If I can find time for a little
more reading in the next day or two I may have more to post on the
Cambodia business.
cheers.
bill
Shel Scott
>> until after the hundreds of millions of dollars of investment were in
>> place?
>
>
question because you KNOW that without that investment the revolution
would never have happened.
>But in the Latin American context we were discussing, chances are pretty
>good that the hundreds of millions of dollars of investment were the
>very instruments of oppression that they were revolting against. You
>know, where you grow bananas or sugar cane or mine some mineral or
>other, and "hire" locals, at the point of a gun if necessary, pay them
>starvation wages, employ them in unsafe situations, and then charge them
>a small fortune for inadequate housing and food. That kind of investment
>is worth revolting against.
>
You have absolutely no clue, do you?
Russil Wvong
time to read books. You're right, that was a cheap shot. (I will
say that the only way I can effectively argue against Chomsky, a
man who's written 80 books and given countless speeches in his
lifetime, is by referring to other books. I can't refute each and
every one of his arguments and examples on a forum like this.)
I should also say that I appreciate the level of discourse you've
maintained so far.
Bill Van <bil...@canada.com> wrote:
> russi...@yahoo.com (Russil Wvong) wrote:
> > Perhaps I ought to discuss what I mean by "power." I mean *the ability
> > to impose one's will on others*, whether by military force, economic
> > incentives, religious or legal authority. As I said, power is always
> > morally questionable, because you're overriding someone else's will.
>
> Always? There have been instances of politicians democratically elected
> to carry out a certain mandate, who then proceed to do so, no more and
> no less. What is morally questionable about that?
If we accept the principle that all people are morally equal, then
it's morally questionable to do something to someone else against
their will. It may be justifiable, since we can't do without
government; but it's still questionable. The fact that we're
fallible--that is, we can't know for certain whether we're making the
right decision or not--makes it even more questionable. This is
particularly the case for life-and-death decisions, but it's an issue
even when it comes to relatively trivial actions. (One example is the
thread in which people argue that it ought to be illegal for parents
to spank their children.)
Consider the case of Ralph Klein, a politician who promised to
eliminate the provincial deficit, and who proceeded to do so. There
was a great deal of angry protest, because eliminating the deficit
meant cutting spending on health, education, and welfare. Cutting
health spending is a life-and-death decision: someone who needs
treatment in order to live may not be able to receive it. The
consequences of cutting welfare spending, for someone who saw their
welfare payments cut off, would have been nearly as drastic.
I'm *not* saying that Klein was morally *wrong* to eliminate the
deficit (it's impossible for a provincial government to borrow money
indefinitely). I'm saying that there's always a certain amount of
guilt associated with power. That applies whether we're talking about
foreign policy, domestic politics, or even parenting.
You asked about a bureaucrat who makes decisions within the
guidelines, with as much compassion as possible. I think that
whenever he says no--when he rejects an immigration application, or a
welfare application, or an application to get into a detox
program--whoever he's rejecting will be seriously affected. Again,
this may be necessary, but I think it illustrates my point: there
is no power without guilt. The greater the power, the greater the
guilt.
Hans Morgenthau described it as the
fear and trembling with which great statesmen have approached
their task, knowing that in trying to mould the political world
they must act like gods, without the knowledge, the wisdom, the
power, and the goodness which their task demands.
> > Power is what defines politics: politics is concerned with the
> > distribution and use of power. This is true whether we're talking
> > about international politics or domestic politics.
>
> Politics and power are certainly closely related, but I don't know that
> power defines politics. The simplest definition of politics is the art
> and science of government.
I think politics is broader than simply government. Election
campaining and blackening the character of one's opponents are part of
the democratic political process, but they're not part of governing.
They're political, in the sense that they're part of the process
which determines who has power.
> There are politicians who strive for consensus
> and serve the community, and neither seek nor acquire power beyond the
> ability to carry out the community's wishes and/or the duties of office.
But "the ability to carry out the community's wishes and/or the duties
of office" is simply another way of saying "power." I'm not arguing
that politicians are driven solely by the lust for power (no, I'm not
a total cynic :-). I'm saying that if they want to be politicians,
they *need power*, in the same way that an office needs electricity.
The purpose of an office isn't to consume electricity, but it's a
prerequisite before the office can do anything else. Similarly,
before a politician can do anything, good or bad, he or she needs
power.
This also applies to the actions of states in international politics.
To quote Hans Morgenthau again:
International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for
power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics,
power is always the immediate aim. Statesmen and peoples may
ultimately seek freedom, security, prosperity, or power itself.
They may define their goals in terms of a religious, philosophic,
economic, or social ideal. They may hope that this ideal will
materialize through its own inner force, through divine
intervention, or through the natural development of human affairs.
They may also try to further its realization through nonpolitical
means, such as technical co-operation with other nations or
international organizations. But whenever they strive to realize
their goal by means of international politics, they do so by
striving for power. The Crusaders wanted to free the holy places
from domination by the Infidels; Woodrow Wilson wanted to make the
world safe for democracy; the Nazis wanted to open Eastern Europe
to German colonization, to dominate Europe, and to conquer the
world. Since they all chose power to achieve these ends, they
were actors on the scene of international politics.
["Politics Among Nations", 6th ed., p. 31]
> > It's human nature -- or simple egotism, if you like --
> > for each of us to believe that if *we* were the ones with the power,
> > we'd do a better job than the screwups who are currently running
> > things.
>
> That is not to say all of us share that belief. I know very well there
> are some things I do very well, and others that I do badly, and others
> where I have no idea how I'd do. Holding power and running a government
> falls into the third category.
You don't think you would be able to do a better job than Gordon
Campbell, or George W. Bush, if you were in their shoes? You don't
find yourself resenting the decisions that they've made, and thinking
that they must be idiots? You never rebelled against your parents as
a teenager?
> Unless you refuse to believe I feel that way, and that there are others
> like me, (and how would you prove *that*?) I think that defeats the
> human nature argument. There is no particular set human nature, IMO.
> Even the most basic tendencies that most of us share, such as survival
> instincts, are neither exclusive to humans nor universal among humans if
> you consider people who commit suicide and groups that follow clearly
> anti-survival paths. I say it all depends on the individual, his/her
> nature and nurture, and the conditions in which he/she finds
> him/herself. If human nature was a fixed, definable thing, so would
> human behavior be, and sociology would be a hard science.
I don't want to get too far off topic, but a colleague of Chomsky's at
MIT, Steven Pinker, argues (in "How the Mind Works" and "The Blank
Slate") that there *is* a fixed human nature, defined by evolution.
Chomsky argues that our ability to use language is hard-wired into our
minds, that there's a special-purpose mental organ which deals with
language, and that this language instinct must have evolved in the
same way as our physical organs. Pinker and other evolutionary
psychologists argue that other mental capabilities -- vision, face
recognition, physical coordination, knowledge of kinship, even
emotions -- have evolved in the same way; in effect, they're trying to
reverse-engineer the mind.
http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/discover.html
But now I'm a little confused. If you're not arguing from a fixed
view of human nature, one in which economic self-interest (or class
interest) is primary, why do you believe that US foreign policy since
World War II has been driven by the economic interests of the elite?
And do you believe that decision-makers consciously sought to further
economic interests, or that it was unconscious?
> > Now of course people may have aims beyond simply attaining power.
>
> Scuse me, but you have not established that all of them have the
> attainment of power among their aims. You have only asserted it.
Let me suggest that if someone doesn't aim to attain power, they're
not going to. I can't think of any leaders in recent history who
were there by accident.
> > But in international politics, *you cannot accomplish anything --
> > even self-defense -- without power*.
>
> Oh, I don't know. You could use outstanding diplomacy, or sell your
> resources or your UN votes to nations that do have power, or be very
> good at picking winners and getting on their good side, or aligning
> yourself with other low-powered nations, and generally be smarter than
> the big, powerful guys. I suppose you could define all of that as part
> of possessing power, i.e. the ability to impose your will.
Correct. By power I don't mean military force alone. I mean the
ability to get other people to do what you want, to impose your will
on theirs. Trading favours may certainly be part of this. Morgenthau
identifies three components of diplomacy (i.e. foreign policy):
persuasion, compromise, and threats.
> However, I think the current example of the United States, clearly the
> most powerful nation on earth, shows us that immense power and a
> ruthless willingness to use it does not necessarily get you your own way
> all the time, i.e. does not necessarily allow you to impose your will
> with the desired results on, say, Iraq or even France.
*Absolutely correct.* Here's a quote to that effect, from 1953:
http://tinyurl.com/g3zx
> > Therefore, regardless of
> > one's ultimate aims, the *immediate* aim of every state's foreign
> > policy is either to maintain one's power (*status quo*) or to
> > increase it (*revisionist*).
>
> It strikes me that you're trapping yourself in an analytical structure
> that requires you to see every situation from that same perspective.
> That is to say, I think you have a rather rigid model on your hands. It
> doesn't prove that every instance involves winners and losers in the
> pursuit of power. Rather, it requires you to look at every situation as
> if that were the case.
I suppose that's the problem inherent in a model: it's an abstraction
of reality, and there's a danger that one will see the model instead
of reality. Nevertheless, I have to say that I find Hans Morgenthau's
arguments regarding the nature of international politics to be pretty
convincing.
> > Moreover, in economics there's the idea of a win-win transaction,
> > in which both parties gain. This isn't the case in politics:
> > power is always relative, and so a gain for one party is a loss
> > for another. This is why conflict is an integral part of
> > politics.
>
> I'm sure if I worked on it, I could think of political transactions in
> which more than one party gains, or loses. But the claim that in
> politics, you either win or lose every time, that there are never
> win-win or loss-loss outcomes or mixed results, again strikes me as
> unworkably rigid. A quick example off the top of my head: the federal
> and B.C. Liberals, who are not necessarily natural allies, have made a
> deal *not* to provide more than a minimum of aid and compensation to the
> owners of 70,000 or so leaky condos. Both parties "win" because neither
> has to shell out a bunch of money they'd rather use for other purposes.
That's a reasonable counter-argument. I suppose I should limit my
argument to saying that a party can only *increase its power* at
the expense of some other party. It's quite possible for two parties
to both increase their power at the expense of a third party, as with
the Nazi-Soviet division of Poland. (In this case, it seems that the
condo owners are the ones who lose.)
> Another: by striving for supremacy among Canadian right-of-centre
> Canadian political parties, the PC Party and the CA are assuring only
> that both of them lose.
This seems like a perfect illustration of my point of view, actually.
They're each trying to increase their power at the expense of the
other.
> > This is why international politics is so ugly: it's because it's
> > about power.
>
> I can agree that most international politics is about power. I am
> extremely doubtful that you can say absolutely that all international
> politics is about power, except with a circular definition that defines
> as international politics only those interactions that *are* about
> power. Mmmh.
I don't think that's important. Let's say that international politics
is primarily about power.
> > > German nationalists thought they were being ruined
> > > economically by the conditions of peace set by the victors after WWI.
> >
> > This does *not* explain why Hitler launched World War II. German
> > reparations had already been renegotiated by the Dawes Plan (1924)
> > and the Young Plan (1929). The Lausanne Conference (1932) ended
> > Allied attempts to extract reparations from Germany. This all
> > happened *before* Hitler came to power in 1933.
>
> Sure, it wasn't exclusively about Germany's post-WWI economic plight,
> although that was surely a big part of what made many victimized-feeling
> Germans support the Nazis in the first place. It also involved extreme
> nationalism, a lust for power that mutated into megalomania, a power
> structure with a madman on top who was subject to no checks and
> balances, a huge dose of xenophobia, and other ingredients.
Right. Are you saying that economic interests are *primarily* what
drive foreign policy, or only that they're a *part* (not necessarily
primary) of foreign policy? I disagree with the former, but not
necessarily the latter.
To me, there's a big difference between saying that Hitler launched
World War II because he sought economic gains, and saying that Hitler
came to power because Germans felt victimized.
> > > The Soviets sought to wrest economic power from the capitalists on
> > > behalf of the working classes (in theory at least).
> >
> > In other words, the Soviet leaders sought *social justice*, not
> > economic gain.
>
> Perhaps you're misunderstanding Marxism. The social justice they sought
> consisted of economic gain.
I thought it was economic redistribution ("expropriating the
expropriators"). In any case, the Soviet leaders didn't seek economic
gains *for themselves*, but for the proletariat. If politics is
driven by economic interests, then political leaders seek economic
gains for themselves--or am I misunderstanding your point of view?
> > > We should remember that Chomsky is not primarily a historian ....
> >
> > Frankly, I don't see how you separate the two roles. If he's making
> > an argument about what was driving US policy, he's making a historical
> > argument. Radical historians such as Robert Buzzanco are happy to
> > claim Chomsky as one of their own.
>
> Chomsky could be seen as an *amateur* historian.
Sure. He certainly uses the same kind of evidence that an academic
historian would. I don't see much of a distinction between a
historian such as Buzzanco (whose point of view is similar to
Chomsky's) and Chomsky.
> Professionally, he is in linguistics. (Or was. For all I know he's
> retired from his old day job.)
He's still active in linguistics.
> He dabbles in history in order to support his assertions about
> U.S. foreign policy.
Not sure I'd describe it as "dabbling". He does a hell of a lot of
research, all carefully footnoted.
> In the context of our discussion, you can define
> him as a political activist, or a polemicist. Or a foreign policy
> critic, for that matter. But he's not an academic historian and that
> might explain the inconsistencies academic historians perceive in his
> arguments.
I don't think it's a matter of inconsistencies. Someone on H-DIPLO (a
mailing list for historians of foreign policy) just compared him to
David Irving, the Holocaust denier.
http://tinyurl.com/g415
> But I'm not sure you want to restrict debates such as the
> ones Chomsky engages in to academic historians.
Of course not. I'm not suggesting that. We're having this debate,
aren't we? :-)
Sorry again about the cheap shot. I'd really encourage you to check
out Hans Morgenthau's "Politics Among Nations", though.
Bill Van
> You asked about a bureaucrat who makes decisions within the
> guidelines, with as much compassion as possible. I think that
> whenever he says no--when he rejects an immigration application, or a
> welfare application, or an application to get into a detox
> program--whoever he's rejecting will be seriously affected. Again,
> this may be necessary, but I think it illustrates my point: there
> is no power without guilt. The greater the power, the greater the
> guilt.
>
> Hans Morgenthau described it as the
>
> fear and trembling with which great statesmen have approached
> their task, knowing that in trying to mould the political world
> they must act like gods, without the knowledge, the wisdom, the
> power, and the goodness which their task demands.
>
You're reminding me of a reaction I have to the old bromide, "Power
corrupts... absolute power corrupts absolutely." If that's the case and
there is an all-powerful God, he must be one corrupt puppy. What that
teaches me is nothing much about the nature of God, but to question
whether such bromides convey any meaning.
> > > Power is what defines politics: politics is concerned with the
> > > distribution and use of power. This is true whether we're talking
> > > about international politics or domestic politics.
> >
> > Politics and power are certainly closely related, but I don't know that
> > power defines politics. The simplest definition of politics is the art
> > and science of government.
>
> I think politics is broader than simply government. Election
> campaining and blackening the character of one's opponents are part of
> the democratic political process, but they're not part of governing.
> They're political, in the sense that they're part of the process
> which determines who has power.
I don't think anything hangs on this point, but campaigning and
skirmishing with your opponents certainly are part of governing in a
real-life sense. They don't stop after an election and resume again come
the next campaign. They continue every day in between. Check out
question period in any of Canada's legislatures.
>
> > There are politicians who strive for consensus
> > and serve the community, and neither seek nor acquire power beyond the
> > ability to carry out the community's wishes and/or the duties of office.
>
> But "the ability to carry out the community's wishes and/or the duties
> of office" is simply another way of saying "power." I'm not arguing
> that politicians are driven solely by the lust for power (no, I'm not
> a total cynic :-). I'm saying that if they want to be politicians,
> they *need power*, in the same way that an office needs electricity.
> The purpose of an office isn't to consume electricity, but it's a
> prerequisite before the office can do anything else. Similarly,
> before a politician can do anything, good or bad, he or she needs
> power.
What would you say to introducing the concept of "authority" at this
stage? Generally speaking when it comes to elected government, power is
not invested in the individual, but in the office he or she occupies,
whether elected or appointed. What the individual has during his period
in office is the authority to wield its power. When the individual
leaves the office, his authority disappears and hence, so does his
ability to wield the powers of office.
>
> This also applies to the actions of states in international politics.
> To quote Hans Morgenthau again:
>
> International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for
> power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics,
> power is always the immediate aim. Statesmen and peoples may
> ultimately seek freedom, security, prosperity, or power itself.
> They may define their goals in terms of a religious, philosophic,
> economic, or social ideal. They may hope that this ideal will
> materialize through its own inner force, through divine
> intervention, or through the natural development of human affairs.
> They may also try to further its realization through nonpolitical
> means, such as technical co-operation with other nations or
> international organizations. But whenever they strive to realize
> their goal by means of international politics, they do so by
> striving for power. The Crusaders wanted to free the holy places
> from domination by the Infidels; Woodrow Wilson wanted to make the
> world safe for democracy; the Nazis wanted to open Eastern Europe
> to German colonization, to dominate Europe, and to conquer the
> world. Since they all chose power to achieve these ends, they
> were actors on the scene of international politics.
> ["Politics Among Nations", 6th ed., p. 31]
Using a notion of authority that's differentiated from power, in
international politics we can see many instances of power being wielded
without clear authority. To circle back to our original topic, many U.S.
military incursions and other kinds of interventions in Latin American
affairs (the Chomsky stuff) could be included in that category.
That's much more difficult in domestic politics, where authority is more
clearly defined. In working democracies, there is limited scope for
politicians and bureaucrats to wield power without authority, and there
is often recourse available when they are caught doing so.
>
> > > It's human nature -- or simple egotism, if you like --
> > > for each of us to believe that if *we* were the ones with the power,
> > > we'd do a better job than the screwups who are currently running
> > > things.
> >
> > That is not to say all of us share that belief. I know very well there
> > are some things I do very well, and others that I do badly, and others
> > where I have no idea how I'd do. Holding power and running a government
> > falls into the third category.
>
> You don't think you would be able to do a better job than Gordon
> Campbell, or George W. Bush, if you were in their shoes? You don't
> find yourself resenting the decisions that they've made, and thinking
> that they must be idiots? You never rebelled against your parents as
> a teenager?
Even if I were in politics, I wouldn't be a Republican president or a
Liberal premier. The question of whether I personally could a better job
really doesn't arise. Sure I resent some of their decisions, and I
sometimes think they are idiots. Certainly I rebelled against my
parents. And I have an ego. But none of that speaks directly to anything
significant in our discussion, as far as I can tell. Feel free to expand.
>
> > Unless you refuse to believe I feel that way, and that there are others
> > like me, (and how would you prove *that*?) I think that defeats the
> > human nature argument. There is no particular set human nature, IMO.
> > Even the most basic tendencies that most of us share, such as survival
> > instincts, are neither exclusive to humans nor universal among humans if
> > you consider people who commit suicide and groups that follow clearly
> > anti-survival paths. I say it all depends on the individual, his/her
> > nature and nurture, and the conditions in which he/she finds
> > him/herself. If human nature was a fixed, definable thing, so would
> > human behavior be, and sociology would be a hard science.
>
> I don't want to get too far off topic, but a colleague of Chomsky's at
> MIT, Steven Pinker, argues (in "How the Mind Works" and "The Blank
> Slate") that there *is* a fixed human nature, defined by evolution.
> Chomsky argues that our ability to use language is hard-wired into our
> minds, that there's a special-purpose mental organ which deals with
> language, and that this language instinct must have evolved in the
> same way as our physical organs. Pinker and other evolutionary
> psychologists argue that other mental capabilities -- vision, face
> recognition, physical coordination, knowledge of kinship, even
> emotions -- have evolved in the same way; in effect, they're trying to
> reverse-engineer the mind.
> http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/discover.html
I don't see any contradictions there. But I'm starting to get a glimpse
of where we might differ, and I suspect we're not off-topic here. Or at
least, we're discussing something that's relevant to our topic.
I wouldn't dream of trying to argue with the world's leading linguistics
experts when they say we have evolved an ability to use language and the
rest. If you define that as an aspect of human nature, I have no problem
with it. In the same way, two arms and two legs are human nature,
etcetera. But I have doubts about whether you can apply the same kind of
analysis to the breadth of human *behavior.* In fact, I think not.
As I said in a slightly different context, if human nature could be
objectively defined, sociology and political science would be hard
sciences, laws of human behavior would be discerned and they would have
predictive uses. You don't see physicists arguing about the temperature
at which water boils. Yet everyone from political scientists to guys on
the street argue constantly about the basics of politics. That alone
shows you that we're not dealing with a hard, objective science.
I've done some quick, shallow scanning of Morgenthau, the authority you
keep citing. I have no problem with his underlying direction, that the
way international politics operates in practice should be studied and
understood to the extent possible.
But if I'm understanding him, I do have a problem with where he ends up:
"Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is
governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. In
order to improve society it is first necessary to understand the laws by
which society lives. The operation of these laws being impervious to our
preferences, men will challenge them only at the risk of failure."
I couldn't disagree more with that first sentence. There are no such
objective laws. There couldn't be, given that human nature -- in the
sense of human behavior -- simply can't be pinned down with any
objectivity.
Perhaps you can assert that such sciences are in their infancy and will
eventually come up with objective laws. But IMO that's not a provable
proposition, and I for one don't believe it. There are too many
unpredictable variables, the most basic one of which might be that each
individual ultimately makes his own decisions. The very fact that people
in identical circumstances frequently make different choices should tell
you there is no such thing as an immutable human nature.
>
> But now I'm a little confused. If you're not arguing from a fixed
> view of human nature, one in which economic self-interest (or class
> interest) is primary, why do you believe that US foreign policy since
> World War II has been driven by the economic interests of the elite?
> And do you believe that decision-makers consciously sought to further
> economic interests, or that it was unconscious?
You don't need a fixed view of human nature to realize that the way you
plug into the economic system goes a long way to determining your
possibilities, that you are not alone, and that you can band together
with others to pursue mutual self-interest.
I do believe that U.S. foreign policy since WWII has been largely driven
by economic interests because it's just so obvious. Until the last few
years, I don't think anyone would disagree that U.S. foreign policy has
been closely tied to the struggle between the Soviet block and U.S.-led
Western capitalism. That's true whether you use economic interests or
power as your focus. I suppose there is room for debate about which is
primary, and they are certainly intertwined. My view is that struggle
was between economic systems, and that power, politics, diplomacy, etc.
were the means with which that struggle was carried out.
I doubt every single foreign policy decision made by the U.S. can be
directly tied to clear economic interests, and it would be a gargantuan
job to try. But a thought now strikes me: perhaps it can be argued that
what Chomsky is railing against is those instances where the U.S.
imposes its will on others, absent clear authority to do so, which *are*
clearly predicated on economic interests.
>
> > > Now of course people may have aims beyond simply attaining power.
> >
> > Scuse me, but you have not established that all of them have the
> > attainment of power among their aims. You have only asserted it.
>
> Let me suggest that if someone doesn't aim to attain power, they're
> not going to. I can't think of any leaders in recent history who
> were there by accident.
I can think of a number of domestic instances where a party loses its
leader by reason of death, retirement, illness, scandal, etc., where a
caretaker premier or prime minister is appointed to wield power while
those who *are* interested in power contest the leadership. In European
democracies, which tend to have periods of vacuum when coalitions
collapse, the same kind of thing occurs.
You could argue that these interim leaders *are* in it for power, but
that their ambition has limits, or that they're attaining the highest
level of power they can. Shades of grey. Nevertheless, whether due to
ambition, ability, and/or other factors, not everyone in politics
strives for or achieves the same level of power.
> > It strikes me that you're trapping yourself in an analytical structure
> > that requires you to see every situation from that same perspective.
> > That is to say, I think you have a rather rigid model on your hands. It
> > doesn't prove that every instance involves winners and losers in the
> > pursuit of power. Rather, it requires you to look at every situation as
> > if that were the case.
>
> I suppose that's the problem inherent in a model: it's an abstraction
> of reality, and there's a danger that one will see the model instead
> of reality. Nevertheless, I have to say that I find Hans Morgenthau's
> arguments regarding the nature of international politics to be pretty
> convincing.
Obviously, I'm not convinced. I can see all kinds of value in attempting
to study international politics from a non-ideological point of view to
learn what can be learned. (aside: I am mindful of arguments that a
refusal to take sides is itself a way of taking sides.)
But I do not accept that there is a fixed human nature that can lead to
predictability of human behavior to the point of developing "objective
laws."
> Let's say that international politics
> is primarily about power.
Sure, as long as we recognize that we're not necessarily agreed about
whether power is sought for its own sake, or for other reasons.
>
> > > > German nationalists thought they were being ruined
> > > > economically by the conditions of peace set by the victors after WWI.
> > >
> > > This does *not* explain why Hitler launched World War II. German
> > > reparations had already been renegotiated by the Dawes Plan (1924)
> > > and the Young Plan (1929). The Lausanne Conference (1932) ended
> > > Allied attempts to extract reparations from Germany. This all
> > > happened *before* Hitler came to power in 1933.
> >
> > Sure, it wasn't exclusively about Germany's post-WWI economic plight,
> > although that was surely a big part of what made many victimized-feeling
> > Germans support the Nazis in the first place. It also involved extreme
> > nationalism, a lust for power that mutated into megalomania, a power
> > structure with a madman on top who was subject to no checks and
> > balances, a huge dose of xenophobia, and other ingredients.
>
> Right. Are you saying that economic interests are *primarily* what
> drive foreign policy, or only that they're a *part* (not necessarily
> primary) of foreign policy? I disagree with the former, but not
> necessarily the latter.
I'm not sure that I'm ready to make a blanket statement about all
foreign policy, period. Certainly some politicians and some governments
are driven by desire for power, but economic interests are such an
integral part of power in the 20th and 21st centuries -- and vise versa
-- that I'd be hard pressed right now to separate them, let alone put
forward an argument showing one is primary and the other isn't.
Does that mean I'm no longer with Chomsky on economic interests driving
U.S. foreign policy?
I don't know. Now that we've introduced some rigorousness to the
discussion, I'd have to read a lot more to study Chomsky's assertions
and the arguments of his opponents. That's not something I'm going to do
over the next day or two.
I think I can still argue that economic interests appear to be an
important element in the U.S. foreign policy initatives that Chomsky
complains about. And I'll add that the distinction between power and
authority, and the lack of clear authority other than the ability to
wield power in international politics, are worth some more thought in
this context.
> I thought it was economic redistribution ("expropriating the
> expropriators"). In any case, the Soviet leaders didn't seek economic
> gains *for themselves*, but for the proletariat.
Well, that was the theory.
> If politics is
> driven by economic interests, then political leaders seek economic
> gains for themselves--or am I misunderstanding your point of view?
That's a good question to ask about individual political leaders. Are
they acting on behalf of the group or class or movement they purport to
represent, or are they opportunists seeking power for themselves? Or
both, in which case, can those interests be reconciled? Much depends on
the checks and balances on the political leaders in question, and the
extent to which the party or movement is able to select and control its
leaders.
I suspect Jimmy Carter would be an interesting case study in this
context.
Finally, your question might illustrate what (with admittedly limited
exposure) I see as the principal weakness in Morgenthau's thinking --
that it is possible to boil down international politics into immutable
laws that lead to objective conclusions. More likely the answer to your
question should be, "Perhaps, sometimes, depending."
>
> > In the context of our discussion, you can define
> > him as a political activist, or a polemicist. Or a foreign policy
> > critic, for that matter. But he's not an academic historian and that
> > might explain the inconsistencies academic historians perceive in his
> > arguments.
>
> I don't think it's a matter of inconsistencies. Someone on H-DIPLO (a
> mailing list for historians of foreign policy) just compared him to
> David Irving, the Holocaust denier.
> http://tinyurl.com/g415
>
A rather monstrous comparison, IMO. Irving is clearly on the side of
those who committed the Holocaust. The chief criticism of Chomsky seems
to be that he didn't denounce the Cambodian genocide early enough or
vociferously enough.
that should hold us for a day or two.
bill
Russil Wvong
> that should hold us for a day or two.
Since our posts are getting pretty long, I'll try to stick to the main
issues, and drop side issues. I'll also wait a couple days before
posting.
> I've done some quick, shallow scanning of Morgenthau, the authority you
> keep citing. I have no problem with his underlying direction, that the
> way international politics operates in practice should be studied and
> understood to the extent possible.
Great! The chapter of Morgenthau's "Politics Among Nations" that's
most relevant to our current discussion is Chapter 3, "Political Power."
> You're reminding me of a reaction I have to the old bromide, "Power
> corrupts... absolute power corrupts absolutely."
The point I'm trying to make is a little different: power is morally
questionable even when there's no corruption involved.
Andrew Schmookler makes the same point in "The Parable of the Tribes".
A brief quote:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3D9F1CDF.E5D82D6E%40yahoo.com
> What would you say to introducing the concept of "authority" at this
> stage? Generally speaking when it comes to elected government, power is
> not invested in the individual, but in the office he or she occupies,
> whether elected or appointed. What the individual has during his period
> in office is the authority to wield its power. When the individual
> leaves the office, his authority disappears and hence, so does his
> ability to wield the powers of office.
I certainly agree that there's a vital difference between legitimate
and illegitimate power, and that in a democracy, being elected to
office confers legitimacy. (In other forms of government, legitimacy
may take different forms -- in a monarchy, for example, the legitimacy
of the monarch is determined by birth rather than election.)
Power cannot be maintained through brute force alone. It's impossible
to maintain power without the consent of those who are subject to power.
And legitimacy is extremely important in determining whether people will
consent or not.
> Using a notion of authority that's differentiated from power, in
> international politics we can see many instances of power being wielded
> without clear authority.
Definitely. This is the key difference between international politics
and domestic politics: international politics is *anarchic*.
In domestic politics, there's a recognized authority with an effective
monopoly on the use of violence (Hobbes' Leviathan). In international
politics, there is no such authority.
This is not to say that international politics is *amoral*. There are
limited moral standards that apply to international politics; the laws
of war, for example. Morgenthau's got a chapter on morality in
international politics.
> Even if I were in politics, I wouldn't be a Republican president or a
> Liberal premier. The question of whether I personally could a better job
> really doesn't arise. Sure I resent some of their decisions, and I
> sometimes think they are idiots. Certainly I rebelled against my
> parents. And I have an ego. But none of that speaks directly to anything
> significant in our discussion, as far as I can tell. Feel free to expand.
I'm suggesting that there are certain emotions or feelings which are
common to all of us: human nature, in short. The stuff of literature
and psychology, if not science. And resentment of those who have power
over us is one such emotion. If you'd said that you hadn't rebelled
against your parents, I would have been very surprised; you would have
been a very rare individual.
I'm suggesting that resentment of others' power over oneself is a
common emotion. And I'm suggesting that *this* is an extremely
important factor in international conflict, more so than economics.
To take another domestic example, Quebec separatism (the desire to
be "maitres chez nous") isn't motivated by economics.
> I do believe that U.S. foreign policy since WWII has been largely driven
> by economic interests because it's just so obvious. Until the last few
> years, I don't think anyone would disagree that U.S. foreign policy has
> been closely tied to the struggle between the Soviet block and U.S.-led
> Western capitalism. That's true whether you use economic interests or
> power as your focus. I suppose there is room for debate about which is
> primary, and they are certainly intertwined. My view is that struggle
> was between economic systems, and that power, politics, diplomacy, etc.
> were the means with which that struggle was carried out.
I think that saying there was a struggle between the Soviet Union and
the West (which I definitely agree with) is very different from saying
that the policies of the West were driven by economic interests! Stalin
believed (wrongly) that the West was implacably hostile to the Soviet
Union; people in Western Europe feared a Soviet takeover, as had
happened in Eastern Europe; and people in the US feared that a hostile
Europe dominated by the Soviet Union would be no less dangerous than
a hostile Europe dominated by Nazi Germany.
Conversely, the US had no trouble cooperating with Yugoslavia after
Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, or Mao after Nixon went to China in
1972. Why would economic interests dictate that the US couldn't
tolerate different economic systems in other countries?
To quote from George Kennan's 1946 "Long Telegram", at a time when
American officials hoping for continued postwar cooperation were
puzzled by Soviet hostility:
... premises on which [Soviet] party line is based are for most
part simply not true. Experience has shown that peaceful and
mutually profitable coexistence of capitalist and socialist states
is entirely possible. Basic internal conflicts in advanced countries
are no longer primarily those arising out of capitalist ownership
of means of production, but are ones arising from advanced urbanism
and industrialism as such, which Russia has thus far been spared
not by socialism but only by her own backwardness. Internal
rivalries of capitalism do not always generate wars; and not all
wars are attributable to this cause. To speak of possibility of
intervention against USSR today, after elimination of Germany and
Japan and after example of recent war, is sheerest nonsense. If
not provoked by forces of intolerance and subversion "capitalist"
world of today is quite capable of living at peace with itself and
with Russia. ...
Falseness of those premises, every one of which predates recent
war, was amply demonstrated by that conflict itself. Anglo-American
differences did not turn out to be major differences of Western
World. Capitalist countries, other than those of Axis, showed no
disposition to solve their differences by joining in crusade
against USSR. Instead of imperialist war turning into civil wars
and revolution, USSR found itself obliged to fight side by side
with capitalist powers for an avowed community of aim.
Nevertheless, all these theses, however baseless and disproven,
are being boldly put forward again today. What does this indicate?
It indicates that Soviet party line is not based on any objective
analysis of situation beyond Russia's borders; that it has, indeed,
little to do with conditions outside of Russia; that it arises
mainly from basic inner-Russian necessities which existed before
recent war and exist today.
Besides hostile Soviet propaganda, a more tangible threat was the fact
that the Soviet Union hadn't demobilized its armies to the same extent
as the West had, resulting in an extremely lopsided conventional
military balance. This was offset by the US atomic monopoly,
but it was clear that this monopoly wouldn't last very long.
groups.google.com/groups?selm=afe9ed76.0210122152.50c6abf1%40posting.google.com
Kennan provides a good summary of the long-term US interest in
maintaining the balance of power in Europe and Asia:
groups.google.com/groups?selm=afe9ed76.0202182246.5758c5af%40posting.google.com
Bill Van
> I'm suggesting that there are certain emotions or feelings which are
> common to all of us: human nature, in short. The stuff of literature
> and psychology, if not science.
I'm not arguing with that. Human nature is reflected in what humans do.
But defining and measuring it, beyond making lists, and turning into a
science is something else again.
What I object to is the implication that "political realism" can be used
with enough accuracy to formulate laws of politics and, presumably, use
those laws to make predictions about human behaviour that are more
accurate than those produced by any other approach that includes clear
thinking and a sense of history.
If you could use it that way, the next step would be subtle
manipulations to affect the course of history.
That takes you right into science fiction, notably Asimov's notion of
psychohistory. A nice conceit, but it would require a model so complex
as to be impossible.
> I'm suggesting that resentment of others' power over oneself is a
> common emotion. And I'm suggesting that *this* is an extremely
> important factor in international conflict, more so than economics.
That requires institutions, such as governments, to respond with
emotions equivalent to an individual's. Not so sure that's what happens,
except in instances where one individual is actually making the
decisions. Even then, it would take a complete lack of checks and
balances for that individual's emotions to determine the actions of a
nation.
> To take another domestic example, Quebec separatism (the desire to
> be "maitres chez nous") isn't motivated by economics.
Actually, the No. 1 manifestation of Quebec resentment against Canada is
always the (mistaken, in my view) notion that Quebec gets a raw economic
deal within Confederation, i.e. pays more into the pot than it gets out.
In any case, the actual outcome to date -- no separation -- might well
have been motivated by economics. I'd guess that virtually all pure
laine quebecois share a certain amount of resentment over the power les
maudits anglais have wielded over them. But a majority have always
decided it makes more sense to stay in Canada, which provides stability
and security, economically and otherwise. So I think it is at least as
sensible to argue that Quebec has stayed put because economic concerns
outweighed resentments about power.
That constitutes an example of how difficult it would be to predict
human behaviour using this political realism approach. Even when you can
identify a specific, powerful emotion shared by a culturally,
linguistically, geographically, etc., cohesive group, you can't predict
whether and how their behaviour will be determined by that emotion.
>
> > I do believe that U.S. foreign policy since WWII has been largely driven
> > by economic interests because it's just so obvious. Until the last few
> > years, I don't think anyone would disagree that U.S. foreign policy has
> > been closely tied to the struggle between the Soviet block and U.S.-led
> > Western capitalism. That's true whether you use economic interests or
> > power as your focus. I suppose there is room for debate about which is
> > primary, and they are certainly intertwined. My view is that struggle
> > was between economic systems, and that power, politics, diplomacy, etc.
> > were the means with which that struggle was carried out.
>
> I think that saying there was a struggle between the Soviet Union and
> the West (which I definitely agree with) is very different from saying
> that the policies of the West were driven by economic interests!
Sure. But my point was that one side in this struggle was the champion
of capitalism, while the other was committed to the destruction of
capitalism. Power was wielded for economic reasons. Over time, things
got very complex and at, say, the heighth of the Cold War, anyone might
be hard-pressed to say what motivated a particular move by either side.
But if you step back and see it as a 70-something-year struggle in which
the forces of capitalism finally triumphed over Soviet communism, it
becomes pretty difficult to separate economics from power as motivating
factors. It strikes me that neither power nor economics at that level
can operate without the other.
> Stalin
> believed (wrongly) that the West was implacably hostile to the Soviet
> Union;
Wrongly? The West sent troops into Russia in 1917 to try to topple the
revolution. That was pretty implacable. And despite various tangents,
lulls and temporary compromises, the U.S. didn't relent until the Soviet
collapse in (roughly) 1990.
> people in Western Europe feared a Soviet takeover, as had
> happened in Eastern Europe; and people in the US feared that a hostile
> Europe dominated by the Soviet Union would be no less dangerous than
> a hostile Europe dominated by Nazi Germany.
We could get into a lot of detail, selectively chosen to support one
case or the other. Over-all, I don't see any way of separating economics
from power as a motivating factor. That makes not only our disagreement
about Chomsky unresolvable, but the whole basis for political realism as
well. Seems to me you're taking one of your basic premises -- that power
is at the root of human motivation -- on faith.
>
> Conversely, the US had no trouble cooperating with Yugoslavia after
> Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, or Mao after Nixon went to China in
> 1972. Why would economic interests dictate that the US couldn't
> tolerate different economic systems in other countries?
There were periods when the two sides established trade and other
economic relations. There were periods when both sides thought they
could erode the foundations of the other from within. There were periods
when they vowed to bury each other, and periods when they were within
minutes of nuclear war. And there were periods when they managed to
compromise, or find common interests.
When things didn't get resolved in the first few months after the
Russian Revolution -- either by the West throttling the revolution in
its crib, or general strikes all over the West toppling one capitalist
state after another -- they got more complicated.
>
> To quote from George Kennan's 1946 "Long Telegram", at a time when
> American officials hoping for continued postwar cooperation were
> puzzled by Soviet hostility:
>
(snip)
Interesting, but not decisive either way. Both sides adopted different
tactics at different times, chose to consolidate rather than advance for
periods of time, and so on. Whether they did so for reasons of power or
economics, who can say? The fact that at a given time, an individual
observer views the situation largely in power terms or in economic terms
doesn't affect what's actually happening. The only thing that's
absolutely clear is that both economics and power were involved. And
perhaps there is no difference that matters because one doesn't exist
without the other.
I'd say I have to acknowledge that I can't prove that the U.S. foreign
policy choices that Chomsky criticizes are strictly motivated by
economics, absent considerations of power. I'd say the reverse is also
true.
I'm not convinced, though, that "political realism" is any more capable
than any other analytical approach of untangling human affairs, let
alone predicting them. And its choice of power as the basic motivator
seems no more provable to me than the same claim for economics.
It has been an interesting discussion. Feel free to continue it or not;
I'm content either way. I don't see a winner and loser here.
cheers and thanks.
bill
Russil Wvong
> It has been an interesting discussion. Feel free to continue it or not;
> I'm content either way. I don't see a winner and loser here.
I'd like to continue for a little while longer. (Sorry for the delay --
for some reason Google didn't see your last response.)
By the way, John Paton Davies Jr. observed that turnover in the US
foreign service is so high that this kind of discussion happens there
extremely frequently -- people don't have a common starting point to
work from, so they have to grope backward until they discover some kind
of common ground. It's pretty amusing. From "Foreign and Other Affairs"
(1964):
How do the affairs of state proceed in this parade of recurring
amateurism? Assume an assistant secretary beginning his
contribution to the commonweal, on leave from a real-estate
operation in the sunland of the Southwest, meeting on an urgent
problem with a special assistant, about to return to his
academic chair at the end of two years of dedication to national
security. The issue is urgent because officials of this stature
do not have time to treat with non-urgent matters.
The Assistant Secretary is a man of action accustomed to making
rapid-fire decisions on the basis of long-familiar business facts.
He is not much given to reflection or to weighing abstractions.
The Special Assistant is reflective and adept at abstractions,
and during his months in government he has discovered that an
appraisal followed by a conclusion, which sufficed in a seminar,
must in the bureaucracy be confirmed by a decision to act, which
must then be cleared with variable numbers of other officials and
then followed up by an "action-forcing process" to be sure that
the action, with which he had slight prior acquaintance, is taken.
This meeting represents the much-lauded cross-fertilization of ideas,
bringing different points of view to bear on a single problem. It
is popularly regarded as an absolute good, notwithstanding evidence
from lower in the animal kingdom that only between a horse and an ass
does cross-fertilization produce anything useful. As between our
Assistant Secretary and our Special Assistant, disparate background,
education, adult experience, vocabulary, and outlook assure a fairly
nonproductive initial exchange.
Approaching the problem from different points of the compass, the
conferees do not really join on the issue. If they are logical and
patient and there is time for the exercise, there ensues a groping
backward, step by step, in search of common basic assumptions. If
those are found and identified, they can begin to build a structure
of agreed-upon, relevant premises on which to judge the issue before
them and decide what to do.
But of course there is rarely time to bring order out of disorder.
So the dialogue is resolved in a squidgy compromise or in a firm
decision on infirm irrelevancies.
Our Assistant Secretary and Special Assistant represent the simplest
form of conference confusion. A committee or task force enriches the
variety: a time-motion engineer from Detroit, temporarily with the
Defense Department; a city hall reporter from the Northwest trying
out Federal employment in the Voice of America; a Wall Street lawyer
on leave to the Treasury and worrying about conflicts of interest;
a 4H graduate from the Peace Corps; a politician unable to contain
the fact that he is from the White House; and two middle-aged,
inarticulate career officials, one a little chief from the Pentagon,
the other an uprooted ambassador versed in Arabic affairs whose job
had been given by the articulate politician from the White House to
someone close to someone in the White House.
In this process of decision making, there is a central theme, as in
a Pentecostal revival meeting. There is likewise the problem of
intelligible communication, as when speaking with the gift of tongues.
It is in the efficiency of communication that an indoctrinated
organization like the [British] establishment does rather better.
There is less of the blind men describing the elephant. The
elephant has long since been categorized, perhaps even erroneously.
Nevertheless, there is general agreement on the basic assumptions.
So the conference point of departure is an estimate of the
elephant's present disposition. Then, shall we prod the beast
or should we feed him surplus peanuts? And if the decision is
to prod, everyone concerned, already educated on the subject, knows
pretty well, without a wealth of agonizing details laid out in a
position paper, how, when, and where to prod. So, prodded the
elephant is, and let the peanut surplus remain stored to the
continuing benefit of the enterprising and the well connected.
This picture is presumably from the 1940s and early 1950s. Davies was
Stilwell's political adviser in China, and later a colleague of George
Kennan's on the Policy Planning Staff; he was purged during the
McCarthy years and ended up manufacturing furniture in Lima.
> > I'm suggesting that there are certain emotions or feelings which are
> > common to all of us: human nature, in short. The stuff of literature
> > and psychology, if not science.
>
> I'm not arguing with that. Human nature is reflected in what humans do.
> But defining and measuring it, beyond making lists, and turning into a
> science is something else again.
>
> What I object to is the implication that [human nature] can be used
> with enough accuracy to formulate laws of politics and, presumably, use
> those laws to make predictions about human behaviour that are more
> accurate than those produced by any other approach that includes clear
> thinking and a sense of history.
That's a litle different from what I'm saying.
I don't have in mind a model of human nature that's detailed enough to
be able to _predict_ the course of history. Rather, I'm arguing that
power is the most important element of international politics, and
this is impossible to change. I have three reasons for saying this:
- Historical evidence. Morgenthau quotes Polybius on the balance of
power at the time of the wars between Rome and Carthage; Francis
Bacon on the balance of power between Henry VIII, Francis I, and
Charles V. (Chapter 12, "The Balance of Power.") He summarizes
England's foreign policy:
In 1512, Henry VIII of England made an alliance with the Hapsburgs
against France. In 1515, he made an alliance with France against
the Hapsburgs. In 1522 and 1542, he joined the Hapsburgs against
France. In 1756, Great Britain allied itself with Prussia against
the Hapsburgs and France. In 1793, Great Britain, Prussia, and the
Hapsburgs were allied against Napoleon. In 1914, Great Britain
joined with France and Russia against Austria and Germany, and in
1939 with France and Poland against Germany.
In each case, England was attempting to prevent one power from
dominating continental Europe, which would have threatened England's
security, by joining a coalition against that power: that is,
England's strategy was based on maintaining the balance of power.
Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" presents many
more examples of such conflicts, from 1500 to 2000.
- Schmookler's argument about the nature of power: "No one is free
to choose peace, but anyone can impose upon all the necessity for
power."
- The human nature argument -- that it's human nature to desire power
over others, and to resent others having power over you. In a
monarchy, one person does make decisions; in a democracy, public
opinion is extremely powerful.
At various times many people have sought to eliminate power from
international politics; the League of Nations and the United Nations
were two such attempts. Morgenthau is arguing that this isn't going
to happen.
I should also point out that this is typically how national leaders
*think* about international politics: in terms of power, and
especially the balance of power. The balance of power is the idea
that when one state threatens to dominate the rest, other states will
form a "balancing" coalition against it. This is why the US, Britain,
and the Soviet Union joined forces against Nazi Germany, and why the
US and Britain joined forces against the Soviet Union (both totally
contradictory to Lenin's theory of imperialism, which predicted war
between the US and Britain).
> > To take another domestic example, Quebec separatism (the desire to
> > be "maitres chez nous") isn't motivated by economics.
>
> Actually, the No. 1 manifestation of Quebec resentment against Canada is
> always the (mistaken, in my view) notion that Quebec gets a raw economic
> deal within Confederation, i.e. pays more into the pot than it gets out.
I suppose this is a side issue, but if economics were really the issue,
then it'd just be a matter of convincing Quebecers that this notion is
mistaken, that they do benefit economically from staying in Canada.
I don't think it is the issue -- I think it's just a symptom, as you said,
a manifestation. I think the underlying issue is a feeling that people
in the rest of Canada don't understand Quebec's legitimate concerns,
particularly about the survival of the French language *in Quebec*.
See John Richards' paper:
http://www.cdhowe.org/pdf/Richards.pdf
> > I think that saying there was a struggle between the Soviet Union and
> > the West (which I definitely agree with) is very different from saying
> > that the policies of the West were driven by economic interests!
>
> Sure. But my point was that one side in this struggle was the champion
> of capitalism, while the other was committed to the destruction of
> capitalism. Power was wielded for economic reasons.
I'm sorry, but when you say that "power was wielded for economic reasons,"
do you mean that the US (for example) opposed the Soviet Union because
it sought economic gain, and vice versa? Or do you mean something different,
namely that the US opposed the Soviet Union because it sought to make
capitalism universal throughout the world, and vice versa? Because I
would describe the latter as an ideological reason, more akin to
the wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics, not an economic
reason.
My own interpretation is that the Cold War was primarily driven by *fear*,
not economics and not ideology (although ideology played a major role
in how each side saw the other side).
> Over time, things
> got very complex and at, say, the height of the Cold War, anyone might
> be hard-pressed to say what motivated a particular move by either side.
Er, actually, it's when you look at a *particular* move by either side
that you *can* say in much more detail what motivated each side. You
can examine documents -- papers, memos, cables, memoirs, and so on --
the stuff of diplomatic history -- to see what each side was thinking.
That's why I'm saying that the Cold War was primarily driven by fear.
You can see it in what people wrote and said at the time.
Here's a few quotes from Louis Halle's "The Cold War as History"
regarding the crisis of 1946-1947.
It was not only Greece that, in the winter of 1946-1947, balanced
upon the brink of perdition. So did Britain and all of western
Europe. We, who know of the last-minute salvation to come, can
hardly recapture, today, the alarm inspired by the picture that
confronted the makers of American policy as they looked out across
the ocean at a world that was collapsing.
The degree to which Britain and western Europe had been exhausted
by the War did not become evident until now, two years after its
termination. In 1945 Britain still had some reserves of gold and
foreign exchange left, and that year the United States and Canada
opened credits of $5,000 million for it to draw on. The
expectation was that these resources would tide the British over
until they had reconstructed the industrial productive power that
would enable them to re-establish the export trade by which they
might earn for themselves what was needed to pay for necessary
imports of food and raw materials.
This, however, was not happening. Britain's productive power was
not becoming re-established. Its limited reserves and the $5,000
million credit were being expended for currently needed food and
fuel, rather than for capital investment. Soon, when they were
used up, and in the absence of rescue from outside, the British
people would starve, and in the winter they would freeze for lack
of fuel. Britain was like a soldier wounded in war who, now that
the fighting was over, would bleed to death.
The plight of Britain--which was no different from the plight of
other free countries in Europe--was made vivid, now, by what
lawyers call an 'Act of God.' The winter of 1946-1947 was one of
extraordinary severity. Beginning on January 25, a succession of
blizzards without precedent struck the British Isles. At this
time Britain was already in the midst of a crisis caused by the
shortage of coal. This shortage had already forced a number of
factories that produced for export to shut down temporarily.
Twelve days before the blizzards struck, the Government had
reduced coal allocations to all industries by fifty per
cent--simply because that was all the coal available. There had
already been some temporary cut-offs of electricity because of the
coal shortage. And food was being severely rationed.
The blizzards that now began simply froze transport in Britain, as
well as killing the winter wheat. Everywhere, the factories that
were still open began to close. By February 7, two weeks after
the British informed the State Department that they would have to
withdraw from Greece and Turkey, more than half of British
industry had come to a halt. On that date the Government
announced in the House of Commons that for several days all
electricity would be cut off from industrial consumers in most of
England, including the Midlands, and that electricity for domestic
use would be cut off for five hours of each day. Immediately,
five million workers were thrown out of work and were left with
little or no heat in their homes.
The approaching crisis in Greece and Turkey was, then, merely the
symptom of a far wider crisis in Britain and throughout Europe.
Britain could no longer continue its rescue operation in Greece
and Turkey because it stood in need of rescue itself. Britain was
collapsing as Greece was collapsing; and so were France and Italy,
in both of which the Communists seemed about to take over as they
already had in the eastern European countries. This was once more
the eleventh hour--as in 1917, as in 1941. If the United States
did not intervene now, all would be lost.
The external and internal threats:
Nothing in the European Recovery Program [the Marshall Plan] could
have been interpreted as antagonistic to Moscow except the fact
that it was undertaken in spite of Moscow's objection. The West
European countries were seeking simply their own salvation and
recovery from the effects of the War. In doing so they were,
however, associating themselves with the United States, which had
taken a stand against any further Russian expansion. The choice
that had been put before them at the beginning of July 1947 had
been that of resigning themselves to helplessness and the descent
into chaos, or facing the active opposition of Moscow by
undertaking to save themselves with American help. Their decision
in favor of the latter course now identified them as members of
the camp opposed to Moscow, and therefore as proper objects of its
hostility.
In the general view then current, of which Churchill made himself
a spokesman, it was only the American monopoly of atomic power,
available for the protection of the West, that made this disregard
of Moscow's opposition possible. Even so, in the months that
followed the first meeting of the sixteen nations, Europeans and
Americans alike had to steel their nerves to live and carry on in
the expectation of a new World War that might begin at any moment
with the occupation of a defenseless West Europe by the Red
Army. [3]
[Footnote 3] From the beginning of the 1930's to almost the
end of 1962 the populations of the West lived continuously in
a terrible fear. The general economic breakdown of 1929-1930,
which foreboded the breakdown of the social order everywhere,
was followed by the rise of Hitler and the Japanese war-lords,
to the point where it no longer seemed possible to stop them.
The terrors of World War II were followed by those associated
with the prospect of an imminent general breakdown of
civilization and the obliteration of all that made life worth
living, or even possible, under the Muscovite tyranny that was
spreading from the East. The emotion of fear is not easily
recaptured, and now a new generation is growing up that, one
hopes, will be spared the experience. However, for those of
the new generation who want to know, and for some of their
elders who want to recapture the brooding terror that lasted
for some thirty years, I recommend J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy,
*The Lord of the Rings*, Boston, 1954-1956, which enshrines
the mood and the emotion of those long years in which we, in
the West, saw almost no possibility of saving ourselves from
the intolerable darkness that was overspreading the world from
the East.
The problem of resisting the hostile Russian power was complicated
in varying degrees for the West European nations by the Communist
parties that operated from within their borders under the
discipline of Moscow and in support of its foreign policy. As we
have seen, their resistance to the Nazis in the occupied countries
had given the Communists prestige and had greatly strengthened
their position when the Nazis were finally overcome and swept
away. They had promptly become one of the strongest parties in
Italy, so that they had to be given four Cabinet posts in the
first Government of the new Italian Republic. In France, after
October 1945 the Communist Party had been the largest and
strongest of the political parties, having polled a higher
percentage of votes than had ever been polled by one party in the
history of France. Consequently, it had held a Vice-Premiership
and four other Cabinet posts (including the Ministry of Defense)
in the first Government under the Fourth Republic. Here appeared
to be a menace of Muscovite conquest from within as grave as the
menace of Muscovite conquest from without. The two menaces in
conjunction were cause for alarm or despair among realistic and
reasonable men. Moreover, continuous suffering from cold and
hunger, as West Europe failed to recover after 1945, seemed likely
to produce increasing numbers of recruits for the Communist
parties, regarded as the parties of protest.
If one has been slipping at an accelerating rate toward the abyss
of disaster, which one has almost reached, one can hardly hope
that one's slide will be halted, at last, just on the brink. The
aggressive intransigence that Moscow now manifested, as the West
approached the brink, was surely based on the expectation that it
would not be able to save itself from going over. It represented
the deep-seated psychology that impells one to turn upon those who
appear stricken and helpless. At this time Moscow was openly
proclaiming the imminence of economic collapse in the United
States as well as Europe, and there can be little doubt that this
is what it confidently expected.
It's when you step back and look at the big picture that you tend to get
theories which are vague and wrong. Herbert Butterfield described this
as "the Whig interpretation of history", the tendency of historians to
interpret history as a process that inevitably brings us to where we
are today.
> > Stalin
> > believed (wrongly) that the West was implacably hostile to the Soviet
> > Union;
>
> Wrongly? The West sent troops into Russia in 1917 to try to topple the
> revolution.
Yes, wrongly. The Soviet version of this history completely ignores the
fact that World War I was going on! Western leaders were primarily
concerned with the war, and for them, the significant think about the
Bolshevik revolution was that *the Bolsheviks took Russia out of the war*.
IIRC, they might have even had the idea that the Bolsheviks were German
agents. George Kennan discusses this in "Russia and the West under
Lenin and Stalin". (And in considerably more detail in "Russia Leaves
the War" and "The Decision to Intervene", which I haven't read.)
> I'd say I have to acknowledge that I can't prove that the U.S. foreign
> policy choices that Chomsky criticizes are strictly motivated by
> economics, absent considerations of power. I'd say the reverse is also
> true.
I'm afraid I'd disagree. As I said, when analyzing a particular decision,
it's possible to determine what the decision-makers were thinking. My
particular area of interest is the Truman administration, especially
George Kennan, but I think John Lewis Gaddis's "Strategies of Containment"
provides a pretty good analysis of US strategy from Roosevelt to Carter.
Thanks for the interesting discussion. If you'd like to stop at some
point, feel free. I agree that there's no winner or loser.