Chomsky: 'US foreign policy is straight out of the mafia'
Tom Davos
guardian.co.uk B) Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
'US foreign policy is straight out of the mafia'
Noam Chomsky is the west's most prominent critic of US imperialism,
yet he is rarely interviewed in the mainstream media. Seumas Milne
meets him
Noam Chomsky: 'Obama's campaign rhetoric was completely vacuous'
Photograph: Rex Features
Noam Chomsky is the closest thing in the English-speaking world to an
intellectual superstar. A philosopher of language and political
campaigner of towering academic reputation, who as good as invented
modern linguistics, he is entertained by presidents, addresses the UN
general assembly and commands a mass international audience. When he
spoke in London last week, thousands of young people battled for
tickets to attend his lectures, followed live on the internet across
the globe, as the 80-year-old American linguist fielded questions from
as far away as besieged Gaza.
But the bulk of the mainstream western media doesn't seem to have
noticed. His books sell in their hundreds of thousands, he is mobbed
by students as a celebrity, but he is rarely reported or interviewed
in the US outside radical journals and websites. The explanation, of
course, isn't hard to find. Chomsky is America's most prominent critic
of the US imperial role in the world, which he has used his erudition
and standing to expose and excoriate since Vietnam.
Like the English philosopher Bertrand Russell, who spoke out against
western-backed wars until his death at the age of 97, Chomsky has lent
his academic prestige to a relentless campaign against his own
country's barbarities abroad b though in contrast to the aristocratic
Russell, Chomsky is the child of working class Jewish refugees from
Tsarist pogroms. Not surprisingly, he has been repaid with either
denunciation or, far more typically, silence. Whereas a much slighter
figure such as the Atlanticist French philosopher Bernard Henri-LC)vy
is lionised at home and abroad, Chomsky and his genuine popularity are
ignored.
Indeed, his books have been banned from the US prison library in
GuantC!namo. You'd hardly need a clearer example of his model of how
dissenting views are filtered out of the western media, set out in his
1990's book Manufacturing Consent, than his own case. But as Chomsky
is the first to point out, the marginalisation of opponents of western
state policy is as nothing compared to the brutalities suffered by
those who challenge states backed by the US and its allies in the
Middle East.
We meet in a break between a schedule of lectures and talks that would
be punishing for a man half his age. At the podium, Chomsky's style is
dry and low-key, as he ranges without pausing for breath from one
region and historical conflict to another, always buttressed with a
barrage of sources and quotations, often from US government archives
and leaders themselves.
But in discussion he is warm and engaged, only hampered by slight
deafness. He has only recently started travelling again, he explains,
after a three-year hiatus while he was caring for his wife and fellow
linguist, Carol, who died from cancer last December. Despite their
privilege, his concentrated exposure to the continuing injustices and
exorbitant expense of the US health system has clearly left him angry.
Public emergency rooms are "uncivilised, there is no health care", he
says, and the same kind of corporate interests that drive US foreign
policy are also setting the limits of domestic social reform.
All three schemes now being considered for Barack Obama's health care
reform are "to the right of the public, which is two to one in favour
of a public option. But the New York Times says that has no political
support, by which they mean from the insurance and pharmaceutical
companies." Now the American Petroleum Institute is determined to
"follow the success of the insurance industry in killing off health
reform," Chomsky says, and do the same to hopes of genuine
international action at next month's Copenhagen climate change summit.
Only the forms of power have changed since the foundation of the
republic, he says, when James Madison insisted that the new state
should "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority".
Chomsky supported Obama's election campaign in swing states, but
regards his presidency as representing little more than a "shift back
towards the centre" and a striking foreign policy continuity with
George Bush's second administration. "The first Bush administration
was way off the spectrum, America's prestige sank to a historic low
and the people who run the country didn't like that." But he is
surprised so many people abroad, especially in the third world, are
disappointed at how little Obama has changed. "His campaign rhetoric,
hope and change, was entirely vacuous. There was no principled
criticism of the Iraq war: he called it a strategic blunder. And
Condoleezza Rice was black b does that mean she was sympathetic to
third world problems?"
The veteran activist has described the US invasion of Afghanistan as
"one of the most immoral acts in modern history", which united the
jihadist movement around al-Qaida, sharply increased the level of
terrorism and was "perfectly irrational b unless the security of the
population is not the main priority". Which, of course, Chomsky
believes, it is not. "States are not moral agents," he says, and
believes that now that Obama is escalating the war, it has become even
clearer that the occupation is about the credibility of Nato and US
global power.
This is a recurrent theme in Chomsky's thinking about the American
empire. He argues that since government officials first formulated
plans for a "grand area" strategy for US global domination in the
early 1940s, successive administrations have been guided by a
"godfather principle, straight out of the mafia: that defiance cannot
be tolerated. It's a major feature of state policy." "Successful
defiance" has to be punished, even where it damages business
interests, as in the economic blockade of Cuba b in case "the
contagion spreads".
The gap between the interests of those who control American foreign
policy and the public is also borne out, in Chomsky's view, by the
US's unwavering support for Israel and "rejectionism" of the two-state
solution effectively on offer for 30 years. That's not because of the
overweening power of the Israel lobby in the US, but because Israel is
a strategic and commercial asset which underpins rather than
undermines US domination of the Middle East. "Even in the 1950s,
President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of
hatred of the US in the Arab world, because of the perception on the
Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take
their oil."
Half a century later, corporations like Lockheed Martin and Exxon
Mobil are doing fine, he says: America's one-sided role in the Middle
East isn't harming their interests, whatever risks it might bring for
anyone else.
Chomsky is sometimes criticised on the left for encouraging pessimism
or inaction by emphasising the overwhelming weight of US power b or
for failing to connect his own activism with labour or social
movements on the ground. He is certainly his own man, holds some
idiosyncratic views (I was startled, for instance, to hear him say
that Vietnam was a strategic victory for the US in southeast Asia,
despite its humiliating 1975 withdrawal) and has drawn flak for
defending freedom of speech for Holocaust deniers. He describes
himself as an anarchist or libertarian socialist, but often sounds
more like a radical liberal b which is perhaps why he enrages more
middle-of-the-road American liberals who don't appreciate their views
being taken to the logical conclusion.
But for an octogenarian who has been active on the left since the
1930s, Chomsky sounds strikingly upbeat. He's a keen supporter of the
wave of progressive change that has swept South America in the past
decade ("one of the liberal criticisms of Bush is that he didn't pay
enough attention to Latin America b it was the best thing that ever
happened to Latin America"). He also believes there are now
constraints on imperial power which didn't exist in the past: "They
couldn't get away with the kind of chemical warfare and blanket B52
bombing that Kennedy did," in the 1960s. He even has some qualified
hopes for the internet as a way around the monopoly of the
corporate-dominated media.
But what of the charge so often made that he's an "anti-American"
figure who can only see the crimes of his own government while
ignoring the crimes of others around the world? "Anti-Americanism is a
pure totalitarian concept," he retorts. "The very notion is idiotic.
Of course you don't deny other crimes, but your primary moral
responsibility is for your own actions, which you can do something
about. It's the same charge which was made in the Bible by King Ahab,
the epitome of evil, when he demanded of the prophet Elijah: why are
you a hater of Israel? He was identifying himself with society and
criticism of the state with criticism of society."
It's a telling analogy. Chomsky is a studiedly modest man who would
balk at any such comparison. But in the Biblical tradition of the
conflict between prophets and kings, there's not the slightest doubt
which side he represents.
guardian.co.uk B) Guardian News and Media Limited 2009