[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [SRRTAC-L:7268] V. K. Ramachandran interview Chomsky In First Person (fwd)

[Al Kagan]

>Delivered-To: akagan at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
>Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 02:25:45 -0600 (CST)
>From: Dale Wertz <dwertz at mc.net>
>To: SRRT Action Council <srrtac-l at ala.org>
>Cc: PLGNet-L at listproc.sjsu.edu
>Subject: [SRRTAC-L:7268] V. K. Ramachandran interview Chomsky In 
>First Person  (fwd)
>X-Spam-Rating: mail.mc.net 1.6.1.petek 0/1000/N
>Reply-To: srrtac-l at ala.org
>Sender: owner-srrtac-l at ala.org
>Status:  
>
>	Topics including US war on Afganistan, coverups v. investigations
>of casualties, the propaganda model of US media, the responsibilities of
>intellectuals.  On the long side.  dw
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Sun,  9 Dec 2001 09:44:50 -0500 (EST)
>Reply-To: a-infos-en at ainfos.ca
>To: Infoshop <infoshop-news at infoshop.org>
>Subject: (en) V. K. Ramachandran interview Chomsky In First Person
>
>  ________________________________________________
>       A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
>             http://www.ainfos.ca/
>  ________________________________________________
>
>In this exclusive interview, Noam Chomsky speaks to V.K. Ramachandran about
>the 'new war against terrorism', imperialism, the media and the role of
>intellectuals.
>
>November 15, 2001: there is a break in the North East monsoon, and it is a
>clear, cool day in Thekkady. Noam Chomsky is on the second day of his first
>holiday in many years, a five-day break from public appearances that takes
>Carol Chomsky and himself to the coast, the hills and the coastal backwaters
>of Kerala. Both of them have spent much of the morning reading and replying
>to e-mails - the torrent that does not recognise time or place - and looking
>at the Internet. She is now at the ayurveda clinic nearby, and Professor
>Chomsky sits in a wicker chair outside his cottage, reading the newspapers
>and preparing for a lengthy interview, exclusive to Frontline, with V.K.
>Ramachandran. This is the most recent of many interviews that he has given
>Frontline; the first was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, more than a decade
>ago, during the Gulf War. The interview, interspersed with conversation,
>goes on for more than an hour and a half, and covers many fields: terrorism
>and the attack on Afghanistan, imperialism and war, the media, and a theme
>on which Chomsky first wrote in the mid-1960s, the role of intellectuals in
>society.
>
>V. K. Ramachandran: Noam, what do you see to be the strategic significance
>of the new military situation in Afghanistan?
>
>Noam Chomsky: I assume that the U.S. will more or less take control over
>Afghanistan. U.S. military force is so overwhelming that it can't fail to
>subdue a basically defenceless country. This is quite different from the
>Soviet invasion. The Soviets were facing a major mercenary military force,
>backed by the United States and other powers. They also had additional
>constraints: they never bombed cities or destroyed them, and they never used
>what amount to weapons of mass destruction, like carpet bombs or
>daisy-cutters. Assuming that this offensive subdues the country mostly, the
>United States will probably delegate authority to reconstitute the country
>to some other hands, maybe the United Nations or maybe its local allies.
>Then comes a very uncertain situation.
>
>The strategic consequences will be particularly significant for Pakistan.
>For the rest of the region, it is hard to predict; it depends how local
>populations will respond to what has happened. For example, will the
>population of Saudi Arabia remain more or less quiescent while observing the
>destruction of an Islamic country nearby? Nobody really knows. Experienced
>correspondents in Saudi Arabia have been comparing the situation there to
>Iran in the late 1970s, where events were completely unpredicted by
>Intelligence services or anyone else. These are very volatile, unpredictable
>situations, in which no one can tell when a popular explosion will take
>place. And if such an event occurs in the Gulf region, it will be of
>extraordinary strategic importance.
>
>Ramachandran: Do you think the current military situation will encourage
>right-wing triumphalism and serve as justification for military action, here
>and elsewhere?
>
>Chomsky: In the United States, undoubtedly. You can predict that any
>military triumph of a great power will lead to a mood of triumphalism, which
>is very bad news for the world. It frees options for further resort to
>military power on the grounds that such power has been seen to succeed. When
>violence succeeds on its own terms, it increases the likelihood of further
>resort to violence.
>
>Here the question is really how the U.S. population will react and how the
>powerful allies will react. Will they be supportive of further unilateral
>application of U.S. power in this fashion? If that is tolerated, it is very
>bad news for the world.
>
>Ramachandran: What is your assessment of the potential of the Northern
>Alliance as a force with political legitimacy in the country and as a force
>capable of governing?
>
>Chomsky: The so-called Northern Alliance is not much of an alliance. Its
>members are warlords who have been in bitter conflict with one another. In
>fact, the massive destruction that they carried out ten years ago when they
>were in control was mostly from fighting each other. Some of them have a
>very ugly record. General Dostum, who is the 'conqueror' of Mazar-e-Sharif,
>was a General in the Soviet Army who was part of the Soviet invasion of
>Afghanistan until the end. After the Soviets withdrew, he retained control
>of his region.
>
>The U.S. will certainly try to forge them into a more or less obedient group
>that listens to central orders, which ultimately will come from Washington.
>However, whether they can impose discipline on these groups is impossible to
>guess. These groups are non-Pashtun; they are Tadjik-Uzbek with ties to the
>Central Asian countries and are, for many Afghans, a sort of foreign force.
>The United States has, of course, been trying to bring in Pashtun Afghans to
>represent somehow the roughly 40 per cent of the population that is Pashtun.
>Whether there are any credible figures among the biggest sector of the
>population who can join a U.S.-run coalition is just unclear at the moment.
>
>Ramachandran: What are the present and potential humanitarian consequences
>of this war?
>
>Chomsky: For obvious reasons, the Western media and doctrinal system are
>trying very hard to suppress that question. First, the threat of bombing and
>the bombing itself have already caused a humanitarian catastrophe. Even
>before September 11, Afghanistan was in a dire predicament from a
>humanitarian point of view. Many millions of people - the United Nations
>says 6 to 7 million - were surviving, and barely that, from international
>aid. With the threat of bombing, international aid workers were withdrawn
>and food deliveries were cut. A few days after September 11, the U.S.
>demanded that Pakistan cut off food deliveries. International aid agencies
>were extremely bitter about this and condemned quite harshly the threats
>that were terminating the delivery of badly needed humanitarian aid (in the
>United States, these reports were either suppressed or barely mentioned). As
>of now, food deliveries are well below what were considered necessary to
>help the people just to survive.
>
>It is not simply food; people need shelter and blankets. Huge numbers of
>people have been driven from their homes and have fled into the countryside.
>There is at least some hope of giving a degree of sustenance to those who
>fled across the border, to Iran or Pakistan. But apparently many millions
>have fled into the countryside, and it is impossible to reach them. For
>example, a couple of weeks ago, Western reporters estimated that about 70
>per cent of the population of Kandahar had fled. It may well be that
>Kandahar, where the U.S. destroyed electricity and water supplies (which
>amounts to biological warfare), is almost unlivable. Where did these people
>go? They are off to the countryside, into regions that, first of all, lack
>access to food, except in an extremely limited fashion. These areas are also
>probably the most heavily mined in the world. The United Nations had been
>carrying out limited mine-clearing operations but those were terminated when
>all international workers were withdrawn. Now the people have an additional
>problem: the area is probably littered with cluster bombs. Cluster bombs are
>much more dangerous than mines. They are vicious anti-personnel weapons that
>send out flechettes that tear people to shreds. They just sit there and if a
>child picks one up, or a farmer hits one with a hoe, it explodes.
>
>Ramachandran: What does a bomb of this sort look like?
>
>Chomsky: It is a little thing that a child would pick up thinking it is a
>toy. In fact, they apparently look pretty much like the food drops, except
>that they are smaller.
>
>The same is happening in many places. The estimates are that in northern
>Laos there are probably thousands of deaths a year, 30 years after the
>bombing. In Laos the Pentagon would not even provide instructions on how to
>defuse them to a volunteer British de-mining group that was working there.
>In Kosovo as well, the U.S. refused to remove cluster bombs.
>
>In Afghanistan nobody is going to clear these things. So in addition to the
>mines, there will be cluster bombs unexploded and very little ability to
>bring in food or blankets or to provide shelter. Many people will disappear
>and no one will even know what happened to them. No one is going to do a
>careful census of Afghanistan to find out what the effects were of the
>bombing and of the threat of bombing.
>
>There may be another problem looming. Before the bombing began, the Food and
>Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations warned that there was a grave
>humanitarian crisis taking place. A few days later, after the bombing began,
>they announced that by their estimate about 80 per cent of the planting of
>grain, which apparently takes place around then, had been disrupted.
>
>A very graphic illustration of the investigation of casualties comes from
>the two major atrocities that ended the millennium, Serbian in Kosovo, and
>Indonesian in East Timor.
>
>These are two major atrocities, but they are quite different. The Serbian
>atrocities in Kosovo occurred after the NATO bombing began. Western
>ideologues tried to suppress this fact, naturally, but we have extensive
>documentation on it from the West.
>
>The British, who were the hawkish element in the alliance, have now released
>their internal records. Up until late January, the British literally
>regarded the KLA as being the main source of killing. Although, just given
>the proportion of force, it seems hard to believe, that is their estimate,
>and that is what Robin Cook and Lord Robertson were saying in late January.
>
>After the bombing, substantial atrocities began. That is when the population
>was driven out of the country and truckloads of bodies were tossed into the
>rivers. Although it is necessary to conceal these facts, they are apparent
>from the Milosevic indictment, which includes virtually nothing before the
>bombing. It all started after the bombing. Not a great surprise: if you
>start bombing a country, they don't just sit there and throw flowers at you.
>And the atrocities constituted real war crimes, no question about that.
>
>After the war, Kosovo was flooded with forensic experts who tried to find
>any possible trace they could of Serbian atrocities and these were
>calculated down to the last detail. That is interesting, because since the
>bombing was not a result of the atrocities but rather a factor in them, the
>greater the atrocities the greater the guilt of the West.
>
>In East Timor, the background is much worse. In the late 1970s, within a few
>years of its invasion of East Timor, the Indonesian Army had killed a couple
>of hundred thousand people, maybe a third of the population. This was done
>decisively with U.S. military and diplomatic support. When the atrocities
>peaked and really became genocidal, the British wanted to take part, so
>since 1978 they have been probably Indonesia's major military supplier.
>
>The atrocities continued right through the 1980s, and in 1998, after the
>fall of Suharto and lots of confusion in the United States, the Clinton
>Administration organised a training programme for the Indonesian military.
>This is violation of Congressional directives, but nobody pays any attention
>to that detail. The United States trained, among others, Indonesian special
>forces. These forces were sent into East Timor in late 1998 and began very
>quickly to carry out atrocities. Their goal was to intimidate the population
>so as to force them to vote in favour of integration into Indonesia in a
>referendum that was planned for August 1999.
>
>When the referendum took place, to everybody's amazement, the population -
>under military occupation and severe intimidation - nevertheless went to the
>polls. Almost the whole population voted and about 80 per cent favoured
>independence. At that point the Indonesian generals went berserk and
>immediately launched a major attack. They drove about 80 to 85 per cent of
>the population out of their homes, and hundreds of thousands of people were
>driven into Indonesian territory in West Timor. Possibly 100,000 are still
>there in concentration camps. Nobody cares about them, because they are
>victims of the United States and Britain. If 100,000 Kosovar Albanians were
>in Serbian concentration camps, we would know about it, but not in this
>case.
>
>Finally, under tremendous pressure, Clinton was compelled to order the
>Indonesians to terminate the atrocities. And within 48 hours the Indonesians
>had reversed their position by 180 degrees. That reversal reveals the latent
>power that was always there and could have stopped the atrocities at any
>point. So you didn't have to bomb Jakarta, you didn't need any sanctions;
>all you had to do was tell them to stop.
>
>Incidentally, Britain was so supportive of Indonesia that it was still
>sending jet fighters to Indonesia two weeks after the European Union
>declared an arms embargo and after the Australian-led peace-keeping force
>had entered. That's Tony Blair the great humanitarian - and Robin Cook and
>Clare Short, incidentally. They are even worse than the Americans.
>
>To return to the question of forensic experts, the Australian forces brought
>in a few and the U.N. pleaded for forensic experts to come in to find out
>what happened.
>
>To this day the United States has sent virtually no forensic experts, since
>it does not want to find out what happened. This is radically different from
>Kosovo, where they are desperately eager to find any trace of an atrocity;
>by contrast, in East Timor, they are desperate not to find any traces of
>atrocities. That's the way it works. If you can blame atrocities on someone
>else, they become huge crimes against humanity and there is no limit to our
>indignation and self-righteousness. If, however, the crimes are ours, they
>have to be suppressed.
>
>I shall give you one last example of how the record of deaths is suppressed.
>The standard estimates of deaths in Indochina...
>
>Ramachandran: Over which period?
>
>Chomsky: They usually start in 1965, because the U.S. does not want to admit
>that it started attacking Vietnam in 1961. In fact, there were probably
>70,000 or so people killed in the late 1950s. According to the official
>chronology, however, the war started in 1965, when you can claim that the
>North Vietnamese got involved (before that the U.S. was just bombing South
>Vietnam).
>
>The general estimates from the early 1960s to 1975 are in the neighbourhood
>of 2 to 4 million for all of Indochina. It is not a precise number by any
>means because nobody looks.
>
>Ramachandran: Two to four million is a pretty wide range.
>
>Chomsky: And what do you count? Do you count the people who are still dying
>of U.S. chemical warfare? The U.S. deluged the place - South Vietnam, not
>North Vietnam - with poisonous chemicals. Nobody counts the effects of
>having wiped out most of Quang-ngai province, an agricultural area - who
>cares?
>
>Whatever the estimates are, it is somewhere in the neighbourhood of several
>millions. When people in the United States are asked to estimate the number
>of Vietnamese dead, the median response is 100,000, a number that gives you
>the impression of the way the culture works. For example, if in Germany you
>asked how many people died in the Holocaust and they said 200,000, you would
>think there is a problem in German culture. This is comparable, but it is
>our atrocity, and therefore the intellectual classes and the media and
>anyone responsible for controlling thought and opinion suppress it. They
>don't know themselves and they don't want anyone else to know.
>
>It is going to be the same in Afghanistan. The humanitarian catastrophe is
>traceable to the United States and its allies, and therefore it is not going
>to be investigated. That is almost a historical law.
>
>Ramachandran: You have, on different occasions, made two sets of points
>about reporting the casualties of war. One is on the tendency of the media
>and commentators to concentrate only on "collateral damage" - terrible
>term - and not on the totality of destruction in a war. The second is a
>point you have made even recently, particularly with reference to Sudan and
>Nicaragua and other parts of Central America, that the victims of an attack
>are not just the number of people who die in the immediate attack but also
>those who die of its long-term effects.
>
>Chomsky: Both of those points are important. By the way, when you see CNN or
>BBC focus on collateral damage, you know it is unimportant. If it was of any
>significance they wouldn't talk about it.
>
>The fact is that collateral damage is unimportant. It is horrible, but it is
>going to be in the order of maybe hundreds of people, maybe thousands, and
>furthermore you can claim - with some plausibility - that it was a mistake.
>On the other hand, a conscious, premeditated operation that will kill
>hundreds of thousands or even millions of people cannot be talked about,
>since you cannot say that our leaders do things like that. The major
>humanitarian catastrophe is suppressed and so-called collateral damage
>receives the focus.
>
>Ramachandran: On the second point, you have referred recently to the
>examples of Sudan and Central America.
>
>Chomsky: Thirty thousand people were killed in the fighting in Nicaragua,
>but how many people died? The numbers are huge.
>
>Sudan is an interesting case. A few Cruise missiles destroyed a
>pharmaceutical factory, one that happened to produce half the pharmaceutical
>supplies for the country, about 90 per cent of its critical medicines, and
>also apparently almost all its veterinary medicines.
>
>The West is willing to accept the fact that two or three guards were killed;
>that is collateral damage. But what were the effects on the population of a
>poor African country? What happens when you destroy half its pharmaceutical
>supplies and its veterinary medicines? The country is under sanctions so
>cannot easily obtain these medicines elsewhere (the British government, for
>instance, refused to provide anti-malarial medicines to Sudan after this
>happened).
>
>There have been virtually no attempts to estimate the effects of the attack.
>The German Embassy in Sudan issued an estimate (I don't know how they
>obtained it); the Ambassador said that his guess was several tens of
>thousands of deaths. One specialist who investigated the matter is the
>regional coordinator for a major NGO, the old and respectable Middle East
>Foundation. His estimate is tens of thousands. He could not do a careful
>study; it is a guess based on what he has seen.
>
>Watching CNN and BBC is horrifying. When they talk of September 11 there is
>justified outrage and shock. "How can human beings sink to such a level?"
>they ask, rightly. When they talk about the humanitarian crisis in
>Afghanistan it is in a few cool, dispassionate phrases, with no particular
>comment: "unfortunate", "heart-rending but necessary" (that's The
>Economist), part of a just war. In a way they are right. This is a normal
>event in modern history. It is entirely normal for the European powers and
>the United States, an offshoot, just to massacre people.
>
>Ramachandran: What kind of popular support do you think there is in the
>United States for this kind of retaliatory war against poverty-stricken
>people?
>
>Chomsky: I think it is extremely low, which is why it is not reported. If
>there were no fear of popular reaction, the facts would be investigated and
>reported. They are aware, however, that there would be popular revulsion.
>Even in the polls that are taken - which are pretty superficial - if you
>look carefully, you find that if people are asked "Should we retaliate
>forcefully against the September 11 atrocities?", almost everyone says
>"Yes". If you go down a few questions and say "Should we carry out military
>attack if it is going to harm innocent civilians?", the numbers go down
>sharply. If you give people any idea of the scale of the harm, support would
>go way down, which is why it is not reported.
>
>Ramachandran: Is there any evidence for this, or are you speaking of what
>you would expect?
>
>Chomsky: It is what you expect... Well yes, there is evidence but it is not
>evidence that you could write a technical paper about.
>
>Take a look at the 25-year gap between the John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan
>Administrations. Kennedy sent the U. S. Air Force to bomb South Vietnam. He
>inaugurated the use of napalm and chemical weapons, and the policy of
>attacking food crops to deprive the population of support, driving millions
>of people into concentration camps called "strategic hamlets" and later into
>slums. Although it was a major attack, there wasn't a whisper of protest. A
>big protest movement built up only in the late 1960s, after many years of
>war.
>
>When the Reagan Administration came to power, Kennedy was in many ways its
>model. It had problems in Central America similar to those Kennedy faced in
>South-East Asia and it tried to duplicate, step by step, what the Kennedy
>Administration had done.
>
>Within a month of the entry of the Reagan government, it published a White
>Paper - almost modelled on the Kennedy White Paper - warning that
>Russian-backed terrorists were going to take over the world, starting from
>Nicaragua. They were plainly planning to move on to direct military attack
>against Nicaragua. There was, however, an enormous - and totally
>unanticipated - public reaction all over the country.
>
>The Administration had to turn to clandestine terror, and never could invade
>Nicaragua. It had to use a terrorist mercenary army attacking from abroad
>because it could not use direct military force. It was the same in other
>parts of Central America.
>
>Ramachandran: You've also said that the Gulf War was one in which protests
>began even before bombing began.
>
>Chomsky: The Gulf War was amazing. It is the first time in history that
>there was protest - major protest by hundreds of thousands of people, you
>were there - before a war.
>
>Actually the 1980s are a very interesting chapter in the history of
>imperialism. This was the first time that ordinary people from the imperial
>society went to live with the victims to try and help and protect them. Tens
>of thousands of people from the United States went to places like Nicaragua
>and El Salvador, partly to provide assistance, but in large part just in the
>hope that a white face in a village could cut down atrocities. Nobody ever
>thought of such action during the Vietnam War. No one thought of living in a
>Vietnamese village to try to protect the village people against atrocities.
>In Central America it was common and many of them are still there.
>
>Ramachandran: Like your daughter in Nicaragua.
>
>Chomsky: Yes. That is an enormous change in consciousness, and it is still
>there.
>
>Ramachandran: It went beyond just solidarity, then; they were conscious of
>being a human shield.
>
>Chomsky: It was participation and it was living there, not just going on a
>march or going to jail overnight, and it was not easy. It is not easy to
>live in a Salvadoran village. First of all it was dangerous; it was also
>hard. These were middle-class, relatively prosperous people. There was also
>an underground resistance, a sort of new Underground Railway run by
>conservative Christians to bring illegal immigrants into the United States
>and to disperse them in the country.
>
>Ramachandran: To shift to some issues of media analysis, to issues relating
>to your 'propaganda model'. In your thinking, the propaganda function of the
>dominant media is part of a broader process of building a consensus for
>official policy.
>
>Chomsky: Official policy and more or less standard doctrine, that is,
>supporting privilege and existing institutional structures.
>
>The work on the 'filters' is mostly Edward Herman's, from his interest in
>institutional economics. My own feeling is that the consistent
>ideological-doctrinal commitments that are part of intellectual life - and
>these are not easily measurable - are an overwhelming factor. That is why
>you do not find much difference between the media and scholarly journals;
>they come from the same roots. In the media the problem is intensified by
>ownership and advertising - these intensify something that already exists.
>
>One of the reasons I study the media is because they are the most visible
>part of the intellectual culture. To study the intellectual culture is not
>easy, but when you study the media, there are some very straightforward ways
>of doing it. You can ask, for example, "How do they handle the war in
>Afghanistan?" There are neutral ways of handling the issue, but do the media
>use the neutral ways or do they just act as a state propaganda agency? You
>can investigate that rather closely. And the results are stunning, I think,
>and beyond what any model would predict.
>
>The degree of conformism and support for elite policies is astonishing.
>Take, say, the elections of November 2000. You can see from the polls that
>there are issues that concern the public greatly. Its main concerns are
>economic issues, for instance, the trade deficit. Most people don't even
>know what the trade deficit is. They couldn't explain it to you, but they
>know that it is leading to the deterioration of their lives, and that it
>makes it possible to attack the quality of their work and even their
>employment. People are strongly opposed to the so-called free trade
>agreements. People are almost instinctively opposed; they do not have a lot
>of information and they cannot give you an explanation, but they are
>opposed.
>
>There is a thing called 'fast-track' legislation, basically Stalinist
>legislation that gives the executive branch the right to enter into economic
>treaties without Congressional participation. Congress is then allowed to
>say 'Yes'. Although for years fast-track legislation was passed without any
>problem, it has been very hard to do so over the last few years.
>
>Right after September 11, the U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick,
>said the first thing that had to be done to combat terrorism was to pass
>fast-track. Now that should really make Osama bin Laden tremble in his
>boots - that the President has Kremlin-style authority to sign economic
>agreements. The Administration wants to use the present window of
>opportunity to ram fast-track through without people noticing.
>
>To get back to 2000, none of these were issues in the elections. There is a
>kind of criterion that determines such exclusion: if the public and the
>business world are both very much interested in some issue, but are on
>opposite sides, the issue doesn't enter the political system.
>
>Ramachandran: Is it getting worse or have your book and your work and that
>of others made a difference to the quality of the media?
>
>Chomsky: They have been barely willing to recognise its existence.
>Nevertheless, people know about this kind of critique because by now there
>is a strong popular movement against the media.
>
>The media are very unpopular. The situation is somewhat similar to what I
>said about free-trade agreements: people don't really have detailed reasons,
>but they just don't trust them, because they feel manipulated.
>
>Edward Herman and I and others, including Michael Parenti, give endless
>numbers of talks - this is basically participation in a mass movement - and
>that reaches a fair number of people.
>
>There is another influence on the mass media that should not be overlooked.
>The 1960s had a big civilising effect on society; people who went through
>that experience are just different. A reporter or young editor in the 1980s
>would have been somebody whose view of the world was shaped by events in the
>1960s and what followed.
>
>My own feeling is that, bad as they are, the media are better than they were
>40 or even 20 years ago, partly for these reasons, partly because the public
>mood is different. Things are still awful, but they used to be much worse.
>
>Ramachandran: I haven't heard you say that before.
>
>Chomsky: I think it's true. In the late 1960s, for example, I tried very
>hard to get the major media to cover the war in Laos, which was a horrible
>atrocity. I actually met with editors of The New York Times and Time-Life
>and talked about it. It was not even a possibility. When the Intifada broke
>out in 2000, I had a meeting with senior editors of The Boston Globe, people
>I have known in one way or another for years.
>
>Ramachandran: Did you ask for the meeting?
>
>Chomsky: There was a small delegation that asked me to come along. The Globe
>was in a way happy: it is under constant attack from the Jewish community
>for being too pro-Arab, so they want criticism from the other side in order
>to be able to say that they are in the middle.
>
>I went anyway, and at the meeting, I tried very hard to get them to cover
>some very simple facts. For example, the following: when the Intifada
>started on September 13, there was no Palestinian fire for the first few
>days. During those days, Israel immediately reacted with extreme violence,
>including helicopter attacks on civilians. Helicopter gunships attacked
>apartment complexes, ambulances and so on, and killed a lot of people. On
>October 3, the Clinton Administration made a deal with Israel for the
>biggest shipment of attack helicopters in a decade. One of the issues I
>raised with the Globe was just, "Why won't you report this fact?" We had a
>polite discussion, but I knew they were never going to report it.
>
>Ramachandran: Did they, finally?
>
>Chomsky: No, they never did. A couple of months later, a new shipment of the
>most advanced helicopters in the United States arsenal was sent. That one
>happened to be mentioned in the business pages.
>
>Ramachandran: So what you are saying is that there is some improvement,
>but....
>
>Chomsky: There is some improvement, but a long, long way to go - and the
>basic structure is the same.
>
>Ramachandran: How do you see the applicability of the propaganda model to
>other situations and places, including, for instance, Europe?
>
>Chomsky: In Britain, there is some work. There is an institute in Britain in
>Glasgow University that does media analysis, but that's about it.
>
>On the Continent, there is virtually nothing. The reason, I feel, is that
>European intellectuals are so deeply indoctrinated that they cannot perceive
>that they are servants of power. They see themselves as courageous opponents
>of power who stand up for human rights and so on, a perception that is
>completely false.
>
>The role of intellectuals in Europe is somewhat different from their role in
>the United States. One of the nice things about the United States is that
>intellectuals aren't taken very seriously. It shows up in personal
>relations: if I get gasoline at a gas station, the person who works there
>and I are equals, and there is no conception that I am at a different level
>than that person is. In Europe that is not the case. Intellectuals are a
>caste aside: they are very respected, every nonsensical thing that they
>produce is front-page news, and their self-image is different.
>
>One consequence of this is that there is virtually no analysis of the media
>in Europe, because it is not a conceivable topic. On the other hand, the
>little that exists indicates that the situation is much the same as in the
>United States. There is somewhat more diversity in Europe, but that is
>because it is socio-politically different. It has labour-based political
>parties, and these parties have their presses and representatives, and so
>you get a little bit of diversity. The U.S. has nothing like that. The very
>fact that Europe has more of a social market system than the U.S. makes a
>difference. It is taken for granted, for example, that there has to be some
>kind of national health service, whereas the United States is such a
>business-run society that these issues barely even arise in the public
>arena.
>
>Ramachandran: So overall do you think that the media in Europe covers a
>wider range of issues and opinions?
>
>Chomsky: Marginally wider, because of the somewhat greater diversity in the
>social organisation. Take, for instance, the labour movement, which is much
>stronger in Germany than in the United States. Co-determination, whatever it
>amounts to, is almost unimaginable in the United States.
>
>You even see it symbolically. As far as I know there is only one country in
>the world, the United States, where nobody knows what May Day is.
>
>Ramachandran: And that's where it began.
>
>Chomsky: It was a day of solidarity for American workers fighting for an
>eight-hour day. People know that everywhere in the world; in the United
>States, I wonder if there is a person in a million who knows what it is.
>
>Ramachandran: How in your opinion should research in the field of media
>studies proceed? I refer in particular to research on using the media to
>impose official doctrinal consensuses on the people.
>
>Chomsky: You have to look at cases. This isn't physics. There is no theory
>behind any of this. We didn't call the propaganda model a theory because it
>is not entitled to that term. In fact, there is almost nothing in the social
>sciences that ought to be called a theory. Human affairs are too
>complicated.
>
>Ramachandran: Well, it is a model in that it is a set of relationships from
>which predictions can be made.
>
>Chomsky: Okay, it is a set of relationships from which predictions can be
>made but it is not the kind of thing that you call a theory in the sciences,
>where you have principles that aren't obvious (in fact, may even seem
>strange), but from which you derive conclusions that can then be tested in
>experimental situations. There is very little like that in the social
>sciences.
>
>That's why we refrained from calling the model a theory. It's just too
>superficial; in fact it's truisms. What would you conclude about
>corporations selling audiences to other businesses? The immediate assumption
>is that the output will probably reflect the interests of the sellers and
>the buyers. That's almost a null hypothesis. If you find that is true, okay,
>it is interesting, but the mass of the work lies in showing how it works out
>in particular cases.
>
>Ramachandran: But each case study is not meant only to illustrate or
>describe just that particular case.
>
>Chomsky: No, it is not; and in fact we tried to pick the hardest cases. We
>picked the cases that the media themselves and the ideological system put
>forth as their strongest.
>
>Ramachandran: In that sense, you are looking for some kind of theoretical
>conclusions, aren't you?
>
>Chomsky: To try to show that anywhere you look, you are going to find the
>same thing. We picked historically crucial cases, the cases that the media
>present as their proudest moments.
>
>Ramachandran: In the light of what you are saying, how, in your view, would
>research on the Indian media, using the Herman-Chomsky method, proceed?
>
>Chomsky: I would begin by looking at the institutional structure. If it is a
>family-owned newspaper, ask questions about the family.
>
>Ramachandran: What are you looking for?
>
>Chomsky: Take some question that is crucial for India. Let us say....
>
>Ramachandran: Food and food security.
>
>Chomsky: Okay, a socio-economic question like food and food distribution or
>a major political issue like Kashmir. Now ask the questions: What would a
>neutral person - a Martian, someone with no commitments - say about it? What
>is the human significance? How is it treated in the media? In fact, Kashmir
>would probably be interesting. You could ask how the Pakistani and Indian
>media treat the same problem. You can predict without looking what's going
>to happen. In Pakistan they will be all upset about Indian repression and
>refusal to allow self-determination; in India, they will be upset about
>Pakistani terrorism.
>
>Ramachandran: You could use this method, I take it, when dealing with other
>issues as well, such as food security or the WTO...
>
>Chomsky: The WTO is a perfect example. Does everybody in India read every
>day that the effect of the neo-liberal programmes has been to slow down
>growth all over the world? That is, after all, the first thing you should
>know. Even in cases where there is growth, it is very specific growth. It is
>growth that leaves out most of the population and, in fact, probably harms
>them. These ought to be things that everybody knows.
>
>Ramachandran: So the methodology would be to choose subjects of great public
>importance, investigate how the press covers them, and then...
>
>Chomsky: Trace the results to what you can about the institutional
>structure. That's not profound, but it's straightforward.
>
>Ramachandran: Although the Internet is increasingly being privatised, we
>wouldn't have had our present access to dissenting opinion without it. It
>clearly has a dual character.
>
>Chomsky: It has been fantastic, and it has very much of a dual character.
>It's had a very big impact all over the place. In Indonesia the student
>rebellion that ended up overthrowing Suharto was able to organise through
>the Internet. About a year or two ago in Bolivia, the World Bank had more or
>less compelled the government to privatise the water system. Bechtel, which
>was going to take it over, instituted user-charges, which are, of course, a
>disaster. The resistance would have been crushed, but there were a couple of
>North American activists in Bolivia who made very intelligent use of the
>Internet. They communicated information of which no one would ever have
>heard of to people all over the world, and there were big protests
>everywhere.
>
>Ramachandran: The classic case is Chiapas.
>
>Chomsky: Yes, Chiapas is in fact a more striking case, because they would
>all be dead if it weren't for the Internet.
>
>Ramachandran: What do you think is going to happen to that space?
>
>Chomsky: That space is contested. There is a very good book on this by
>Edward Herman and Robert McChesney called Global Media. Have you read it?
>
>Ramachandran: Alas.
>
>Chomsky: The privatisation of the Internet is a very obscure development.
>Nobody knows how it took place, nobody knows what the decisions were. In
>1995, after about 30 years of development in the public sector, the Internet
>was privatised. How? Who decided? Nothing is known. It's very obscure and
>was very sudden.
>
>In 1994, one year before the privatisation, Bill Gates was so contemptuous
>of the Internet that he refused publicly to go to conferences about it. One
>year later, something happened and they suddenly realised that it is a
>terrific tool for business and they... took it over! Since then, the
>question has been whether they are going to be able to control access to it.
>
>It is technically very difficult to just shut down the Internet. But what
>you can do is to make it difficult for people to go where they want. Say
>there are only a few points of access and that they are commercially owned.
>When you open them up, suppose you immediately get a tonne of advertisements
>and they lead you down different paths. If you are really dedicated and you
>know what you want, you can wade through it and get to ZNet or whatever.
>Most people, though, are just going to be distracted and drawn away from it.
>
>The question is whether that space can be protected. It is a very important
>question because the Internet has been very important.
>
>Ramachandran: As a means of...
>
>Chomsky: Getting around media control. Take the humanitarian crisis in
>Afghanistan, for instance. You couldn't learn anything about it through
>scattered sentences here and there, but there is a lot of material on the
>Internet.
>
>Ramachandran: To shift the subject, in 1967 you published "The
>Responsibility of Intellectuals".
>
>Chomsky: Actually, it had been published before, in a student newspaper.
>
>Ramachandran: Which one?
>
>Chomsky: You wouldn't believe it, but it was published in the journal of the
>Hillel Foundation, a Jewish student group at Harvard.
>
>Ramachandran: If you had to rewrite "The Responsibility of Intellectuals"
>today, what would you say?
>
>Chomsky: In retrospect, it seems to me there were unclarities and omissions.
>One has to do with the category of intellectuals. Who are they? Suppose that
>we take the term "intellectual" to refer to people who think seriously about
>issues of general human concern, seek and evaluate evidence, and try to
>articulate their judgments and conclusions clearly and honestly. Then some
>of the most impressive intellectuals I have known had little formal
>education, and many of those who are granted great respect as leading
>intellectuals do not deserve the name. If we adopt this conception, there is
>no special "responsibility of intellectuals" other than the responsibility
>of people generally to act with integrity and decency, but there is a
>responsibility of all of us to work for a society in which everyone is
>encouraged and helped to become an intellectual, in this sense.
>
>Those who have privilege, training, access to resources and other advantages
>do have special responsibilities. One formula is that their responsibility
>is "to speak truth to power". Among those who adopt this stand, there are
>people I greatly respect and admire. But although I often agree with them in
>practice, I don't agree with the principle. One reason is that none of us
>can claim to have The Truth. We have our judgments and conclusions, and
>maybe good reasons for them. But these are at best tentative, and it is
>important to make that clear, particularly in cultures in which technical
>knowledge and training are accorded considerable prestige - sometimes
>warranted, sometimes not. It is important to make clear the limits of our
>knowledge and understanding, and not to exploit prestige and authority as a
>weapon of domination and control. So the idea of "speaking truth" is already
>flawed. Furthermore, to the extent that we think we have some grasp of the
>truth about matters of significance, why should our audience be "power"? Is
>it important to convince the king, or to enlighten his subjects? Or better,
>not to "enlighten" the subjects but to join with them in a common effort to
>gain better understanding, and to use it to dismantle illegitimate authority
>and expand the domains of freedom and justice? The task, then, is not to
>"speak truth" to the king, or even to the king's subjects, but to learn from
>them, to contribute what we can, and to participate with them in common
>struggle for values we discover and uphold. It seems to me that those are
>the directions in which responsibilities of intellectuals should be sought.
>*************************************************
>Alternative Press Review  -  www.altpr.org
>Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream
>PO Box 4710  -  Arlington, VA 22204
>
>Mid-Atlantic Infoshop  -  www.infoshop.org
>Infoshop News Kiosk - www.infoshop.org/inews
>
>
>
>			********
>        ****** The A-Infos News Service ******
>       News about and of interest to anarchists
>                        ******
>		COMMANDS: lists at ainfos.ca
>		REPLIES: a-infos-d at ainfos.ca
>		HELP: a-infos-org at ainfos.ca
>		WWW: http://www.ainfos.ca/
>		INFO: http://www.ainfos.ca/org
>
>-To receive a-infos in one language only mail lists at ainfos.ca the message:
>                 unsubscribe a-infos
>                 subscribe a-infos-X
>  where X = en, ca, de, fr, etc. (i.e. the language code)

-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu