[Peace-discuss] Chomsky on Responsibility and War Guilt

[Morton K. Brussel]

There is  quite a thought provoking interview, one of Chomsky's  
best,  at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? 
SectionID=105&ItemID=13555.

I think there are contradictions in some of his arguments on the  
notion of responsibility, but see what you think. The title is  
"Responsibility and War Guilt, A culture setting Intelligentsia".  An  
excerpt of the interview:

…

What about degrees of responsibility and shared burdens of guilt on  
an individual level? What can we learn about how one views oneself  
often in positions of power or authority?

You almost never find anyone, whether it’s in a weapons plant, or  
planning agency, or in corporate management, or almost anywhere, who  
says, ‘I’m really a bad guy, and I just want to do things that  
benefit myself and my friends.’  Almost invariably you get noble  
rhetoric like: ‘We’re working for the benefit of the people.’ The  
corporate executive who is slaving for the benefit of the workers and  
community; the friendly banker who just wants to help everybody start  
their business; the political leader who’s trying to bring freedom  
and justice to the world—and they probably all believe it. I’m not  
suggesting that they’re lying. There’s an array of routine  
justifications for whatever you’re doing. And it’s easy to believe  
them. It’s very hard to look into the mirror and say, ‘Yeah, that guy  
looking at me is a vicious criminal.’ It’s much easier to say, ‘That  
guy looking at me is really very benign, self-sacrificing, and he has  
to do these things because it’s for the benefit of everyone.’

Or you get respected moralists like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was once  
called ‘the theologian of the establishment’. And the reason is  
because he presented a framework which, essentially, justified just  
about anything they wanted to do. His thesis is dressed up in long  
words and so on (it’s what you do if you’re an intellectual). But  
what it came down to is that, ‘Even if you try to do good, evil’s  
going to come out of it; that’s the paradox of grace’. —And that’s  
wonderful for war criminals. ‘We try to do good but evil necessarily  
comes out of it.’ And it’s influential. So, I don’t think that people  
in decision-making positions are lying when they describe themselves  
as benevolent. —Or people working on more advanced nuclear weapons.  
Ask them what they’re doing, they’ll say: ‘We’re trying to preserve  
the peace of the world.’ People who are devising military strategies  
that are massacring people, they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s the cost you  
have to pay for freedom and justice’, and so on.

But, we don’t take those sentiments seriously when we hear them from  
enemies, say, from Stalinist commissars. They’ll give you the same  
answers. But, we don’t take that seriously because they can know what  
they’re doing if they choose to. If they choose not to, that’s their  
choice. If they choose to believe self-satisfying propaganda, that’s  
their choice. But it doesn’t change the moral responsibility. We  
understand that perfectly well with regard to others. It’s very hard  
to apply the same reasoning to ourselves.

In fact, one of the—maybe the most—elementary of moral principles is  
that of universality, that is, If something’s right for me, it’s  
right for you; if it’s wrong for you, it’s wrong for me. Any moral  
code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow. But  
that principle is overwhelmingly disregarded all the time. If you  
want to run through examples we can easily do it. Take, say, George  
W. Bush, since he happens to be president. If you apply the standards  
that we applied to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, he’d be hanged.  
Is it an even conceivable possibility? It’s not even discussable.  
Because we don’t apply to ourselves the principles we apply to others.

There’s a lot of talk about ‘terror’ and how awful it is. Whose  
terror? Our terror against them? I mean, is that considered  
reprehensible? No, it’s considered highly moral; it’s considered self- 
defense, and so on. Now, their terror against us, that’s awful, and  
terrible, and so on.

But, to try to rise to the level of becoming a minimal moral agent,  
and just enter in the domain of moral discourse is very difficult.  
Because that means accepting the principle of universality. And you  
can experiment for yourself and see how often that’s accepted, either  
in personal or political life. Very rarely.
  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/private/peace-discuss/attachments/20070818/95135f07/attachment.html