[Peace-discuss] The West Is Terrified of Arabic Democracies

[C. G. Estabrook]

NOAM CHOMSKY: "The West Is Terrified of Arabic Democracies”

23. Jun, 2011

Noam Chomsky is one of the major intellectuals of our time. The 
eighty-two-year-old American linguist, philosopher and activist is a severe 
critic of US foreign and economic policy. Ceyda Nurtsch talked to him about the 
Arabic spring in its global context

Q: Mr. Chomsky, many people claim that the Arab world is incompatible with 
democracy. Would you say that the recent developments falsify this thesis?

Noam Chomsky: The thesis never had any basis whatsoever. The Arab-Islamic world 
has a long history of democracy. It’s regularly crushed by western force. In 
1953 Iran had a parliamentary system, the US and Britain overthrew it. There was 
a revolution in Iraq in 1958, we don’t know where it would have gone, but it 
could have been democratic. The US basically organized a coup.

False friends: Iran’ democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh during a 
visit in the US in 1951, two years before the CIA’s coup d’état that ousted him

In internal discussions in 1958, which have since been declassified, President 
Eisenhower spoke about a campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world. Not 
from the governments, but from the people. The National Security Council’s top 
planning body produced a memorandum – you can pick it up on the web now – in 
which they explained it. They said that the perception in the Arab world is that 
the United States blocks democracy and development and supports harsh dictators 
and we do it to get control over their oil. The memorandum said, this perception 
is more or less accurate and that’s basically what we ought to be doing.

Q: That means that western democracies prevented the emergence of democracies in 
the Arab world?

Chomsky: I won’t run through the details, but yes, it continues that way to the 
present. There are constant democratic uprisings. They are crushed by the 
dictators we – mainly the US, Britain, and France – support. So sure, there is 
no democracy because you crush it all. You could have said the same about Latin 
America: a long series of dictators, brutal murderers. As long as the US 
controls the hemisphere, or Europe before it, there is no democracy, because it 
gets crushed.

Q: So you were not surprised at all by the Arab Spring?

Chomsky: Well, I didn’t really expect it. But there is a long background to it. 
Let’s take Egypt for instance. You’ll notice that the young people who organized 
the demonstrations on January 25th called themselves the April 6th movement. 
There is a reason for that. April 6th 2008 was supposed to be a major labour 
action in Egypt at the Mahalla textile complex, the big industrial centre: 
strikes, support demonstrations around the country and so on. It was all crushed 
by the dictatorship. Well, in the West we don’t pay any attention: as long as 
dictatorships control people, what do we care!

Egyptian riot police beat a protester with batons, during anti government 
protests in the city of Mahalla, Egypt (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser).

“Efforts to create democracy”: On 6 April 2008 Egyptian workers, primarily in 
the state-run textile industry, striked in response to low wages and rising food 
costs. Strikes were illegal in Egypt, and the protests were eventually crushed

But in Egypt they remember, and that’s only one in a long series of militant 
strike actions. Some of them succeeded. There are some good studies of this. 
There is one American scholar, Joel Beinen – he is at Stanford – he has done a 
lot of work on the Egyptian labour movement. And he has recent articles and 
earlier ones, in which he discusses labour struggles going on for a long time: 
those are efforts to create democracy.

Q: Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, claimed to cause a domino effect of 
freedom with his policy of the “New Middle East”. Is there a relation between 
the uprisings in the Arab world to the policy of George W. Bush?

Chomsky: The main theme of modern post-war history is the domino effect: Cuba, 
Brazil, Vietnam… Henry Kissinger compared it to a virus that might spread 
contagion. When he and Nixon were planning the overthrow of the democratically 
elected Allende in Chile – we have all the internal materials now – Kissinger in 
particular said, the Chilean virus might affect countries as far as Europe. 
Actually, he and Brezhnev agreed on that, they were both afraid of democracy and 
Kissinger said, we have to wipe out this virus. And they did, they crushed it.

Today it’s similar. Both Bush and Obama are terrified of the Arab spring. And 
there is a very sensible reason for that. They don’t want democracies in the 
Arab world. If Arab public opinion had any influence on policy, the US and 
Britain had been tossed out of the Middle East. That’s why they are terrified of 
democracies in the region.

Q: The well-known British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk recently stated 
that Obama and his policy is irrelevant for the developments in the region…

Chomsky: I read the article, it’s very good. Robert Fisk is a terrific 
journalist and he really knows the region well. I think what he means is that 
the activists in the April 6th movement don’t care about the United States. They 
have totally given up on the US. They know the United States is their enemy. In 
fact in public opinion in Egypt about 90 per cent think that the US is the worst 
threat that they face. In that sense the USA is of course not irrelevant. It’s 
just too powerful.

Q: Some criticize the Arab intellectuals for being too silent, too passive. What 
should the role of the Arab intellectual be today?

Chomsky: Intellectuals have a special responsibility. We call them intellectuals 
because they are privileged and not because they are smarter than anyone else. 
But if you are privileged and you have some status and you can be articulate and 
so on we call you an intellectual. And it’s the same in the Arab world as 
anywhere else.

Source: Noam Chomsky

Ceyda Nurtsch

© Qantara.de 2011

Editor: Lewis Gropp/Qantara.de