Showing posts with label Noam Chomsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Noam Chomsky. Show all posts
Wednesday
Noam Chomsky: Ending Climate Change “Has to Come From Mass Popular Action,” Not Politicians
Noam Chomsky talks about US hypocrisy in stoking needless conflict with China, the unnecessarily bloody and grinding war in Afghanistan, and why the United States could easily solve climate change.
Despite rapidly approaching his ninety-third birthday, Noam Chomsky shows few signs of slowing down. The world-famous public intellectual has published two books in 2021 — Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance (with Marv Waterstone) and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (with C. J. Polychroniou) — and his willingness to sit down for interviews on wide-ranging topics remains unflagging.
Chomsky spoke with Poyâ Pâkzâd and Benjamin Magnusson from the Danish magazine Eftertryk in October 2021 about the war in Afghanistan, ongoing US-instigated conflicts with China, climate change, and anarchism. You can watch the conversation on YouTube here. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
On Afghanistan
PP
Thursday
Noam Chomsky: “Bernie Sanders Has Inspired a Mass Popular Movement”
Although a linguistics professor by trade, Chomsky’s contributions to politics have influenced generations of activists — from his “propaganda model” explanation of corporate media domination to his critiques of capitalist globalization, the limits of liberal democracy and the failures of Western intellectuals to defend the principles they proclaim. It is this breadth of contribution that has made him one of the most cited academics alive today.
In this interview, Noam Chomsky speaks at a moment when socialists across the world are looking to the United States and the Bernie Sanders campaign for inspiration. He discusses the barriers facing a potential Sanders presidency, the importance of the labor movement to any prospect of meaningful change — and why the US business class will bitterly resist any attempt at social-democratic reform.
JC: If — and this is a big “if” — Bernie Sanders secures the Democratic nomination and then wins the presidency, to what extent do you think he will be able to deliver the program which he has promised — for example, policies like Medicare for All?
NC:Well, as you say that is a big “if,” but let’s assume it happens. Then there are many factors that would have to be considered. One is what the character of Congress is. Let’s also assume, and this is an even bigger “if,” that he carries a substantial majority of Congress with him. That’s pretty hard to imagine, but let’s suppose so. Then a lot would depend on the character, energy, and commitment of the popular movements that he’s inspired and that, under these assumptions, would have been the factor that led him to victory. If they keep the pressure up, then things could happen.
Unfortunately, the historic cutting-edge of popular activism is
lacking in this case — namely, an organized labor movement. So if you
look say at the New Deal in the 1930s, it was possible to achieve fairly
significant reforms because there was a militant, energized labor
movement which was pressing very hard. In fact, it was threatening
corporate control of business and there was a sympathetic administration
which responded to the pressure. That combination has been critical for
just about every reform known in the past.
There would be a question in the hypothetical case we are considering whether the labor movement could be revived to participate in these efforts. It’s been badly beaten back both in the United States and Britain by the neoliberal assault since Reagan and Thatcher. There is also a question about whether the other popular movements that have developed in recent years, which are pretty significant, can fill the gap. I think those are the kinds of factors that would be essential to achieving anything. But we can be certain that concentrated capital will fight back vigorously.
In fact, if we go back to the New Deal it is a complicated and interesting matter which has been studied in some detail and very insightfully by Thomas Ferguson, a fine political scientist. What he shows pretty convincingly is that during the New Deal there was a split within private capital. In general, more high-tech capital-intensive internationally oriented industries tended to support Roosevelt. Labor-intensive domestically oriented industries like the National Association of Manufacturers violently opposed Roosevelt. So there was an internal split which contributed to the success of the New Deal measures, along with the crucial element of very extensive and active and militant popular support, mostly from the labor movement.
JC: You mentioned the importance of the labor movement which sadly is not as active as it was in previous decades. How does the labor movement, and the progressive left as a whole, address this weakness? Do you think there are internal contradictions or weaknesses within the movement itself which need addressing first before it is able to fight capital and big business?
There would be a question in the hypothetical case we are considering whether the labor movement could be revived to participate in these efforts. It’s been badly beaten back both in the United States and Britain by the neoliberal assault since Reagan and Thatcher. There is also a question about whether the other popular movements that have developed in recent years, which are pretty significant, can fill the gap. I think those are the kinds of factors that would be essential to achieving anything. But we can be certain that concentrated capital will fight back vigorously.
In fact, if we go back to the New Deal it is a complicated and interesting matter which has been studied in some detail and very insightfully by Thomas Ferguson, a fine political scientist. What he shows pretty convincingly is that during the New Deal there was a split within private capital. In general, more high-tech capital-intensive internationally oriented industries tended to support Roosevelt. Labor-intensive domestically oriented industries like the National Association of Manufacturers violently opposed Roosevelt. So there was an internal split which contributed to the success of the New Deal measures, along with the crucial element of very extensive and active and militant popular support, mostly from the labor movement.
JC: You mentioned the importance of the labor movement which sadly is not as active as it was in previous decades. How does the labor movement, and the progressive left as a whole, address this weakness? Do you think there are internal contradictions or weaknesses within the movement itself which need addressing first before it is able to fight capital and big business?
NC:First of all, we should mention and bear in mind that Margaret Thatcher
and the people around Reagan were not fools. They understood that it
would be necessary to destroy the labor movements if they wanted to
carry through the kinds of policies which were certain to harm the
general population, as indeed they have done.
If you want to see some contradictions within the labor movement, take a look at the front page of the New York Times recently, which had a very interesting case. Bernie Sanders was campaigning in Nevada, and there was a conflict within the labor movement. One of the major unions [the Culinary Union, Local 226] was strongly opposed to Sanders’s proposal for Medicare for All. That has to do with an interesting specificity of American labor history. So let’s compare the United States and Canada, which are pretty similar societies. In fact, there’s the same labor movements on both sides of the border. The United Auto Workers (UAW) is the same union on both sides. But they have a different mentality related to the culture and the nature of the societies.
If you go back to the 1950s the UAW in Canada was militantly working for universal health care, what’s called single-payer health care. That was achieved in part because of their militant commitment to it. So Canada now has a health care system of the kind common in developed societies. In the United States on the other hand, the same union — UAW — was struggling for health care for their own members, not for society. They were working out the deals with management in which they would sacrifice control of the workplace benefits. Management was willing to make these deals to keep the labor force quiet. So, union contracts often provide pretty decent health care for their own members, but not for society.
The health care system in the United States is a disaster. It has about twice the per capita costs of other comparable countries with relatively poor outcomes. Sanders’s program for general health care would help everyone and indeed cut back overall costs substantially. But it doesn’t necessarily improve health care for the workers who have succeeded through their own narrow struggles in the workplace to achieve health care for themselves, and there was a split in the union over this. That’s a factor that we have to consider.
While unions were making deals with management for many years, they assumed that there was a compact between themselves and management. They learned better by 1980. Around that time the president of the UAW, Doug Fraser, resigned from a committee that President Carter was instituting. Fraser condemned management for fighting what he called “a one-sided class war against the labor movement,” which of course they had always been doing. Business never relents in its one-sided class war. If management decides that the deal is over, it’s over. Doug Fraser realized that many years too late and the labor movement of course suffered from these class-collaboration policies.
So yes, there are divisions in the labor movement and have been for a long time. There were reform movements within the major unions — steel workers, auto workers, and others — and there’s been conflicts over this, but it’s a situation that’s not easy to resolve.
JC:It’s quite paradoxical because on the one hand the labor movement was built as a collective force, so that workers can secure what they couldn’t secure individually. But on the other hand, it has become a bureaucratic system. How do you think this contradiction can be resolved?
NC:Again, you have to look at the specific history of the United States, which is somewhat different from other industrial societies, even different from Canada. The United States happens to be to an unusual extent a business-run society with a highly class-conscious business community which is also always fighting a vicious class war. Look at the history of American labor, which is unusually violent. Hundreds of workers were being killed in labor actions in the United States when nothing like that was happening in England, Canada, France, and other similar countries.
If you want to see some contradictions within the labor movement, take a look at the front page of the New York Times recently, which had a very interesting case. Bernie Sanders was campaigning in Nevada, and there was a conflict within the labor movement. One of the major unions [the Culinary Union, Local 226] was strongly opposed to Sanders’s proposal for Medicare for All. That has to do with an interesting specificity of American labor history. So let’s compare the United States and Canada, which are pretty similar societies. In fact, there’s the same labor movements on both sides of the border. The United Auto Workers (UAW) is the same union on both sides. But they have a different mentality related to the culture and the nature of the societies.
If you go back to the 1950s the UAW in Canada was militantly working for universal health care, what’s called single-payer health care. That was achieved in part because of their militant commitment to it. So Canada now has a health care system of the kind common in developed societies. In the United States on the other hand, the same union — UAW — was struggling for health care for their own members, not for society. They were working out the deals with management in which they would sacrifice control of the workplace benefits. Management was willing to make these deals to keep the labor force quiet. So, union contracts often provide pretty decent health care for their own members, but not for society.
The health care system in the United States is a disaster. It has about twice the per capita costs of other comparable countries with relatively poor outcomes. Sanders’s program for general health care would help everyone and indeed cut back overall costs substantially. But it doesn’t necessarily improve health care for the workers who have succeeded through their own narrow struggles in the workplace to achieve health care for themselves, and there was a split in the union over this. That’s a factor that we have to consider.
While unions were making deals with management for many years, they assumed that there was a compact between themselves and management. They learned better by 1980. Around that time the president of the UAW, Doug Fraser, resigned from a committee that President Carter was instituting. Fraser condemned management for fighting what he called “a one-sided class war against the labor movement,” which of course they had always been doing. Business never relents in its one-sided class war. If management decides that the deal is over, it’s over. Doug Fraser realized that many years too late and the labor movement of course suffered from these class-collaboration policies.
So yes, there are divisions in the labor movement and have been for a long time. There were reform movements within the major unions — steel workers, auto workers, and others — and there’s been conflicts over this, but it’s a situation that’s not easy to resolve.
JC:It’s quite paradoxical because on the one hand the labor movement was built as a collective force, so that workers can secure what they couldn’t secure individually. But on the other hand, it has become a bureaucratic system. How do you think this contradiction can be resolved?
NC:Again, you have to look at the specific history of the United States, which is somewhat different from other industrial societies, even different from Canada. The United States happens to be to an unusual extent a business-run society with a highly class-conscious business community which is also always fighting a vicious class war. Look at the history of American labor, which is unusually violent. Hundreds of workers were being killed in labor actions in the United States when nothing like that was happening in England, Canada, France, and other similar countries.
The labor movement in the past had been based on class solidarity and
mutual support — support by one group of workers for another — and in
fact to an extent that still remains. The union of longshoremen has, for
example, refused to allow boats to dock if the countries were violently
suppressing their own populations and labor forces. The US conservative
business establishment understood early on that they must break that
mutual support.
You can see this immediately after the Second World War, when the business world mobilized to try to undermine the power of labor that had developed during the Depression and the war. One of the first reactions in 1947 was the Taft-Hartley Act, which for example, banned secondary pickets. Secondary pickets are a means of class solidarity. They happen when a union is on strike and another union helps them — that was made illegal. Actually, President Truman vetoed it, but the reservation was passed over his veto. There was a strong business backlash against the democratic forces that had developed in the previous decades.
There is another special thing about the United States — the militant, almost hysterical, anti-Left propaganda. For example, McCarthyism, which is attributed to Joe McCarthy, though Truman actually is the one who started it. One of its aspects — the red-baiting — was to drive the militant labor leaders out of the unions on charges that they were soft on Communism or working for the Russians or one thing or another. Again, that’s pretty specific to the United States.
You can see that strikingly today where there is huge debate about Sanders being a socialist. “How can we have a socialist president?” In fact, Sanders is what would be called a moderate social democrat in most other societies. In other societies, the word “socialist” is not a curse word — people call themselves socialists and even communists. In the United States, there’s a stigma attached to it by massive propaganda going way back to 1917. Such huge propaganda efforts to demonize the concepts of socialism and communism (saying it means the “gulag” or whatever) is again pretty much unique to the United States. It’s a barrier to introducing even mild New Deal–style social-democratic reforms.
These are all specific problems. They’re not completely unique to the United States, of course, but they happen to be exaggerated here because of the nature of the society — that it is business-run to an unusual extent, and this business community is militant and organized. The Chamber of Commerce and other business organizations are fighting a bitter class war.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), for example, is an important business-based institution which draws support from pretty much the entire spectrum of business. They’re fighting a serious class war now to try to make it impossible to pass any reform legislation. The way they’re doing it is by operating at the state level. They write legislation for states — business-based corporate propaganda — and try to get state legislators to pass it. It’s not very difficult to bribe a US Senator, but it takes some work. However, to pressure the state legislature is much easier; they don’t have any resources and they’re unable to stand up again massive corporate lobbying and pressure. So, the state legislatures tend to pass this legislation.
A lot of it is remarkably regressive. They’re very clearly trying to destroy the public education system and any labor reforms. In fact, they go so far that they’re succeeding in blocking efforts to stop the theft of wages being criminalized. Theft of wages is a huge business in the United States. Workers are having their wages stolen at the level of billions of dollars per year, with employers simply refusing to pay. Wage theft is a huge business. ALEC is trying to prevent it from even being investigated, let alone prosecuted, and they’re succeeding. This is an illustration of the savagery of the highly class-conscious business classes.
One of the most insidious of their proposals, which is proceeding more or less secretly, is an effort to get states to demand an amendment to the Constitution which will require a balanced budget. If you get enough states to ratify that, there’s an amendment. Of course, a balanced budget for the federal government means that we pour money into the military and cut back on social benefits. They’re coming pretty close to achieving that. It’s almost never reported in the media but they’re pretty much succeeding.
This is a class war that goes on constantly in the United States to a level far beyond other comparable societies. You can see this in many ways. If you take a look at CEO salaries relative to workers’ pay the gap, especially since the 1980s, is far higher in the United States than it is in European societies. These are all crucial issues in the United States which require a very intensive effort.
The reason why Sanders is vilified in the media pretty much across the spectrum is not so much because of his policies. It’s because he has inspired a mass popular movement which doesn’t just show up every four years to push a button but is acting constantly — pressuring — to achieve changes and having some success. That’s frightening for the business class. The role of the public is to be passive spectators and not to interfere.
JC:You discuss the role of the media and propaganda quite often. You have referred to what you described in the past as “Orwell’s problem” — a population which despite so much access to information is misled and propagandized by a powerful media system. Do you think that’s still the case? And how can the general public transcend that system of control?
NC:The fact that some people, in fact quite a lot of people, break out of it is not terribly surprising. I mean, even in totalitarian states you have dissidents despite severe punishment and the total control of the media. People are not just robots — plenty of people can see what’s in front of their eyes.
You can see this immediately after the Second World War, when the business world mobilized to try to undermine the power of labor that had developed during the Depression and the war. One of the first reactions in 1947 was the Taft-Hartley Act, which for example, banned secondary pickets. Secondary pickets are a means of class solidarity. They happen when a union is on strike and another union helps them — that was made illegal. Actually, President Truman vetoed it, but the reservation was passed over his veto. There was a strong business backlash against the democratic forces that had developed in the previous decades.
There is another special thing about the United States — the militant, almost hysterical, anti-Left propaganda. For example, McCarthyism, which is attributed to Joe McCarthy, though Truman actually is the one who started it. One of its aspects — the red-baiting — was to drive the militant labor leaders out of the unions on charges that they were soft on Communism or working for the Russians or one thing or another. Again, that’s pretty specific to the United States.
You can see that strikingly today where there is huge debate about Sanders being a socialist. “How can we have a socialist president?” In fact, Sanders is what would be called a moderate social democrat in most other societies. In other societies, the word “socialist” is not a curse word — people call themselves socialists and even communists. In the United States, there’s a stigma attached to it by massive propaganda going way back to 1917. Such huge propaganda efforts to demonize the concepts of socialism and communism (saying it means the “gulag” or whatever) is again pretty much unique to the United States. It’s a barrier to introducing even mild New Deal–style social-democratic reforms.
These are all specific problems. They’re not completely unique to the United States, of course, but they happen to be exaggerated here because of the nature of the society — that it is business-run to an unusual extent, and this business community is militant and organized. The Chamber of Commerce and other business organizations are fighting a bitter class war.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), for example, is an important business-based institution which draws support from pretty much the entire spectrum of business. They’re fighting a serious class war now to try to make it impossible to pass any reform legislation. The way they’re doing it is by operating at the state level. They write legislation for states — business-based corporate propaganda — and try to get state legislators to pass it. It’s not very difficult to bribe a US Senator, but it takes some work. However, to pressure the state legislature is much easier; they don’t have any resources and they’re unable to stand up again massive corporate lobbying and pressure. So, the state legislatures tend to pass this legislation.
A lot of it is remarkably regressive. They’re very clearly trying to destroy the public education system and any labor reforms. In fact, they go so far that they’re succeeding in blocking efforts to stop the theft of wages being criminalized. Theft of wages is a huge business in the United States. Workers are having their wages stolen at the level of billions of dollars per year, with employers simply refusing to pay. Wage theft is a huge business. ALEC is trying to prevent it from even being investigated, let alone prosecuted, and they’re succeeding. This is an illustration of the savagery of the highly class-conscious business classes.
One of the most insidious of their proposals, which is proceeding more or less secretly, is an effort to get states to demand an amendment to the Constitution which will require a balanced budget. If you get enough states to ratify that, there’s an amendment. Of course, a balanced budget for the federal government means that we pour money into the military and cut back on social benefits. They’re coming pretty close to achieving that. It’s almost never reported in the media but they’re pretty much succeeding.
This is a class war that goes on constantly in the United States to a level far beyond other comparable societies. You can see this in many ways. If you take a look at CEO salaries relative to workers’ pay the gap, especially since the 1980s, is far higher in the United States than it is in European societies. These are all crucial issues in the United States which require a very intensive effort.
The reason why Sanders is vilified in the media pretty much across the spectrum is not so much because of his policies. It’s because he has inspired a mass popular movement which doesn’t just show up every four years to push a button but is acting constantly — pressuring — to achieve changes and having some success. That’s frightening for the business class. The role of the public is to be passive spectators and not to interfere.
JC:You discuss the role of the media and propaganda quite often. You have referred to what you described in the past as “Orwell’s problem” — a population which despite so much access to information is misled and propagandized by a powerful media system. Do you think that’s still the case? And how can the general public transcend that system of control?
NC:The fact that some people, in fact quite a lot of people, break out of it is not terribly surprising. I mean, even in totalitarian states you have dissidents despite severe punishment and the total control of the media. People are not just robots — plenty of people can see what’s in front of their eyes.
On the other hand, when you talk about access to information, you
have to be pretty careful. For example, one of the major popular
research institutions that studies popular attitudes in the United
States, the Pew Research Center, just came out with a pretty remarkable
study. They took about thirty news sources — television, print, radio,
and blogs — and they asked people which ones they know and trust, and
they divided it between Democrats and Republicans.
Among Democrats, pretty much no one trusts the major media outlets. Among Republicans the only ones that received even a slight majority were Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Breitbart, which is an ultraright website. Even the Wall Street Journal is considered too far left for most Republicans. You just listen to Rush Limbaugh someday. You’ll see what kind of information people are getting. For Rush Limbaugh, science, government, and the media are pillars of deceit — and you just have to listen to the ultraright instead. That’s what Republicans, almost half the population, are getting as information. Not that the rest is so open and free, far from it.
What do you do about this? You do what you’ve always done. You have to work hard on education and organization. The labor movement used to be a major base for it — that can be revived. And there are other bases that can be developed and are being developed.
On many issues popular activism is breaking through. One good example is the environmental movement. Despite overwhelming corporate opposition, Congress is now pressured by popular activism to address its highly regressive policies on this issue. That could make a difference, and there’s a lot more like that.
JC:You have pointed out a lot of evidence for pessimism. What do you think are grounds for optimism?
NC:Oh, the grounds for optimism are pretty clear. I mean, take Bernie Sanders again. In 2016 with no media support, no business backing, and no funding from the wealthy, he was able to almost win the Democratic Party nomination because of popular forces. He probably would have won if it hadn’t been for party shenanigans. He ended up as the most popular political figure in the country. That’s exactly why the establishment is so frightened by him.
Among Democrats, pretty much no one trusts the major media outlets. Among Republicans the only ones that received even a slight majority were Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Breitbart, which is an ultraright website. Even the Wall Street Journal is considered too far left for most Republicans. You just listen to Rush Limbaugh someday. You’ll see what kind of information people are getting. For Rush Limbaugh, science, government, and the media are pillars of deceit — and you just have to listen to the ultraright instead. That’s what Republicans, almost half the population, are getting as information. Not that the rest is so open and free, far from it.
What do you do about this? You do what you’ve always done. You have to work hard on education and organization. The labor movement used to be a major base for it — that can be revived. And there are other bases that can be developed and are being developed.
On many issues popular activism is breaking through. One good example is the environmental movement. Despite overwhelming corporate opposition, Congress is now pressured by popular activism to address its highly regressive policies on this issue. That could make a difference, and there’s a lot more like that.
JC:You have pointed out a lot of evidence for pessimism. What do you think are grounds for optimism?
NC:Oh, the grounds for optimism are pretty clear. I mean, take Bernie Sanders again. In 2016 with no media support, no business backing, and no funding from the wealthy, he was able to almost win the Democratic Party nomination because of popular forces. He probably would have won if it hadn’t been for party shenanigans. He ended up as the most popular political figure in the country. That’s exactly why the establishment is so frightened by him.
That tells you to think about what is happening among the general
public. Well, that can extend — there have been dim periods in the past.
In the 1920s the labor movement had been killed — inequality was
soaring, it was a capitalist paradise, and there were no popular
movements. In the 1930s, it all radically changed — that can happen
again.
Deconstructed Special: The Noam Chomsky Interview
The Noam Chomsky Interview
Legendary linguist, activist, and political theorist Noam Chomsky
has been speaking out against U.S. interventionism from Vietnam to
Latin America to the Middle East since the 1960s. He’s the most cited
author alive, but you won’t see him on the nightly news or in the pages
of most major newspapers. On this week’s Deconstructed, Chomsky sits
down with Mehdi Hasan to discuss the impeachment inquiry against
President Donald Trump, the 2020 Democratic field, and why he opposed
Trump’s Syria troop withdrawal.
[Music interlude.]
Mehdi Hasan: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Mehdi Hasan.
This week who better to speak with about a combination of domestic and international crises, from violence in Syria to the Democratic presidential race in the U.S., than the legendary writer, activist, and political theorist, Noam Chomsky. Wanna know what he makes of impeachment too?
NC: I mean, Trump is impeachable 100 times over. He’s a major crook. Is it politically wise? I frankly doubt it.
MH: Today, in a special episode of Deconstructed, I speak to the one, the only, Noam Chomsky.
My guest today has been a scathing critic of U.S. presidents, and especially U.S. foreign policy, for more than 50 years. He rose to prominence as an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam war and was even included on Richard Nixon’s Enemies List. An academic, activist and best-selling author, he’s been described as “the founding father of linguistic philosophy,” but he’s best known today as the intellectual hero to anti-capitalists, anti-imperialists, socialists and anarchists.
I’m talking of course about Noam Chomsky, who is often referred to as one of the 10 most quoted sources in the humanities, along with Shakespeare and the Bible, and yet you rarely if ever, see him quoted, published or invited onto the mainstream media, whether it’s the New York Times op-ed page or CNN primetime.
Chomsky, the arch-anti-interventionist surprised a lot of people last year on my colleague Jeremy Scahill’s Intercepted podcast, when he said that the U.S. should maintain a troop presence in Syria in order to deter Turkish aggression against the Kurds. Does he still feel that way today, in the wake of President Trump’s controversial withdrawal of U.S. troops? And what’s his view on impeaching Trump and on the presidential prospects of his old friend Senator Bernie Sanders?
Recently — and I should add shortly before Donald Trump announced the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi — Noam Chomsky joined me for an interview from his new academic base at the University of Arizona, where, aged 90, he’s now laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics and chair of an environment and social justice program.
[Music interlude.]
MH: Professor Chomsky, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed.
Noam Chomsky: Very pleased to be with you.
MH: In recent weeks, we’ve seen some pretty gruesome images coming out of northeastern Syria, rebel groups backed by Turkey on the offensive killing and mutilating, not just Kurdish fighters from the SDF, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, but women and children too.
Announcer [translated from Arabic]: This house you see here, there were children playing. A motor fell and killed a boy. The girl she lost her leg.
MH: Am I right in saying that you didn’t support President Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from the front lines in Syria?
NC: That’s correct. For a long time, I’ve been trying to organize support for opposition to the withdrawal.
MH: And why is that?
NC: Because the, from the left at least, the call for withdrawal was based on anti-imperialist principles. But principles have to be understood in connection with the human reality of the existing circumstances. A small, U.S. contingent with the sole mission of deterring a planned Turkish invasion, which was obvious, is not imperialism. It’s protecting the Kurds from an expansion of the atrocities and massacres that Erdogan has been carrying out both within Turkey itself and in the areas of Syria that he’s already conquered.
MH: And a lot of people listening especially on the left might be surprised to hear you say this. They might say Noam Chomsky, we associate him with anti-interventionism, with opposition to U.S. foreign policy, and U.S. military interventions abroad. Why are the Kurds the exception to that, you know, life-long, career-long opposition to U.S. military interventions, especially in the Middle East?
NC: If you take a look at what’s happening, it’s not intervention. Syria was already invaded by Turkey. The troops that are there were essentially doing nothing except deterring an expansion of a further invasion. You have to not deal with slogans as if it’s a religious catechism. You have to ask how they apply in particular to complex human circumstances.
MH: I take your point. But I do want to explore this a bit more broadly because I’ve agreed with a lot of what you’ve written over the years in terms of U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Latin America. And as you know, and you’ve written so eloquently on, a lot of these interventions, invasions, bombing campaigns, regime changes, are justified on humanitarian grounds, with leaders saying what you’re saying that we should protect civilians. A liberal interventionist listening to you speaking now might say, “Well, why didn’t Noam Chomsky support the Kosovo intervention to protect Albanians? Why didn’t he support a no fly zone for Syrian Arabs in Idlib or Aleppo who were being bombed by Assad? Why only the Kurds?”
NC: Let’s take your first example, Kosovo. I opposed the NATO bombing because it was known both to the Clinton administration and to the press, which refused to report it, that the bombing would radically increase the level of crimes and atrocities against the people in Kosovo. General Wesley Clark informed the Clinton administration weeks earlier that that’s exactly what would happen. He informed the press when the invasion began that that’s what was gonna happen. The reason I opposed it was because there were diplomatic options available. And instead, NATO, meaning the U.S., chose to undertake a major military attack consciously knowing that it would greatly increase atrocities as the Serbs couldn’t react by bombing Washington. So they’d react on the ground.
You have to ask yourself, in each circumstance, what are the consequences of your decisions? If you don’t do that, you’re not a moral human being. Now you’re perfectly right that every monster you can think of in history has declared that whatever acts they’re going to carry out are for humanitarian reasons. Now, if you have a brain functioning, what you do is ask is this correct? Or isn’t it correct? You don’t say, because Hitler said it was a humanitarian intervention in the Sudetenland therefore, there are no humanitarian interventions.
MH: No, of course, but in Syria, for example, as you know, very complicated conflict with people, you know, people of good faith and bad faith on many sides. There are a lot of Syrian Arabs who would say, why didn’t Noam Chomsky ask for U.S. troops to protect us when we were being butchered by Assad? Why only for the Kurds when they’re being butchered by Erdogan?
NC: Because there was no way for a small contingent of U.S. troops to deter Assad. What in fact was done was that under Obama when they were still planning to overthrow the regime, the CIA was providing heavy weapons to the rebels who were by then mostly jihadi rebels.
Newscaster: There’s word tonight that the CIA has been delivering weapons to rebels in Syria over the last two weeks. According to the Washington Post, the Obama administration is sending vehicles and other equipment to boost the muscle of rebel fighters in Syria’s two-year civil war.
NC: They in fact, slowed down Assad’s advance, but quite predictably, they brought the Russians in to escalate the conflict.
Newscaster: There’s growing concern among top officials in the Defense Department over Russia’s growing involvement in Syria’s civil war. It’s escalating by the day and so are the risks of a confrontation with the U.S.
NC: So yes, you have to ask yourself, what are the likely predictable consequences in every situation? You can’t find formulas in human affairs that will determine the action in every particular case.
MH: And just on Iran, because as you well know, a lot of U.S. politicians, especially on the right, they want American troops in Syria, partly to “deter Iran.”
Mitt Romney: At a time when we’re applying maximum pressure on Iran by giving them a stronger hand in Syria, we’ve actually weakened that pressure.
Lindsey Graham: President Trump, if you remove all of our forces from Syria, you’re throwing the Kurds over. ISIS will come back on your watch and Iran will take over.
MH: How worried are you about a U.S. attack on Iran next year? Because it’s election year and with Trump behind in the polls, I for one can see the appeal for Trump of launching a new war in the Middle East in the run up to November?
NC: Well, first of all, let’s separate those two issues. A small contingent of troops to deter Turkish aggression would have nothing to do with Iran. So we put that aside, what are the prospects for a war against Iran? It’s hard to say.
I don’t think the Trump administration could answer. I don’t think they want a war. A war could have extremely harsh effects not only out of Iran, but much more generally. So for example, Saudi Arabia’s major oil production, almost all the oil production is in the northeast corner right in the Shiite areas, very close to Iran. They have missile capacities. They could devastate one of the main oil producers in the world.
There could be many other consequences. So I don’t think the United States wants a war with Iran. What they want to do is torture Iranians as much as possible in the hope that destruction of the economy will lead to some breakdown inside Iran. But that can easily get out of hand. Any accidental incidents in the Gulf, could blow up suddenly and could lead to an attack.
Newscaster: Tensions on the rise in the Persian Gulf once again. The United States says Iran is behind attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf. Now, lawmakers say the Trump administration says it already has the legal authority to begin a war with Iran.
NC: It wouldn’t really be an invasion. The U.S. is not going to invade Iran. That’s much too costly. It would be an attack from a safe distance.
MH: And of course, as you say, that could escalate as well. No one knows what the unintended consequences of such dangerous action could be. I want to talk about the Donald Trump presidency especially with impeachment on the cards. But before I do, does the seemingly global rise of the far right, of authoritarianism, and nativism from Putin to Orban to Duterte to Narendra Modi in India, how much does that worry you? And what do you think is driving it at this moment in human history?
NC: Of course, it’s worrisome. It’s very hard to detect geo-strategic planning in the chaos of the Trump administration, which is highly personalized, and so, yeah, megalomaniac, and so on. But you can kind of detect something.
MH: Yeah.
NC: The effort which is overt in Steve Bannon’s case to construct a kind of a reactionary international which will consist in the Middle East of the most reactionary states in the region, Saudi Arabia.
Donald J. Trump: The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, a friend of mine. You’ve done really spectacular job.
NC: United Arab Emirates, Egypt under the Sisi dictatorship.
DJT: Egypt has a great leader. He’s highly respected. He’s brought order.
NC: Israel, which is now far to the right.
DJT: Netanyahu, a very special man. He’s done a great job.
NC: To be kind of a base for U.S. power in the region. And that extends beyond to try to bring Modi’s India into it.
DJT: Prime Minister Modi is doing a truly exceptional job for India.
NC: Orban is another case. Salvini in Italy, Farage if he emerges in the post-Brexit period. Bolsonaro in Brazil.
MH: But is there a particular social or economic or political driver of all this that links all this together?
NC: Sure, yeah, it’s very simple and straightforward. Forty years of the neoliberal assault on the general population which has been extremely harmful almost everywhere. It’s led to anger, resentment, contempt for institutions. And when you have a period of unfocused anger, resentment and so on, it’s fertile territory for demagogues to arise, and try to mobilize it, and blame it, not on its sources. So, like not on the international financial institutions that are lying behind it to a substantial extent. But to focus it on scapegoats. Typically, people even more vulnerable than you are, immigrants, Muslims, Afro-Americans. This goes way back to Ronald Reagan’s “Welfare queens” and so on and many other demagogues in the past. So yes, that’s rising. There are also counter-forces that are rising. Now they’re very significant. It’s pretty common these days to quote Gramsci’s famous —
MH: Interregnum.
NC: Yeah, Interregnum with morbid symptoms, but there are morbid symptoms and there are positive symptoms. And it’s a real question which will prevail.
MH: Let’s talk about Donald Trump specifically. You have witnessed, I think 16 presidents over the course of your lifetime. Donald Trump being the 16th. How does Trump stack up against the rest of them? Is he sui generis in your view?
NC: Yeah, he’s off the spectrum. But the fact is that that’s true of the Republican Party generally. Two well-known commentators from the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Mann and Norman Orenstein years ago, described the Republican Party since Newt Gingrich as a radical insurgency that has abandoned parliamentary politics, and is now often a different dimension. What’s actually happened is that during the neoliberal period both of the political parties have shifted to the right. So the mainstream Democrats, the ones who are now meeting with their billionaire friends to try to figure out how to get rid of Sanders and Warren, they’re basically what used to be called moderate Republicans. The Democrats abandoned the working class by the late ’70s. The last bit of a show of interest was the Humphrey Hawkins 1978 Full Employment Bill which Carter watered down so that it had no teeth. And after that, they kind of gave up. They handed the working class over to their class enemy, the Republicans who try to mobilize them on what are called cultural issues. They’re shafting them at every turn, including Trump, but you can try to mobilize them on the basis of abortion, immigrants, guns, anything but the real issues.
MH: And I agree with you that the Republican party as you said, you call them the biggest threat to mankind in terms of their views on climate change. As you say, the radical insurgency, but having said that, even a Ted Cruz or a Mike Pence, as radical as they may be, they still fit within some sort of understandable political prism. Trump, as you say, is off the spectrum. Have you ever seen a western Democratic leader like him in your lifetime? Who behaves like him, talks like him?
NC: No. But it’s worth looking back a little bit. So for the last, I suppose, 15 years, take a look at the Republican primaries. Every Republican primary, a candidate who arose from the base was so outrageous that the Republican establishment tried and succeeded in suppressing them. Michele Bachmann —
Michele Bachmann: Carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas. It is a harmless gas.
NC: Rick Santorum —
Rick Santorum: I don’t want to make Black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.
NC: Herman Cain —
Herman Cain: Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.
NC: All madmen, and they managed to suppress them. What was different in 2016 is that they failed. And the guy who came into office over their opposition was a megalomaniac, narcissist, kind of like a three-year-old who’s enjoying the opportunity to smash everything in sight and knows he can get away with it and a very good politician. He has his finger on the pulse of his voting constituency. It’s a kind of an adoring constituency that will support him no matter what he does, and he’s playing to that gallery. The only policy that you can discern clearly in the Trump administration is a very simple one: me. Anything that benefits me I’ll do no matter what the consequences. If it destroys the world, okay.
MH: While acknowledging that point and you’re hundred percent right to talk about his kind of narcissism and egomania, but is it also fair now to describe the president as a white nationalist or white supremacist? Because when I spoke to you in 2016, shortly after his election, you made the point that every far-right, nationalist, neo-Nazi has been encouraged and excited by his victory, you said. But then you said we don’t know what direction he’ll go in.
We don’t know if he’ll go in that direction. Given the last three years, the Charlottesville, the, you know, what’s been going on recently, the attacks on synagogues and mosques, his far-right rallies where they chant “send them back,” it’s pretty clear that he has now gone in a full on white nationalist white supremacist direction, isn’t it?
NC: But that’s part of the problem of the Republican party. Its primary constituency is extreme wealth and corporate power. Those are the ones they serve. So you take the one legislative achievement of the Trump administration, the tax scam. That was for the rich and the very rich and the corporate sector. Take deregulation, does it help working people to eliminate eliminate health and safety conditions in the workplace? Does it increase profits? Okay, we know the answer. Same across the board.
So you run across the legislative programs, the ones that are carried out by the really evil characters, Mitch McConnell. Before him, Ryan and so on. Those, those policies are dedicated to the traditional Republican constituency. But you can’t get votes on those policies. So you have to mobilize some kind of a voting base. And the way they did it is, as I described it, as you know.
MH: Mobilize the racists.
NC: So if it turns out that white nationalists are the voting base that you can mobilize, Trump will become a white nationalist. I think it does him too much credit to attribute to him beliefs like support for white nationalism, or fascism or anything else. His motive is himself. And he’s a good enough politician to understand that the only way he’s going to get support is by appealing to those sectors of those sectors of the population. One should bear in mind the utter cynicism of the Republican Party since Reagan.
Take their actual planks. One unbreakable commitment of the Republican party is anti-abortion. What’s called pro-life. Where’d that come from? You go back to the 1960s. The leading republican figures, Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, all the rest of them were what we call pro-choice. What changed? Well, in the 1970s, Republican strategist, Paul Weyrich, had the brilliant idea that if the Republicans pretended, I stress pretended, to be anti-abortion, they could pick up the evangelical vote and the northern working class Catholic vote. So they turned on a dime. They all became passionately anti-abortion. Take climate change. That’s an interesting one. You go just 10 years, 2008 John McCain when he ran for president had a global warming plank, not very strong but something.
John McCain: There are vital measures we can take in the short-term even as we focus on long-term policies to mitigate the effects of global warming.
NC: The Republicans were in fact toying with cap and trade. What happened to it? Very simple. David Koch, died recently. The Koch brothers launched a huge campaign, major juggernaut, bribing congressmen, threatening them, intimidating them. Huge lobbying organization, fake popular organizations to you know, knock on doors and so on. They switched. Now, part of the catechism is you have to be against climate change.
MH: Let’s talk impeachment. The Democrats have launched an impeachment inquiry into President Trump specifically around this suggestion that he was pressuring a foreign country Ukraine to dig up dirt on his political opponent and even withholding military aid until they agreed to do so. Do you support the House Democrats’ decision to finally start an impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump?
NC: First notice something, they’re going after Trump not on his major crimes but because he went after a leading Democrat. Does that remind you of anything? Yes. Watergate. They didn’t go after Nixon on his major crimes. They were off the record. It was because he had attacked the Democratic party.
MH: Good point.
NC: So yes, they’ll protect themselves. Is it the right thing to do? I mean, Trump is impeachable 100 times over. You know, he’s a major crook. There’s no doubt about it. Is it politically wise? I frankly doubt it. I think it’ll turn out pretty much like the Mueller report, which, that I thought was also a political mistake. What’ll happen is probably the House will impeach, goes to the Senate. The Republican senators are utterly craven. They’re terrified of Trump’s voting base. So they’ll vote to turn down the impeachment request. Trump will come along, say I’m vindicated. Say it was the Deep State and the treacherous Dems trying to overturn the election. Oh, vote for me.
MH: I had the filmmaker Michael Moore on the show last week, and he thinks that eventually this evidence is going to pile up against Trump that’s so damning — and we’ve already seen some of the testimony from the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and others — that actually he thinks Republican senators, some of them who you know, who need to save their skins will join Senate Democrats to vote to remove Trump from office. You don’t seem to buy that?
NC: I think you may find a handful who will find a way to evade taking a position But if you just look at the record of the party — I gave you a couple of examples, but we could go on — it’s very hard to imagine any bit of principle emerging. It’s true that if some of them thought they were really going to suffer for it politically or in other ways, maybe they’d change, but that doesn’t seem too likely. I mean, just take a look at Trump’s voting base, you know, there are pretty regular polls and studies. They haven’t changed. They buy his line. Here’s our hero. The one man in the world who’s willing to stand up for us.
MH: Although whether it works or not in the Senate, it doesn’t mean the House Democrats shouldn’t take a stand regardless of whether Republican Senators convict. Can Trump be beaten at the ballot box next November? Is there a Democratic candidate who you think can beat him or more than one candidate?
NC: Well, here it’s very interesting to see what’s being done. You may have seen a day or two ago in the New York Times was a big article about a meeting of the Democratic centrists, the establishment, the billionaires, the donors, you know, the mainstream political figures. And it was about, their concern about just what you asked, is there a Democrat who can defeat Trump? And they went through the possible Democratic candidates and discussed their flaws, and then asked, can we bring in someone else like Bloomberg or Michelle Obama? Take a look at the leading candidates they listed: Warren, Biden and Mayor Pete. Do you notice somebody missing?
MH: Senator Sanders doesn’t make the cut of these lists.
NC: There’s a very good reason for it. He has absolutely infuriated the liberal establishment by committing a major crime. It’s not his policies. His crime was to organize an ongoing political movement that doesn’t just show up at the polls every four years and push a button, but keeps working. That’s no good. The rabble is supposed to stay home. Their job is to watch not to participate.
MH: To be fair to Elizabeth Warren, who you mentioned a moment ago, she has upset a lot of big democratic donors.
Newscaster: Some Democratic donors on Wall Street are reportedly threatening to vote for President Trump or sit out of the 2020 election cycle if the party nominates Elizabeth Warren.
MH: Is she someone you’re not impressed with, are impressed with? What’s your take on Senator Elizabeth Warren?
NC: I think she’s seems to me quite honest. I think many of her plans are perfectly reasonable. She’s working with quite serious economists, some of them friends. But she doesn’t pretend to be to try, to hoping to institute radical institutional changes. Sanders does. Furthermore, she has not organized a mass political movement which Sanders did. And it’s had a lot of effect. That’s how you get people in Congress like Ocasio-Cortez and others because of this movement.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: It wasn’t until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders that I began to assert and recognize my inherent value.
NC: That’s scary. Nobody in the political mainstream wants that.
MH: Some argue, as you know, Bernie Sanders is a deeply controversial figure for good reasons and bad. You know, he’s a divisive figure, again, for good reasons or bad depending on your perspective. Some would say with Elizabeth Warren, you get the best of both worlds, you get left wing policies, but you get a candidate who can reach out across the Democratic party. Why not go with her instead of Bernie Sanders?
NC: Well, you can make that calculation. I think it’s up to individuals to decide.
MH: But Bernie’s got your vote, it’s fair to say?
NC: If I were voting in the primary, I would vote for him. But I think Warren would be a reasonable candidate, almost anybody you can think of, you know, the next guy you meet in the street would be better than Trump.
MH: Of course, of course, even Joe Biden, what’s your view of Joe Biden?
NC: (laughs) You know, he’s a kind of a mild Obama. Nothing very special. I suspect in a debate with Trump, I think he’d probably be overwhelmed just by the showmanship and the deceit and the lies, but he’d certainly be better candidate than Trump.
MH: I suspect you’re right about him being overwhelmed. One of the things that a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters point to, they say, “Look, Elizabeth Warren says she’s a capitalist to her bones. Bernie says he’s a socialist.” Do you think it’s accurate to describe Bernie Sanders, number one, do you think is accurate to describe him as a socialist? And number two, how would you define your own politics, your own ideology?
MC: Well, I don’t think the word socialism should even be used in this context. Bernie Sanders is a decent person. I like what he’s doing. To be quite frank, his major policies would not have surprised President Eisenhower very much. He’s a progressive, New Deal Democrat. Politics has shifted so far to the right during the neoliberal period that things that were sort of conventional and mainstream 50-60 years ago now sound radical.
MH: So why do you think he calls himself a socialist given it’s not going to help him with the electorate? Why do you think he describes himself as a socialist then?
NC: Well, you know, what does socialism mean these days? Socialism means the New Deal. In the United States, you don’t call it socialism because socialism is a curse word. We’re a very business-run society.
MH: That’s my point. He uses the word to self-define in that way when it doesn’t really help him. And you’re saying he’s not one.
NC: He is if you want to use the term that way. Most terms of political discourse have almost totally lost their meaning. So, Reagan is called a free-market Republican. His administration intervened radically in the market over and over for the benefit of the rich.
MH: So on that point then, dare I ask, how would you define your own politics, your own ideology? Is there a label we could give you?
NC: By now I don’t even like labels, but I’ve been more or less, I hate to use the word because it’s so misunderstood, but one or another form of anarchist all my life and never saw any reason to change. Actually, I think most people are anarchists in the traditional sense.
MH: How would you define that to someone listening at home saying, “Well, what does that mean if Noam Chomsky is an anarchist?”
NC: Well, what does anarchism mean? And it’s the whole long tradition actually going back to classical liberalism. It fundamentally means opposition to structures of authority and domination unless they can justify themselves. Illegitimate structures of domination and hierarchy ranging from paternalistic family to business which is a tyranny in which people rent themselves as slaves, to international affairs. Anywhere across this domain if you find illegitimate authority, it should be eliminated. I suspect most people believe that. Of course, that means lots of consequences. It means they should be opposed to private tyrannies. People who are called libertarians in the United States, strange notion, very anti-libertarian, are fundamentally calling for rule by unaccountable private tyrannies. I don’t see anything libertarian about that.
Mh: That’s a very good point and I kind of know where you stand on the economy and on foreign policy. What I’m wondering is where do you stand on issues of political reform? Do you think it’s time for the Democrats to take action to fix the ridiculously undemocratic and archaic U.S. political system, would you, for example, support abolishing the Electoral College and the Senate filibuster? Would you back packing the Supreme Court to undo Gorsuch and Kavanaugh? Would you support statehood for DC and Puerto Rico?
NC: Well, you have to take each case on its own. Take the Electoral College, that’s bad enough, take the Senate. The Senate is one of the most undemocratic institutions in the western world. Take a look at the number of voters that each senator represents. If a country tried to enter the European Union with the U.S. political system, they’d be turned down by the European Court of Justice. I mean, there’s a whole history here that has to be thought of. The Constitution in the 18th century, though it was a pretty conservative doctrine nevertheless, by the standards of the eighteenth century was pretty novel and even progressive in some respects.
But to adhere to the 18th century constitution in the 21st century is a pretty strange phenomenon. I mean, take the people who are called originalists, you know the right-wing originalist Gorsuch and so on who say we have to interpret the Constitution the way the founders and the framers in the 18th century understood it. I mean, does that even approach rationality? To discuss the modern world the way somebody in 1780 perceived it?
MH: So you would like to see the Democrats take a much stronger line on some of these issues, on changing some of this stuff?
NC: Well, you’re living in the real world, not in some ideal world. We’re actually facing a constitutional crisis. The way the demography and the political structure are organized, it’s increasingly becoming the case that a very small sector of voters, maybe 20% or so, who are white, often white nationalist, Christian, often Evangelical, traditional, older, less educated, rural, can actually run the country. And that can’t be changed by amendment, because there’s enough votes in the small states to prevent it.
How do you deal with this? Well, you have to deal with it piecemeal in some fashion. Maybe you’d like to say this very reactionary system should be overturned. But that’s like saying I’d like to have peace on earth.
MH: But you could do stuff like pack the Supreme Court which doesn’t require any constitutional amendments?
NC: That’s a possible tactic, but even that wouldn’t get you very far and it could avert some of the extreme reactionary decisions of the Roberts Court, which is the most reactionary in living memory. You’d have to go far back to find anything like it. But the serious issues, like for example, the un-amendable commitment to a radically undemocratic Senate, that’s going to be hard to change.
MH: Before we finish, you’ve lived through and documented, analyzed the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Reagan era, the Iraq War, the financial crisis. Given that, how unique, how toxic even, is this current political moment that we’re living through right now?
NC: The current moment, not just political, is the most grim moment in human history. We are now in a situation where this generation, in fact, in the next few years, is going to have to make a decision of cosmic significance which has never arisen before: Will organized human society survive? And there are two enormous threats. The threat of environmental catastrophe, which at least is getting some attention, not enough. The other is the threat of nuclear war, which is increasing sharply by the Trump administration, in fact. These have to be dealt with quickly. Otherwise, there’s nothing to talk about.
And notice that the wrecking ball in the White House just doesn’t give a damn. He’s having fun. He’s serving his rich constituency. So what the hell, let’s destroy the world. And it’s not that they don’t know it. Some months ago, maybe a year ago by now, one of the Trump bureaucracies the National Transportation Administration came out with what I think is the most astonishing document in the entire history of the human species.
It got almost no attention. It was a long 500-page environmental assessment in which they tried to determine what the environment would be like at the end of the century. And they concluded, by the end of the century, temperatures will have risen seven degrees Fahrenheit, that’s about twice the level that scientists regard as feasible for organized human life. The World Bank describes it as cataclysmic. So what’s their conclusion? Conclusion is we should have no more constraints on automotive emissions. The reasoning is very solid. We’re going off the cliff anyway. So why not have fun? Has anything like that ever appeared in human history? There’s nothing like it.
MH: There’s nothing like this administration in particular. One last question before I let you go, you’re about to turn 91 years old. You’re still going strong doing interviews like this one, teaching at the University of Arizona. What keeps you going? What motivates you? I’m sure a lot of people listening would like to know.
NC: What’s the alternative? It’s fine. It’s easy, personal life. You know, the political scene, the issues that have to be addressed, professional work which is exciting, all the things in life that make life worth living.
MH: Do you ever get exhausted having to campaign and argue and debate and push for these things decade after decade?
NC: Not really, just more incentive as time goes on.
MH: Professor Noam Chomsky, thank you so much for joining me on Deconstructed.
NC: Very pleased to be with you.
MH: That was Noam Chomsky and that’s our show! Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.
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The war in Afghanistan has been dubbed “the good war,” usually in contrast to the war in Iraq. I know you have an alternative view of what the war in Afghanistan was.
NC
Let’s go back twenty years [to] 9/11. It’s important to recognize first that the United States didn’t know who was responsible for 9/11. In fact, eight months later, the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, had his first major press conference. He was asked, “Who was responsible for 9/11?” This is now after the most intensive multinational investigation, probably, in human history. He said, “We presume that the perpetrators were al-Qaeda and [Osama] bin Laden, but we haven’t been able to establish it.” That’s eight months after the invasion.
What was the motivation for the invasion itself? I think the best answer to this was given by the leading figure in the anti-Taliban Afghan resistance, Abdul Haq, a highly respected Afghan leader [who was] leading the resistance to the Taliban from within. He had an interview in October 2001, right after the bombing started, with a leading Central Asia scholar, Anatol Lieven, who asked him, “What do you think about the invasion?”
[Abdul Haq] said, “The invasion will kill many Afghans, [and] it will undermine our efforts to overthrow the Taliban-regime from within.” He laid out those efforts and thought they were promising. This [the invasion] will undermine them. “But the Americans don’t care about the Afghans, and they don’t care about overthrowing the Taliban. What they want to do is show their muscle and intimidate everyone in the world.”
That was pretty much repeated, in different words, by the American secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who was one of the main agents of the invasion. The Taliban very quickly offered to surrender. They would just go back to their villages and be left alone, and the United States could take over. Of course, [the United States] could then have Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in their hands.
Rumsfeld’s response to this offer was “We do not negotiate surrenders.” It was then seconded by the president, George W. Bush, who said the same thing: “We do not negotiate surrenders, we just use force.” He was asked questions about al-Qaeda and [Osama] bin Laden. He said, “I don’t know anything about them. We don’t really care about them. We have a bigger game in mind.”
The “bigger game in mind” was, of course, outlined publicly. It was not a secret. They wanted to go after Iraq — that’s the real prize. Afghanistan is nothing. [They wanted to] go after Iraq, the major prize, and then use that as a base for going on to other countries in the region. That was the plan.
In fact, if the United States had wanted to capture [Osama] bin Laden — who was then a suspect, remember, not guilty — it wouldn’t have been very difficult. [They] could have done it with a small police action, which probably would have been supported by the Taliban. They would have been happy to get rid of him. He was a nuisance for them. [The Taliban] couldn’t just throw him out because of tribal rules — you don’t throw out somebody who’s taken refuge. That’s important for the Pashtun conception of proper behavior. But they wouldn’t have offered any opposition if the United States wanted to send in a police action.
[But] that’s no good. We have to show our muscle and intimidate everyone.
What happened after that is, the Taliban went back to their villages. The United States came in, its allies came in. There are very good reporters who have been following this on the ground from the beginning. The best is Anand Gopal. [He] has a recent article about it in the New Yorker repeating it. Others have reported the same thing. A recent report in the Washington Post is saying basically the same thing, from another one of the few reporters who was actually in the rural areas — that’s where Afghanistan is.
They all say the same thing: at the beginning, the Afghan rural population was relieved that the fighting was over. They could have some peace. And they had this idea — they didn’t know much of the United States — that many people in the world have: “Here’s this superrich country, which can do all kinds of good things for us.” They hoped that the United States would somehow come in and deal with their problems with poverty and so on.
That didn’t last very long. As soon as the US forces came in, they started attacking Afghans. A bomb could be aiming at somebody they thought was Taliban, but it could hit a wedding party and kill forty people. So now [the Taliban] could recruit the relatives. [US] Special Forces break into people’s houses during the night, humiliate them, send them to a torture chamber. You have created more Taliban. This continued to go on until you had a substantial resistance in the countryside.
How did the United States deal with it? Intensifying the violence. Either itself or the Afghan army that had mobilized, which used the same tactics [as the United States]. What they say now, the same reporters, is “everyone hated the Americans, including the Afghan army.” For pretty good reasons.
Meanwhile, something else was happening. The United States, when it came in, didn’t know anything about Afghanistan. So they looked for people who could carry out their orders. Who were they? The warlords. The monsters who were running the place. There, the ones who were savvy could put themselves forth, saying, “I’ll work for you.” But they’re not stupid. One warlord could approach the Americans and say, “In this village over here, there’s some Taliban” — namely, one of his enemies. Then the Americans would come in and smash up that village and create more Taliban recruits.
This went on through twenty years. By the end, there was a huge resistance. A popular resistance. Actually, the Taliban originally were based in the Pashtun — it’s the largest of the ethnic groups [in Afghanistan] — but it’s extended. One of the few surprises, very few surprises, in the last few weeks was that the warlords in the Tajik and Uzbek areas immediately moved to the Taliban. That was unexpected. Everything else was perfectly well expected.
It was obvious that the government would collapse. The government is just a morass of corruption, [for] which there’s no support. The Afghan army — half of it was just on paper, ghost soldiers. Others were soldiers who didn’t get paid, didn’t have ammunition. The corrupt leaders and officials were stealing everything. They weren’t going to fight for the Americans, so they just disappeared.
All of that was plain. I wrote about it in advance, [and] others did [as well]. Now, the only people who didn’t seem to understand it were the people who had access to intelligence. Intelligence had a different story. That’s one of the ways in which intelligence gets distorted. But if you looked at the facts on the ground, it was plain what was going to happen. The surprise was the joining of the Taliban by their former enemies, the warlords in Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, and others — that’s how it was unexpected. So, now it’s apparently a multiethnic-ruled organization.
What about the withdrawal? This goes back to President Donald Trump. In February 2020, Trump made a deal with the Taliban. He didn’t even bother to inform the Afghan government, [because] they’re nothing. Afghan people, of course, don’t count at all. [Trump] made a deal with the Taliban that American troops would withdraw in May 2021 — the worst possible time. The onset of the fighting season. No opportunity to accommodate, to make local arrangements. “We will pull out, and you can do anything you like,” he said. He imposed no conditions. He just had one condition: “Don’t fire at American soldiers, which wouldn’t look good for me. But anything else is your business.”
It’s interesting to see the reaction of the Republican Party, which hailed this as a historic achievement by our great leader President Trump. It was featured on the Republican Party web page, and it stayed there, up until when the debacle began. Actually, Joe Biden slightly improved on Trump’s conditions: he delayed it a couple of months, so there was a little more time, [and he] added some conditions on the Taliban. [Joe Biden] carried out an improved version of what they were hailing as a marvelous historic achievement by the genius Trump.
As soon as the debacle began, they pulled it off their web page and turned to attacking the Democrats and the army for the disaster. You may have seen the Senate hearing, where General Mark Milley and others were called to account by Republicans who, a month earlier, were hailing the historic achievement, now denouncing the military for following what they had hailed. This carries shamelessness to a higher level — but that’s the Republican Party.
Now comes the next stage. Now, there’s a split in the international community about how to deal with the situation. One approach was advocated by the China-based regional powers — it’s basically the Shanghai Cooperation Organization [SCO] — China, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, India, and Pakistan. Their approach is to accommodate somehow the Taliban regime. It’s a miserable situation in Afghanistan. A mass of people is starving, [and] the economy [has] collapsed, so their approach is, “Let’s give them some aid and support for the population, engage with them, and make an effort to make their government more inclusive, less repressive, and shift the economy from opium production to the export of minerals and their other resources.” That’s one approach.
There’s another approach, which is led by the United States and includes India, a US ally. In the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, India opposed this, preferring the US approach, which is to deprive Afghans of any aid and assistance. To hold their resources — [their] treasury resources happen to be in US banks — and pressure the IMF and the World Bank not to offer them assistance. Just punish the Afghans as much as possible. This doesn’t punish the leadership — sanctions hurt the population. They usually make the leader stronger, as the population has to huddle under the leader’s umbrella just to survive.
The United States is the only country that can impose sanctions. Others go along sometimes, but if they try to do it on their own, nobody would pay the slightest attention. When the United States imposes sanctions, everyone has to obey — even if you oppose them.
Take the sanctions against Cuba, the oldest ones. The entire world opposes them. The vote at the United Nations, the last one, was 184 to 2. Israel goes along with the United States — it’s a client state, so it has to. The rest of the world says no, but they all abide by the sanctions, because US sanctions are third-party sanctions. They tell others, “If you don’t abide by them, we throw you out of the international financial system.” And you have other punishments. The world is basically the mafia, and the Godfather gives the orders, and others obey, whether they like it or not. It’s reality, [it’s] not political science.
So, if the United States imposes sanctions, like on Afghanistan, like it or not, the rest of the world has to obey. Maybe not China. They won’t. That’s one of the reasons China is an enemy: they don’t just follow orders. It’s not tolerable. But maybe the Central Asian states will go along with China. In fact, they have been shifting — they have kicked out the American bases and are moving toward the China-based Eurasian system, the Belt and Road Initiative, the investment system that China’s been carrying out. So that seems to be the way it’s developing.
On China and AUKUS
China is portrayed as a threat to the West — namely Europe and the United States — and recently there has been this new alliance, which seems to be a weapons-sale alliance. And we have a big reaction from Emmanuel Macron in France, because he is losing market share. What do you make of it?
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AUKUS. First of all, why is China a threat? A good recent statement about this [was made] by the distinguished international diplomat, former prime minister of Australia Paul Keating. He said, “What’s the China threat? Well, here’s a country that raised 20 percent of the world’s population from poverty moving on to become a functioning state.” It’s moving forward in the economy, [but] it’s independent of the United States — that’s the China threat. The China threat, he said, is China’s existence. That can’t be tolerated.
Let’s go back to the mafia. The Godfather does not accept centers of power that don’t follow the rules, so China’s a threat. It’s not a military threat. The military threat is against China. China is ringed with US bases with nuclear armed missiles, right offshore, aimed at China. It’s China that’s under threat, not the United States. The United States is under threat from a potential rival that doesn’t follow orders. That’s the threat.
Let’s take a look at AUKUS. What’s portrayed in the press and the governments is [that] it’s a problem of freedom of navigation. [But] there is no problem of freedom of navigation. Actually, one of Australia’s leading strategic analysts just wrote an important article about this. He said, “[There’s] no threat to navigation.” And there is none. There’s none that’s been raised. The problem is what are called the “exclusive economic zones.” The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982 established what are called “exclusive economic zones.” Two hundred miles offshore, there has to be complete freedom of navigation. But there should be no “threat or use of force.”
Now, that’s interpreted by China and India to mean no military intelligence operations. The United States disagrees. [They] say that the United States has the right to carry out military and intelligence operations in the exclusive zone, which they recently did, just a couple of weeks ago, in the Indian zone. India protested vigorously, but [they], of course, can’t do anything about it.
Well, China also protests, and they can do something about it. That’s the contention: Can there be US military intelligence operations in China’s exclusive economic zone? The wording again is “no threat or use of force.”
I should mention on the side that the United States is the only maritime power that does not ratify the Law of the Sea. [The] United States doesn’t ratify international conventions — that’s an interference with its sovereignty. Because the Godfather doesn’t accept that.
So the issue is kind of a technical one: How do you interpret the Law of the Sea with regard to the question “Does rule of force bar military intelligence operations?” That’s the issue. The United States on one side, China and India on the other. [It’s an] obvious place for diplomacy to move in. [But] the United States does not pursue sissified things like “diplomacy.”
We can go back to Afghanistan. When the Taliban surrendered, the answer was, “We don’t do negotiations. We use force.”
Now, let’s come to AUKUS. The United States made a deal with Australia to send them a fleet of advanced hunter-killer submarines with nuclear weapons. China has none of these, [and] this is the South China Sea. China has four submarines. Old submarines [that are] noisy, nonnuclear, easily detected and hemmed in the South China Sea. They can’t go anywhere. That’s China. [The] United States ,of course, has [a lot]. Take a look at the nuclear submarines in the United States. There’s a fleet of advanced submarines. Each one of them — a single one — has, I forgot how many, Trident missiles. Each Trident missile has many warheads. Each US submarine can attack about two hundred cities all over the world. That’s the balance of submarines in the South China Sea.
To correct this, the United States is sending more nuclear submarines to Australia — which Australia pays for, but then they’re folded into the US naval command. It’s a very serious threat to China. There’s no strategic purpose. These subs won’t even be in operation for probably fifteen years. By that time, of course, China will have built up its military forces to counter this new threat — so we get an escalation. Again, we show our muscle, show that we intend to dominate the world.
Same with France. France had already made a deal with Australia to send conventional submarines. The United States did not even notify France that it was being abrogated by the US-Australia deal to send advanced nuclear submarines. So, naturally, [Emmanuel] Macron was pretty upset. It’s a blow to French industry, a serious blow. They weren’t even informed. There’s a message there. It tells the European Union, “Here is your role in world affairs. If we need you, we’ll ask you to do something. If we want to do something, we won’t even bother notifying you. You’re vassals.”
France withdrew its ambassadors in protest. The ambassadors to Australia and the United States didn’t bother withdrawing their ambassador from England, because everybody knows that England is just a vassal state. Don’t bother with them. But that’s how world affairs are shaking up. That’s the AUKUS deal. It’ll escalate to crisis. It’s very tense. There’s a mutual escalation.
So the United States escalates tensions off the China coast. China sends warplanes into Taiwan’s protected area. Those are the “tit for tat” actions. They expand. They can lead to war, [and] a war between China and United States means we’re finished. It’s over. Not just them — everybody. You can’t have a war between nuclear powers. China doesn’t have much of a nuclear system — nothing like the United States — but enough to attack the continental of the United States from the mainland [of China].
On Climate Change
To change subjects: What do you see as the greatest obstacle in solving the climate crisis?
There are two major obstacles. One is, of course, the fossil fuel companies. Second is the governments of the world, including Europe and the United States. We have just seen that very dramatically over the summer. On August 9, 2021, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] issued its last analysis of the climate situation. It was a very dire warning — much more than before.
The message basically was, “We have two choices.” We can either start right now cutting back on fossil fuel use, [and] do it systematically every year, until we phase them out by mid-century. That’s one choice. The other choice is cataclysm. The end of organized human life on earth. Not immediately — we’ll just reach irreversible tipping points, and it goes on to disaster. Those are the options.
How did the great powers react? The day after the IPCC report, Joe Biden issued an appeal to the OPEC cartel [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] to increase production. Europe chimed in by calling on all producers, including Russia, to increase production. Increase production. This is a response to the IPPC warning that we have to start reducing right now.
That’s for political reasons, for profit for the oil companies. [The] political reason is that they want the price reduced. It’s better for them. [For] Joe Biden, if the gas prices are high, it harms his electoral prospects. [If] you read the major business press right now, [there’s] a big discussion going on: What’s the best way to increase production? Is it through the American shale oil — the fracking industry — or is it through OPEC? But how do we increase production best? That’s the business press. Turn to the petroleum journals. [They are] euphoric: “We just found new fields to exploit. Demand is going up. It’s great.”
Let’s go to the US Congress. The Biden program — under pressure from young activists, the Bernie Sanders movements, and so on — is actually a big improvement on any previous ones, on paper. It’s not wonderful, but it’s much better than anything else. Well, the [previous] negotiations in Congress over the “reconciliation bill,” initiated by Bernie Sanders, cut back very sharply from Sanders’s proposals. It’s a very valuable bill. It somewhat reverses the huge assault on the population during the neoliberal era.
The Republicans are 100 percent opposed. Nothing. [They] won’t accept anything. The Democrats do have a swing vote. The so-called moderate Democrats, who should be called “ultra-reactionaries,” are the swing vote. One of them is the chair of the Senate Energy Committee, [who] also happens to be the champion in Congress of receiving funding from the fossil fuel industry — which is quite an achievement, because they pay off everyone — but he’s the champion. His name is Joe Manchin. He has a policy — he’s made it explicit — that’s taken from the playbook of the oil companies. He made it very clear; he said: “No elimination, only innovation.” So, no cutbacks on the use of fossil fuel. If you can make up something new, it’s okay. So, he’s blocking it. There are climate change provisions in it. They’re already out. Blocked.
In Europe, it varies. There are some countries, like Denmark, for example, that are moving toward renewable energy pretty significantly. Others vary. But when it comes to the crunch, telling the oil companies and the producers right now what to do, Europe is, as far as I know, unified in saying, “Increase production” — right after the warning that we have to decrease production. That’s the world we live in.
Considering this, do you think it’s possible to find solutions at the scale and time we need within the capitalist system?
It’s very simple. Straightforward. There are very careful and detailed proposals that have been worked out. Even by the International Energy Agency [IEA], which is a producer-based group. There are detailed proposals, others by a number of economists, very good economists. One of them is my coauthor Robert Pollin, another is Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia. Using different models, they all come up with the same results. There are perfectly feasible measures to meet the IPPC goals and, at the same time, make a better world. Better jobs, better living conditions, [and] improvement of the nature of society. It’s all possible.
The leaders in Europe who are calling for increased production know it perfectly well — if they’re literate. And it’s within maybe 2 to 3 percent of the GDP — easily manageable. It’s actually less than what the US Treasury spent to bail out the financial institutions during the current crisis. Easily within range. [It is a] tiny fraction of what was spent during World War II.
But the problem is: Can you get the will to do it? It’s not going to come from the leadership. It has to come from mass popular action. And the scandal and tragedy is that that’s coming only from young people. The climate strike earlier this year — young people. The “Sunrise Movement” in the United States, which impelled the Biden administration to at least adopt a reasonable proposal on paper — it’s young people. When Greta Thunberg stands up at the Davos meeting and says, “You have betrayed us,” she’s exactly right. She got a light applause, and then they said, “Nice little girl, why don’t you go back to school? We’ll take care of it.” It can be done. But it’s going to take plenty of effort and energy.
There are major problems. Actually, last month, an IMF [International Monetary Fund] study tried to estimate the subsidies that are being given to the fossil fuel companies. Their estimate is around $11 million a minute in subsidies, mostly by the rich countries to the fossil fuel industry. Some of them are direct, others are indirect, like by underestimating the cost of the use of fossil fuel. That’s a pretty significant sum. It’s going on every day.
The whole neoliberal period was basically class war. It had nothing to do with the markets or anything else. Just class war. This is another form. Do we want to hand the future of our children and grandchildren to elements that want to make as much profit as possible and then don’t care what happens tomorrow? That’s one choice. The other choice is to move onto a livable and better world.
On Anarchism and Classical Liberalism
Let’s move on to anarchism. I think it’s a term that’s greatly misunderstood. A lot of people believe that anarchism has to do with a chaotic society without any rules, which is quite different from the anarchism that you speak of. Could you briefly try to explain what you mean, when you speak of anarchism?
Well, I mean, anarchism covers a very wide range. There are all sorts of things. But even the ultraright calls itself anarchist — meaning they want power to shift from government to private tyranny. But the mainstream has been based on a very simple principle: any form of hierarchy and domination is illegitimate, unless it can justify itself. It has a burden of proof. Sometimes that burden of proof can be me — very rarely. If it can’t be met, dismantle it, and turn it into a more free, participatory, cooperative society.
An anarchist system could very well have hierarchy, as long as it’s controlled from below. Like, if I need surgery, I go to a doctor, not a carpenter. That’s hierarchy. But I chose it — he’s a doctor by virtue of my decision, our decision collectively, that some group of people can gain skills that the community needs. So, as long as responsibility is vested in the democratic participatory community in every institution, in the workplace, in communities everywhere, then we’re moving toward a free and just society.
It will be a highly organized society. There can be a lot of planning about how we should distribute resources, what our policies ought to be. It could be, or should be, international in scope. So, a rich and complex organization based on popular and democratic control, meeting the condition that any form of hierarchy that can’t justify itself has to be dismantled in favor of more freedom. Then you can spell that out in many detailed ways.
I suppose that the practical realization of this philosophy, in economic terms, would be to do something about those private tyrannies.
Well, there are many things that can be done and, in fact, are being done. One thing that should be done is the classic position of the workers’ movements and the farmers’ movements back in the nineteenth century — in fact, it has its roots in classical liberalism: “Those who work in an enterprise should own and manage it.” We should move toward what radical farmers called a cooperative commonwealth, where the farmers themselves organized collectively [and] freed themselves from the rule of the Northeastern bankers and market managers [and instead] did it themselves. That was the populist movement in the United States in the nineteenth century. They were beginning to link up with the growing workers’ movement, which held that “those who work in the mill should own them. No one has the right to expropriate the labor of someone else.”
This is, actually, classical liberalism. Go back to someone like Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the main founders of classical liberalism, who said that “the peasant who works the fields has more right of ownership than the landlord who sits in some palace somewhere.” That’s classical liberalism. Abraham Lincoln in the United States was a classical liberal. For him, and indeed for the Republican Party, what they called “wage slavery” — subordination to a master — is just like slavery, except that it’s temporary, until you can free yourself. Now, there’s a little difference. He talked about individual freedom, [and] the farmers and workers talked about collective freedom — a cooperative commonwealth. But other than that, the roots are in the classical idea, [which] goes way back to the Romans — that subordination to a master is a fundamental attack on basic human dignity and human rights. That’s been beaten out of people’s heads by a century of propaganda.
Now it’s supposed to be a wonderful thing if you can subordinate yourself to a master for most of your working life. It’s called “getting a job.” It was considered a horrible attack on human dignity for millennia. Millennia, literally, up through the nineteenth century. It’s taken a lot of work to impose on people the idea that it’s a wonderful thing to spend your waking hours following somebody else’s orders.
And doing it in a way that is actually more extreme than totalitarian states! Like, Stalin couldn’t tell you “You’re allowed to go to the bathroom for fifteen minutes at 3 p.m.” He couldn’t do that. That’s what’s called “getting a job” — [someone telling you] what kind of clothes to wear [and], if you’re working at an Amazon warehouse, what kind of path to take between two spots. If you’re working for a delivery company, you’re not allowed to stop for coffee for fifteen minutes, and we control you because we have a surveillance system in the truck. If you do that, you get a demerit, and if you get a couple of them, you’ll get thrown out. That’s called “getting a job.” Subordinating yourself to a master.
Well, not only the anarchists but even the socialist movement took that as a slogan. “Workers’ control of enterprises” was the basis for the traditional socialist movement, [but] it’s long changed from that. But I think all these ideas can be reconstructed quickly — they are [already], to a certain extent. There are worker-controlled enterprises, cooperatives, localist initiatives developing, which are pieces of a more free and just society, which would follow general anarchist principles.
Unfortunately, this cannot happen in time to deal with our immediate crises. The timescales are wrong. The immediate crises [are] crises of survival [and] will have to be dealt with within more or less the existing institutions. They can be modified, but they are not going to be fundamentally changed in time to deal with the crises. That doesn’t mean that you stop working on the long term. You do it, and it changes consciousness, changes understanding, and builds elements of freedom within a highly repressive society. It can be done. But the immediate crises are going to require working with the institutions that exist. We’re stuck with that.