This Q&A was transcribed from the Z Video “What Went Wrong.” The questions came from the 35 ZMI student activists in a 90-minute class at Z Media Institute in Woods Hole, MA, 2010. It covers many issues relevant to 2016, particularly some of the contentious issues raised during the election campaign.
Q: What is the left and what kind of language can we use to describe our movement and our positions to others?
CHOMSKY: Well, the Left is the movement that is in favor of all decent things—freedom, justice, peace. Of course we have to define it for ourselves, but traditionally it’s the movement that’s been in favor of more freedom, more justice, more equality, more participation, more control over our own lives—all decent things. That’s the Left.
Q: How can we present it to people?
Honestly, just take the issues. There’s no point in formulating abstractions. Anybody can say those words—Hitler can say them. What we have to do is show that we mean them by the particular way we apply them to the problems people face. the drive toT pursue those objectives, I think, is what has always animated the Left.
Q: The changes that many voters hoped would come in the U.S. when Obama was elected have yet to happen. What went wrong?
What went wrong was the hope. There was never any reason for it. You can’t blame him. If you read his website, you’d have found what limited content there was in what he was saying. He pretty much presented himself as a normal centrist democrat, not very different in international affairs from Bush’s second term—that is, very hawkish. There was just nothing there.
I wrote about him before the election, even before the primaries. His website was perfectly transparent. If people wanted to be deluded they had that choice, of course. So no hope/change happened and there was no reason to expect it to happen. He was a creature of the financial institutions and they preferred him to John McCain. The core of his funding came from the financial institutions and they expected to be paid back. That’s the way American politics works. And they were paid back with a huge bailout. They were richer and better off than before. So the question is, “What do we do about it?”
This happened before, by the way. History doesn’t repeat exactly, but an analogy is close enough to pay attention to. If you go back to 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected with similar illusions—a lot of glitz, a lot of glamour, Camelot, and so on, and so forth. It elicited a lot of enthusiasm among young people who thought the world was going to change after the stodgy, terrible, Eisenhower years. Well, it didn’t take long for the illusions to be shed by Kennedy’s actions. What was interesting was how people reacted. They didn’t react by saying “we give up, the illusions are gone.” They reacted with deep engagement in activism and that led to the activism of the 1960s.
The serious question now is how those who were misled by the illusions created around the Obama presidency will react. There are two choices: you react by saying there is no hope, let’s give up and go back to our private lives. Or we can say, we were misled, now we’re going to really pursue the illusions that were shattered—that were the right ones—and we get another period of activism and significant change. I think that’s really in the hands of those who were caught up in the wave of enthusiasm, mistakenly, but you can make mistakes, and you can look back and say, how do we go on from here?
Q: Do you have any strategic advice on how the left can better organize around the legitimate popular grievances that the right wing preys on?
There are things that can be done. It depends on who you are and where you are. I’m not going to organize steel workers—I’m not a steel worker. But in our own communities we can do a lot of things. Take, say, the deficit.
The propaganda today is that we’ve got this hideous deficit and we’ve got to concentrate attention on getting rid of it—everything has to go. Well, first of all, it doesn’t make much sense economically. In a recession, you want to have a deficit because you want to have a stimulus to grow your way out of economic recession—17 million unemployed, and so on. But putting that aside, what’s the deficit? If you listen to NPR (National Public Radio), the deficit is Social Security and Medicare. But that’s only because the rich and privileged have been trying for years to destroy them.
Social Security isn’t in any kind of trouble. Medicare is in trouble because it’s linked to the privatized health care system which is in serious trouble. Take a look at the deficit. About half is military spending which has gone up under Obama. In fact, it’s reached new heights and nobody’s talking about cutting that. So when people talk about cutting the deficit, you know right away they’re not serious.
The other half of the deficit is pretty much medical costs and they are growing in our completely disfunctional health-care system. Costs are going to overwhelm the federal budget which is not bad for those who are just as happy to have the benefit system cut. The rich will still get what they want. We already have a health-care system that is rationed by wealth and if it gets even more so, you’re not going to get any complaints from wealth and privilege.
The Deficit
This is an issue that is easy to organize around: it’s true, there is a deficit, and let’s look at what it comes from. Do we have to spend as much as the rest of the world combined on a military force technologically more advanced, and with hundreds of thousands of bases all over the world? I don’t think anybody’s calculated it, but if you simply look at the costs of the prepositioned weapons around the world and the navy that the U.S. has scattered around the world doing nothing—just getting ready in case there’s ever a need to use those prepositioned weapons for aggression wherever it may be. Those costs, if calculated, would be astronomical.
Do we need that? Is it good for the world? Is it good for us to be working on advanced drone technology so we can produce miniature drones that can find their way into a person’s living room and kill a particular person who may be under surveillance? Is that what we need? There’s plenty to organize around about that and none of it’s being discussed in a public arena.
Health Care
I happened to listen recently to NPR’s weekly talk program all about the deficit. They had their two experts on, both of them deficit hawks. Their only suggestion for dealing with the deficit was to cut social security and Medicare benefits. Not a word about the military budget or why health care costs are going out of sight. Health care reform was opposed by two-thirds of the population, but if you take a look at the actual polls, you’ll see that a large part of the population objected because the reforms didn’t go far enough—they gave everything away. We can appeal to the those people with the fact that they are supporting a health care system that is twice the per capita costs of health care in the rest of the world (industrial counties) and we have about the worst outcomes.
We could bring to light something the press hasn’t covered by citing maternal deaths in childbirth which are about the highest in the world. Or we could cite studies of comparative health care that found that in Cuba, a poor country—under attack by the world’s greatest superpower—health outcomes are about the same as in the U.S. while Cuba’s expenses are 5 percent of U.S. expenses because Cuba’s healthcare system is focused on preventive care, with clinics all over the place and doctors who offer prenatal care and who will visit mothers and babies in the home.
So just these two issues that are causing the large deficit—the military and health care—should be easy to organize around and they can lead in all kinds of other directions, as well.
Plant Closings
If you happen to be living in Central Michigan, you can organize around quite different things. For example, the government now pretty much owns much of the auto industry and it has been following the path of a state corporate system for the last 30 years—transferring industrial production abroad. It’s not closing down industrial production, it’s just continuing the process somewhere else where labor is cheaper—Mexico, China, Vietnam, and so on, but the profits stay here. The banks like it and so do managers and owners, but it’s destroying the society. When you close an auto plant, you are destroying not only the workforce, but the community. Communities are largely built around the industrial plants. Do they have to be closed? Well, there are plenty of things that are needed here.
In fact, we could point out that at the time Obama was closing down GM plants, he sent his secretary of transportation to Europe to get contracts using taxpayer federal stimulus money for industrial firms in Europe—primarily Spain—to build high speed rail transport, which we badly need in the U.S. and which could be produced in those closed-down plants in Michigan. You can’t compare the trains here with those in Europe, Japan, China—or almost anywhere else. That’s not something that happened by accident, it was the result of careful state corporate planning to design a particular kind of society, one that’s highly wasteful, and fossil fueled, which scatters people and breaks down cities. It goes back to the 1940s and it’s led to a situation that’s harmful for everybody except the rich. What’s the obvious strategy in this case? The obvious strategy is for working people to take over the factories, run them, manage them, and produce high speed rail equipment or whatever else is badly needed in this society.
That’s not such a radical step. It’s the kind of thing that’s been just below the surface in American history. If you go back to the 1930s, the business class got frightened by sitdown strikes. Sitdown strikes are just one thought away from taking over the factory and running it yourself, then kicking out the bosses.
And there are other issues around which there are plenty of organizing possibilities. We are, after all, facing two crises which literally have to do with survival of the species. One of these is nuclear weapons; another has to do with destruction of the environment.
Just to keep to the front pages: there was a lot of concern about the BP catastrophe in the Gulf. There’s a lot to say about it, but one thing is that as bad as this catastrophe was, by global standards, what goes on in the Niger Delta in Nigeria is incomparably worse and its been going on for decades. Oil companies are destroying the place, resulting in huge oil spills, people are getting killed and no one seems to care much about it. What’s happening here is in substantial part traceable to the collapse of the regulatory apparatus under the neoliberal fanaticism of the last generation, which is pretty much the same as what led to the financial crises. Except there weren’t any financial crises from the 1930s until the 1970s because the regulatory system was in place and the financial system was more or less regulated. But with the explosion of finance and the elimination of regulation, you get repeated crises that are getting worse and worse. And the same is true for the environmental crises. All of these things—almost anything in people’s lives—we can organize about. And that’s the mission of the Left.
Q: What form of resistance can help us stop the racist anti-immigrant sentiment that seems to be growing?
Anti-immigrant sentiment is extraordinary. Here in the U.S., people have the feeling that “they” are taking everything away from us. We worked hard to achieve what we have and “they” are taking it all away. Well, who are “they?” “They” are the illegal immigrants.
The feelings are genuine and they have to be dealt with, partly by explaining what the facts are. First of all, why are immigrants coming from Africa to Europe instead of the other way around? Actually, why is the wave of immigration from South to North? Take say, immigration from Mexico and Central America to the United States. What’s the source of it? Well, from Central America to the U.S. it’s Reagan’s terrorist wars which tore those countries to pieces. In the Mayan territories in Guatemala it was literal genocide in the 1980s, supported by the U.S. So, it’s not just that people are coming here to steal from us, they are coming because we destroyed their lives. That’s something that people should know about. In fact, Latin America has had a horrible history of repression and violence—sources include the western imperialism of the last century, mostly the U.S., and the other is their own elites, mostly Europeanized white elites which have been vicious, brutal, and savage. Between those two, countries have been crushed. The people are very poor—they’re doing better now, but if you look at the large part of their improvement, it’s coming from remittances. In fact, remittances to Latin America are more than foreign aid and about the level of foreign direct investment. They survive on that basis after suffering years of violence and oppression.
Why are Mexicans coming to the U.S.? Well, there’s something called NAFTA, which was established in 1994, rammed through by the liberals over the opposition of the American public, the Mexicans, and the Canadians. There were alternatives proposed by the labor movement, but the media wouldn’t even report them. So Clinton managed to ram through the executive version of NAFTA. If you look at the background, it’s pretty clear what it was about.
When NAFTA was established, it was understood that it was going to destroy Mexican agriculture and Mexican business. Mexican agriculture couldn’t compete with U.S. agribusiness, which is massively state subsidized under NAFTA, so, of course, it devastated the economy and people began to flee. Where are they going to flee to? They’re not going to Guatemala, so they’re going to the U.S.
What do you do about it? Clinton understood exactly what to do about it. The border between Mexico and the U.S. had been a pretty open border. It was established, of course, by conquest and pretty much the same people lived on both sides so people were mainly crossing to visit their relatives.
In 1994, the year NAFTA was passed, Clinton initiated the militarization of the border—Operation Gatekeeper. Why? Because anybody could see that the impact of NAFTA was going to be harmful and was going to lead to a flow of immigrants, which would have to be stopped by force. That’s the immigrant issue, that’s the basis for it.
The fact of the matter is that when an immigrant comes in, it leads to economic growth. They do a lot of the dirty work of society for low wages and in bad conditions. They can’t complain for obvious reasons—they’re undocumented—so they are easily exploitable. They send back remittances and they spend money, so their net effect, from an economic point of view, is beneficial to the economy—and they take jobs from no one.
There’s a mass of issues that can be discussed to deal with the anti-immigrant hysteria. People need to recognize that it has legitimate roots; that people feel threatened that their way of life is being taken away, but it’s not being taken away by immigrants, it’s being taken away by Goldman Sachs executives. It will take some work, but that’s what organizing is about, taking grievances that people have, recognizing their legitimacy, and pointing out the sources and causes and what they reveal about themselves and about the society in which they live, and the propaganda which they are being subjected to.
Q: What can we expect from the situation in Iraq?
It depends on two factors, primarily the Iraqis and secondarily the U.S. What happened in Iraq was that the U.S. was actually defeated, which is quite unusual. If you look at the U.S. war aims in Iraq, it was a defeat—a serious defeat. The main factor was nonviolent resistance. The U.S. was able to kill insurgents—we’re really good at killing people; we have a massive killing machine —but we could not deal with hundreds of thousands of people in the streets demanding elections. The U.S. tried in every way to block elections.
Contrary to the headlines, the U.S. was desperately trying to prevent any form of democracy in Iraq, but step by step the U.S. had to back off. As late as January 2008, the official U.S. government position, stated by the President, was that the U.S. was committed to insuring that there would be permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq, permanent options for U.S. military actions in Iraq and privileged access for U.S. corporations to Iraqi oil. That was always in the background, but in the early stages of the war, it was kind of hidden under the usual boilerplate of “democracy.” As the situation got more and more desperate for the U.S., they had to come out with the truth and by late 2007/early 2008, if you look closely, the official pronouncements were saying exactly what the Left had been saying all along—that the goal of the war was to establish a U.S. client state with a major U.S. military presence in position to dominate the region, and, of course, to control the energy resources and make sure U.S. corporations had privileged access to them.
If you said that during the war, you were considered an anti-American, lunatic from Mars. But by 2008, they had to concede publically that there were war aims and they had to give them up. Take a look at the Status of Forces Agreement. The U.S. had to give up on every one of those points, just as it had to step back year after year from its efforts to prevent elections and any form of democracy. It was a major defeat. So what happens there depends on the Iraqis. But there’s something for us to learn, too. Why was the U.S. forced to back off? The primary reason was Iraq’s nonviolent resistance, a major triumph for non-violence. But there’s a second reason: the U.S. population would not tolerate the war.
There’s kind of a principle that if you read something that’s conventionally believed, you can pretty much take for granted that it’s false and the opposite is true. It’s commonly argued across the spectrum that there was no opposition in the U.S. to the war in Iraq. People lament that it wasn’t like Vietnam where there was huge opposition, but for Iraq there was no opposition. Exactly the opposite was the case.
Take the Vietnam War. At any point where it was at the same stage as the Iraq War, there was no opposition at all. Not only no opposition, but efforts to express opposition were repressed pretty violently In October 1965, after three years of war in Vietnam, a couple of thousand troops there, South Vietnam practically destroyed, we tried to have our first public anti-war demonstration.
So there was a small march from Harvard Square to Boston Common—a few thousand people. There were supposed to be talks, but they were violently broken up by students. The only reason people weren’t wounded or killed was a couple of hundred state police.
The next day the Boston Globe—a liberal newspaper—reported with great applause for the counter-demonstrators with a picture of a wounded vet on the front page and denunciations of the demonstrators who were asking for things so mild it was embarrassing (to stop the bombing). That was 1965. I can remember that you could maybe give a talk in a church for four people—the minister, the organizer, a drunk who walked in off the street, and some guy who wanted to kill you. So Kennedy and Johnson had no problem initially authorizing napalm, B-52 saturation bombing, chemical warfare—no protests
Bernard Fall—a French military historian and a highly respected Vietnam specialist—wrote in Last Reflections on a War, which came out in 1967, that he thought it doubtful that Vietnam would survive as a cultural and an historical entity after massive attacks by the most extraordinary military machine that had ever been unleashed against a territory that size. At that point there were over a half a million troops in South Vietnam, the U.S. was extensively bombing the North and had expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia. So there started to be bigger protests. Among elites there were never any protests. Among the general population, however, things were changing and anti-war demonstrations and activism was significant. In January 1968, the Tet Offensive took place, an event that has been grossly distorted in history. It was an amazing event. Those interested in popular movements should take a close look at it. South Vietnam was completely saturated with over a half a million troops and probably 100,000 or so mercenaries from South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and so on—a huge client army. Every village was swarming with intelligence and government officials. Yet, nobody knew the Tet offensive was coming. It was a simultaneous uprising all over South Vietnam and it took everybody by surprise.
What it meant was that in every South Vietnamese village, people were already organized to rise up on a particular moment against the occupation. That means that nobody talked about it, or if somebody did talk about it, the eyes didn’t see it and the ears didn’t hear it. I don’t think there’s an event like that in the history of spontaneous popular uprisings.
The U.S. succeeded in putting it down by massive violence, and now it’s treated as a defeat for North Vietnam. Actually, North Vietnam wasn’t even there. They were on the border basically trying to draw American troops away from the country so the uprising could take place. But this was called a defeat for North Vietnam because the U.S. was able to put down the uprising with massive firepower, That’s the way it enters history. But what actually happened is quite astonishing and power centers in the U.S. understood it. Intellectuals still don’t understand it, but the business community understood. At that point there was an interesting power play. There was a group called the wise men—Wall Street hot shots—who went to Washington and read President Lyndon Johnson the riot act. They told him, look, you’re going to stop escalating the war, it’s costing too much, it’s hurting the economy, populations are in an uproar, you’ve got to stop bombing North Vietnam and start withdrawing troops, and announce that you’re not going to run for re-election in the upcoming elections. And the president did everything he was ordered to do, instantaneously. That gives us insight into how American politics works.
In the intellectual community something extremely interesting happened. It all of a sudden turned out that everybody had been a long-time opponent of the war. So Kennedy memoirists—there were a lot of memoirs about Camelot and how wonderful it was. Well, the Kennedy memoirists—Arthur Schlesinger, Ted Sorenson, and the rest of them—immediately rewrote their histories, inventing the fairy tale that Kennedy was trying to get out of the war. It was a total fairy tale. There was not a particle of evidence for it.
Well, the effects of the antiwar movement in the 1960s and the expansion of the same popular movements led to a situation where the public simply wouldn’t tolerate the measures that were undertaken in South Vietnam. They couldn’t do that in Iraq. So resistance at home and in Iraq led to a U.S. defeat.
Iraq was left with the fact that the invasion elicited sectarian conflicts, which had not really existed there in the past. As late as 2005 or so, Iraqis were saying that there were never going to be sectarian conflicts. When it finally blew up, it got very ugly right through the Middle East. The U.S. war on Iraq created a major sectarian conflict which has threatened to tear the region apart.
The Left can do what it can to try to prevent a colonial administration from being established; to force the U.S. government to live up to what it formally agreed to in the Status of Forces Agreement, which Obama is certainly not planning to do. You’ll notice nobody’s talking about what’s happening to the military bases. I know they’re being taken care of by contractors. The U.S. has sort of farmed out most of them to private military corporations, which are continuing to build large military bases with the intention of somehow reversing the defeat.
How this pans out depends on us. Do we want to spend millions a year to build cities in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan to ensure that we control the region along with military bases, torture chambers, and so on? That’s up to us—our choice. Do we give up? or do we push for more freedom, more justice, more equality, more participation, more control over our own lives—all decent things?
Z
Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as “the father of modern linguistics,” Chomsky is one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He has spent more than half a century at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, U.S. foreign policy, and mass media.