Good morning, welcome to Aaron Mills Town Center.
Three, two, one, take two. Good morning, welcome to Aaron Mills Town Center, the home of the
world's largest permanent point of purchase video wall installation. My name is Calvin
Fluck and I'm your video host all day here at EMTV. I want to take this opportunity to
extend a very special and warm welcome to the film crew from Necessary Illusions. We've
got an excellent line up of television programming for you today so let's get on with it.
So how long have they been working on this documentary?
Gosh, they've been working, I don't know how long, but every country I show up they're always there.
They're there, huh?
England, they're in Japan, all over the place. They must have 500 hours worth of tape by
now.
But they put together a real doozy when they're done, huh?
I can't imagine who's going to want to hear somebody talk for an hour, but I guess they
know what they're doing.
Where are y'all from?
Colorado.
Colorado?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're making a film about Noam Chomsky. Does anybody know who Noam Chomsky is?
No.
Good afternoon and welcome to Wyoming Talks. My name is Mary Hicks.
My guest today is well-known intellectual Noam Chomsky. Thank you for being on our program
today.
Very glad to be here.
Well I know probably the main purpose for your trip to Wyoming is to discuss thought
control in a democratic society. Now, I'd say I'm just Jane USA and I say, well gee,
this is a democratic society and what do you mean thought control? I make up my own mind,
I create my own destiny. What would you say to her?
Well, I would suggest that Jane take a close look at the way the media operate, the way
the public relations industry operates, the extensive thinking that's been going on for
a long, long period about the necessity for finding ways to marginalize and control the
public in a democratic society. But particularly to look at the evidence that's been accumulated
about the way the major media, the sort of agenda setting media, I mean the national
press and the television and so on, the way that they shape and control the kinds of opinions
that appear, the kinds of information that comes through, the sources to which they go
and so on and I think that Jane will find some very surprising things about the democratic
system.
I'd like to welcome all of you to this lecture today. Several years ago, Professor Chomsky
was described in the New York Times Book Review as follows, judged in terms of the power,
change, novelty and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important
intellectual alive. Professor Noam Chomsky.
I gather there are some people out behind that blackness there, but if I don't look
you in the eye, it's because I don't see you. All I see is the blackness.
So to begin by reporting something that's never read, the line about the arguably the
most important intellectual in the world and so on comes from a publisher's blurb and you
always got to watch those things because if you go back to the original, you'll find that
that sentence is actually there. This is in the New York Times. But the next sentence
is, since that's the case, how can he write such terrible things about American foreign
policy? I may never quote that part, but in fact if it wasn't for that second sentence,
I would begin to think that I'm doing something wrong and I'm not joking about that. It's
true that the emperor doesn't have any clothes, but the emperor doesn't like to be told it
and the emperor's lap dogs like the New York Times are not going to enjoy the experience
if you do. Good evening. I'm Bill Moyers. What's more
dangerous, the big stick or the big lie? Governments have used both against their own people. Tonight
I'll be talking with a man who has been thinking about how we can see the developing line.
He says that propaganda is to democracy what violence is to a dictatorship, but he hasn't
lost faith in the power of common people to speak up for the truth.
You have said that we live entangled in webs of endless deceit, that we live in a highly
indoctrinated society where elementary truths are easily buried. Elementary truths such
as the fact that we invaded South Vietnam or the fact that we're standing in the way
of significant and have for years of significant moves towards arms negotiation or the fact
that the military system is to a substantial extent, not totally, but to a substantial
extent a mechanism by which the general population is compelled to provide a subsidy to high
technology industry since they're not going to do it if you ask them to. You have to deceive
them into doing it. There are many truths like that and we don't face them.
Do you believe in common sense? I mean, you do.
Absolutely. I believe in Cartesian common sense. I think people have the capacity to
see through the deceit in which they're ensnared, but they've got to make the effort.
It seems a little in Congress to hear a man from the ivory tower of Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, a scholar, a distinguished linguistics scholar, talk about common people
with such appreciation.
I think that scholarship, at least the field that I work in, has the opposite consequences.
My own studies in language and human cognition demonstrate to me at least what remarkable
creativity ordinary people have. The very fact that people talk to one another is a
reflection, just in a normal way, I don't mean anything particularly fancy, reflects
deep-seated features of human creativity which in fact separate human beings from any other
biological system we know.
Tonight scientists talk to the animals, but are they talking back?
The Journal with Barbara Frum and Mary Lou Finley.
Communicating with animals is a serious scientific pursuit.
This is Nim Chimpsky. Nim, jokingly named after the great linguist Noam Chomsky, was
the great hope of animal communication in the 1970s. For four years, Petito and others
coached him in sign language, but in the end they decided it was a lost cause. Nim could
ask for things, but not much more.
I would have loved to have a conversation with Nim and understand how he looked at the
universe. He failed to communicate that information to me, and we gave him every opportunity.
Noam Chomsky, theorist of language and political activist, has had an extraordinary career.
I can think of none like it in recent American history, and few anywhere at any time. He
has literally transformed the subject of linguistics. At the same time, he's become one of the most
consistent critics of power politics in all its protean guises. Scholar and propagandist,
his two careers apparently reinforce each other.
In 1957, he published his Syntactic Structures, which began what has frequently been called
the Chomskyian Revolution in linguistics. Like a latter-day Copernicus, Chomsky proposed
a radically new way of looking at the theory of grammar. Chomsky worked out the formal
rules of the universal grammar, which generated the specific rules of actual or natural languages.
The general approach I'm taking seems to me rather simple-minded and unsatisficated,
but nevertheless correct.
Later he came to argue that such systems are innate features of human beings. They belong
to the characteristics of the species and have been, in effect, programmed into the
genetic equipment of the mind like the machine language in a computer.
One needn't be interested in this question. Of course, I am interested in it. And the
interesting question from this point of view would be, what is the nature of the initial
state? That is, what is human nature in this respect?
That in turn explains the...
Astonishing... Let me try that next one.
Facility.
Facility.
That in turn explains the astonishing facility that children have in learning the rules of
natural language, no matter how complicated, incredibly quickly, from what are imperfect
and often degenerate samples.
Complicated.
Complicated. It's a complicated word. You know what complicated means? It means it's
complicated.
If in fact our minds were a blank slate and experience wrote on them, we would be very
impoverished creatures indeed. So the obvious hypothesis is that our language is the result
of the unfolding of a genetically determined program. Well, plainly, there are different
languages. In fact, the apparent variation of languages is quite superficial. It's certain,
as certain as anything else, is that humans are not genetically programmed to learn one
or another language. So you bring up a Japanese baby in Boston that will speak Boston English.
And you bring up my child in Japan that will speak Japanese. And that means that from that
it simply follows by logic that the basic structure of the languages must be essentially
the same. Our task as scientists is to try to determine exactly what those fundamental
principles are that cause the knowledge of language to unfold in the manner in which
it does under particular circumstances. And incidentally, I think there is no doubt that
the same must be true of other aspects of human intelligence and systems of understanding
and interpretation and moral and aesthetic judgment and so on.
The implications of these views have washed over the fields of psychology, education,
sociology, philosophy, literary criticism, and logic.
In the 50s and 60s, the bridge between your theoretical work and your political work seems
to have been the attack on behaviorism. But now, behaviorism is no longer an issue, or
so it seems. So how does this leave the link between your linguistics and your politics?
Well I've always regarded the link, I've never really perceived much of a link to tell you
the truth. Again, I would be very pleased to be able to discover intellectually convincing
connections between my own anarchist convictions on the one hand and what I think I can demonstrate
or at least begin to see about the nature of human intelligence on the other. But I
simply can't find intellectually satisfying connections between those two domains. I can
discover some tenuous points of contact.
There is no possible creativity except through a system of rules. The problem I'm facing
and I don't quite agree with Mr. Chomsky is when he puts these rules inside the
human mind or nature. I wonder if the system of rules, of constraints, which make science
a science, can't be found elsewhere, outside of the human mind, in social forms, in production
relationships, in class struggles, etc.
If it is correct, as I believe it is, that a fundamental element of human nature is the
need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting
effects of coercive institutions, then of course it will follow that a decent society should
maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized.
Now a federated, decentralized system of free associations incorporating economic as well
as social institutions would be what I refer to as anarcho-syndicalism. And it seems to
me that it is the appropriate form of social organization for an advanced technological
society in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of
cogs in a machine.
Since the 1960s, Noam Chomsky has been the voice of a very characteristic brand of rationalist,
libertarian socialism. He has attacked the abuses of power wherever he saw them. He has
made himself deeply unpopular by his criticism of American policy, the subservience of the
intelligentsia, the degradation of Zionism, the distortions of media and self-delusions
and prevailing ideologies.
Under the liberal administration of the 1960s, the club of academic intellectuals designed
and implemented the Vietnam War and other similar though smaller actions. This particular
community is a very relevant one to consider at a place like MIT because of course you
are all free to enter this community. In fact, you are invited and encouraged to enter the
community of technical intelligentsia and weapons designers and counterinsurgency experts
and pragmatic planners of an American empire is one that you have a great deal of inducement
to become associated with. The inducements in fact are very real. The rewards and power
and affluence and prestige and authority are quite common.
This came with the mail. I'll be with you in a second. Okay. I want to start. In your
essay, Language and Freedom, you write, social action must be animated by a vision of a future
society. I was wondering what vision of a future society animates you?
Well, I have my own ideas as to what a future society should look like. I've written about
them. I think that we should, at the most general level, we should be seeking out forms
of authority and domination and challenging their legitimacy. Sometimes they are legitimate.
That is, let's say they are needed for survival. So, for example, I wouldn't suggest that during
the Second World War the forms of authority, we had a totalitarian society basically and
I thought there was some justification for that under the wartime conditions. And there
are other forms of, so for relations between parents and children, for example, involve
forms of coercion which are sometimes justifiable. But any such, any form of coercion and control
requires justification and most of them are completely unjustifiable. Now, at various
stages of human civilization it's been possible to challenge some of them but not others.
Others are too deep-seated or you don't see them or whatever. And so at any particular
point you try to detect those forms of authority and domination which are subject to change
and which do not have any legitimacy, in fact, which often strike at fundamental human rights
and your understanding of fundamental human nature and rights. Well, what are the major
things say today? There are some that are being addressed in a way. The feminist movement
is addressing some. The civil rights movement is addressing others. The one major one that's
not being seriously addressed is the one that's really at the core of the system of domination
and that's private control over resources. And that means an attack on the fundamental
structure of state capitalism. I think that's in order. That's not something far off in
the future.
Your live word. The alphabet has only 26 letters. With these 26 magic symbols, however, millions
of words are written every day. Nowhere else are people so addicted to information and
entertainment via the printed word. Every day the world comes thumping on the American
doorstep and nothing that happens anywhere remains long a secret from the American newspaper
reader. It comes to us pretty casually, the daily paper. But behind its arrival on your
doorstep is one of journalism's major stories, how it got there.
There is a standard view about democratic societies and the role of the media within
them. It's expressed, for example, by Supreme Court Justice Powell when he spoke of the
crucial role of the media in effecting the societal purpose of the First Amendment, namely
enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process. That kind of formulation
expresses the understanding that democracy requires free access to information and ideas
and opinion. And the same conceptions hold not only with regard to the media, but with
regard to educational institutions publishing the intellectual community generally.
It is basic to the health of a democracy that no phase of government activity escape the
scrutiny of the press. Here reporters are assigned to stories fateful not only to our nation,
but to all nations. Congress, says the First Amendment, shall pass no law abridging the
freedom of the press. And the chief executive himself throws open the doors of the White
House to journalists representing papers of all shades of political opinion.
But it is worth bearing in mind that there is a contrary view. And in fact the contrary
view is very widely held and deeply rooted in our own civilization. It goes back to the
origins of modern democracy, to the 17th century English Revolution, which was a complicated
affair like most popular revolutions. There was a struggle between Parliament representing
largely elements of the gentry and the merchants and the royalists representing other elite
groups and they fought it out. But like many popular revolutions there was also a lot of
popular ferment going on that was opposed to all of them. There were popular movements
that were questioning everything. The relation between master and servant, the right of authority
altogether, all kinds of things were being questioned. There was a lot of radical publishing,
the printing presses had just come into existence. This disturbed all the elites on both sides
of the Civil War. So as one historian pointed out at the time in 1660, he criticized the
radical democrats, the ones who were calling for what we would call democracy, because
they are making the people so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility
enough to submit to a civil rule. Now underlying these doctrines, which were very widely held,
has a certain conception of democracy. It's a game for elites, it's not for the ignorant
masses who have to be marginalized, diverted and controlled, of course for their own good.
The same principles were upheld in the American colonies. The dictum of the founding fathers
of American democracy that, I'm quoting, the people who own the country ought to govern
it, quoting John Jay. Now in modern times for elites, this contrary view about the intellectual
life and the media and so on, this contrary view in fact is the standard one, I think,
apart from rhetorical flourishes. From Washington, D.C., he's intellectual, author and linguist,
Professor Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent. What is that title meant to describe? Well,
the title is actually borrowed from a book by Walter Lippmann written back around 1921
in which he described what he called the manufacture of consent as a revolution in the practice
of democracy. What it amounts to is a technique of control. And he said this was useful and
necessary because the common interests, the general concerns of all people elude the public.
Public just isn't up to dealing with them and they have to be the domain of what he
called a specialized class. Notice that that's the opposite of the standard view about democracy.
There's a version of this expressed by the highly respected moralist and theologian Reinhold
Niebuhr who was very influential on contemporary policy makers. His view was that rationality
belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows
not reason but faith. And this naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally
potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person
on course. It's not the case, as the naive might think, that indoctrination is inconsistent
with democracy. Rather, as this whole line of thinkers observes, it's the essence of
democracy. The point is that in a military state or a feudal state or what we would nowadays
call a totalitarian state, it doesn't much matter what people think because you've got
a bludgeon over their head and you can control what they do. But when the state loses the
bludgeon, when you can't control people by force and when the voice of the people can
be heard, you have this problem. It may make people so curious and so arrogant that they
don't have the humility to submit to a civil rule and therefore you have to control what
people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used
to be called propaganda. Manufacture of consent, creation of necessary illusions, various ways
of either marginalizing the general public or reducing them to apathy in some fashion.
The oldest of two boys, Avram Nonchomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1928.
As a Jewish child, the anti-Semitism of the time affected him. Both parents taught Hebrew
and he became fascinated by literature, reading translations of French and Russian classics.
He also took an interest in a grammar book written by his father on Hebrew of the Middle
Ages. He recalls a childhood absorbed in reading, curled up in a sofa, often borrowing up to
twelve books at once from the library. He is married to Carol and they have three children.
I don't like to impose on my wife and children a form of life that they certainly haven't
selected for themselves, namely one of public exposure or exposure to the public media.
That's their choice and I don't believe that they have themselves selected this. I don't
impose it on them. I don't like to attack them from it, frankly. The second, perhaps
principal point is that I'm rather against the whole notion of developing public personalities
who are treated as stars of one kind or another, where aspects of their personal life are supposed
to have some significance and so on.
Take one in the reception room.
You said that you were just like us. You went to school, got good grades. What made you
start being critical and seeing the difference? What started the change?
Well, you know, there are all kinds of personal factors in anybody's life. First of all, don't
forget I grew up in a depression.
My parents actually happened to have jobs, which was kind of unusual. They were Hebrew
school teachers, so lower middle class. For them, everything revolved around being Jewish,
Hebrew, Palestine in those days and so on. And I grew up in that media. So, you know,
I learned Hebrew and went to Hebrew school, became a Hebrew school teacher, went to Hebrew
college, led youth groups, summer camps, Hebrew camps, the whole business. The branch of the
Zionist movement that I was part of was all involved in socialist binationalism and Arab-Jewish
cooperation and all sorts of nice stuff.
What did they think of you hopping on a train and going up to New York and hanging out at
Anarchist bookstores on 4th Avenue and talking to your working-class relatives there?
I mean, I don't want to totally trust my childhood memories, obviously, but the family was split
up. Like a lot of Jewish families, it went in all sorts of directions. There were sectors
that were super-orthodox. There were other sectors that were very radical and very assimilated
and working-class intellectuals. And that's the sector that I naturally gravitated towards.
It was a very lively intellectual culture. For one thing, it was a working-class culture,
had working-class values, values of solidarity, socialist values and so on. There was a sense
somehow things were going to get better. And the institutional structure was around the
method of fighting, you know, of organizing, of doing things, which had some hope.
And I also had the advantage of having gone to an experimental progressive school, to
a Deweyite school, which was quite good, run by a university there. And, you know, there
was no such thing as competition. There was no such thing as being a good student. I mean,
literally, the concept of being a good student didn't even arise until I got to high school.
I went to the academic high school and suddenly discovered I'm a good student, you know, which
is then I hated high school because I had to do all the things you have to do to get
into college. But until then, it was kind of a free, pretty open system. And I don't
know, there were lots of other things, but maybe I was just cantankerous.
As a historian, I have read with interest and amazement your long review article of
Gabriel Jackson's Spanish Civil War, and that's a very respectable piece of history. And I
can appreciate how much work goes into that. When did you find...
You know, when I did that work?
When did you do that?
I did that work in the early 1940s when I was about 12 years old.
The first article I wrote was right after the fall of Barcelona in the school newspaper.
It was a lament about the rise of fascism in 1939.
Actually, I guess one of the people who was the biggest influence in my life was an uncle
who had never gone past fourth grade. He was, you know, had a background in crime, then
left-wing politics and all sorts of things. But he was a hunchback, and as a result, he
could get a newsstand in New York. They had some program for people with physical disabilities.
Some of you are from New York, I guess. Well, you know the 72nd Street kiosk?
Yes!
You know that? That's where I got my political education. At 72nd Street, there's a place
where you come out of the subway, and everybody goes toward 72nd Street. And there were two
newsstands on that side, which were doing fine, and there's two newsstands on the back.
And nobody comes out the back, you know. And that's where his newsstand...
But it was a very lively place. He was a very bright guy. It was the 30s. There were a lot
of emigres, you know, and a lot of people were hanging around there. And in the evenings,
especially, it was sort of a literary political salon, you know, every kind of guy was hanging
around, arguing and talking. And as a kid, like 11, 12 years old, the biggest excitement
was to work the newsstand.
You write in Manufacturing Consent that it's the primary function of the mass media in
the United States to mobilize public support for the special interests that dominate the
government and the private sector. What are those interests?
Well, if you want to understand the way any society works, ours or any other, the first
place to look is who makes... who is in a position to make the decisions that determine
the way the society functions. Societies differ, but in ours, the major decisions over what
happens in the society, decisions over investment and production and distribution and so on,
are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations and conglomerates
and investment firms and so on. They are also the ones who staff the major executive positions
in the government, and they're the ones who own the media, and they're the ones who have
to be in a position to make the decisions. They have an overwhelmingly dominant role
in the way life happens, you know, what's done in the society. Within the economic system,
by law and in principle, they dominate. The control over resources and the need to satisfy
their interests imposes very sharp constraints on the political system and the ideological
system.
When you talk about manufacturing of consent, whose consent is being manufactured?
We can... to start with, there are two different groups we can get into more detail, but at
the first level of approximation, there's two targets for propaganda. One is what's
sometimes called the political class. There's maybe 20% of the population, which is relatively
educated, more or less articulate, that plays some kind of role in decision making. They're
supposed to sort of participate in social life, either as managers or cultural managers,
like say teachers, writers, and so on. They're supposed to vote. They're supposed to play
some role in the way economic and political and cultural life goes on. Now, their consent
is crucial. One group that has to be deeply indoctrinated. Then there's maybe 80% of the
population whose main function is to follow orders and not to think, and not to pay attention
to anything. And the other ones usually pay the cost.
Alright. Professor Chomsky, you outlined a model with filters that propaganda is sent
through, that's a way to the public. Can you briefly outline those?
It's basically an institutional analysis of the major media, what we call a propaganda
model. We're talking primarily about the national media, those media that sort of set a general
agenda that others more or less adhere to, to the extent that they even pay much attention
to national or international affairs. Now, the elite media are sort of the agenda-setting
media. That means the New York Times, the Washington Post, the major television channels,
and so on. They set the general framework. Local media more or less adapt to their structure.
World news.
And they do this in all sorts of ways, by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns,
by emphasis and framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within
certain limits.
Forty-five seconds.
They determine, they select, they shape, they control, they restrict in order to serve the
interests of dominant elite groups in society.
There is an unusual amount of attention focused today on the five nations of Central America.
This is democracy's diary. Here, for our instruction, are triumphs and disasters, the pattern of
life's changing fabric. Here is great journalism, a revelation of the past, a guide to the present,
and a clue to the future.
The New York Times is certainly the most important newspaper in the United States, and one could
argue the most important newspaper in the world. The New York Times plays an enormous
role in shaping the perception of the current world on the part of the politically active,
educated classes. Also, the New York Times has a special role, and I believe its editors
probably feel that they bear a heavy burden in the sense that the New York Times creates
history.
What happened years ago may have a bearing on what happens tomorrow. Millions of clippings
are preserved in the Times Library, all indexed for instant use, a priceless archive of events,
and the men who make them.
That is, history is what appears in the New York Times archives, a place where people
will go to find out what happened as the New York Times. Therefore, it's extremely important
if history is going to be shaped in an appropriate way that certain things appear, certain things
not appear, certain questions be asked, other questions be ignored, and that issues be framed
in a particular fashion. Now, in whose interests is history being so shaped? Well, I think
that's not very difficult to answer.
The process by which people make up their minds on this is a much more mysterious process
than you would ever guess from reading manufacturing consent. There is a saying about legislation
that legislation is like making sausage, that the less you know about how it's done, the
better for your appetite. The same is true of this business. If you are in a conference
in which decisions are being made on what to put on page one or what not, you would
get, I think, the impression that important decisions were being made in a flippant and
frivolous way. But in fact, given the pressures of time to try to get things out, you resort
to a kind of a shorthand, and you have to fill that paper up every day. It's curious
in a kind of a mirror image way that Professor Chomsky is in total accord with Reid Irvine,
who at the right-wing end of the spectrum says exactly what Chomsky does about the insinuating
influence of the press, of the big media, as, quote, agenda-setters, to use one of the
great buzzwords of the time. And of course, Reid Irvine sees this as a left-wing conspiracy
conspiracy of foisting liberal ideas in both domestic and foreign affairs on the American
people. But in both cases, I think that the premise really is an insult to the intelligence
of the people who consume news.
Now, to eliminate confusion, all of this has nothing to do with liberal or conservative
bias. According to the propaganda model, both liberal and conservative wings of the media,
whatever those terms are supposed to mean, fall within the same framework of assumptions.
In fact, if the system functions well, it ought to have a liberal bias, or at least
appear to, because if it appears to have a liberal bias, that will serve to bound thought
even more effectively. In other words, if the press is indeed adversarial and liberal
and all these bad things, then how can I go beyond it? They're already so extreme in their
opposition to power that to go beyond it would be to take off from the planet. So therefore,
it must be that the presuppositions that are accepted in the liberal media are sacrosanct,
can't go beyond them. And a well-functioning system would in fact have a bias of that kind.
The media would then serve to say, in effect, thus far and no further.
We ask, what would you expect of those media on just relatively uncontroversial, guided
free market assumptions? And when you look at them, you find a number of major factors
entering into determining what their products are. These are what we call the filters. So
one of them, for example, is ownership, who owns them.
The major agenda setting media, after all, what are they as institutions in the society?
What are they? Well, in the first place, they are major corporations, in fact, huge corporations.
Furthermore, they're integrated with and sometimes owned by even larger corporations, conglomerates.
So for example, by Westinghouse, GE, and so on.
What I wanted to know was how specifically the elites control the media. What I mean
is... It's like asking how do the elites control
General Motors? Well, why isn't that a question? I mean, General Motors is an institution of
the elites. They don't have to control it. They own it.
Except, I guess, at a certain level, I think... I guess I work with student press, so I know
reporters and stuff. The elites don't control the student press,
but I'll tell you something. You try in the student press to do anything that breaks out
of conventions, and you're going to have the whole business community around here down
on your neck, and the university is going to get threatened. Maybe they'll pay any attention
to you. That's possible. But if you get to the point where they don't stop paying attention
to you, the pressures will start coming, because there are people with power. There are people
who own the country, and they're not going to let the country get out of control.
What do you think about that? This is the old cabal theory that somewhere
there's a room with a base-covered desk, and there are a bunch of capitalists sitting around,
and they're pulling strings. These rooms don't exist. I mean, I hate to tell Noam Chomsky
this. You don't share that. I think it is the most absolute rubbish I've ever heard.
This is the current fashion in the universities. It's patent nonsense, and I think it's nothing
but a fashion. It's a way that intellectuals have of feeling like a clergy. There has to
be something wrong.
So, what we have in the first place is major corporations, which are parts of even bigger
conglomerates. Now, like any other corporation, they have a product, which they sell to a
market. The market is advertisers, that is, other businesses. What keeps the media functioning
is not the audience. They make money from their advertisers. Remember,
we're talking about the elite media, so they're trying to sell a good product, a product which
raises advertising rates. Ask your friends in the advertising industry. That means that
they want to adjust their audience to the more elite and affluent audience. That raises
advertising rates. So, what you have is institutions, corporations, big corporations, that are selling
relatively privileged audiences to other businesses. Well, what point of view would you expect
to come out of this? I mean, without any further assumptions, what you'd predict is that what
comes out is a picture of the world, a perception of the world, that satisfies the needs and
the interests and the perceptions of the sellers, the buyers, and the product.
Now, there are many other factors that press in the same direction. If people try to enter
the system who don't have that point of view, they're likely to be excluded somewhere along
the way. After all, no institution is going to happily design a mechanism to self-destruct.
That's not the way institutions function. So, they all work to exclude or marginalize
or eliminate dissenting voices or alternative perspectives and so on because they're dysfunctional.
They're dysfunctional to the institution itself. Do you think you've escaped the ideological
indoctrination of the media and of society that you grew up in? Have I? Often not. I
mean, when I look back and think of the things that I haven't done that I should have done,
it's very, it's not a pleasant experience. So, what's the story of young Noam in the
schoolyard? Yeah, another, I mean, that was a personal thing for me. I don't know why
it's of interest to anyone else, but I do remember. Well, you drew certain conclusions.
Well, yeah, I mean, I had a big influence on me. I mean, I remember when I was about
six, I guess, first grade, there was the standard fat kid everybody made fun of. And I remember
in the schoolyard, he was on a, you know, standing on a, right outside the school classroom
and a bunch of kids outside sort of taunting him and, you know, so on. And one of the kids
actually brought over his older brother, sort of like from third grade instead of first
grade, you know, big kid. And he was going to, you know, beat him up or something. And
I remember going up to stand next to him, feeling somebody ought to help him. And I
did for a while. And then I got scared and I went away. And I was very much ashamed of
it afterwards and sort of felt, you know, not going to do that again. That's a feeling
that's stuck with me. You should stick with the underdog. And the shame remained. You
should have stayed there. You had already established you were a professor at MIT. You
had a reputation. You had a terrific career ahead of you. You decided to become a political
activist. Now, here is a classic case of somebody whom the institution does not seem to have
filtered out. I mean, you were a good boy up until then, were you? Or you'd always been
a slight, sometimes you were a rebel. Yeah, pretty much. I had been pretty much outside.
You felt isolated. You felt out of sympathy with the prevailing currents of American life.
But a lot of people do that. Suddenly in 1964, you decide, I have to do something about this.
What made you do that? Well, that was a very conscious decision and a very uncomfortable
decision because I knew what the consequences would be. I was in a very favorable position.
I had the kind of work I liked. We had a lively, exciting department. The field was going well.
Personal life was fine. I was living in a nice place, children growing up. Everything
looked perfect. And I knew I was giving it up. And at that time, remember, it was not
just giving talks. I began involved right away in resistance. And I expected to spend
years in jail and came very close to it. In fact, my wife went back to graduate school
in part because we assumed she was going to have to support the children. These were the
expectations. And I recognized that if I returned to these interests, which were the
dominant interests of my own youth, life would become very uncomfortable because I know that
the United States, you don't get sent to psychiatric prison and they don't send a death
squad after you and so on. But there are definite penalties for breaking the rules. So these
were real decisions. And it simply seemed at that point that it was just hopelessly
immoral not to.
I'm Noam Chomsky. I'm on the faculty at MIT. And I've been getting more and more heavily
involved in anti-war activities for the last few years. Beginning with writing articles
and making speeches and speaking to congressmen and that sort of thing, and gradually getting
involved more and more directly in resistance activities of various sorts. I've come to
the feeling myself that the most effective form of political action that is open to a
responsible and concerned citizen at the moment is action that really involves direct resistance,
refusal to take part in what I think are war crimes, to raise the domestic cost of American
aggression overseas through non-participation and support for those who are refusing to
take part in particular draft resistance throughout the country.
I think that we can see quite clearly some very, very serious defects and flaws in our
society, our level of culture, our institutions, which are going to have to be corrected by
operating outside of the framework that is commonly accepted. I think we're going to
have to find new ways of political action.
I rejoice in your disposition to argue the Vietnam War as a political
question, especially when I recognize what an act of self-control this must involve.
It does. It really does. I mean, I think that there's a kind of issue where...
You don't grow up. You don't grow up.
Sometimes I lose my temper. Maybe not tonight.
Maybe not tonight. Because, if you would, I'd smash you in the goddamn face.
It's a good reason for not losing my temper.
You say the war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men.
Including all of us. Including myself. Including every... That's the next sentence. Same sentence.
Sure, sure, sure. Because you count everybody in the company of the guilty.
I think that's true in this case.
Yeah. But then...
See, one of the points I was trying...
This is a sense of theological observation, isn't it?
No, I don't think so.
Because as somebody points out, if everybody's guilty of everything, then nobody's guilty of anything.
No, I don't believe that. See, I think the point that I'm trying to make, and I think ought to be made,
is that the real... At least to me, I say this elsewhere in the book, what seems to me a very, in a sense,
terrifying aspect of our society and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment
with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe such events.
I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up.
These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity.
And therefore, I think that it's, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people
who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others
who seem more extreme and more violent.
Twelve million pounds of confetti dropped into New York City's so-called Canyon of Heroes.
Americans were officially welcoming the troops home from the Persian Gulf War.
It worked out really great for us.
I mean, it just goes to show that we're a mighty nation and we'll be there no matter what comes along.
I mean, it's the strongest country in the world, and you've got to be glad to live here.
So tell me what you feel about media coverage of the war.
I guess it was good. It got to be a bit much after a while, but I guess it was good to know everything.
I guess in Vietnam you didn't really know a lot was going on, but here you're pretty much up to the moment on everything.
So I guess it was good to be informed.
For the first time because of technology, we have the ability to be live from many locations around the globe.
And because of the format and all-news network, we can spend whatever time is necessary
to bring the viewer the complete context of that day's portion of the story.
And by context, I mean the institutional memory that is critical to understand why and how.
And that's those who are analysts and do commentary and those who can explain.
Select that last piece, ITN Israel post war.
David Brinkley once said that you step in front of the camera and you get out of news business and into show business.
But nonetheless, that should not in any way subtract or obscure the need for the basic standards of good journalism.
Pat, hang tight. Let me give you a lead for selling you right now.
President Bush and Prime Minister Major have closed or have almost rejected the Soviet peace talk, peace efforts.
In Saudi Arabia, the door is being left open. Rick Salinger is standing by live in Riyadh with the latest.
All but closed.
Accuracy, speed, a fair approach, honesty and integrity within the reporter to try and bring the truth, whatever the truth may be.
Going to war is a serious business. In a totalitarian society, the dictator just says we're going to war and everybody marches.
And with this weapon of human brotherhood in our hands, we are seeing the war for men's minds not as a battle of truth against lies,
but as a lasting alliance pledged in faith with all those millions driving forward to create the true new order, the world order of the people first, the people before all.
In a democratic society, the theory is that if the political leadership is committed to war, they present reasons and they got a very heavy burden of proof to meet
because a war is a very catastrophic affair as it's been proved to be.
The role of the media at that point is to present the relevant background, for example, the possibilities of peaceful settlement,
such as what they may be have to be presented, and then to present, to offer a forum, in fact encourage a forum of debate over this very dread decision
to go to war and in this case kill hundreds of thousands of people and leave two countries wrecked and so on.
That never happened. There was never, well, you know, when I say never, I mean 99.9 percent of the discussion excluded the option of a peaceful settlement.
Washington's Office of War Information calls one of the most vital and constructive tasks of this war.
This is a people's war and to win it the people ought to know as much about it as they can.
This office will do its best to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, for the home and the war.
The first weapon in this worldwide strategy of truth is the great machine of information represented by the free press
with its powers of molding public thought and leading public action,
with all its lifelines for the exchange of new ideas between fighting nations spread across the earth.
Every time George Bush would appear and say there will be no negotiations, there would be, you know,
100 editorials the next day lauding him for going the last mile for diplomacy.
If he said you can't reward an aggressor instead of cracking up and ridicule the way people did in civilized sectors of the world,
like the whole third world, the media would say oh man, a fantastic principle, you know, the invader of Panama,
the only head of state who stands condemned for aggression in the world, the guy who was head of the CIA during the Timor aggression, you know,
he says aggressors can't be rewarded. The media just applauded.
The motion picture industry with its worldwide organization of newsreel camera crews,
invaluable for bringing into vivid focus the background drama and perspectives of the war.
Mobilized too in this all out struggle for men's minds are the radio networks with all their experience
and the swift reporting of great occasion and event.
From every strategic center and front line stronghold, their reporters are sending back the lessons of new tactics, new ways of war.
The result was it's a media war. There's tremendous fakery all along the line.
The UN is finally living up to its mission, you know, wondrous sea change, the New York Times told us.
The only wondrous sea change was that for once the United States didn't veto a Security Council resolution against aggression.
People don't want a war unless you have to have one and they would have known that you don't have to have one.
Well, the media kept people from knowing it and that means we went to war very much in the manner of a totalitarian state,
thanks to the media subservience. That's the big story.
Now, remember I'm not talking about a small radio station in Laramie.
I'm talking about the national agenda setting media.
If you're on a radio news show in Laramie, chances are very strong that you pick up what was in the Times that morning and you decide that's the news.
In fact, if you follow the AP wires, you find that in the afternoon they send across tomorrow's front page of the New York Times.
That's so that everybody knows what the news is and the perceptions and the perspectives and so on are sort of transmitted down,
not to the precise detail, but the general picture is pretty much transmitted elsewhere.
The foreign news comes here to the foreign news desk. The editor is Bob Hanley.
Bob, I suppose you get far more foreign news than you can possibly use in the paper.
Yes, we do. We get a great deal more than we can accommodate in a day.
And your job is to weed it out, I suppose.
This is the selection center, as it were, and when I have selected it, I pass it across the desk to one or the other of these sub-editors.
It comes back to me and on this chart I design the page. That is page one and page two.
Fine, Bob. Thank you very much.
Why do you want to make a film about media?
Well, it's a nice quiet town.
It's a beautiful town.
Well, we're making a film about the mass media, so we thought, what a good place to come.
You want to know where they got the name.
So maybe you could start by introducing yourself.
Yes, I'm Bowden Senko. I'm the Main Street Manager and the Executive Director of the Media Business Authority.
And we are in Media, Delaware County in the southeastern part of Pennsylvania.
Media is called Everybody's Hometown.
The motto was developed as a way to promote the community. We're a very high promotion-conscious community.
When you walk through media, you'll be treated very well and you'll find that people have taken the idea of being Everybody's Hometown to heart.
The local picker, the talk of the town.
The town talk.
Do you read that?
Yes, I read the town talk.
What do you think the difference is between the Wall Street Journal and the talk of the town?
Well, the town talk is completely local news. It's fun, it's nice to read, it's interesting.
You read about your neighbors and see what's going on in the school district, something like that.
We're in business to make bucks, just like the big daily newspapers and just like the big radio stations, and we do quite well.
And rightfully so, because we work very hard at it.
I just want to show you a copy of the paper here, the way it is this week.
It's plastic wrapped on all four sides, weatherproof, and hung on everybody's front door.
And many, many times you'll find that this paper runs well over 100 pages a week.
This particular edition, you have to remember there are five editions.
This happens to be the Central Delaware County edition, which is the edition that covers media in Pennsylvania.
What you see here now is the advertising and composition department.
Say hello, guys, will you?
Hi.
Hi.
And what we're doing now is we're putting red dots, green dots, and yellow dots up on the map, wherever there is a store.
Now, the red dots are the stores that don't advertise with us at all.
The green dots are the ones that advertise with us every week, and the yellow dots are the ones that run sporadically.
Now, we have computer printouts of every one of these stores, and what we do is we take the printouts of all the red dots, which are the bad dots,
and what our idea is is to turn these red dots into yellow dots and turn the yellow dots into green dots and eventually make them all green dots
so 100 percent of the stores and 100 percent of the merchants and service people advertise in our newspaper every week.
That way we won't have any more red dots.
I guess there will always be a few red dots, but I have high hopes that there will be a lot more green ones than red ones when we're finished.
Hi, I'm Jim Morgan.
I'm with the Corporate Relations Department of the New York Times, and I'm here to take you on a tour of the New York Times.
So, let's begin.
So, they're just taking audio in here.
Yeah, they're taking audio in here.
Audio.
No cameras, no still.
We went over this quite thoroughly.
They don't even take a still camera in here.
We're in the composing room.
This is where the pages are composed.
This is the typographical area.
What's the ratio of news to advertising?
60 percent ads.
This might seem big, but it is average, in fact, below average.
Our 60 percent might include on some days maybe 20 pages of classified advertising all to itself,
where the rest of the newspaper is weighted much heavier news to advertising.
The paper in its entirety every day, large or small, is 60 ads, 40 news.
Well, that completes our tour of the New York Times, and I hope you found it informative,
and I hope that you read the New York Times every day of your life from now on.
Now, there are other media, too, whose basic social role is quite different.
It's diversion.
There's the real mass media, the kinds that are aimed at the guys who, Joe Sixpack, that kind.
The purpose of those media is just to dull people's brains.
This is an oversimplification, but for the 80 percent, or whatever they are,
the main thing for them is to divert them, to get them to watch National Football League,
and to worry about a mother with a child with six heads or whatever you pick up in the thing
that you pick up on the supermarket stands and so on, or look at astrology or get involved in fundamentalist stuff,
or something, just get them away, get them away from things that matter.
And for that, it's important to reduce their capacity to think.
The sports section is handled in another special department.
The sports reporter must be a specialist in his knowledge of sports.
He gets his story right at the sporting event and often sends it into his paper play-by-play.
They say sports, that's another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view.
For one thing, because it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance.
That keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives
that they might have some idea about doing something about.
And in fact, it's striking to see the intelligence that's used by ordinary people in sports.
I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in, they have the most exotic information
and understanding about all kind of arcane issues.
And the press undoubtedly does a lot with this.
I remember in high school already, I was pretty old, I suddenly asked myself at one point,
why do I care if my high school team wins the football game?
I mean, I don't know anybody on the team, you know, that has nothing to do with me.
I mean, why am I cheering for my team? It doesn't make any sense, you know.
But the point is it does make sense.
It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority
and, you know, group cohesion behind, you know, leadership elements.
In fact, it's training in irrational jingoos.
That's also a feature of competitive sports.
I think if you look closely at these things, I think they have, typically they do have functions.
And that's why energy is devoted to supporting them and creating a basis for them
and advertisers are willing to pay for them and so on.
I'd like to ask you a question essentially about the methodology in studying the propaganda model
and how would one go about doing that?
Well, there are a number of ways to proceed.
One obvious way is to try to find more or less paired examples.
History doesn't offer true controlled experiments, but it often comes pretty close.
So one can find atrocities or
abuses of one sort that on the one hand are committed by official enemies
and on the other hand are committed by friends and allies
or by the favored state itself, by the United States in the U.S. case.
And the question is whether the media accept the government framework
or whether they use the same agenda, the same set of rules.
And I think that's a very important question.
The question is whether the media accept the government framework or whether they use the same agenda,
the same set of questions, the same criteria for dealing with the two cases
as any honest outside observer would do.
If you think America's involvement in the war in Southeast Asia is over,
think again.
The Khmer Rouge are the most genocidal people on the face of the earth.
Peter Jennings reporting from the killing fields, Thursday.
I mean the great act of genocide in the modern period is Pol Pot.
1975 through 1978, that atrocity, I think it would be hard to find any example
of a comparable outrage and outpouring of fury and so on and so forth.
So that's one atrocity.
Well, it just happens that in that case, history did set up a controlled experiment.
Have you ever heard of a place called East Timor?
I can't say that I have.
Where?
East Timor?
No.
No, huh?
Well, it happens that right at that time there was another atrocity,
very similar in character, but differing in one respect.
We were responsible for it, not Pol Pot.
Hello, I'm Louise Penny and this is Radio Noon.
If you've been listening to the program fairly regularly over the last few months,
you'll know East Timor has come into the conversation more than once,
particularly when we were talking about foreign aid and also the war and a new world order.
People wondered why, if the UN was serious about a new world order,
no one was doing anything to help East Timor.
The area was invaded by Indonesia in 1975.
There are reports of atrocities against the Timorese people,
and yet Canada and other nations have consistently voted against UN resolutions
to end the occupation.
Today we're going to take a closer look at East Timor, what's happened to it,
and why the international community is doing nothing to help.
One of the people who have been most active is Elaine Bruyere,
a photojournalist from British Columbia.
She's the founder of the East Timor Alert Network, and she joins me in studio now. Hello.
Hi.
One tragedy compounding a tragedy is that a lot of people don't know much about East Timor.
Where is it?
East Timor is just north of Australia, about 420 kilometers,
and it's right between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Just south of East Timor is the deep-water sea lane,
perfect for U.S. submarines to pass through.
There's also huge oil reserves there.
One of the unique things about East Timor is that it's truly one of the last
surviving ancient civilizations in that part of the world.
The Timorese spoke 30 different languages and dialects amongst a group of 700,000 people.
Today, less than 5% of the world's people live like the East Timorese,
basically self-reliant. They live really outside of the global economic system.
Small societies like the East Timorese are much more democratic and much more egalitarian,
and there's much more sharing of power and wealth.
Before the Indonesians invaded, most people lived in small rural villages.
The old people in the village were like the university.
They passed on tribal wisdom from generation to generation.
Children grew up in a safe, stimulating, nurturing environment.
A year after I left East Timor, I was appalled when I heard that Indonesia had invaded.
They didn't want a small, independent country setting an example for the region.
East Timor was a Portuguese colony. Indonesia had no claim to it, and in fact stated that they had no claim to it.
During the period of colonization, there was a good deal of politicization that different groups developed.
A civil war broke out in August of 1975.
It ended up in a victory for Fredlund, which was one of the groupings,
described as populist Catholic in character with some typical leftist rhetoric.
Indonesia at once started intervening.
What's the situation? When do those ships come in?
They start arriving since Monday. Six, seven boats together very close to our border.
They're just for fun, you know. They're preparing a massive operation.
Something happened here last night that moved us very deeply.
It was so far outside our experience as Australians that we'll find it very difficult to convey to you, but we'll try.
Sitting on woven mats under a thatched roof in a hut with no walls,
we were the target of a barrage of questioning from men who know they may die tomorrow
and cannot understand why the rest of the world does not care.
That's all they want, for the United Nations to care about what is happening here.
The emotion here last night was so strong that we, all three of us,
felt we should be able to reach out into the warm night air and touch it.
Greg Shackleton is an unnamed village which we'll remember forever in Portuguese Timor.
Ford and Kissinger visited Jakarta, I think it was December 5th.
We know that they had requested that Indonesian soldiers go to the island
We know that they had requested that Indonesia delay the invasion until after they left
because it would be too embarrassing.
Within hours, I think, after they left, the invasion took place on December 7th.
What happened on December 7th in 1975 is just one of the great evil deeds of history.
Early in the morning bombs began dropping on Dili.
The number of troops that invaded Dili that day almost outnumbered the entire population of the town.
And for two or three weeks they just killed people.
This council must consider Indonesian aggression against Timor as the main issue of the discussion.
When the Indonesians invaded, the UN reacted as it always does, calling for sanctions and condemnation and so on.
Various water down resolutions were passed, but the US was very clearly not going to allow anything to work.
So the Timorese were fleeing into the jungles by the thousands.
By late 1977-78, Indonesia set up receiving centers for those Timorese who came out of the jungle waving white flags.
Those the Indonesians thought were more educated or who were suspected of belonging to Fredline or other opposition parties were immediately killed.
They took women aside and flew them off to Dili in helicopters for use by the Indonesian soldiers.
They killed children and babies.
But in those days their main strategy and their main weapon was starvation.
By 1978 it was approaching really genocidal levels.
The church and other sources estimated about 200,000 people killed.
The US backed it all away. The US provided 90% of the arms.
Right after the invasion, arms shipments were stepped up.
When the Indonesians actually began to run out of arms in 1978, the Carter administration moved in and increased arms sales.
And other western countries did the same. Canada, England, Holland, and everybody who could make a buck was in there trying to make sure they could kill more Timorese.
There is no western concern for issues of aggression, atrocities, human rights abuses and so on if there's a profit to be made from them.
Nothing could show it more clearly than this case.
It wasn't that nobody had ever heard of East Timor.
Crucial to remember that there was plenty of coverage in the New York Times and elsewhere before the invasion.
The reason was that there was concern at the time over the breakup of the Portuguese Empire and what that would mean.
There was a fear that they would lead to independence or Russian influence or whatever.
After the Indonesians invaded the coverage dropped.
There was some, but it was strictly from the point of view of the State Department and Indonesian generals.
Never a Timorese refugee.
As the atrocities reached their maximum peak in 1978, when it really was becoming genocidal, coverage dropped to zero in the United States and Canada.
The two countries have looked at it closely.
Literally dropped to zero.
All this was going on at exactly the same time as the great protest of outrage over Cambodia.
The level of atrocities was comparable in relative terms.
It was probably considerably higher in Timor.
It turns out right in Cambodia in the preceding years, 1970 through 1975, there was also a comparable atrocity for which we were responsible.
The major US attack against Cambodia started with the bombings of the early 1970s.
They reached a peak in 1973 and they continued up till 1975.
They were directed against inner Cambodia.
Very little is known about them because the media wanted it to be secret.
They knew what was going on, they just didn't want to know what was happening.
The CIA estimates about 600,000 killed during that five-year period, which is mostly either US bombing or a US-sponsored war.
So that's pretty significant killing.
Also, the conditions in which it left Cambodia were such that high US officials predicted that about a million people would die in the aftermath just from hunger and disease because of the wreckage of the country.
Pretty good evidence from US government sources and the following sources that the intense bombardment was a significant force, maybe a critical force, in building up peasant support for the Khmer Rouge.
Before that, it was a pretty marginal element.
Well, that's just the wrong story.
After 1975, atrocities continued and that became the right story because now they're being carried out by the bad guys.
Well, it was bad enough.
In fact, current estimates are that, well, you know, they vary.
I mean, the CIA claimed 50 to 100,000 people killed and maybe another million or so who died one way or another.
Michael Vickery is the one person who's given a really close detailed analysis.
His figure is maybe 750,000 deaths above the normal.
Others, like Ben Kiernan, suggest higher figures, but so far without a detailed analysis.
Anyway, it was terrible, no doubt about it.
Although the atrocities, the real atrocities, were bad enough, they weren't quite good enough for the purposes needed.
Within a few weeks after the Khmer Rouge takeover, the New York Times was already accusing them of genocide.
At that point, maybe a couple hundred or maybe a few thousand people had been killed.
And from then on, it was a drum beat, a chorus of genocide.
The big bestseller on Cambodia, Pol Pot, is called Murder in a Gentle Land.
Up until April 17, 1975, it was a gentle land of peaceful, smiling people, and after that, some horrible holocaust took place.
Very quickly, a figure of two million killed was hit upon.
In fact, what was claimed was that the Khmer Rouge boasted of having murdered two million people.
The facts are very dramatic.
In the case of atrocities committed by the official enemy, extraordinary show of outrage.
Exaggeration, no evidence required, faked photographs are fine, anything goes.
Also, a vast amount of lying. I mean, an amount of lying that would have made Stalin cringe.
It was fraudulent, and we know that it was fraudulent by looking at the response to comparable atrocities for which the United States was responsible.
Early 70s Cambodia, Timor are two very closely paired examples.
Well, the media response was quite dramatic.
Back in 1980, I taught a course at Tufts University.
Well, Chomsky came around to this class.
He made a very powerful case that the press underplayed the fact that the Indonesian government annexed this former Portuguese colony in 1975.
And that if you compare it, for example, with Cambodia where there was acreage of things, that this was a communist atrocity, whereas the other was not a communist atrocity.
Well, I got quite interested in this, and I went to talk to the then deputy foreign editor of the Times.
And I said, you know, we've had very poor coverage on this.
And he said, you're absolutely right. There are a dozen atrocities around the world that we don't cover.
This is one for various reasons. So I took it up.
I was working as a reporter and writer for a small alternative radio program in upstate New York.
And we received audio tapes of interviews with Timorese leaders.
And we were quite surprised that given the level of American involvement, that there was not more coverage, indeed practically any coverage, of the large scale Indonesian killing in the mainstream American media.
We formed a small group of people to try to monitor the situation and see what we could do over time to alert public opinion to what was actually happening in East Timor.
There were literally about half a dozen people who simply dedicated themselves with great commitment to getting the story to break through.
And they reached a couple of people in Congress. They got to me, for example. I was able to testify at the UN and write some things.
They kept at it, kept at it, kept at it.
Whatever is known about the subject is mainly comes from, essentially comes from their work. There's not much else.
I wrote first an editorial called An Unjust War in East Timor.
It had a map and it said exactly what had happened.
We then ran a dozen other editorials on it.
They were read, they were entered in the congressional record, and several congressmen then took up the cause.
And then something was done in Congress as a result of this.
The fact that the editorial page in the New York Times on Christmas Eve published that editorial put our work on a very different level.
And it gave a great deal of legitimacy to something that we were trying to advance for a long time.
And that was the idea and the reality that a major tragedy was unfolding in East Timor.
If one takes literally the various theories that Professor Chomsky puts out,
one would feel that there's a tacit conspiracy between the establishment press and the government in Washington
to focus on certain things and ignore certain things.
So that if we broke the rules, that we would instantly get a reaction, a sharp reaction from the overlords in Washington
who would say, hey, what are you doing speaking up on East Timor?
We're trying to keep that quiet. We didn't hear a thing.
What we did hear, and this was quite interesting, is that there was a guy named Arnold Kohn, and he became a one-person lobby.
I appreciate the nice things that Carl Meyer said about me in his interview,
but I object to the notion that a one-man lobby was formed or anything like that.
I think that if there weren't a large network composed of the American Catholic Bishops' Conference, composed of other church groups,
composed of human rights groups, composed of simply concerned citizens and others, and a network of concern within the news media,
I think that it would have been impossible to do anything at all at any time,
and it certainly would have been impossible to sustain things for as long as they've been sustained.
Professor Chomsky and a lot of people who engage in this kind of press analysis have one thing in common.
Most of them have never worked for a newspaper. Many of them know very little about how newspapers work.
When Chomsky came around, he had with him a file of all the coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other papers of East Timor,
and he would go to the meticulous degree that if, for example, the London Times had a piece on East Timor,
and then it appeared in the New York Times that if a paragraph was cut out, he'd compare and he'd say,
look, this key paragraph right near the end, which is really what tells the whole story,
was left out of the New York Times version of the London Times thing.
There was a story in the London Times which was pretty accurate.
The New York Times revised it radically. They didn't just leave the paragraph out.
They revised it and gave it a totally different cast.
It was then picked up by Newsweek, giving it the New York Times cast.
It ended up being a whitewash, whereas the original was an atrocity story.
So I said to Chomsky at the time, I said, well, it may be that you're misinterpreting ignorance, haste, deadline pressure, etc.,
for some kind of determined effort to suppress an element of the story.
He said, well, if it happened once or twice or three times, I might agree with you,
but if it happens a dozen times, Mr. Meyer, I think there's something else at work.
And it's not a matter of happening one time, two times, five times, a hundred times. It happens all the time.
I said, Professor Chomsky, having been in this business, it happens a dozen times.
These are very imperfect institutions.
When they did give coverage, it was from the point of view of it was a whitewash of the United States.
That's not an error. That's systematic, consistent behavior, in this case without even any exception.
This is a much more subtle process than you get in the kind of the sledgehammer rhetoric of the people
that make an A to B equation between what the government does, what people think, and what newspapers say.
That sometimes what the Times does can make an enormous difference.
At other times, it has no influence whatsoever.
So one of the greatest tragedies of our age is still happening in East Timor.
The Indonesians have killed up to a third of the population. They're in concentration camps.
They conduct large-scale military campaigns against the people who are resisting,
campaigns with names like Operation Eradicate or Operation Clean Sweep.
Timorese women are subjected to a forced birth control program.
In addition, they're bringing in a constant stream of Indonesian settlers to take over the land.
Whenever people are brave enough to take to the streets and demonstrations or show the least sign of resistance,
they just massacre them.
It's sort of like Indonesia. If we allow them to continue to stay in East Timor, the international community,
they will simply digest East Timor and turn it into, they're trying to turn it into cash crop.
I mean, this is way beyond just demonstrating the subservience of the media to power.
I mean, they are actual, they have real complicity in genocide in this case.
The reason that the atrocities can go on is because nobody knows about them.
If anyone knew about them, there'd be protests and pressure to stop them.
So therefore, by suppressing the facts, the media are making a major contribution to some of the,
probably the worst act of genocide since the Holocaust.
You say that what the media do is to ignore certain kinds of atrocities that are committed by us and our friends
and to play up enormously atrocities that are committed by them and our enemies.
And you posit that there's a test of integrity and moral honesty,
which is to have a kind of equality of treatment of corpses.
Quality of principle.
I mean, that every dead person should be in principle equal to every other dead person.
That's not what I say at all.
Well, I'm glad that's not what you say because that's not what you do.
Of course it's not what I do, nor would I say it.
In fact, I say the opposite.
What I say is that we should be responsible for our own actions primarily.
Because your method is not only to ignore the corpses created by them,
but also to ignore the corpses that are created by neither side,
but which are irrelevant to your ideological agenda.
That's totally untrue.
Well, let me give you an example.
That one of your own causes that you take very seriously is the cause of the Palestinians.
And a Palestinian corpse weighs very heavily on your conscience.
And yet a Kurdish corpse does not.
That's not true at all.
I've been involved in Kurdish support groups for years.
That's absolutely true.
That's absolutely false.
I've asked the Kurdish, asked the people who are involved,
and I mean, you know, they come to me, I sign their petitions, and so on and so forth.
In fact, if you look at the things we've written, I mean, take a look.
I mean, I'm not Amnesty International.
I can't do everything.
I'm a single person.
But if you read, say, take a look, say, at the book that Edward Herman and I wrote on this topic.
In it we discuss three kinds of atrocities, what we called benign blood baths,
which nobody cares about, constructive blood baths, which are the ones we like,
and nefarious blood baths, which are the ones that the bad guys do.
The principle that I think we ought to follow is not the one that you stated.
You know, it's a very simple ethical point.
You're responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions.
You're not responsible for the predictable consequences of somebody else's actions.
The most important thing for me and for you is to think about the consequences of your actions.
What can you affect?
These are the things to keep in mind.
These are not just academic exercises.
We're not analyzing the media on Mars or in the 18th century or something like that.
We're dealing with real human beings who are suffering and dying and being tortured and starving
because of policies that we are involved in.
We as citizens of democratic societies are directly involved in and are responsible for.
And what the media are doing is ensuring that we do not act on our responsibilities
and that the interests of power are served, not the needs of the suffering people
and not even the needs of the American people who would be horrified
if they realized the blood that's dripping from their hands
because of the way they're allowing themselves to be diluted and manipulated by the system.
What about the third world?
Well, despite everything, and it's pretty ugly and awful,
these struggles are not over.
The struggle for freedom and independence never is completely over.
Their courage, in fact, is really remarkable and amazing.
I've personally had the privilege, and it is a privilege, of witnessing it a few times
in villages in Southeast Asia and Central America and recently in the occupied West Bank.
And it is astonishing to see.
And it's always amazing, at least to me it's amazing, I can't understand it.
It's also very moving and very inspiring. In fact, it's kind of awe-inspiring.
Now, they rely very crucially on a very slim margin for survival
that's provided by dissidence and turbulence within the imperial societies.
And how large that margin is, is for us to determine.
The End
In today's On the Spot assignment, we're going to see just what's behind the making of movies.
The director and the crew are shooting a documentary film.
Let's take a closer look.
Bob, this word documentary, what would you say is the difference between a documentary film and a feature movie?
Well, there are a good many differences. One would be length.
Generally speaking, documentaries are a good deal shorter than feature films.
Also, documentaries have something to say in the way of a message. They are informational films.
Also, another term that's used interchangeably with documentary is the word actuality, actuality films.
Bob, is this the thing you hold up in front of the camera before each scene?
This is a clapperboard, yes.
This identifies on the visual camera the scene number and the take number, and also, as you heard, on the soundtrack.
The editor back at the studio puts the two pieces of film together, matches where the lips of the clapper come together, and there you are in sync.
Before the break, you were mentioning the media putting forth the information that the Power Elite want.
I'm not sure if I understand, how does the Power Elite do this, and why do we stand for it? Why does it work so well?
Well, I think here we have to – there are really two questions here.
One, is this picture of the media true? And there you have to look at the evidence.
I mean, I've given one example, and that shouldn't convince anybody.
One has to look at a lot of evidence to see whether this is true.
I think anyone who investigates it will find out that the evidence to support it is simply overwhelming.
In fact, it's probably one of the best-supported conclusions in the social sciences.
But the other question is, how does it work?
I'm the media guy.
What do you like? I got you an international hero tribute.
Do you want anything in a Western language?
Do you want financial support?
Yes, absolutely.
That's the only paper that tells the truth.
Did you get the one where they've been debating back before?
NRC, Hundle's Blood.
Hundle's Blood.
Well, this evening's program is scheduled as a debate, which puzzled me all the way through.
There are some problems.
One problem is that no proposition has been set forth.
As I understand debate, people are supposed to advocate something and oppose something.
Rather more sensibly, a topic has been proposed for discussion.
The topic is manufacture of consent.
It's somewhat unusual for a member of the government to debate with a professor in public.
It hasn't happened in Holland before. I don't think it often happens elsewhere.
Mr. Boggstein, the floor is yours.
Now, we all know that a theory can never be established merely by examples.
It can only be established by showing some internal inherent logic.
Professor Chomsky has not done so.
Professor Chomsky?
He's quite right when he says you can't just pick examples.
You have to do them in a rational way.
That's why we compared examples.
The truth is that things are not as simple as Professor Chomsky maintains.
Another of Professor Chomsky's case studies concerns the treatment that Cambodia has received in the Western press.
Here he goes badly off the rails.
We didn't discuss Cambodia.
We compared Cambodia with East Timor to very closely paired examples.
And we gave approximately 300 pages of detail covering this in Political Economy of Human Rights,
including a reference to every article we could discover about Cambodia.
Many Western intellectuals do not like to face the facts and balk at the conclusions that any untutored person would draw.
Many people are very irritated by the fact that we exposed the extraordinary deceit over Cambodia
and paired it with the simultaneous suppression of the US-supported ongoing atrocities in Timor.
That people don't like that.
For one thing we were challenging the right to lie in defense of the state.
For another thing we were exposing the apologetics and support for actual ongoing atrocities.
That doesn't make you popular.
Where did he learn about the atrocities in East Timor or in Central America?
If not in the same free press which he so derives.
You can find out where I learned about them by looking at my footnotes.
I learned about them from Human Rights reports, from Church reports, from Refugee studies and extensively from the Australian press.
There was nothing from the American press because it was silenced.
Chairman, this is an attempt at intellectual intimidation.
These are the ways of the bully.
Professor Chomsky uses the oldest debating trick on record.
He erects a man of straw and proceeds to hack away at him.
Professor Chomsky calls this the manufacture of consent.
I call it the creation of consensus.
In Holland we call it draagvlak, which means foundation.
Professor Chomsky thinks it is deceitful, but it is not.
In a representative democracy it means winning people for one's point of view.
But I do not think that Professor Chomsky believes in representative democracy.
I think he believes in direct democracy.
With Rosa Luxemburg he longs for the creative, spontaneous, self-correcting force of mass action.
That is the vision of the anarchist.
It is also a boy's dream.
Those who believe in democracy and freedom have a serious task ahead of them.
What they should be doing, in my view, is dedicating their efforts to helping the despised common people
to struggle for their rights and to realize the democratic goals that constantly surface throughout history.
They should be serving not power and privilege, but rather their victims.
Freedom and democracy are by now not merely values to be treasured.
They are quite possibly the prerequisite to survival.
It is a conspiracy theory, pure and simple. It is not borne out by the facts.
Mr Chairman, I have to go to Amsterdam. If you'll excuse me, I'm leaving.
One thing is sure. Their consent has not been manufactured tonight.
There is nothing more remote from what I'm discussing or what we have been discussing than a conspiracy theory.
If I give an analysis of, say, the economic system and I point out that General Motors tries to maximize profit and market share,
that's not a conspiracy theory. That's an institutional analysis.
There's nothing to do with conspiracies. And that's precisely the sense in which we're talking about the media.
The phrase conspiracy theory is one of those that's constantly brought up.
And I think its effect simply is to discourage institutional analysis.
Do you think there's a connection somehow about what the government wants us to know and what the media tell us?
It's not communism, but I think to a certain point it is sensitized.
They don't always tell the truth the way it goes, huh?
Got that right.
Do you think that the information you're getting from this paper is biased in any way?
Oh, yeah.
I think by and large it's well done. You get both sides of the stories.
You get the liberal and the conservative side, so to speak.
But I don't think you get a very balanced picture because they only have 20 seconds, 30 seconds for a news item or whatever,
and they're going to pick out a highlight, and every network is going to cover the same highlight, and that's all you're going to see.
You get what they want you to hear.
Do you think they're biased in some way, then?
No.
Here we go.
See you later.
Is it possible for the likes to get a little brighter and see somebody out there?
Over the last hour and 41 minutes, we've been whining about how the elite and how the government have been using thought control
to keep radicals like yourself out of the public limelight.
Now, you're here. I don't see any CIA men waiting to drag you off.
You were in the paper. That's where everyone here heard you were coming from, in the paper,
and I'm sure they're going to publish your comments in the paper.
Now, a lot of countries, you would have been shot for what you have done today.
So what are you whining about? We are allowing you to speak, and I don't see any thought control.
First of all, I haven't been saying – I haven't said one word about my being kept out of the limelight.
The way it works here is quite different.
Now, I don't think you heard what I was saying, but the way it works here is that there is a system of shaping, control, and so on,
which gives a certain perception of the world.
I gave one example. I'll give you sources where you can find thousands of others.
That's – and it has nothing to do with me.
It has to do with marginalizing the public and ensuring that they don't get in the way of elites
who are supposed to run things without interference.
In a review of the Chomsky Reader, it was written that as he's been forced to the margins, he's become strident and rigid.
Do you feel this categorization of your later writings is accurate
and that you've been a victim of this sort of process you've been describing?
Well, the business about being forced to – other people will have to judge about the stridentcy.
I won't talk about – I don't believe it, but anyway, that's for other people to judge.
However, the matter of being forced to the margins is a matter of fact, and the fact is the opposite of what is claimed.
The fact is it's much easier to gain access to even the major media now than it was 20 years ago.
You've dealt in such unpopular truths and have been such a lonely figure as a consequence of that.
Do you ever regret either that you took the stands you took, have written the things you have written,
or that we had listened to you earlier?
I don't. I mean, there are particular things which I would do differently,
because you think about things differently, but in general I would say I do not regret it.
Do you like being controversial?
No, it's a nuisance.
Because this mass medium pays little attention to the views of dissenters, not just Noam Chomsky,
but most dissenters do not get much of a hearing in this medium.
No, in fact, that's again completely understandable.
They wouldn't be performing their societal function if they allowed favored truths to be challenged.
Now, notice that that's not true when I cross the border anywhere,
so that I have easy access to the media in just about every other country in the world.
There's a number of reasons for that, and one reason is I'm primarily talking about the United States,
and it's much less threatening.
Your view there is that the militarization of the American economy has come about
because there are not other means of controlling the American population.
In a democratic society. I mean, it may be paradoxical,
but the freer the society is, the more it's necessary to resort to devices like induced fears.
Okay, I'll go along with that.
Arguably, he is the most important intellectual alive today.
And if my program can get him 500,000 people listening or three-quarters of a million people listening,
I'll be delighted.
Okay, Professor, then you're on time.
Wartime planners understood that actual war aims should not be revealed.
Part of the reason why the media in Canada and Belgium and so on are more open
is that it just doesn't matter that much what people think.
It matters very much what the politically articulate sectors of the population,
those narrow minorities, think and do in the United States
because of its overwhelming dominance on the world scene.
But of course, that's also a reason for wanting to work here.
What we might call the fifth freedom, the freedom to rob, exploit and dominate
and to curb mischief by any feasible means.
Let's conclude, not include.
The United States is ideologically narrower in general than other countries.
The more the structure of the American media is such as to pretty much eliminate critical discussion.
Our guests are as far apart on the counter question as American intellectuals can be.
Now, if we had the slightest concern with democracy,
which we do not in our foreign affairs and never have,
we would turn to countries where we have influence, like El Salvador.
Now, in El Salvador, they don't call the archbishop bad names.
What they do is murder him.
They do not censor the press.
They wipe the press out.
They sent the army in to blow up the church radio station.
The editor of the independent newspaper was found in a ditch mutilated and cut the pieces with machete.
May I continue? I did not interrupt you.
Don't you ever want to put a time value on anything you say or do you want to lie systematically on television?
I'm talking about 1980.
You are a systematic liar.
Did these things happen or didn't they?
These things did not happen in the context in which you suggested all of it.
You are a phony, Mr., and it's time that the people read you great, correctly.
It's clear why you want to divert me from the discussion that I'm having.
No, it's not. It's because you get tired of rubbish.
But let's continue with...
Except we can't. I'm afraid we're out of time.
We thank you both, John Silver and Noam Chomsky.
Okay.
Last time you were here, you spoke about how when you go overseas you are given access to the mass media.
But here that doesn't seem to be the case.
Has that changed at all? Have you ever been invited to appear on Nightline or Brinkley?
Yes, I have a couple of times been invited to speak on Nightline.
I couldn't do it. I had another talk and something or other.
And to tell you the honest truth, I don't really care very much.
FAIR, the media monitoring group, published a very interesting study of Nightline.
It shows that their conception of a spectrum of opinion is ridiculously narrow, at least by European or world standards.
Let me tell you a personal experience.
I happened to be in Madison, Wisconsin, on a listener-supported radio station, a very good one.
I was having an interview with the news director.
I've been on that program dozens of times, usually by telephone.
And he's very good. He gets to all sorts of people.
And he started the interview by playing for me a tape of an interview that he had just had and had broadcast with the guy who's some mucky-muck in Nightline.
I think his name is Jeff Greenfield or some such name. Does that name mean anything?
I'm Jeff Greenfield from Nightline in New York.
What about, just in the selection of guests, to analyze things, why is Noam Chomsky never on Nightline?
I couldn't begin to tell you.
He's one of the leading intellectuals in the entire world.
I have no idea. I mean, I can make some guesses.
He may be one of the leading intellectuals who can't talk on television.
You know, that's a standard that's very important to us.
If you've got a 22-minute show and a guy takes five minutes to warm up, now I don't know whether Chomsky does or not.
He's out.
One of the reasons why Nightline has the usual suspects is one of the things you have to do when you book a show is know that the person can make the point within the framework of television.
And if people don't like that, they should understand it is about as sensible to book somebody who will take eight minutes to give an answer as it is to book somebody who doesn't speak English.
But in the normal given flow, that's another culture bad thing. We've got to have English-speaking people. We also need concision.
So Greenfield or whatever his name is hit the nail on the head.
The U.S. media are alone in that you must meet the condition of concision.
You've got to say things between two commercials or in 600 words.
And that's a very important fact because the beauty of concision, you know, saying a couple of sentences between two commercials, the beauty of that is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts.
I was reading Chomsky 20 years ago. I think his notion, doesn't he have a, doesn't he co-authored a new book called Engineering Consent or the Manufacturing of Consent?
I mean some of that stuff to me looks like it's from Neptune.
This is the first time the Neptune system has been seen clearly by human eyes.
These pictures taken only hours ago by Voyager 2 are its latest contribution.
You know, he's firmly entitled to say that I'm seeing it through a prism too.
But my view of that, of his notions about the limits of debate in this country is absolutely wacko.
Suppose I get up on Nightline, say, and I'm given whatever it is, two minutes, and I say, Kadhafi is a terrorist, Khomeini is a murderer, you know, etc., etc.
The Russians, you know, invaded Afghanistan, all this sort of stuff. I don't need any evidence. Everybody just nods.
On the other hand, suppose you say something that just isn't regurgitating conventional pieties.
Suppose you say something that's the least bit unexpected or controversial.
Suppose you say, I mean the biggest international terror operations that are known are the ones that have run out of Washington.
Or suppose you say, what happened in the 1980s is the U.S. government was driven underground.
Suppose I say the United States is invading South Vietnam, as it was.
The best political leaders are the ones who are lazy and corrupt.
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
The Bible is probably the most genocidal book in our total canon.
Education is a system of imposed ignorance.
There's no more morality in world affairs fundamentally than there was in the time of Genghis Khan.
There are just different factors to be concerned with.
No, Chopsy, thank you.
Well, you know, people will quite reasonably expect to know what you mean.
Why did you say that? I never heard that before.
If you said that, you better have a reason, you know, you better have some evidence.
In fact, you better have a lot of evidence because that's pretty startling comment.
You can't give evidence if you're stuck with concision, you know.
That's the genius of this structural constraint.
And in my view, if people like, say, Nightline and McNeil, Laird and so on were smarter,
if they were better propagandists, they would let this in and so on.
Let them on more, in fact.
The reason is that they would sound like they're from Neptune.
Then comes our special conversation on the Middle East crisis.
Tonight's is with the activist writer and professor Noam Chomsky.
Again, there is, has been an offer on the table, which we rejected, an Iraqi offer last April,
to eliminate their chemical and other unconventional arsenals
if Israel were to simultaneously do the same.
I have to end it there.
But I think that should be pursued as well.
Sorry to interrupt you. I have to end it there. That's the end of our time.
Professor Chomsky, thank you very much for joining us.
AT&T has supported the McNeil-Laird NewsHour since 1983
because quality information and quality communications is our idea of a good connection.
AT&T, the right choice.
Okay, could you just have a second?
It's just for two shots, that's all, and we can do everything else.
Okay.
What about the mic?
I think there's something hanging around here.
Right, the idea of this one is it's just a shot where I'm seen talking to you
and you're seen listening to me.
I'll ask you, though, if you don't speak to me or move your lips
so that I can be seen to be asking you a question.
The reason for this shot is simply this.
Okay, just don't talk to me and I'll keep going.
That's the thing.
The reason for this shot, I'll explain it through,
because I usually find that's the easiest way to do it.
The reason for this shot is I need a shot where you're sitting and seen
listening to me while I'm asking you a question.
We can use this shot to introduce you, explain who you are,
where you fit into the piece I'm doing.
But if you don't speak to me, I can also use...
Got it.
Okay, thanks for your time.
Righto.
If there is a narrow range of opinion in the United States
and it is harder to express a variety of different opinions,
why do you live in the U.S.?
Well, first of all, it's my country,
and secondly, it's in many ways, as I said before,
it's the freest country in the world.
I think there's more possibilities for change here
than in any other country I know.
Again, comparatively speaking,
it's the country where the state is probably most restricted.
But isn't that what you should be looking at comparatively
rather than in absolute terms?
Yes, I do.
But you don't create that impression.
Well, maybe I don't give the impression.
I certainly say it often enough.
What I've said over and over again,
and I've been saying it all tonight,
and I've written it a million times,
is that the United States is a very free society.
It's also a very rich society.
Of course, the United States is a scandal
from the point of view of its wealth.
I mean, given the natural advantages that the United States has
in terms of resources and lack of enemies and so on,
the United States should have a level of health and welfare and so on
that's an order of magnitude beyond anybody else in the world.
We don't.
The United States is last among 20 industrialized societies
in infant mortality.
That's a scandal of American capitalism.
And it ends up being a very free society,
which does a lot of rotten things in the world.
Okay?
There's no contradiction there.
I mean, Greece was a free society by the standards of Athens.
It's also a vicious society from the point of view of its imperial behavior.
There's virtually no correlation between the internal freedom of a society
and its external behavior.
You start your line of discussion at a moment that is historically useful for you.
That's why I say you pick the beginning.
The grand fact of the post-war world is that the communist imperialists,
by the use of terrorism, by the use of deprivation of freedom,
have contributed to the continuing bloodshed.
And the sad thing about it is not only the bloodshed,
but the fact that they seem to dispossess you of the power of rationalization.
May I say something?
Sure.
I think that's about 5% true, and about, or maybe 10% true.
It certainly is true.
Why do you give that?
May I complete a sentence?
Sure.
It's perfectly true that there were areas of the world,
in particular Eastern Europe, where Stalinist imperialism very brutally took control
and still maintains control.
But there were also very vast areas of the world where we were doing the same thing.
And there's quite an interplay in the Cold War.
You see, what you just described is a, I believe, a mythology about the Cold War,
which might have been tenable ten years ago,
but which is quite inconsistent with contemporary scholarship.
Ask a Czech.
Ask a Guatemalan. Ask a Dominican.
Ask a person from the Dominican Republic.
Ask a person from South Vietnam.
You know, ask a Thai.
Obviously, we can't get away if you can't distinguish
between the nature of our venture in Guatemala and the nature of the Soviet Union in Prague.
Then we have a real difficulty.
Explain the difference.
Sorry.
Now, what about making the media more responsive and democratic?
Well, there are very narrow limits to that.
It's kind of like asking how do we make corporations more democratic.
Well, the only way to do that is get rid of them, you know.
I mean, if you have concentrated power, you can, I mean, I don't want to say you can do nothing.
Like you can, you know, like the church can show up at the stockholders meeting
and start screaming about not investing in South Africa.
And sometimes that has marginal effects.
I don't want to say it has no effects.
But you can't really affect the structure of power,
because if you, I mean, to do that would be a social revolution.
And unless you're ready for a social revolution,
that is power is going to be somewhere else,
the media are going to have their present structure
and they're going to represent their present interests.
Now, that's not to say that one shouldn't try to do things.
I mean, it makes sense to try to push the limits of a system.
It only takes one or two people that think they have integrity as journalists
to give you some good press.
See, that's important.
And that goes back to something that came up before.
I mean, there's a lot, you know, there are contradi...
You know, things are complex.
It's not monolithic.
I mean, the mass media themselves are complicated institutions with internal contradictions.
So on the one hand, there's the commitment to indoctrination and control.
But on the other hand, there's the sense of professional integrity.
She works alone as her own boss,
writing newspaper columns and producing radio commentaries
for a hodgepodge of small clients across the country.
This so-called leather-lung Texan has been firing questions
at our chief executive for almost 40 years.
And many a young man in this country is being disillusioned totally by his government these days.
Well, this is a question which you very properly bring to the attention of the nation.
It's not that we haven't been holding press conferences.
I was just waiting for Sarah to come back.
Mr. President, that's very nice of you, and I appreciate it.
Sarah, I want to call to your attention a real problem we've got in this country today.
Those unique and often terrifying McClendon questions
reflect her desire to dig out information.
And I want to ask your new man what he feels...
What does he feel?
Oh, my God.
With enough know-how and persistence, she usually gets her man.
What would you do if you were in a situation where you were trying to be an honest reporter
and you were worried sick about your country and you saw how sick it was,
and you were facing this weak White House and a weak Congress as a reporter?
What would you do?
I think there are a lot of reporters who do a very good job.
In fact, I have a lot of friends in the press who I think do a terrific job.
I know they are, but I mean, they want to.
But now, what would you do if you were here?
First of all, you have to understand what the system is.
And smart reporters do understand what it is.
You have to understand what the pressures are, what the commitments are,
what the barriers are, and what the openings are.
Like right after the Iran-Contra hearings, a lot of good reporters understood,
well, things are going to be a little more open for a couple of months,
so they could ram through stories that they knew they couldn't even talk about before.
After Watergate.
And the same after Watergate. And then, you know, it closes up again and so on.
Most people, I imagine, simply internalize the values.
That's the easiest way and the most successful way.
You just internalize the values, and then you regard yourself, in a way,
correctly as acting perfectly freely.
All right, let's get to the White House now,
where I think veteran correspondent Frank Sesno could tell us a little bit about self-censorship,
that inertial guidance system is always going on.
Is there any formal censorship there?
Well, there's no self-censorship, Reid.
If somebody tells me something, I'm going to pass it on, unless there's a particular and compelling reason not to.
I can't deny that I wouldn't like to have access to the Oval Office
and all the same maps and charts and graphs that the president's looking at,
but that's not possible, it's not realistic, and it's probably not even desirable.
Hello. How are you?
I'm fine.
Can I sit down there, please?
Welcome to Holland.
I'll introduce you first in a few lines.
Professor Chomsky, Noam Chomsky, is now sixth and is about the most controversial intellectual in America.
That's also a plattitude, but that's how it's always been called.
Chomsky has been called the Einstein of modern linguistics.
The New York Times has said he's arguably the most important intellectual alive today,
but his presence here has sparked a protest.
This book has poisoned the world and all liars in there,
and as a Vietnamese people, we come here to learn the book.
Vietnam! Vietnam!
He said that in Vietnam there's no violation of human rights and no crime in Cambodia is wrong.
Chomsky is using his profession, he's using that to poison the world,
and we come here to protest that.
I don't mind the denunciations, frankly. I mind the lies.
I mean, intellectuals are very good at lying, but there are professionals at it.
You know, vilification is a wonderful technique. There's no way of responding to it.
If somebody calls you an anti-Semite, what can you say? I'm not an anti-Semite.
Somebody says you're a racist, you're a Nazi or something.
You always lose. I mean, the person who throws the mud always wins,
because there's no way of responding to such charges.
Professor Chomsky seems to believe that the people he criticizes fall into one of two classes, liars or dupes.
Consider what happened when I discussed the case of Robert Fourisson. Let me recall the facts.
Let's not go into details, please, because...
The details happen to be important.
Yes, but I have only one question on the Fourisson question.
Do the facts matter or don't they matter?
Of course they do.
Well, let me tell you what the facts are then.
Fourisson says that the massacre of the Jews in the Holocaust is a historic lie.
Can we have the next question?
This is an important one. I have a lot to do with the topic.
Your views are extremely controversial, and perhaps one of the things that has been most controversial
and you've been most strongly criticized for was your defense of a French intellectual
who was suspended from his university post for contending that there were no Nazi death camps in World War II.
My name is Robert Fourisson. I am 60. I am university professor in Lyon, France.
Behind me you may see the courthouse of Paris, the Palais de Justice.
In this place I was convicted many times at the beginning of the 80s.
I was charged by nine associations, mostly Jewish associations.
For inciting hatred, racial hatred, for racial defamation, for damage by falsifying a story.
Professor Chomsky and a number of other intellectuals signed a petition in which Fourisson is called
a respected professor of literature who merely tried to make his findings public.
Perhaps we can start with just the story of Robert Fourisson and your involvement.
More than 500 people signed, maybe 600, mostly university students.
What happened to the other 499 of them? How come we only hear about Chomsky's signature?
Well, I think it's because Chomsky has in himself a kind of political power.
I signed a petition calling on the tribunal to defend his civil rights.
At that point the French press, which apparently has no conception of freedom of speech,
concluded that since I had called for his civil rights I was there for defending his theses.
Fourisson then published a book in which he tried to prove that the Nazi gas chambers never existed.
What we deny is that there was an extermination program and an extermination actually,
especially in gas chambers or gas vans.
The book contains a preface written by Professor Chomsky in which he calls Fourisson
a relatively apolitical sort of liberal.
A communist is a man, a Jew is a man, a Nazi is a man, I am a man.
Are you a Nazi?
I am not a Nazi.
How would you describe yourself politically?
Nothing.
The preface that you wrote, whether you reflected it...
No, that's not the preface that I wrote because I never wrote a preface.
And you know that I never wrote a preface.
He's referring to a statement of mine on civil liberties which was added to a book in which Fourisson...
Excuse me.
You are a linguist and the language you use has meaning.
That's right.
And the language I use...
...as apolitical liberal or as someone whose views can be signified by the words findings or conclusions.
That is a judgment and that is a favorable judgment of his youth.
On the contrary.
Can I continue with the fact?
Yes, you can continue with the fact for hours.
But they are futile.
Let's get to the so-called preface.
I was then asked by the person who organized the petition to write a statement on freedom of speech.
Just banal comments about freedom of speech, pointing out the difference between defending a person's right to express his views and defending the views expressed.
So I did that.
I wrote a rather banal statement called Some Elementary Remarks on Freedom of Expression.
And I told him, do what you like with it.
So Pierre produced a book which all the arguments of Fourisson were to be put in front of the court.
And we thought wise to use the text of Noam Chomsky as a kind of warning, a foreword, to say that it was a matter of freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom of reserve.
Why did you try at the last moment to get it back from the book?
That's the one thing I'm sorry about.
But that's the real important thing.
No, it's not.
It's not.
Because with that you said it was wrong of you to do it.
No, I didn't.
See, in fact, take a look at what I did.
I wrote a letter which was then published by us in which I said, look, things have reached the point where the French intellectual community simply is incapable of understanding the issues.
At this point it's just going to confuse matters even more if my comments on freedom of speech happen to be attached to this book which I didn't know existed.
So just to clarify things, you better separate them.
Now, in retrospect, I think I probably shouldn't have done that.
I should have just said, fine, then let it appear because it ought to appear.
But apart from that, I regard this as not only trivial but as compared with other positions I've taken on freedom of speech, invisible.
I do not think that the state ought to have the right to determine historical truth and to punish people with deviation.
I'm not willing to give the state that right even if they happen to fall which way.
But are you denying that the gas chambers ever existed?
But I'm saying if you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like.
I mean, Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked.
So was Stalin.
If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.
Otherwise, you're not in favor of freedom of speech.
There's two positions you can have on freedom of speech.
And you can decide which position you want.
With regard to my defense of the utterly offensive, the people who express utterly offensive views,
I have the slightest doubt that every commissar says you're defending that person's views.
No, I'm not. I'm defending his right to express them.
The difference is crucial and the difference has been understood outside of fascist circles since the 18th century.
Is there anything like scientific objectivity, reality as a scientist?
Look, I'm not saying I defend the views.
Look, if somebody publishes a scientific article, which I disagree with, I do not say the state ought to put him in jail.
All right, but you don't have to support him right away.
I don't support him.
I support him just for the sake of the people saying that whatever he wants is fair.
Fine, but suppose this guy is taken to court and charged with falsification.
Then I'm going to defend him even if I disagree with him.
That's right, but he wasn't taken to court.
Oh, you're wrong.
But when did you write the support?
When he was brought to court.
In fact, the only support that I gave him is to say he has a right of freedom of speech, period.
There is no doubt in my mind that the example that I gave about the story is the Holocaust that did not exist.
It's very, very typical.
I'll give you another example about the history.
How much of the American press believes that Henri Saint has anything to say or any press?
How much of the press in France?
Since I followed Sylvain.
What percentage would you say?
I'll tell you.
Is it higher than zero?
I don't know.
Is it higher than zero?
I'll tell you.
Have you ever seen anything in any newspaper or any journal saying that this man is anything other than a lunatic?
I'll try to answer.
I'll try to answer.
I think that I just followed the case.
That's a simple question.
I followed the case five or six years ago, and I happened to see that Noam Chomsky was in for strong criticism,
even from some of his supporters, for doing something which could be interpreted only in terms of a campaign against Israel.
Going back years, I am absolutely certain that I've taken far more extreme positions on people who deny the Holocaust than you have.
For example, you go back to my earliest articles, and you'll find that I say that even to enter into the arena of debate
on the question of whether the Nazis carried out such atrocities is already to lose one's humanity.
So I don't even think you ought to discuss the issue if you want to know my opinion.
But if anybody wants to refute Faurisson, there's certainly no difficulty in doing so.
I'm not interested in freedom of speech and all that.
I have to win, and that's the question. And I shall win.
I'm just an ordinary mom who just thinks in terms of I don't want to someday be holding my grandchildren
and watching something horrible happen and feel like I didn't do anything.
And I mean, it's obvious what you're doing.
And my question is, on a practical level, where do you see the most practical place to put your energy?
I mean, tonight I feel overwhelmed. I feel like it's too big, it's too much to even make a dent in.
The way things change is because lots of people are working all the time.
And they're working in their communities, in their workplace, or wherever they happen to be.
And they're building up the basis for popular movements which are going to make changes.
That's the way everything has ever happened in history,
whether it was the end of slavery or whether it was the democratic revolutions or anything you want, you name it.
That's the way it worked.
You get a very false picture of this from the history books.
In the history books there's a couple of leaders, you know, George Washington or Martin Luther King or whatever.
And I don't want to say that those people are unimportant.
Martin Luther King was certainly important, but he was not the civil rights movement.
Martin Luther King can appear in the history books because lots of people whose names you will never know
and whose names are all forgotten and who may have been killed and so on were working down in the South.
When you have active activists and people concerned and people devoting themselves
and dedicating themselves to social change or issues or whatever, then people like me can appear.
And we can appear to be prominent, but that's not because somebody else is doing the work.
My work, whether it's giving hundreds of talks a year or spending 20 hours a week writing letters or writing books,
is not directed to intellectuals and politicians.
It's directed to what are called ordinary people.
And what I expect from them is in fact exactly what they are,
that they should try to understand the world and act in accordance with their decent impulses
and that they should try to improve the world.
And many people are willing to do that, but they have to understand.
And in fact as far as I can see in these things,
I feel that I'm simply helping people develop courses of intellectual self-defense.
What did you mean by that? What would such a course be?
I don't mean go to school because we're not going to get it there.
It means you have to develop an independent mind and work on it.
Now that's extremely hard to do alone.
The beauty of our system is it isolates everybody.
Each person is sitting alone in front of the two.
It's very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances.
You can't fight the world alone.
Some people can, but it's pretty rare.
The way to do it is through organization.
So courses of intellectual self-defense will have to be in the context of political and other organizations.
And it makes sense, I think, to look at what the institutions are trying to do
and to take that almost as a key.
What they're trying to do is what we're trying to combat.
If they're trying to keep people isolated and separate and so on,
well, we're trying to do the opposite. We're trying to bring them together.
So in your local community, you want to have sources of alternative action.
People with parallel concerns may be differently focused,
but at the core, sort of similar values and a similar interest in helping people
learn how to defend themselves against external power and taking control of their lives
and reaching out your hand to people who need it.
That's a common array of concerns.
You can learn about your own values and you can figure out how to defend yourself and so on
in conjunction with others.
Are there one or two publications that I, as an average person, a biologist,
can read to bypass this filter of our press?
Now, if you ask what media can I turn to to get the right answers,
first of all, I wouldn't tell you that because I don't think there's an answer.
The right answers are what you decide are the right answers.
Maybe everything I'm telling you is wrong.
Okay? Could perfectly well be. I'm the God.
But that's nothing for you to figure out.
And I could tell you what I think happens to be more or less right,
but there isn't any reason why you should pay any attention to it.
What impact do you feel alternative media is currently having or could potentially have?
I'm actually a little more interested in its potential.
And just to define my terms, by alternative media I'm referring to media that are
or could be citizen controlled as opposed to state or corporate controlled.
You know, that's what's kept people together.
To the extent that people are able to do something constructive,
it's because they have some way of interacting.
I mean, I've always felt it would be a very positive thing,
and it should be pushed as far as it can go.
I think it's going to have a very hard time.
There's just such a concentration of resources and power that
alternative media, while extremely important, are going to have quite a battle.
It's true there are things which are small successes,
but it's because people have just been willing to put in incredible effort.
Like I say, take Z Magazine.
I mean, that's a national magazine which literally has a staff of two and no resources.
Tell us a little bit about Z Magazine, what it is and what makes it different.
Go ahead.
Go ahead? Thank you.
We just wanted to do a magazine that would address all the sides of political life,
economics, race, gender, authority, political relations.
We wanted to do it in a way that would incorporate attention to how to not only
understand what's going on, but how to make things better, what to aim toward,
and to provide at the same time humor, culture, a kind of a magazine that people
could relate to and could get a lot out of and could participate in.
What we wanted to do, which we didn't think was provided by the existing magazines,
was to give it a real activist slant so that it could be very useful to the
variety of movements in the country.
And we just felt there wasn't a magazine that reflected that, that inspired people
and that gave people sort of a strategy and perhaps even a vision of how things
could be better.
Music
The South End Press has sort of made it.
That is, they're surviving.
It's a small collective, again, with no resources, and they put out a lot of
books, including quite a lot of good books.
But for a South End book to get reviewed is almost impossible.
Editorially and business-wise, we make decisions based on politics that no
corporate publisher can really advocate because of their ties to corporate America.
We can solicit manuscripts based on what we feel is the relevance for the
movement, and we can make our business decisions based on whether we feel people
can afford our books, whether we feel that a book might not make that much money,
but it needs to be out there and maybe there is a thousand people who would buy it.
And those are criteria that we feel are very precious in this day of corporate
mergers.
And likewise our structure about sharing work and continuing our training process
as long as we're at the press.
There are losses there in terms of productivity, but in terms of empowerment,
all of us are then able to say, my perspective is different from yours.
Then all of our intelligence gets used in making those decisions and not just
whoever happens to have done it the longest, whoever happens to have graduated
from the best schools in order to be the best editor making all the decisions and
only using his or her intelligence.
Listening to supported radio in the United States has undergone a remarkable
growth in the last decade.
It's perhaps the fastest growing alternative media.
There are many reasons for this.
First and foremost, it's enormously economical and it reaches communities that
have not been served by community radio before.
And in Boulder, particularly, we see with someone like Noam Chomsky who's been
there I believe three times in the last six years, he has a tremendous audience
and KJNU is partly responsible for that because we play his tapes on a regular
basis, we play his lectures and his interviews.
So when he does come to Boulder and people hear what he has to say, they're
able to tune in.
It's not something exotic or esoteric that he's talking about.
It's material that they're very familiar with and he's noted this incidentally.
If there's a listener supported radio station, it means that people can get daily,
every day, a different way of looking at the world, not just what the corporate
media want you to see, but a different picture, a different understanding.
Not only can you hear it, but you can participate in it.
You can add your own thoughts and you can learn something and so on.
Well, that's the way people become human.
That's the way you become human participants in a social and political system.
Hello, I'm Ed Robinson and this is Non-Corporate News.
What is Non-Corporate News and why is it necessary?
I didn't want to just show another film at a library or something.
I wanted to make my own statement.
I thought it would be more fun to do and perhaps I could get other people
involved in a project besides showing a film.
We could make a film or a video.
The local cable station is hooked up to three communities, Lynn, Swampscott,
and Salem, so that's 30,000 people or 30,000 homes.
I'm not sure, but I'm sure a lot of people will see it and they'll be the kind
of people who don't go out to see a film.
They'll go right into their houses, so if they're flipping through the channels,
they might be able to get a completely new idea of the world.
So there's kind of networks of cooperation developed, which I mean,
like here for example, is a collection of stuff from a friend of mine in Los Angeles
who does careful monitoring of the whole press in Los Angeles and a lot of the
British press, which he reads and does selections.
I don't have to read the movie reviews and the local gossip and all this kind of stuff,
but I get the occasional nugget that sneaks through and that you find if you're
carefully and intelligently and critically reviewing a wide range of press.
Well, there are a fair number of people who do this and we exchange information.
We wrote this two-volume work in which we saw one another for a couple weeks
when we were getting started, but then we wrote two volumes essentially
without seeing one another, just by phone, by mail and exchanging manuscripts.
But this takes a lot of communication by mail.
My Chomsky file is a couple of feet thick.
The end result is that you do have access to resources in a way which I doubt that
any national intelligence agency can duplicate a little on scholarship.
So there are ways of compensating for the absence of resources.
People can do things.
Like for example, I found out about the arms flow to Iran by reading transcripts
of the BBC and by reading an interview somewhere with an Israeli ambassador
in one city and reading something else in the Israeli press.
Now, okay, the information is there, but it's there to a fanatic,
somebody who wants to spend a substantial part of their time and energy
exploring it and comparing today's lies with yesterday's leaks and so on.
That's a research job.
And it just simply doesn't make any sense to ask the general population
to dedicate themselves to this task on every issue.
I'm not given the false modesty.
There are things that I can do and I know that I can do them reasonably well,
including analysis and study, research.
I mean, I know how to do that sort of thing.
And I think I have a reasonable understanding of the way the world works
as much as anyone can.
And that turns out to be a very useful resource for people who are doing active
organizing, trying to engage themselves in a way which will make it a little bit
of a better world.
And if you can help in those things or participate in them,
well, that's rewarding.
I wonder if you can envision a time when people like myself,
again, the naive people of this world, can again take pride in the United States.
And is that even a healthy wish now?
Because it may be this hunger for pride in our country that makes us more easily
manipulated by the powers that you talk about.
I think you first of all have to ask what you mean by your country.
Now, if you mean by the country, the government,
I don't think you can be proud of it and I don't think you could ever be proud of it.
Or you could be proud of any government.
It's not our government.
And you shouldn't be.
States are violent institutions.
The government of any country, including ours,
represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually violent.
States are violent to the extent that they're powerful.
That's roughly accurate.
You look at American history, it's nothing to write home about.
Why are we here?
We're here because, say, some 10 million Native Americans were wiped out.
That's not very pretty.
Until the 1960s, it was still Cowboys and Indians.
In the 1970s, for the first time, really, it became possible,
even for scholarship, to try to deal with the facts as they were.
For example, to deal with the fact that the Native American population was far higher
than had been claimed, millions higher, maybe as many as 10 million higher
than had been claimed, and that they had an advanced civilization,
and that there was something akin to genocide that took place.
We went through 200 years of our history without facing that fact.
One of the effects of the 1960s is it's possible to at least begin
to come to think about the facts.
Well, that's in advance.
Do you think that this activism 20 years ago has made a difference
in how our society operates now?
It has not changed the institutions and the way they function,
but it has led to very significant cultural changes.
Remember, these movements of the 60s expanded in the 70s
and expanded further in the 80s, and they reached into other parts
of the society and different issues.
A lot of things that seemed outrageous in the 60s are taken for granted today.
So, for example, take the feminist movement, for example,
which barely began to exist in the 60s.
Now it's part of general consciousness and awareness.
The ecological movements began in the 70s.
The third world solidarity movements were very limited in the 60s.
It was really Vietnam.
In the 60s also it was a student movement, as you say.
Now it's not. Now it's mainstream America.
If there is more dissidence now than you can remember,
why do you go on to write that the people feel isolated?
Because I think much of the general population recognizes
that the organized institutions do not reflect their concerns
and interests and needs.
They do not feel that they participate meaningfully in the political system.
They do not feel that the media are telling them the truth
or even reflect their concerns.
They go outside of the organized institutions to act.
We see more and more of our elected leaders
know less and less of what they're doing.
This medium does that.
Very striking.
In fact, the presidential elections have been almost removed from the point
where the public even takes them seriously as involving a matter of choice.
So what do you think about what goes on in the White House?
It's kept too private, I think.
They should come out.
I know.
Who should talk to the people?
George Bush.
Well, it means that the political system increasingly functions
without public input.
It means to an increasing extent not only do people not ratify decisions presented to them,
but they don't even take the trouble of ratifying them.
They assume that the decisions are going on independently
of what they may do in the polling booth.
Ratification would be what?
Well, ratification would mean a system in which there are two positions presented to me, the voter.
I go into the polling booth and I push one or another button
depending on which of those positions I want.
That's a very limited form of democracy,
and really meaningful democracy would mean that I play a role in forming those decisions
and creating those positions.
And that would be real democracy.
That's not happening.
We're very far from that.
But we're even departing from the point where there is ratification.
When you have stage-managed elections,
with the public relations industry determining what words come out of people's mouth,
candidates decide what to say on the basis of tests
that determine what the effect will be across the population.
Somehow people don't see how profoundly contemptuous that is of democracy.
The summer moment is near, but first the swearing-in of Van Quaer.
Please move to your seats.
For the first time in this century, for the first time in perhaps all history,
man does not have to invent a system by which to live.
We don't have to talk late into the night about which form of government is better.
We don't have to wrest justice from the candy.
We only have to summon it from within ourselves.
This is a time when the future seems a door you can walk right through
into a room called tomorrow.
Great nations of the world are moving toward democracy through the door to freedom.
Here come the bloody world.
Paget paper, free expression, free thought.
Is there a more conforming intellectual staff than the left-wing?
We'll never see a cloud.
We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for men on Earth
through free market, free speech, free elections,
and the exercise of free will unhampered by the state.
I've spoken at a thousand points in life.
All the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the nation doing good.
To the world, too, we offer new engagements and a renewed vow.
We will stay strong to protect the peace, the offered hand, the reluctant fist.
America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principles.
We as a people have such a purpose today.
It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.
Referring back to your earlier comment about escaping from or doing away with capitalism,
I was wondering what scheme, workable scheme, you would put in its place.
Me?
What would you suggest to others who might be in a position to set it up and get it going?
Well, I think that what used to be called centuries ago wage slavery is intolerable.
I don't think people ought to be forced to rent themselves in order to survive.
I think that the economic institutions ought to be run democratically by their participants,
by the communities in which they exist, and so on.
And I think basically through various kinds of free association.
Historically, have there been any sustained examples on any substantial scale of societies
which approximated to the anarchist ideal?
There are small societies, small in number, that have, I think, done so quite well.
And there are a few examples of large-scale libertarian revolutions
which were largely anarchist in their structure.
As to the first, small societies extending over a long period,
I myself think the most dramatic example is perhaps the Israeli Kibbutzim,
which for a long period, may or may not be true today,
really were constructed on anarchist principles, that is,
of direct worker control integration of agriculture, industry, service, personal life,
on an egalitarian basis with direct and in fact quite active participation in self-management,
and were, I should think, extraordinarily successful.
A good example of a really large-scale anarchist revolution, or largely anarchist revolution,
in fact the best example to my knowledge, is the Spanish Revolution in 1936.
And in fact, you can't tell what would have happened,
that anarchist revolution was simply destroyed by force,
but during the period in which it was alive, I think it was inspiring testimony
to the ability of poorer working people to organize, manage their affairs
extremely successfully without coercion and control.
How far does the success of libertarian socialism or anarchism as a way of life
really depend on a fundamental change in the nature of man,
both in his motivation, his altruism, and also in his knowledge and sophistication?
I think it not only depends on it, but in fact,
the whole purpose of libertarian socialism is that it will contribute to it.
It will contribute to a spiritual transformation,
precisely that kind of great transformation in the way humans conceive of themselves
and their ability to act, to decide, to create, to produce, to inquire,
precisely that spiritual transformation that social thinkers from the left Marxist tradition,
from Luxembourg, say, on over through anarcho-syndicalists have always emphasized.
So on the one hand, it requires that spiritual transformation.
On the other hand, its purpose is to create institutions
which will contribute to that transformation.
You've written that in looking at contributions of gifted thinkers,
one must make sure to understand their contributions,
but also to eliminate the errors in them.
And of your ideas, what would your guess would be discarded
and what would be assimilated by future thinkers?
Well, I mean, I would assume virtually everything would be discarded.
For example, and here we have to distinguish.
I mean, the work that I do in my professional area,
I mean, if I still believed what I believed ten years ago,
I'd assume the field is dead.
So I assume that when next time you read a student's paper,
you're going to see something that has to be changed
and you continue to make progress.
In dealing with social and political issues,
in my view, what is at all understood is pretty straightforward.
I don't think that there may be deep and complicated things,
but if so, they're not understood.
The basic ways, to the extent that we understand society at all,
it's pretty straightforward.
I don't think that those simple understandings are likely to undergo much change.
The point is that you have to work,
and that's why the propaganda system is so successful.
Very few people are going to have the time or the energy or the commitment
to carry out the constant battle that's required
to get outside of, you know, McNeely or Van Rather or somebody like that.
The easy thing to do, you know, you come home from work, you're tired,
it's a busy day, you're not going to spend the evening carrying out a research project.
So you turn on the tube and say, it's probably right.
So you look at the headlines on the paper and then you watch the sports or something.
And that's basically the way the system and the indoctrination works.
Sure, the other stuff is there, but you're going to have to work to find it.
Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths.
The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain,
which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy,
on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation.
Now, it's long been understood very well that a society that is based on this principle
will destroy itself in time.
It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails,
as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited,
that the world is an infinite resource and that the world is an infinite garbage can.
At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible.
Either the general population will take control of its own destiny
and will concern itself with community interests,
guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others,
or alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control.
As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority,
it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves.
But the conditions of survival, let alone justice,
require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole,
and by now that means the global community.
The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication
and should use this power as they tell us they must,
namely to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority
and remove them from the public arena.
The question in brief is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved
or threats to be avoided.
In this possibly terminal phase of human existence,
democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured.
They may well be essential to survival.
He's up there thinking for himself,
and he's deciphering this tremendously overweighted body of information
which he puts into an order
and gives you the feeling that you can do the same thing,
that the whole thing is decipherable.
And he also gives you the sense that there is a source,
there's a center to a dissenting population,
although we feel that there's no center.
And I think that is what reactivated in me
a desire to get back,
get reacquainted with the political scene after 30 years of alienation from it.
You do hundreds of interviews and lectures,
and you're dealing with massacres in East Timor and invasions of Panama, et cetera,
pretty horrific stuff, death squads.
What keeps you going?
I mean, don't you get burned out on this material?
That's mainly a matter of whether you can look yourself in the mirror, I think.
Oh, gotta go.
Get these people in town.
Okay.
Maybe you can say, all aboard for us.
All aboard.
Bye-bye.
All aboard.
Good to see you.
Just hit the microphone.
Thank you.
Bye, Canada.
Goodbye, Canada.
Bye.
It's like I can't pass the hour that you agreed to.
Can I give you an introduction?
He's from Harvard.
Oh, I heard that.
Oh, yes, that is true.
Who the bleep is?
Sorry about making you answer that.
It's okay.
It worked.
Did we hit it in two minutes?
Well, we did pretty well.
Actually, that means less sports, and that's fine with me.
People out there, they don't know what's going on.
If the people knew what you say here today, there'd be a...
There'd be a real change.
Thank you.
On that optimistic note, Professor Chomsky, thank you very much indeed.
So how did it go?
Oh, I thought it was sort of technical sounding.
But, um, there wasn't much of a...
Did you ever think of running for president?
If I ran for president, the first thing I'd do is tell people not to vote for me.
This guy's gotta go home. He really does.
People still believe that the South takes Boston as a world champion.
Thanks.
So take it up!
On that freedom train
That's freedom, love, all aboard.
Get on board.
That's freedom, change, all aboard.
You better get on board.
King of love, all aboard.
You better get on board.
That's the King of love, all aboard.
You better get on board.