Because We Say So (3 page)

We live at a time when the growing catastrophes that face Americans and the rest of the globe are increasingly matched by the accumulation of power by the rich and financial elite. Their fear of democracy is now strengthened by the financial, political and corporate elite’s intensive efforts to normalize their own power and silence those who hold them accountable. For many, we live in a time of utter despair. But resistance is not only possible, it may be more necessary now than at any other time in America’s past, given the current dismantling of civil rights and democratic institutions, and the war on women, labor unions and the poor—all accompanied by the rise of a neoliberal regime that views democracy as an excess, if not dangerous, and an obstacle to implementing its ideological and political goals.

Brimming from each page of this book is what Noam
Chomsky has been telling us for over 50 years: Resistance demands a combination of hope, vision, courage and a willingness to make power accountable, all the while connecting with the desires, aspirations and dreams of those whose suffering is both structurally imposed and thus preventable. He has also reminded us again and again through numerous historical examples that public memory contains the flashpoints for remembering that such struggles are always collective and never merely a matter of individual resistance. Movements bring change, and solidarity is key. As Archon Fung points out, Chomsky’s role as a public intellectual makes clear the importance of making power visible, holding authority accountable, and engaging in rigorous critique. His work also suggests that in addition to rigorous criticism, public intellectuals can also help to “shape the democratic character of public policy,” work with “popular movements and organizations in their efforts to advance justice and democracy,” and while refusing to succumb to reformist practices, “join citizens—and sometimes government—to construct a world that is more just and democratic.”
⁷

He may be one of the few public intellectuals left of an older generation who offers a rare glimpse into what it means to widen the scope of the meaning of political and intellectual inquiry—an intellectual who rethinks in a critical fashion the educative nature of politics within the changed and totalizing conditions of a neoliberal global assault on all vestiges of democracy. He not only trades in ideas that defy scholastic disciplines and intellectual boundaries, he also makes clear that it is crucial to hold ideas accountable for the practices they legitimate and produce, while at the same time refusing to limit critical ideas to simply modes of critique. In this instance, ideas not only challenge the normalizing discourses and representations of commonsense and the power inequities
they legitimate, but also open up the possibilities inherent in a discourse that moves beyond the given and points to new ways of thinking and acting about freedom, civic courage, social responsibility and justice from the standpoint of radical democratic ideals.

B
ECAUSE
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may be one of the most insightful collections of Chomsky’s work yet published. Throughout his commentaries, he demonstrates that it is not only democracy and human decency that are at risk, but survival itself. In doing so, Chomsky makes clear that the urgency of the times demands understanding and action, critique and hope. This is a book that should and must be read, given the dire times in which we live. For Chomsky, history is open and the time has come to reclaim the promise of a democracy in which justice, liberty, equality and the common good still matter.

Notes

1
See, for example, Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,”
N
EW
Y
ORK
R
EVIEW
OF
B
OOKS
(February 13, 1967). See also an updated version of this essay in Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux: Using Privilege to Challenge the State,”
B
OSTON
R
EVIEW
(September 1, 2011).

2
“Chomsky book banned at Guantánamo,”
S
EATTLE
T
IMES
, October 13, 2009.
http://o.staging.seattletimes.com/nation-world/chomsky-book-banned-at-guantnamo/

3
Stuart Hall and Les Back, “In Conversation: At Home and Not at Home,”
 C
ULTLTURAL
S
TUDIES
, Vol. 23, No. 4, (July 2009), pp. 680–681.

4
Over the course of his career, a number of false claims have been attributed to Chomsky, including the absurd notion published in the
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Y
ORK
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IGHER
E
DUCATION
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UPPLEMENT
that he was an apologist for the Pol Pot regime, and on another occasion, the damaging charge that he was anti-Semitic, given his defense of freedom of speech, including that of the French historian Robert Faurisson, an alleged Holocaust denier. Chomsky’s long-standing critique of totalitarianism in all its forms seems to have been forgotten in these cases.

5
Noam Chomsky, “Paths Taken, Tasks Ahead,”
P
ROFESSION
(2000), p. 38.

6
See, for instance, Noam Chomsky, “America Hates Its Poor,”
O
CCUPY
: R
EFLECTIONS ON
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LASS
W
AR
, R
EBELLION AND
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OLIDARITY
(Westfield, NJ: Zuccotti Park Press, Second Edition, 2013).

7
Archon Fung, “The Constructive Responsibility of Intellectuals,”
B
OSTON
R
EVIEW
, (September 9, 2011).

MARCHING OFF THE CLIFF

December 5, 2011

A task of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, now under way in Durban, South Africa, is to extend earlier policy decisions that were limited in scope and only partially implemented.

These decisions trace back to the U.N. Convention of 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which the U.S. refused to join. The Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period ends in 2012. A fairly general pre-conference mood was captured by a
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headline: “Urgent Issues but Low Expectations.”

As the delegates meet in Durban, a report on newly updated digests of polls by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) reveals that “publics around the world and in the United States say their government should give global warming a higher priority and strongly support multilateral action to address it.”

Most U.S. citizens agree, though PIPA clarifies that the percentage “has been declining over the last few years, so that American concern is significantly lower than the global average—70 percent as compared to 84 percent.”

“Americans do not perceive that there is a scientific consensus on the need for urgent action on climate change. . . . A large majority think that they will be personally affected by climate change eventually, but only a minority thinks that they are being affected now, contrary to views in most other countries. Americans tend to underestimate the level of concern among other Americans.”

These attitudes aren’t accidental. In 2009 the energy industries, backed by business lobbies, launched major campaigns
that cast doubt on the near-unanimous consensus of scientists on the severity of the threat of human-induced global warming.

The consensus is only “near-unanimous” because it doesn’t include the many experts who feel that climate-change warnings don’t go far enough, and the marginal group that deny the threat’s validity altogether.

The standard “he says/she says” coverage of the issue keeps to what is called “balance”: the overwhelming majority of scientists on one side, the denialists on the other. The scientists who issue the more dire warnings are largely ignored.

One effect is that scarcely one-third of the U.S. population believes that there is a scientific consensus on the threat of global warming—far less than the global average, and radically inconsistent with the facts.

It’s no secret that the U.S. government is lagging on climate issues. “Publics around the world in recent years have largely disapproved of how the United States is handling the problem of climate change,” according to PIPA. “In general, the United States has been most widely seen as the country having the most negative effect on the world’s environment, followed by China. Germany has received the best ratings.”

To gain perspective on what’s happening in the world, it’s sometimes useful to adopt the stance of intelligent extraterrestrial observers viewing the strange doings on Earth. They would be watching in wonder as the richest and most powerful country in world history now leads the lemmings cheerfully off the cliff.

Last month, the International Energy Agency (IEA), which was formed on the initiative of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1974, issued its latest report on rapidly increasing carbon emissions from fossil fuel use.

The IEA estimated that if the world continues on its
present course, the “carbon budget” will be exhausted by 2017. The budget is the quantity of emissions that can keep global warming at the 2 degrees Celsius level considered the limit of safety.

IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said, “The door is closing . . . if we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum (for safety). The door will be closed forever.”

Also last month, the U.S. Department of Energy reported the emissions figures for 2010. Emissions “jumped by the biggest amount on record,” the Associated Press reported, meaning that “levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario” anticipated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.

John Reilly, co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) program on climate change, told the Associated Press that scientists have generally found the IPCC predictions to be too conservative—unlike the fringe of denialists who gain public attention. Reilly reported that the IPCC’s worst-case scenario was about in the middle of the MIT scientists’ estimates of likely outcomes.

As these ominous reports were released, the
F
INANCIAL
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IMES
devoted a full page to the optimistic expectations that the U.S. might become energy-independent for a century with new technology for extracting North American fossil fuels.

Though projections are uncertain, the
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INANCIAL
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IMES
reports, the U.S. might “leapfrog Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s largest producer of liquid hydrocarbons, counting both crude oil and lighter natural gas liquids.”

In this happy event, the U.S. could expect to retain its global hegemony. Beyond some remarks about local ecological impact, the
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INANCIAL
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IMES
said nothing about what kind
of a world would emerge from these exciting prospects. Energy is to burn; the global environment be damned.

Just about every government is taking at least halting steps to do something about the likely impending catastrophe. The U.S. is leading the way—backward. The Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives is now dismantling environmental measures introduced by Richard Nixon, in many respects the last liberal president.

This reactionary behavior is one of many indications of the crisis of U.S. democracy in the past generation. The gap between public opinion and public policy has grown to a chasm on central issues of current policy debate such as the deficit and jobs. However, thanks to the propaganda offensive, the gap is less than what it should be on the most serious issue on the international agenda today—arguably in history.

The hypothetical extraterrestrial observers can be pardoned if they conclude that we seem to be infected by some kind of lethal insanity.

RECOGNIZING THE “UNPEOPLE”

January 5, 2012

On June 15, three months after the NATO bombing of Libya began, the African Union (A.U.) presented to the U.N. Security Council the African position on the attack—in reality, bombing by their traditional imperial aggressors: France and Britain, joined by the United States, which initially coordinated the assault, and marginally some other nations.

It should be recalled that there were two interventions. The first, under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, adopted on March 17, 2011, called for a no-fly zone, a cease-fire and measures to protect civilians. After a few moments, that intervention was cast aside as the imperial triumvirate joined the rebel army, serving as its air force.

At the outset of the bombing, the African Union called for efforts at diplomacy and negotiations to try to head off a likely humanitarian catastrophe in Libya. Within the month, the A.U. was joined by the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and others, including the major regional NATO power Turkey.