Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (20 page)

See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist—it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super-exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist—just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic—there’s no reason why it should be a
negative
characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all of the junk that’s produced—that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.

So in this respect, I think you can expect that anti-apartheid moves will be reasonably well supported by the mainstream institutions in the United States. And over the long term, I suspect that apartheid in South Africa will break down—just for functional reasons. Of course, it’s going to be really rough, because white privilege in South Africa is extreme, and the situation of blacks is grotesque. But over time, I assume that the apartheid system will erode—and I think we should press very hard to make that happen: like, one doesn’t turn against the Civil Rights Movement because you realize that business interests are in favor of it. That’s kind of not the point.

Winning the Vietnam War

W
OMAN
: Mr. Chomsky, what’s really going on in Vietnam—is it just the horrible dictatorship it’s portrayed to be, and do you see any prospects at all for social or economic recovery there?

Well, Vietnam’s a pretty tight and autocratic place—but it was obvious that it was going to be that way. Don’t forget, what we did to that country practically wiped it out. You have to bear in mind what
happened
there. Nobody here cares, so nobody studies it carefully, but over the course of the Indochina wars the number of people killed was maybe four million or more. [“Indochina” was the French colony comprising the area of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos; the United States attacked each of those countries in the 1960s and Seventies.] Tens of millions of others were displaced from their homes. Large parts of the country were simply destroyed. There are still thousands and thousands of deaths every year because of our use of chemical weapons—children are born with birth defects, and cancers, and tumors, deformities. I mean, Vietnam suffered the kind of fate there’s nothing to compare to in European history back to the Black Plague. It’ll be a century before they can recover—if then.
  ⁵²

In fact, by about 1970, my own view, and I wrote this at the time, was that either nothing in the region would survive—which was a possibility—or else the only thing that would survive would be North Vietnam, which is a harsh, orthodox Marxist-Leninist regime. And the reason why only North Vietnam would have survived is because under conditions of tremendous violence, the only thing that survives is the toughest people.
  ⁵³

See, libertarian structures are not very resilient—they can easily be wiped out by violence, whereas tough authoritarian structures can often survive that violence; in fact, one of the
effects
of violence is to magnify the power of authoritarian groups. For example, suppose we came under physical attack here—suppose a bunch of gangsters came and wanted to kill us, and we had to find a way to survive. I suspect that what we would do (at least what I would do) is to look for whoever around here is the toughest bastard, and put them in charge—because they’d be the most likely to help us survive. That’s what you do if you want to survive a hostile attack: you subject yourself to power and authority, and to people who know how to fight. That’s in fact the
result
of a hostile attack: the ones left in command at the end are the elements who were capable of surviving, and usually they survived because they’re very violent. Well, our attack on Vietnam was extraordinarily violent, and the more constructive National Liberation Front in South Vietnam just couldn’t survive it, but the tough authoritarian regime of the North could—so it took over.

And because the pressures on them have never let up since the war, if there ever
were
any possibilities for recovery afterwards, the United States has ensured that Vietnam could never do anything with them. Because U.S. policy since the war has been to make Vietnam suffer as much as possible, and to keep them isolated from the rest of the world: it’s what’s called “bleeding Vietnam.”
  ⁵⁴
The Chinese leadership is much more frank about it than we are—for example, Deng Xiaoping [China’s dominant political figure until the 1990s] says straight out that the reason for supporting Pol Pot in Cambodia is that he’s Vietnam’s enemy, and he’ll help us make Vietnam suffer as much as possible. We’re not quite as open about it, but we take basically the same position—and for only slightly different reasons. China wants Vietnam to suffer because they’re an ideological competitor, and they don’t like having an independent state like that on their border; the United States wants them to suffer because we’re trying to increase the difficulty of economic reconstruction in Southeast Asia—so we’ll support Pol Pot through allies like China and Thailand, in order to “bleed” Vietnam more effectively.
  ⁵⁵
[Pol Pot was the Cambodian Khmer Rouge Party leader responsible for a mass slaughter in that country in the mid-1970s.]

I mean, remember what the Vietnam War was fought for, after all. The Vietnam War was fought to prevent Vietnam from becoming a successful model of economic and social development for the Third World. And we don’t want to lose the war, Washington doesn’t want to lose the war. So far we’ve won: Vietnam is no model for development, it’s a model for destruction. But if the Vietnamese could ever pull themselves together somehow, Vietnam could again become such a model—and that’s no good, we always have to prevent that.
  ⁵⁶

The extent of the sadism on this is extraordinary, in fact. For example, India tried to send a hundred buffalo to Vietnam, because the buffalo herds there had been virtually wiped out—Vietnam’s a peasant society, remember, so buffalo mean tractors, fertilizer, and so on; the United States threatened to cut off “Food for Peace” aid to India if they did it. We tried to block Mennonites from sending wheat to Vietnam. We’ve effectively cut off all foreign aid to them over the past twenty years, by pressuring other countries not to give them anything.
  ⁵⁷
And the only purpose of all these things has been to make Vietnam suffer as much as possible, and to prevent them from ever developing—and they’ve just been unable to deal with it. Whatever minuscule hopes they might have had have been eliminated, because they’ve made error after error in terms of economic reconstruction. I mean, in the last couple years, they’ve tried to fool around with liberalizing markets to attract foreign investors and so on, but it’s pretty hard to envision any positive scenario for them.

Look, to try to deal with economic problems in general is not so simple—the United States is doing a rotten job of it, with all the advantages in the world. And to deal with problems of economic reconstruction under conditions of total devastation, and lack of resources, and imposed isolation from the world—that’s very, very hard. I mean, economic development in the West was a very brutal process, and that was under pretty good conditions. For example, the American colonies in the eighteenth century were objectively better off than most Third World countries today—that’s in
absolute
terms, not relative terms, meaning you had to work less to feed yourself, things like that.
  ⁵⁸
And economic development here still was very brutal, even with those enormous advantages. And remember, that was with all of the resources in the world still around to be robbed—nobody has that anymore, they’ve all been robbed already. So there are just real, qualitative differences in the problems of Third World development today—and the Vietnamese have problems far beyond that, problems they simply cannot overcome at this point, as far as I can see.

[Editors’ Note: Official U.S. relations with Vietnam changed in February 1994, as American businesses pressured the government to allow them to join foreign-based corporations that were violating the embargo and making profits off Vietnam.
  ⁵⁹
]

“Genocide”: the United States and Pol Pot

M
AN
: You said that we support Pol Pot in Cambodia through our allies. Isn’t there a chance that there could be another genocide there if the Khmer Rouge gets back in power? I’m terrified of that possibility
.

Yeah, it’s dangerous. What will happen there depends on whether the West continues to support them …

M
AN
: But we may be heading for another genocide
.

Well, look, the business about “genocide” you’ve got to be a little careful about. Pol Pot was obviously a major mass murderer, but it’s not clear that Pol Pot killed very many more people—or even
more
people—than the
United States
killed in Cambodia in the first half of the 1970s. We only talk about “genocide” when other people do the killing. [The U.S. bombed and invaded Cambodia beginning in 1969, and supported anti-Parliamentary right-wing forces in a civil war there which lasted until 1975; Pol Pot ruled the country between 1975 and ’78.]

So there’s a lot of uncertainty about just what the scale was of the Pol Pot massacre, but the best scholarly work in existence today estimates the deaths in Cambodia from all causes during the Pol Pot period in the hundreds of thousands, maybe as much as a million.
  ⁶⁰
Well, just take a look at the killing in Cambodia that happened in the first half of the decade from 1970 to 1975—which is the period that
we’re
responsible for: it was also in the hundreds of thousands.
  ⁶¹

Furthermore, if you really want to be serious about it—let’s say a million people died in the Pol Pot years, let’s take a higher number—it’s worth bearing in mind that when the United States stopped its attacks on inner Cambodia in 1975, American and other Western officials predicted that in the aftermath, about a million more Cambodians would die just from the
effects
of the American war.
  ⁶²
At the time that the United States withdrew from Cambodia, people were dying from starvation in the city of Phnom Penh alone—forget the rest of the country—at the rate of 100,000 a year.
  ⁶³
The last U.S. A.I.D. [Agency for International Development] mission in Cambodia predicted that there would have to be two years of slave labor and starvation before the country could even begin to get moving again.
  ⁶⁴
So while the number of deaths you should attribute to the United States during the Pol Pot period isn’t a simple calculation to make, obviously it’s a lot—when you wipe out a country’s agricultural system and drive a million people out of their homes and into a city as refugees, yeah, a lot of people are going to die. And the responsibility for their deaths is not with the regime that took over afterwards, it’s with the people who
made
it that way.

And in fact, there’s an even more subtle point to be made—but not an insignificant one. That is: why did Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge carry out their massacre in the first place? Well, there’s pretty good evidence that the Khmer Rouge forces took power primarily because they were the only ones who were tough enough bastards to survive the U.S. attacks. And given the destructive psychological effects of the American bombings on the peasant population there, some sort of violent outpouring was fairly predictable—and there was a big element of just plain peasant revenge in what happened.
  ⁶⁵
So the U.S. bombings hit a real peak of ferocity in around 1973, and that’s the same period in which the Pol Pot group started gaining power. The American bombardment was certainly a significant factor, possibly the critical factor, in building up peasant support for the Khmer Rouge in the first place; before that, they had been a pretty marginal element. Okay, if we were honest about the term “genocide,” we would divide up the deaths in the Pol Pot period into a major part which is
our
responsibility, which is the responsibility of the United States.

Heroes and Anti-Heroes

M
AN
: Noam, I have to say, I’m getting a little depressed by all of this negative information—we need it, there’s no question about it, but we also need a certain degree of empowerment. So let me just ask you, who are your heroes?

Well, let me first just make a remark about the “empowerment” point, which comes up again and again. I never know exactly how to respond to it—because it’s just the wrong question. The point is, there are lots of opportunities to do things, and if people do something with them, changes will happen. No matter how you look at it, it seems to me that’s always what it comes down to.

M
AN
: Well, I guess I’m asking about your heroes so that you’ll he a little bit more specific about some of these “opportunities.” For example, who do you really admire when it comes to activism?