Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (56 page)

So if by “left” you mean people who are struggling for peace, and justice, and freedom, and human rights, and for social change, and elimination of authority structures, whether in personal life or in the institutions—if that’s what the left is, there are more of them around than I can remember in my lifetime, at least. A lot more.

M
AN
: There really has been a big change in the culture
.

Yes. If you take almost any area you can think of in life, whether it’s race, or sex, or military intervention, the environment—these are all things that didn’t even
exist
in the 1950s, people didn’t even think they were issues, you just submitted. And people don’t anymore. I mean, if I just look at pictures from the early Sixties, I can hardly believe how disciplined everything was, how deep the authority structures were—even just in personal relations, and in the way you looked and talked when you went out with your friends. Younger people may not always realize it, but life’s a lot easier than it was forty years ago: there’s been a big change, there are a lot of successes to point to.

Look, a lot of this stuff got started over the Vietnam War. Well, in terms of official ideology, all of us who were opposed to the war just lost, flat out: within the mainstream institutions, the only question today is, have the Vietnamese done enough to compensate us for the crimes that they committed against us? That’s the only question you’re allowed to discuss if you want to be a part of the educated culture in the United States. So George Bush can get up and say, “The Vietnamese should understand that we bear them no permanent grudge, we’re not going to make them pay for everything they did to us; if they finally come clean, you know, devote their entire lives and every last resource they have to searching for the remains of one of those people they viciously blew out of the sky, then maybe we’ll allow them entry into the civilized world”—and there won’t be a single editorial writer or columnist who either falls on the floor laughing, or else says, “This guy is worse than the Nazis.” Because that’s the way they all are: the only issue is, will we forgive them for the crimes that they committed against us?
  ⁵⁶
I mean, among the educated sector of the population in the U.S., there is overwhelming opposition to the war—but it’s only on what are called “pragmatic” grounds: namely, we couldn’t get away with it. So: “We tried, we made blundering efforts to do good, but it was a mistake.” Well, at that level, we’ve just lost the entire discussion.

On the other hand, let’s go to the general population: to this day, after twenty-five years of this endless, unremitting propaganda to which no response is ever tolerated, 66 percent of the American population still disagrees with the elite culture—that tells you there’s been a victory at another level. I mean, if two-thirds of the population still says in polls, after all of this brainwashing, that the war was “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake,” well, something got through. And remember, everybody who’s choosing that answer is choosing it all by themselves—because that is not what they hear in the mainstream culture, certainly not from educated people.
  ⁵⁷

And the thing we have to keep in mind is, the people in power know it: they might not want
us
to know it, but they know it. In fact, it’s even clear from their own documents that they know it. For example, a very important early Bush administration planning document on Third World intervention was leaked to the press and published on the day of the ground attack in the Gulf War—by Maureen Dowd, incidentally, who’s basically a gossip columnist for the
New York Times
. It was an inter-agency study on the general world situation, prepared by the C.I.A. and the Pentagon and others during an early stage of the Bush administration, well before the Gulf War. And it had a section on U.S. military intervention, and what they said was: in the case of confrontations with “much weaker enemies”—meaning anybody we’re willing to fight—we must not only defeat them, but we must defeat them “decisively and rapidly,” because anything else will “undercut political support,” which is understood to be extremely thin.
  ⁵⁸

See, their belief is, maybe we can frighten the domestic population and get them to huddle under the flag for a couple days, but unless we get the intervention over with quickly, it’s hopeless—people are going to start to rise up and pressure us to stop it. These people recognize that there can’t be classical interventions anymore—you know, U.S. soldiers slogging it out in Vietnam for years and years—it has to be either clandestine warfare, as in Peru now, where not one American in ten thousand knows there are U.S. troops, or the Panama/Iraq game, with enormous propaganda about the enemy ready to destroy us, and then a quick victory without any fighting.
  ⁵⁹

Well, that’s just a radical difference from the Kennedy period—and that difference reflects major changes in the culture. Powerful people here understand that they do not have the option of carrying out foreign interventions anymore, unless they carry out decisive, rapid victories over totally defenseless enemies, after having first gone to great lengths to demonize them. They certainly recognize that—and that’s a tremendous victory for the left.

And anybody who’s my age or even a little bit younger must also realize that it’s a very different country today—and a much more civilized one. Just look at the issue of the rights of indigenous peoples. When I was a kid, I considered myself a radical-anarchist-this that and the other thing—but I was playing “Cowboys and Indians” with my friends: you know, shoot the Indians. That’s like playing “Aryans and Jews” in Germany—you go out and try to kill the Jews. Well, that lasted for a very long time in the United States, and nobody even noticed anything curious about it.

I mean, just to tell you another story: I live in Lexington, a mainly upper-middle-class professional town near Boston, which is very liberal, everybody votes for the Democrats, they all give to the right causes, and so on. Well, in 1969—the year’s interesting—one of my kids was in fourth grade, and she had a Social Studies textbook about the early history of New England, called
Exploring New England
; the book was centered on a boy named Robert, who was being shown the glories of colonial New England by some older man or something. Well, one day I decided to poke through it, because I was curious about how the authors were going to deal with the colonists’ extermination of the native peoples here. So I turned to the point in the book where they got to the first really major act of genocide in New England, the Pequot Massacre of 1637—when the colonists murdered the Pequot tribe. And to my surprise, it was described quite accurately: the colonists went into the village and slaughtered all the men, women and children, burned everything down, burned out all the Pequots’ crops. Then I got to the bottom line. The bottom line had this boy, Robert, who’s being told all of these things, say: “I wish I were a man and had been there.” In other words, it was a
positive
presentation. That was in 1969, right after the My Lai massacre was exposed.
  ⁶⁰

That would be
inconceivable
today—because there have been very important changes in the culture, and a real increase in civilization. And those changes are largely the result of a lot of very significant activism and organizing over the last couple decades, by people that I would refer to as “honest intellectuals.”

In fact, I think all of this screaming about “Political Correctness” that we hear these days in the elite culture is basically just a tantrum over the fact that it has been impossible to crush all of the dissidence and the activism and the concern that’s developed in the general population in the last thirty years. I mean, it’s not that some of these “P.C.” things they point out aren’t true—yeah, sure, some of them are true. But the real problem is that the huge rightwing effort to retake control of the ideological system didn’t work—and since their mentality is basically totalitarian, any break in their control is considered a huge tragedy: 98 percent control isn’t enough, you have to have 100 percent control; these are totalitarian strains. But they couldn’t get it, especially among the general population. They have not been able to beat back all of the gains of the popular movements since the 1960s, which simply led to a lot of concern about sexism, and racism, and environmental issues, respect for other cultures, and all this other bad stuff. And it’s led to real hysteria among elites, so you get this whole P.C. comedy.

I mean, right now the universities are all flooded with Olin Professorships of Free Enterprise [endowed by the conservative Olin Foundation], there are glossy right-wing magazines handed out free to every student—and these are not just right-wing, but
crazy
right-wing. Meanwhile, everybody’s screaming about how the left has taken over. And that’s all just out of hysteria that they haven’t gotten back total control—in fact, they’ve probably lost most of the population by now. And there’s no reason to think that those changes have ended—I think there’s every reason to think that they could go a lot further, and ultimately lead to changes in the institutions.

Again, people just have to remember: there is nothing in the mainstream culture that is ever going to tell you you’ve succeeded—they’re always going to tell you you’ve failed. I mean, the official view of the Sixties is that it was a bunch of crazies running around burning down the universities and making noise, because they were hysterics, or because they were afraid to go to Vietnam or something—that’s the official story, and that’s what people always hear from the intellectual culture. They may know from their own lives and experience that that’s not what really happened, but they never hear anybody saying it: that’s not the message the system is always pouring into you through television, and radio, and newspapers, and books, and histories, and so on and so forth. It’s beating into your head another story—that you failed, and that you
should
have failed, because you were just a bunch of crazies.

And of course, it’s natural that the official culture
would
take that view: it does not want people to understand that you can make changes, that’s the last thing it wants people to understand. So if there have been changes, it’s because “We the elites are so great that we carried through the changes.” When they bow to pressures, they’re going to present that as their benevolence. Like, “We ended slavery because we were such great moral figures that we decided we didn’t like slavery”—but the cause is gone, the slave revolts and the Abolitionist movement are gone.

And we’ve seen that on a not-so-trivial scale in the last thirty years with regard to the Sixties movements. There’s been something close to a revolutionary change in moral values and cultural level in the general population, but since that change has taken place without any lasting institutional effects, the intellectual culture can just keep pounding home its moral: “You guys are worthless, you can’t do anything—why don’t you just shut up and go home.” That’s what they’re always going to tell us, and we should try to remember that.

8

Popular Struggle

Based on discussions in Massachusetts, Maryland, Ontario, California, and Wyoming in 1989 and between 1993 and 1996
.

Discovering New Forms of Oppression

M
AN
: Dr. Chomsky, some of your examples just reemphasize for me how power is not with popular opinion. I’m wondering, what do you think should happen if power ever gets back into popular hands?

Well, it wouldn’t be “back,” because it never was there. But I think what we want to do is to extend the domains of popular power in as many areas as possible. In fact, a large part of human history is just that: a struggle to extend the domains of popular power and to break down centers of concentrated power.

Take the American Revolution, for example. There was kind of an ideological structure behind it, and that ideological structure was in part libertarian. So if you really took the rhetoric seriously—and to some extent the eighteenth-century Jeffersonians did, it wasn’t nothing—what you wanted to do was to break down concentrations of power and to create a society of essentially equal participants. Now of course, their sense of “equal participants” included only a very small part of the population: white male property-owners. Today we would call that a reversion to Nazism, and rightly so. I mean, suppose some Third World country came out saying that a part of the population is only three-fifths human—that’s in the U.S. Constitution, in fact.
  ¹
That would be unacceptable.

So the American Constitution was basically for white male property-owners, because they’re the only ones who are real people—but the idea was supposed to be that
they’re
more or less equal, and therefore you want to break down the concentrations of power that are oppressing them. Well, in those days that meant Church power, state power, the feudal system, and so on—and what you were supposed to get was this egalitarian society for “the People,” equals white male property-owners.

Well, it didn’t work out that way, even for the white male property-owners, but that was the picture behind it. And to some extent it was achieved—some forms of centralized power
were
in fact dissolved. And the course of American history since then has just gone on from there. In the nineteenth century, concentrated power began to be located in corporations—that’s another center of power that now has to be dissolved, and if you’re an eighteenth-century-style libertarian, that’s what your main critique will be of today.