Noam Chomsky over Obama

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Interview to Noam Chomsky by Vincent Navarro
Published
by
victoria
on Juliol 18, 2008
in English, Internacional i EUA
.

For the Progressive Summer University of Catalonia (UPEC).
Interviewed by Vincent Navarro. at M.I.T., Cambridge, Massachusetts,
on May 13, 2008. Vincent Navarro is Professor of Public Policy at the
Pompeu Fabra University, and The Johns Hopkins University.

Vincent Navarro: Thank you so much for welcoming us here.

Noam Chomsky: Delighted to have a chance to talk to you.

VN: We are here on behalf of the Summer Progressive University of
Catalonia. As I told you before the interview, the University’s
intention is to recover the history of Catalonia, recalling the time
during the thirties when workers and academics would get together in
the summer to discuss matters of interest to them. This was, of
course, forbidden during the Franco dictatorship. When the left-wing
parties regained the government of Catalonia in 2003, they renewed
this commitment to restarting the Summer Progressive University. We
would have liked you to give the inaugural address for this reopening.
I’m sorry you couldn’t make it. We hope you will come to visit us
there some day.

NC: I hope so.

VN: I want to chat with you about yourself and about the United
States. Outside the United States you are the best-known U.S.
intellectual, and most people outside the country are not fully aware
of what it means that the best-known U.S. intellectual seldom appears
in the U.S. media. So, when we watch the major TV channels – CBS, NBC,
and the many other channels – you are never there. Many people do not
understand this, because the United States is frequently idealized and
presented as an extremely dynamic, active democracy, and they do not
fully realize how much the left is discriminated against in the United
States. This discrimination occurs even within the left of the liberal
establishment. How do you respond to this? How do you explain this
discrimination in most forums?
NC: I should say that the place where I am most feared and despised is
probably in left liberal intellectual circles. If you want to see a
graphic indication of this, take a look at one of my favorite journal
covers, which is framed and posted right outside my door. It’s the
more or less official journal of left liberal intellectuals, The
American Prospect, and the cover depicts the terrible circumstances in
which they try to survive – the enormous forces that are virtually
destroying them.

In the picture, two figures are depicted; two faces, sneering and
angry. On one side is Dick Cheney and the Pentagon, on the other side
is me. The left liberal intellectuals are caught between these two
huge forces. This depiction is indicative of the paranoia and concern
that there might be some small break in orthodoxy. The liberal
intellectuals (and not just in the United States) are typically the
guardians at the gates: we’ll go this far, but not one millimeter
farther; and it’s terrifying to think that somebody might go a
millimeter farther. This extends throughout the major media too. So,
yes, the United States is a very free country, in fact it’s the freest
country in the world. I don’t think freedom of speech, for example, is
protected anywhere in the world as much as it is here. But it’s a very
managed society, it’s a business-run society, carefully managed, with
strict doctrinal requirements and no deviation tolerated – this would
be too dangerous.

One of the reasons it’s too dangerous is that the political
establishment, both political parties and the political class, is, on
many major issues, well to the right of the population. On health
care, for example, which you’ve written about for decades, the
population is to the left of the establishment, and has been so
forever. And the same is true for many other issues. So, permitting
issues to be discussed is threatening, and permitting deviation from a
kind of party line is dangerous and has to be carefully controlled.

So, yes, this is a very free country, but at the same time there’s a
very rigid ideology.
VN: But this is surprising because, from outside the United States,
one has the impression the country has a very secure, stable political
system. One would think that, with such powerful political and media
establishments, they could afford to allow more critical voices in the
media.

NC: Yes!

VN: It’s as if they are afraid of critical voices, such as your voice.

NC: Yes, I think they are afraid. There’s a terrible fear that a
slight deviation might lead to disaster. It’s a typical totalitarian
mentality. You have to control everything. If anything is out of
control, it’s a disaster. And, in fact, the stability of U.S. society
is not so obvious. It requires a lot of suppression – the Pentagon
Papers are quite interesting in this respect. The Pentagon Papers are
not declassified documents. Getting access to them is like stealing
the archives; it’s like conquering a country and stealing the
archives. The information wasn’t intended for the public. There are a
few interesting things in the Pentagon papers that are suppressed –
not formally, but in effect. The most interesting is the account at
the very end – the period they cover ends in mid-1968, right after the
Tet offensive in January 1968, which convinced the business classes
that the war was too costly, not worth pursuing. But, in those next
few months there was an attempt by the government to send an extra
200,000 troops to Vietnam, to raise the troop level to almost
three-quarters of a million. There was a debate on this, as discussed
in the Pentagon papers, and they decided not to do it. The reason was
that they feared that if they did so, they would need the troops for
civil disorder control in the United States. There would be an
uprising of unprecedented proportions among young people, women,
minorities, the poor, and so on. They barely had things under control
at home, and any move might have led to an uprising. And this
continues. You cannot let the population get out of control. It has to
be tightly disciplined.

One of the reasons for the extraordinary pressure of consumerism,
which goes back to the 1920s, is the recognition by the business world
that unless it atomizes people, unless it drives them to what it calls
the “superficial things of life, such as fashionable consumption,” the
population may turn on them. Right now, for example, about 80% of the
U.S. population believes that the country is, in their words, run by
“a few big interests looking out for themselves,” not for the benefit
of the population. About 95% of the population thinks that the
government ought to pay regular attention to public opinion. The
degree of alienation from institutions is enormous. As long as people
are atomized, worried about maxing out their credit cards, separated
from one another, and don’t hear serious critical discussion, the
ideas can be controlled.

VN: Another thing that happens abroad is the idealization of the U.S.
system by the European media. For example, the presidential primaries
are being portrayed in the European media as a sign of the vitality of
U.S. democracy. And the Obama phenomenon is presented as being
responsible for the mobilization of the masses. This is so contrary to
the reality. But how do you explain this idealization of the American
political scene that is so common in Europe?

NC: People have these illusions, and you have to ask, what is the
source of these illusions? But it’s clear what has happened, and the
establishment understands it very well.
For example, on one day, called Super Tuesday, February 5th, there are
a couple of dozen primaries, so there’s big excitement. Take a look at
the Wall Street Journal: its front page story on Super Tuesday, with a
big headline, reads: “Issues recede in ’08 Contest as Voters Focus on
Character.” Shortly after, a poll appeared, which I did not see
reported, finding that three-fourths of the public want coverage of
candidates’ positions on issues. Exactly the opposite of the standard
doctrine, expressed in the headline. That’s not new. The same has been
true in earlier elections But issues are carefully kept out of sight
by the party managers. It’s not true that voters prefer character over
issues. Voters would be perfectly happy to vote for the national
health care system that they’ve wanted for decades. It’s just that
those things aren’t options. The party managers – or, basically, the
public relations industry that sells commodities on television and
markets candidates in the same way that they market commodities. When
you see an ad on television, you don’t expect to learn anything from
it. If we had a free market of the kind economists discuss, in which
informed consumers make rational choices, General Motors would post on
television the characteristics of the cars they’re selling. They don’t
do that. What they do is try to create illusions, using complicated
graphics, a famous actress driving up to heaven, or something like
that. The point is to delude and marginalize the public, so that
uninformed consumers will make irrational choices. When you market
candidates, it’s the same thing – keep away from the issues, that’s
too dangerous because the public doesn’t agree with you on the issues.
So what you have is character, trivialities, personal issues –
somebody’s pastor says something, Clinton made a mistake when she
talked about Bosnia. The Pew research foundation released a study of
press coverage of the primaries. The top story was Rev. Jeremy
Wright’s sermons. Second was the role of the “superdelegates.” Third
was whether Obama misformulated his comment about “bitterness” of the
electorate over the economy. And on down to the tenth story about
Clinton’s misstatement concerning Bosnia. All of the top stories
listed were about marginal irrelevancies. None brought up the stand of
the candidates on any issue – what the vast majority of the public
wants to hear. You know, anything but the issues. So the population
just doesn’t know what the issues are, and this is quite obvious.

Popular opinion in the United States has been very well studied,
mainly because the business classes, who run the country, want to have
their finger on the public pulse – for the purpose of control and
propaganda. You can only hope to control people’s attitudes and
opinions if you know a lot about them, so we know a lot about public
opinion. In the last election, 2004, most Bush voters were mistaken
about his views on major issues – not because they’re stupid or
uninterested, but because the elections are a marketing system. This
is a business-run society: you market commodities, you market
candidates. The public are the victims and they know it, and that’s
why 80% think, more or less accurately, that the country is run by a
few big interests looking after themselves. So people are not deluded,
they just don’t really see any choices.

The Obama phenomenon is an interesting reaction to this. Obama’s
handlers, the campaign managers, have created an image that is
essentially a blank slate. In the Obama campaign the words are hope,
change, unity – totally vacuous slogans said by a nice person, who
looks good and talks nicely – what commentators call “soaring
rhetoric” – and you can write anything you like on that blank slate. A
lot of people are writing on it their hopes for progressive change. In
the campaign, as the Wall Street Journal correctly notes, issues have
received little attention. Personal characteristics are the key
element. It’s character that’s up front.

But, yes, the support for Obama is a popular phenomenon, and I think
it reflects the alienation of the population from the institutions.
People are grasping at a straw: here’s a possibility that maybe
somebody will stand up for what they want. Even though he’s not saying
so, he looks like the kind of person who might do it. It’s quite
interesting to look at the comparisons that are made. Obama is
compared to John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan – Kennedy and Reagan
were media constructions, Reagan particularly. He probably didn’t even
know what the policies were, but he was a creation of the media. He
wasn’t particularly popular, incidentally, but the media created the
image of this wonderful cowboy who would save us, and so on and so forth.

The Kennedy administration was more in control; they were the first
ruling group to understand the power of television and they created a
kind of charisma through good public relations: the image of Camelot,
this marvelous place, with wonderful things happening, and a great
president. When you look at the actual actions, it’s grotesque.
Kennedy is the president who invaded South Vietnam and launched a
major terrorist war against Cuba, and we could go on and on about it.
His administration was responsible for establishment of the Brazilian
neo-Nazi dictatorship. The coup took place right after Kennedy’s
assassination, but the ground was prepared by the Kennedys and led to
a horrible plague of repression over Latin America, and on and on. But
the image of Camelot is there, and imagery is very important when you
are trying to control a dissident population.

Actually, the United States is far from a fascist country, that’s a
bad analogy. But the similarity to fascist propaganda techniques is
quite striking, and it’s not accidental. The Nazis explicitly,
consciously, and openly adopted the techniques of American commercial
advertising, and said so. They took a few simple ideas, stressed them
over and over again, and made them look glamorous – that was the
technique of American commercial advertising in the 1920s and it was
the model that the Nazis explicitly adopted, and it’s the model of
business propaganda today.

So, yes, the Obama phenomenon, I think, reflects the alienation of the
population that you find in the polls: 80% say the country is run by a
few big interests. While Obama says we are going to change that,
there’s no indication of what the change is going to be. In fact, the
financial institutions, which are his major contributors, think he’s
fine, so there’s no indication of any change. But if you say “change,”
people will grasp at it; you say “change” and “hope,” and people will
grasp at this and say, OK, maybe this is the savior who will bring
about what we want, even though there is no evidence for it.

VN: Sure.

NC: So I think the Obama phenomenon and people’s alienation go hand in
hand.

VN: What would be the difference between a McCain administration and
an Obama administration?

NC: McCain is another example of very effective propaganda-creation
imagery. I mean, suppose there was a Russian pilot who was bombing
civilian targets in Afghanistan and was shot down and tortured by the
American-run Islamic fanatic terrorists there. Would we say he’s a war
hero? Would we say he’s an expert in strategic and security issues,
because he was a bomber of civilian targets? We wouldn’t. But this is
the image that’s been created of McCain. His heroism and his expertise
and strategy are based on the fact that he was bombing people from
30,000 feet and he was shot down. It’s not nice that he was tortured,
it shouldn’t have happened, it was a crime, and so on. But that
doesn’t make him a war hero or a specialist in foreign policy. That’s
all a public relations creation. The public relations industry is a
huge industry, very sophisticated. Probably something like a sixth of
the gross domestic product goes into marketing, advertising, and so
on, and that’s a core element of society. It’s the way you keep people
separated from one another, subdued, and focused on something else.
And this is explicit and, as I say, it’s all discussed in public
relations propaganda.

VN: Would you foresee any difference between McCain and Obama
administrations in terms of foreign policy?

NC: Yes. McCain may be worse than Bush. He doesn’t say much, because
you’re not supposed to say much about issues, but the few things he
has said are pretty frightening. He could be a real loose cannon.

VN: Could you explain the sympathy that Europe has toward Obama?

NC: I suppose Europeans are also writing what they want on the blank
slate. And it’s no secret that they feared and disliked Bush. The
American establishment itself was afraid of Bush. Bush came under
unprecedented criticism even from officials of the Reagan
administration, and from the mainstream generally. For example, when
his national security strategy was announced in September 2002,
calling for preventive war, virtually announcing a war in Iraq,
immediately, within weeks, there was a major article in Foreign
Affairs (the main establishment journal) condemning what they called
the New Imperial Grand Strategy – not on principle, but because it
would be harmful to the United States. And there has been a lot of
criticism of the Bush administration as extremist, if not at the far
extreme of radical nationalism, and McCain is probably in the same
territory. Obama very likely would move back to the center right where
the Clinton administration was.
The Bush doctrine itself, the doctrine of preventive war – you know,
brazen contempt for our allies and so on – is an interesting example.
The doctrine, however, was not new. Clinton’s doctrine was even worse,
taken literally. Clinton’s doctrine officially was that the United
States has the right to use force to protect access to markets and
resources, and that’s more extreme than the Bush doctrine. But the
Clinton administration presented it politely, quietly, not in a way
that would alienate our allies. The Europeans couldn’t pretend they
didn’t hear it – of course they knew it and, in fact, European leaders
probably approved of it. But the arrogance, brazenness, extremism, and
ultra-nationalism of the Bush administration did offend the mainstream
center in the United States and Europe. So, there’s a more polite way
of following the same policies.

VN: Do you see room for the left in the United States at some point?

NC: I think this country presents an enormous opportunity for
organizers. You see this if you look at public opinion, which is very
well studied. Your own work on people’s opinion on national health
programs shows that people want such a program in the United States.
If we had a functioning democracy, the United States would have had a
national health care system decades ago. The public has always wanted
it. The same is true in foreign policy. Take Iran, the next big issue
coming along. Every presidential candidate, including Obama, says we
must maintain the threat of force against Iran, keep the options open.
It happens to be in violation of the U.N. Charter, but elite opinion
takes for granted that the United States should be an outlaw state so
nobody comments on that. But this is not what the public wants. The
large majority of the public says we should not make threats, we
should enter into diplomacy. The large majority, about 75%, of the
public, holds that Iran has the same rights as any signer of the
non-proliferation treaty: the right to enrich uranium for nuclear
power but not for nuclear weapons. And, strikingly, a very large
majority of the public thinks we should support a nuclear-weapons-free
zone in the region, including Iran, Israel, and the American forces
deployed there. That happens to be Iranian official policy, too, and,
in fact, the United States and England are officially committed to
this position, though the facts are unmentionable. When the U.S.-U.K.
tried to construct a thin legal cover for their invasion of Iraq, they
appealed to U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 in 1991, which called
on Iraq to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction, and they claimed
it had not done so. That much was publicized, but not the fact that
the same Resolution commits the signers to move to establish a
nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East (Article 14). But no
candidate can even mention this possibility. If the United States were
a functioning democracy in which public opinion influenced policy, the
very dangerous confrontation with Iran might well be settled peacefully.

Also, consider Cuba. For 45 years the United States has been dedicated
to punishing Cubans – we have the internal documents from the Kennedys
and so on to show it. We’ve got to punish the Cuban people because of
their “successful defiance” of U.S. policies going back to the Monroe
Doctrine of 1823. The Monroe Doctrine established the United States’
right to run the hemisphere. The Cubans are successfully defying that,
so the population must be punished by a very substantial war, a
terrorist war. This aim wasn’t concealed. Arthur Schlesinger, the
semi-official biographer of Robert Kennedy and a Kennedy adviser, says
that Robert Kennedy was put in charge of bringing “the terrors of the
earth” to Cuba. This was his prime responsibility. They were fanatical
about it – also about bringing economic strangulation to punish the
Cuban population for its misdeed. What does the U.S. public think
about this? In polls taken since the 1970s, about two-thirds of the
public says we should enter into normal diplomatic relations with
Cuba, just as the rest of the world does. But the fanaticism of the
establishment includes the whole spectrum here – the Kennedys, the
ones who started it, along with others. No political candidate will
ever mention it.

The same is true for a host of other issues. So, as I say, the United
States should be an organizer’s paradise. I think the possibilities
for the left are extraordinary, and that’s one reason for the clamping
down on opinion, on expression of attitudes, and so on. And, in fact,
the country has a pretty activist population. There are now probably
more people involved in activism on one serious issue or another than
in the 1960s. It’s just kind of subdued, and atomized. There are many
popular movements that never existed in the past. Take, say, the
solidarity movements with the third world: that’s something totally
new in the history of European Imperialism, and it came from
mainstream America in the 1980s. Rural churches, evangelicals, people
from the mainstream, thousands of people, were going to Central
America to live with the victims of Reagan’s terrorist wars, to help
them, to try to protect them, and so on; and this was thousands or
tens of thousands of people. One of my daughters is still there, in
Nicaragua. This has never happened before in the history of
Imperialism. Nobody from France went to live in an Algerian village to
help the people, to protect them from French atrocities. It wasn’t
even an option that was considered, during the Indochina wars either,
apart from a very scattered few. But in the 1980s this developed
spontaneously – not in the elite centers, so you didn’t find it in
Boston, but in rural Kansas and Arizona, and it’s now spread all over
the world. So you have Christian peace-keepers, and heaven knows who
else. Another very important new development is the international
global justice movement, which is called, ridiculously,
“anti-globalization.”

The propaganda says that the so-called anti-globalization movement
began in Seattle. It didn’t. It began in the third world. When
hundreds of thousands of Indian peasants storm the parliament, that’s
not a fact – only if people do something in a Northern city is it a
fact. So the mass popular movements in Brazil and India, and so on,
didn’t exist until a Northern city became involved. But it did become
involved, and the movement has now spread over much of the North as
well all over the South.

VN: The “anti-globalization” movement has indeed been a splendid
movement. But sometimes there’s a feeling that maybe it’s stuck and
paralyzed. What do you think about the idea of establishing a Fifth
International, or some form of organization that could come up with an
alternative to the current worldwide system?

NC: I’ve talked at the meetings of the World Social Forum, which are
always in the South, and I’ve mentioned that this movement may carry
the seeds of a real International and, in my view, the first real
International. What was called the First International was important,
but it was highly localized. It was part of Europe, and it was
essentially destroyed by Marx when he couldn’t control it. The Second
International collapsed before the Second World War. The Third
International was taken over as a propaganda institution by the Soviet
Union. And the Fourth International was marginal Trotskyite .
But this is the first authentic International, or at least it seems
so. I don’t mean just the World Social Forum, but, say, the Via
Campesina. The last time I went to Puerto Alegre in Brazil, to attend
the World Social Forum, the first place I visited was the
international meeting of the Via Campesina, the international
peasants’ organization. It was very lively, very exciting. It
represents most of the population of the world, and it was really
exciting to be there. The World Social Forum, too. This is authentic
globalization. These are people from all over the world, all spheres
of life, interacting, discussing, and going back home and trying to
implement ideas about social change.

I don’t know whether the new International will fail. Perhaps. But its
failure would raise the level of action for the next try. So I think
it makes sense, what you say. We may see the seeds of the first
authentic International, constituted by popular classes from all over,
trying to overcome the extraordinary alienation that people everywhere
are feeling, in the United States and elsewhere – the feeling that the
institutions don’t work for us, that they work for someone else. These
groups may mobilize and organize, using the freedoms that we do enjoy.
That’s a very significant prospect.

VN: One thing that is very worrisome is the Americanization of
European politics, which I think is happening everywhere. Even the
European left has lost its language. For example, even left-wing
leaders do not speak about the working class, but about the middle
class. Class struggle has completely disappeared from left-wing
discourse. So there is a very worrisome development: American
political language is now appearing in Europe, coinciding with the
enormous weakness of the left.

This Americanization of European political life seems paradoxical,
because it is happening at the same time that U.S. influence is
declining in the world. Europe is becoming more and more like the
United States. Political parties, for example, have lost their potency
and value. Rather than political parties, what we see is leaders’
media networks. And politics becomes a show, a theatrical show. As you
said earlier in our conversation, slogans are presented without any
meaning. How do you explain that, at a time when U.S. influence is
declining, the cultural and political values of the U.S. establishment
are becoming very dominant in Europe?

NC: That’s a large topic, but let’s just pick a few elements. If you
look over a longer historical sweep, Europe was the most savage and
brutal region of the world for centuries. Establishing the
nation-state system in Europe was a program of mass murder and
destruction. In the 17th century, probably 40% of the population of
Germany was wiped out by war. In the course of this savagery and
brutality, Europe created a culture of savagery and a technology of
savagery that enabled it to conquer the world. For example, Britain is
a little island off the coast of Europe, but it dominated the world.
And the rest of Europe didn’t exactly have nice policies. A small
country like Belgium was able to kill probably 10 million people in
the Congo.

This, of course, was associated with racist arrogance of the most
extreme kind. And it finally culminated in two world wars. Since the
Second World War, Europe has been at peace, not because Europeans
became pacifists, but because there was a realization that the next
time they played the traditional game of slaughtering each other they
would wipe out the world. They’ve created such a culture of savagery
and technology of destruction that that game is over.

The Second World War was also a sharp shift of global power. The
United States had been the most powerful economy in the world for a
long time, far stronger than Europe, but it was not a major player in
world affairs. It dominated the Western hemisphere and there were
forays into the Pacific, but it was second to England and even France.

The Second World War changed all that. The United States profited
enormously from the war, and the rest of the world was seriously
harmed and destroyed. The war ended the Depression, and industrial
production practically quadrupled. The United States ended the war
possessing literally half the wealth of the world and with
incomparable security and military force, and planners knew it. They
planned for global domination in which the exercise of sovereignty by
other countries would not be tolerated. The plans were developed and
implemented. In Europe, at the end of the war, there was a wave of
radical democracy, anti-fascism, the resistance, workers’ control –
some of which was quite significant — and the first task of the United
States and Britain, the conquerors, was to crush it. So in country
after country, Japan as well, the first task of the liberators,
so-called, was to crush the resistance to fascism and restore the
traditional order. Maybe not under the same name, but often under the
same leaders. It was a battle that didn’t happen overnight. For
example, Italy was probably the main target of CIA subversion, at
least into the 1970s when the record runs dry, to try to prevent
Italian democracy, because this would have meant a big role for the
labor movement, which couldn’t be tolerated. It gradually sank in:
European elites had to accept a position in which the United States
would take over their traditional role of running the world by
savagery and barbarism, and they would accept part of the gains that
would come to the United States from global domination.

It’s not that the radical democrats lost entirely in Europe – they did
gain a measure of social democracy. In fact, Europeans live better
that Americans in many respects: they’re healthier, they’re taller,
they have more leisure. The United States, especially since the 1970s,
has about the highest number of work hours in the industrial world,
about the lowest wages, the worst benefits, and the worst health
outcomes. Even if we just look at height: when an American goes to
Europe, the first thing that strikes you is how tall everybody is, and
it’s literally true. So Europe has had many gains from its subordinate
position – let the United States take the lead in destroying,
massacring, and so on – and a kind of complacency has set in. There’s
almost a sigh of relief: after centuries of savagery and barbarism,
we’ll relax and follow somebody else, let them do it, and we’ll just
enjoy the benefits from that.

The political classes, the business classes, and so on, don’t have any
objection to this. What you call Americanization is really the spread
of business control. The business classes are quite happy. They’re
closely integrated. There is some conflict, but they are really
closely integrated with the United States.

If you look at the conflict, that is interesting. We supposedly have a
free market, or so the ideology says. In fact, we have a state-based
economic system. The dynamism of the high-tech economy comes largely
from the state sector, places like where we are sitting right now
[Massachusetts Institute of Technology], and then it’s handed over to
private capital to exploit. Sometimes it becomes almost comical. One
of the leading exports is civilian aircraft. The civilian aircraft
industry is now dominated by two companies, Airbus and Boeing, and
they are constantly having battles in the World Trade Organization as
to which one gets greater state subsidies. In fact, they are both
offshoots of state power. In the United States, commercial aircraft
are largely an offshoot of the Air Force and aerospace, and wouldn’t
exist without it.

In Europe the civilian aircraft industry has massive state subsidies.
Recently, great horror was expressed in the United States over the
fact that Airbus won a contract to refuel planes for the U.S. Air
Force. Take a look at the contract and you’ll see it’s integrated: a
U.S. company working together with Airbus. That’s what we call a free
market: state-based industries integrated with one another. But for
the European business classes and American business classes this is an
acceptable arrangement, and since they largely dominate their
societies, it’s OK. It’s what the propaganda and the doctrine say, too.
I suspect that, underneath the surface, a class struggle still exists
and is understood, and is ready to burst out at any moment. It’s true
you’re not supposed to talk about it. One of my daughters teaches in a
state college that has students from relatively poor families whose
aspirations are to be a nurse or a policeman, or something like that,
for the most part. In her first class she asks them to identify
themselves, their class background, give a classifying word. Most of
them have never heard this, you’re not supposed to use that word. The
answers that she gets are “underclass” or “middle class.” If your
father has job as a janitor somewhere, you’re middle class. If your
father is in jail, you’re underclass. Those are the two classes.
That’s an ideological trap. The understanding that class has something
to do with who gives the orders and who follows them has been driven
out of consciousness, at least on the surface. But it is there, right
below. As soon as you talk to working-class people, they respond quite
promptly because they feel it.

VN: Thank you. I had promised not to take too much of your time. Just
one last question, a personal one. A lot of people in the world thank
you so much for the work you do, but where do you get your strength?
How do you carry on? Here you are, in the center of the Empire,
speaking quite clearly to the powerful forces and being silenced,
ostracized, marginalized. Meanwhile, all over the world, people admire
you, read your work, find it extremely helpful.

NC: I don’t feel marginalized in the United States. When I get home
tonight I will spend five hours answering e-mail, and probably several
dozen letters will be invitations.

VN: I meant marginalized by the power structures.

NC: I don’t care about the power structures, that’s not where I live.
If I wasn’t their enemy I’d think something was wrong. That’s why I
have that picture of the magazine cover [The American Prospect] I
described earlier so prominently displayed.

VN: It’s the best way to indicate you’re doing the right thing.

NC: Yes, that I’m doing the right thing. It’s partly that. But what
keeps me working is things that are illustrated by some of those
photographs over there [pointing]. One shows the worst labor massacre,
probably in history. In Chile, a century ago, in Iquique, miners
worked the mines under indescribable conditions. They and their
families marched about thirty kilometers to the town to ask for a
slight increase in wages. The British mine owners welcomed them,
showed them into a schoolyard, allowed them to begin their meeting,
and then brought in soldiers and machine-gunned them all: men, women,
children. Nobody knows how many were killed – you don’t count the
number of people that we kill – maybe thousands. It was a century
before there was any commemoration of this. That [shown in the
photograph] is a small monument, which I saw last year; it was put up
by young people who are just beginning to break out of the iron grip
of the dictatorship. It’s not just Pinochet. Chile has a bitter
history of state violence and repression. But now they’re breaking
out. So, yes, the atrocity took place, and now they begin to pay
attention to it.
That one over there [pointing] is – you know what it is, of course – a
painting given to me by a Jesuit priest. On one side, Archbishop
Romero, who was assassinated in 1980. In front of him, six leading
intellectuals, Jesuit priests, who had their brains blown out in 1989
by U.S.-run terrorist forces who had already compiled a hideous record
of massacre of the usual victims. And the Angel of Death, standing
over them. That event captures Reagan – not the cheerful uncle. That’s
the reality of the 1980s. I just put it there to remind myself of the
real world. But it’s been an interesting “Rorschach” test. Almost no
one from the United States knows what it is; because we’re responsible
for the massacre, we don’t know. People from Europe, maybe 10% know
what it is. From South America, I’d say, everyone knows what it is.
Until recently. By now, young people often don’t know because they,
too, are having history driven out of their heads. History and reality
are too dangerous. On the other hand, they’re now coming back. The
Iquique commemoration was mostly initiated by young people, rising up,
wanting to recover the past, recover idealism, and do something about
it. So that’s enough, I would say, more than enough, to keep me going.

VN: Thank you. It has been great. You have a standing invitation to
come to Barcelona and Catalonia. Thank you on behalf of millions of
people.

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