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"I
will never apologise for the United States of America — I don't care what the
facts are."
President
George Bush Sr.
SITTING
in my home in New Delhi, watching an American TV news channel promote itself
("We report. You decide."), I imagine Noam Chomsky's amused,
chipped-tooth smile.
Everybody
knows that authoritarian regimes, regardless of their ideology, use the mass
media for propaganda. But what about democratically elected regimes in the
"free world"?
Today,
thanks to Noam Chomsky and his fellow media analysts, it is almost axiomatic
for thousands, possibly millions, of us that public opinion in "free
market" democracies is manufactured just like any other mass market
product — soap, switches, or sliced bread. We know that while, legally and
constitutionally, speech may be free, the space in which that freedom can be
exercised has been snatched from us and auctioned to the highest bidders.
Neoliberal capitalism isn't just about the accumulation of capital (for
some). It's also about the accumulation of power (for some), the accumulation
of freedom (for some). Conversely, for the rest of the world, the people who
are excluded from neoliberalism's governing body, it's about the erosion of
capital, the erosion of power, the erosion of freedom. In the
"free" market, free speech has become a commodity like everything
else — — justice, human rights, drinking water, clean air. It's available
only to those who can afford it. And naturally, those who can afford it use
free speech to manufacture the kind of product, confect the kind of public
opinion, that best suits their purpose. (News they can use.) Exactly how they
do this has been the subject of much of Noam Chomsky's political writing.
Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major
Italian newspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses.
"[T]he prime minister in effect controls about 90 per cent of Italian TV
viewership," reports the Financial Times. What price free speech? Free
speech for whom? Admittedly, Berlusconi is an extreme example. In other
democracies — the United States in particular — media barons, powerful
corporate lobbies, and government officials are imbricated in a more
elaborate, but less obvious, manner. (George Bush Jr.'s connections to the
oil lobby, to the arms industry, and to Enron, and Enron's infiltration of
U.S. government institutions and the mass media — all this is public
knowledge now.)
After
the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes in New York and Washington, the
mainstream media's blatant performance as the U.S. government's mouthpiece,
its display of vengeful patriotism, its willingness to publish Pentagon press
handouts as news, and its explicit censorship of dissenting opinion became
the butt of some pretty black humour in the rest of the world.
Then
the New York Stock Exchange crashed, bankrupt airline companies appealed to
the government for financial bailouts, and there was talk of circumventing
patent laws in order to manufacture generic drugs to fight the anthrax scare
(much more important, and urgent of course, than the production of generics
to fight AIDS in Africa). Suddenly, it began to seem as though the twin myths
of Free Speech and the Free Market might come crashing down alongside the
Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
But
of course that never happened. The myths live on.
There
is however, a brighter side to the amount of energy and money that the
establishment pours into the business of "managing" public opinion.
It suggests a very real fear of public opinion. It suggests a persistent and
valid worry that if people were to discover (and fully comprehend) the real
nature of the things that are done in their name, they might act upon that
knowledge. Powerful people know that ordinary people are not always
reflexively ruthless and selfish. (When ordinary people weigh costs and
benefits, something like an uneasy conscience could easily tip the scales.)
For this reason, they must be guarded against reality, reared in a controlled
climate, in an altered reality, like broiler chickens or pigs in a pen.
Those
of us who have managed to escape this fate and are scratching about in the
backyard, no longer believe everything we read in the papers and watch on TV.
We put our ears to the ground and look for other ways of making sense of the
world. We search for the untold story, the mentioned-in-passing military
coup, the unreported genocide, the civil war in an African country written up
in a one-column-inch story next to a full-page advertisement for lace
underwear.
We
don't always remember, and many don't even know, that this way of thinking,
this easy acuity, this instinctive mistrust of the mass media, would at best
be a political hunch and at worst a loose accusation, if it were not for the
relentless and unswerving media analysis of one of the world's greatest
minds. And this is only one of the ways in which Noam Chomsky has radically
altered our understanding of the society in which we live. Or should I say,
our understanding of the elaborate rules of the lunatic asylum in which we
are all voluntary inmates?
Speaking
about the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, President George
W. Bush called the enemies of the United States "enemies of
freedom". "Americans are asking why do they hate us?" he said.
"They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech,
our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."
If
people in the United States want a real answer to that question (as opposed
to the ones in the Idiot's Guide to Anti-Americanism, that is: "Because
they're jealous of us," "Because they hate freedom,"
"Because they're losers," "Because we're good and they're
evil"), I'd say, read Chomsky. Read Chomsky on U.S. military
interventions in Indochina, Latin America, Iraq, Bosnia, the former
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. If ordinary people in the
United States read Chomsky, perhaps their questions would be framed a little
differently. Perhaps it would be: "Why don't they hate us more than they
do?" or "Isn't it surprising that September 11 didn't happen
earlier?"
Unfortunately,
in these nationalistic times, words like "us" and "them"
are used loosely. The line between citizens and the state is being
deliberately and successfully blurred, not just by governments, but also by
terrorists. The underlying logic of terrorist attacks, as well as
"retaliatory" wars against governments that "support
terrorism", is the same: both punish citizens for the actions of their
governments.
(A
brief digression: I realise that for Noam Chomsky, a U.S. citizen, to
criticise his own government is better manners than for someone like myself,
an Indian citizen, to criticise the U.S. government. I'm no patriot, and am
fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the
leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country
and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So
may I clarify that I speak as a subject of the U.S. empire? I speak as a
slave who presumes to criticise her king.)
If
I were asked to choose one of Noam Chomsky's major contributions to the
world, it would be the fact that he has unmasked the ugly, manipulative, ruthless
universe that exists behind that beautiful, sunny word "freedom".
He has done this rationally and empirically. The mass of evidence he has
marshalled to construct his case is formidable. Terrifying, actually. The
starting premise of Chomsky's method is not ideological, but it is intensely
political. He embarks on his course of inquiry with an anarchist's
instinctive mistrust of power. He takes us on a tour through the bog of the
U.S. establishment, and leads us through the dizzying maze of corridors that
connects the government, big business, and the business of managing public
opinion.
Chomsky
shows us how phrases like "free speech", the "free
market", and the "free world" have little, if anything, to do
with freedom. He shows us that, among the myriad freedoms claimed by the U.S.
government are the freedom to murder, annihilate, and dominate other people.
The freedom to finance and sponsor despots and dictators across the world.
The freedom to train, arm, and shelter terrorists. The freedom to topple
democratically elected governments. The freedom to amass and use weapons of
mass destruction — chemical, biological, and nuclear. The freedom to go to
war against any country whose government it disagrees with. And, most
terrible of all, the freedom to commit these crimes against humanity in the
name of "justice", in the name of "righteousness", in the
name of "freedom".
Attorney
General John Ashcroft has declared that U.S. freedoms are "not the grant
of any government or document, but... our endowment from God". So,
basically, we're confronted with a country armed with a mandate from heaven.
Perhaps this explains why the U.S. government refuses to judge itself by the
same moral standards by which it judges others. (Any attempt to do this is
shouted down as "moral equivalence".) Its technique is to position
itself as the well-intentioned giant whose good deeds are confounded in
strange countries by their scheming natives, whose markets it's trying to
free, whose societies it's trying to modernise, whose women it's trying to
liberate, whose souls it's trying to save.
Perhaps
this belief in its own divinity also explains why the U.S. government has
conferred upon itself the right and freedom to murder and exterminate people
"for their own good".
When
he announced the U.S. air strikes against Afghanistan, President Bush Jr.
said, "We're a peaceful nation." He went on to say, "This is
the calling of the United States of America, the most free nation in the
world, a nation built on fundamental values, that rejects hate, rejects
violence, rejects murderers, rejects evil. And we will not tire."
The
U.S. empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre of millions of
indigenous people, the stealing of their lands, and following this, the
kidnapping and enslavement of millions of black people from Africa to work
that land. Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like
caged cattle between continents. "Stolen from Africa, brought to
America" — Bob Marley's "Buffalo Soldier" contains a whole
universe of unspeakable sadness. It tells of the loss of dignity, the loss of
wilderness, the loss of freedom, the shattered pride of a people. Genocide
and slavery provide the social and economic underpinning of the nation whose
fundamental values reject hate, murderers, and evil.
Here
is Chomsky, writing in the essay "The Manufacture of Consent," on
the founding of the United States of America:
During
the Thanksgiving holiday a few weeks ago, I took a walk with some friends and
family in a national park. We came across a gravestone, which had on it the
following inscription: "Here lies an Indian woman, a Wampanoag, whose
family and tribe gave of themselves and their land that this great nation
might be born and grow."
Of
course, it is not quite accurate to say that the indigenous population gave
of themselves and their land for that noble purpose. Rather, they were
slaughtered, decimated, and dispersed in the course of one of the greatest
exercises in genocide in human history... which we celebrate each October
when we honour Columbus — a notable mass murderer himself — on Columbus Day.
Hundreds
of American citizens, well-meaning and decent people, troop by that
gravestone regularly and read it, apparently without reaction; except,
perhaps, a feeling of satisfaction that at last we are giving some due
recognition to the sacrifices of the native peoples.... They might react
differently if they were to visit Auschwitz or Dachau and find a gravestone
reading: "Here lies a woman, a Jew, whose family and people gave of
themselves and their possessions that this great nation might grow and
prosper."
How
has the United States survived its terrible past and emerged smelling so
sweet? Not by owning up to it, not by making reparations, not by apologising
to black Americans or native Americans, and certainly not by changing its
ways (it exports its cruelties now). Like most other countries, the United
States has rewritten its history. But what sets the United States apart from
other countries, and puts it way ahead in the race, is that it has enlisted
the services of the most powerful, most successful publicity firm in the
world: Hollywood.
In
the best-selling version of popular myth as history, U.S.
"goodness" peaked during World War II (aka America's War Against
Fascism). Lost in the din of trumpet sound and angel song is the fact that
when fascism was in full stride in Europe, the U.S. government actually
looked away. When Hitler was carrying out his genocidal pogrom against Jews,
U.S. officials refused entry to Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. The United
States entered the war only after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. Drowned
out by the noisy hosannas is its most barbaric act, in fact the single most
savage act the world has ever witnessed: the dropping of the atomic bomb on
civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war was nearly over. The
hundreds of thousands of Japanese people who were killed, the countless
others who were crippled by cancers for generations to come, were not a
threat to world peace. They were civilians. Just as the victims of the World
Trade Center and Pentagon bombings were civilians. Just as the hundreds of
thousands of people who died in Iraq because of the U.S.-led sanctions were
civilians. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a cold, calculated
experiment carried out to demonstrate America's power. At the time, President
Truman described it as "the greatest thing in history".
The
Second World War, we're told, was a "war for peace". The atomic
bomb was a "weapon of peace". We're invited to believe that nuclear
deterrence prevented World War III. (That was before President George Bush
Jr. came up with the "pre-emptive strike doctrine". Was there an
outbreak of peace after the Second World War? Certainly there was (relative)
peace in Europe and America — but does that count as world peace? Not unless
savage, proxy wars fought in lands where the coloured races live (chinks,
niggers, dinks, wogs, gooks) don't count as wars at all.
Since
the Second World War, the United States has been at war with or has attacked,
among other countries, Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia,
Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan,
Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. This list should also include the U.S.
government's covert operations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the coups
it has engineered, and the dictators it has armed and supported. It should
include Israel's U.S.-backed war on Lebanon, in which thousands were killed.
It should include the key role America has played in the conflict in the
Middle East, in which thousands have died fighting Israel's illegal
occupation of Palestinian territory. It should include America's role in the
civil war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in which more than one million people
were killed. It should include the embargos and sanctions that have led
directly, and indirectly, to the death of hundreds of thousands of people,
most visibly in Iraq.
Put
it all together, and it sounds very much as though there has been a World War
III, and that the U.S. government was (or is) one of its chief protagonists.
Most
of the essays in Chomsky's For Reasons of State are about U.S. aggression in
South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It was a war that lasted
more than 12 years. Fifty-eight thousand Americans and approximately two
million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians lost their lives. The U.S.
deployed half a million ground troops, dropped more than six million tons of
bombs. And yet, though you wouldn't believe it if you watched most Hollywood
movies, America lost the war.
The
war began in South Vietnam and then spread to North Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia. After putting in place a client regime in Saigon, the U.S.
government invited itself in to fight a communist insurgency — Vietcong
guerillas who had infiltrated rural regions of South Vietnam where villagers
were sheltering them. This was exactly the model that Russia replicated when,
in 1979, it invited itself into Afghanistan. Nobody in the "free world"
is in any doubt about the fact that Russia invaded Afghanistan. After
glasnost, even a Soviet foreign minister called the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan "illegal and immoral". But there has been no such
introspection in the United States. In 1984, in a stunning revelation,
Chomsky wrote:
For
the past 22 years, I have been searching to find some reference in mainstream
journalism or scholarship to an American invasion of South Vietnam in 1962
(or ever), or an American attack against South Vietnam, or American
aggression in Indochina — without success. There is no such event in history.
Rather, there is an American defence of South Vietnam against terrorists
supported from the outside (namely from Vietnam).
There
is no such event in history!
In
1962, the U.S. Air Force began to bomb rural South Vietnam, where 80 per cent
of the population lived. The bombing lasted for more than a decade. Thousands
of people were killed. The idea was to bomb on a scale colossal enough to
induce panic migration from villages into cities, where people could be held
in refugee camps. Samuel Huntington referred to this as a process of
"urbanisation". (I learned about urbanisation when I was in
architecture school in India. Somehow I don't remember aerial bombing being
part of the syllabus.) Huntington — famous today for his essay "The
Clash of Civilizations?"— was at the time Chairman of the Council on
Vietnamese Studies of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group. Chomsky
quotes him describing the Vietcong as "a powerful force which cannot be
dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to
exist". Huntington went on to advise "direct application of
mechanical and conventional power"— in other words, to crush a people's
war, eliminate the people. (Or, perhaps, to update the thesis — in order to
prevent a clash of civilizations, annihilate a civilisation.)
Here's
one observer from the time on the limitations of America's mechanical power:
"The problem is that American machines are not equal to the task of
killing communist soldiers except as part of a scorched-earth policy that
destroys everything else as well." That problem has been solved now. Not
with less destructive bombs, but with more imaginative language. There's a
more elegant way of saying "that destroys everything else as well".
The phrase is "collateral damage".
And
here's a firsthand account of what America's "machines" (Huntington
called them "modernising instruments" and staff officers in the
Pentagon called them "bomb-o-grams") can do. This is T.D. Allman
flying over the Plain of Jars in Laos.
Even
if the war in Laos ended tomorrow, the restoration of its ecological balance
might take several years. The reconstruction of the Plain's totally destroyed
towns and villages might take just as long. Even if this was done, the Plain
might long prove perilous to human habitation because of the hundreds of
thousands of unexploded bombs, mines and booby traps.
A
recent flight around the Plain of Jars revealed what less than three years of
intensive American bombing can do to a rural area, even after its civilian
population has been evacuated. In large areas, the primary tropical colour —
bright green — has been replaced by an abstract pattern of black, and bright
metallic colours. Much of the remaining foliage is stunted, dulled by
defoliants.
Today,
black is the dominant colour of the northern and eastern reaches of the
Plain. Napalm is dropped regularly to burn off the grass and undergrowth that
covers the Plains and fills its many narrow ravines. The fires seem to burn
constantly, creating rectangles of black. During the flight, plumes of smoke
could be seen rising from freshly bombed areas.
The
main routes, coming into the Plain from communist-held territory, are bombed
mercilessly, apparently on a non-stop basis. There, and along the rim of the
Plain, the dominant colour is yellow. All vegetation has been destroyed. The
craters are countless.... [T]he area has been bombed so repeatedly that the
land resembles the pocked, churned desert in storm-hit areas of the North African
desert.
Further
to the southeast, Xieng Khouangville — once the most populous town in
communist Laos — lies empty, destroyed. To the north of the Plain, the little
resort of Khang Khay also has been destroyed.
Around
the landing field at the base of King Kong, the main colours are yellow (from
upturned soil) and black (from napalm), relieved by patches of bright red and
blue: parachutes used to drop supplies.
[T]he
last local inhabitants were being carted into air transports. Abandoned
vegetable gardens that would never be harvested grew near abandoned houses
with plates still on the tables and calendars on the walls.
(Never
counted in the "costs" of war are the dead birds, the charred
animals, the murdered fish, incinerated insects, poisoned water sources,
destroyed vegetation. Rarely mentioned is the arrogance of the human race
towards other living things with which it shares this planet. All these are
forgotten in the fight for markets and ideologies. This arrogance will
probably be the ultimate undoing of the human species.)
The
centrepiece of For Reasons of State is an essay called "The Mentality of
the Backroom Boys", in which Chomsky offers an extraordinarily supple,
exhaustive analysis of the Pentagon Papers, which he says "provide
documentary evidence of a conspiracy to use force in international affairs in
violation of law". Here, too, Chomsky makes note of the fact that while
the bombing of North Vietnam is discussed at some length in the Pentagon
Papers, the invasion of South Vietnam barely merits a mention.
The
Pentagon Papers are mesmerising, not as documentation of the history of the
U.S. war in Indochina, but as insight into the minds of the men who planned
and executed it. It's fascinating to be privy to the ideas that were being
tossed around, the suggestions that were made, the proposals that were put
forward. In a section called "The Asian Mind — the American Mind",
Chomsky examines the discussion of the mentality of the enemy that
"stoically accept[s] the destruction of wealth and the loss of
lives", whereas "We want life, happiness, wealth, power", and,
for us, "death and suffering are irrational choices when alternatives
exist". So, we learn that the Asian poor, presumably because they cannot
comprehend the meaning of happiness, wealth, and power, invite America to
carry this "strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide".
But, then "we" balk because "genocide is a terrible burden to
bear". (Eventually, of course, "we" went ahead and committed
genocide any way, and then pretended that it never really happened.)
Of
course, the Pentagon Papers contain some moderate proposals, as well.
Strikes
at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a
counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to
increase the risk of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet Union.
Destruction of locks and dams, however — if handled right — might... offer
promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown
people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread
starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided — which we could
offer to do "at the conference table".
Layer
by layer, Chomsky strips down the process of decision-making by U.S.
government officials, to reveal at its core the pitiless heart of the
American war machine, completely insulated from the realities of war, blinded
by ideology, and willing to annihilate millions of human beings, civilians,
soldiers, women, children, villages, whole cities, whole ecosystems — with
scientifically honed methods of brutality.
Here's
an American pilot talking about the joys of napalm:
We
sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn't
so hot — if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started
adding polystyrene — now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the
gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie
Peter [white phosphorous] so's to make it burn better. It'll even burn under
water now. And just one drop is enough, it'll keep on burning right down to
the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.
So
the lucky gooks were annihilated for their own good. Better Dead than Red.
Noam
Chomsky ... weaving his spell over Chennai in November 2001. He spoke on
"September 11 and its aftermath".
Thanks
to the seductive charms of Hollywood and the irresistible appeal of America's
mass media, all these years later, the world views the war as an American
story. Indochina provided the lush, tropical backdrop against which the
United States played out its fantasies of violence, tested its latest
technology, furthered its ideology, examined its conscience, agonised over
its moral dilemmas, and dealt with its guilt (or pretended to). The
Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and Laotians were only script props. Nameless,
faceless, slit-eyed humanoids. They were just the people who died. Gooks.
The
only real lesson the U.S. government learned from its invasion of Indochina
is how to go to war without committing American troops and risking American
lives. So now we have wars waged with long-range cruise missiles, Black
Hawks, "bunker busters". Wars in which the "Allies" lose
more journalists than soldiers.
As
a child growing up in the state of Kerala, in South India — where the first
democratically elected Communist government in the world came to power in
1959, the year I was born — I worried terribly about being a gook. Kerala was
only a few thousand miles west of Vietnam. We had jungles and rivers and
rice-fields, and communists, too. I kept imagining my mother, my brother, and
myself being blown out of the bushes by a grenade, or mowed down, like the
gooks in the movies, by an American marine with muscled arms and chewing gum
and a loud background score. In my dreams, I was the burning girl in the
famous photograph taken on the road from Trang Bang.
As
someone who grew up on the cusp of both American and Soviet propaganda (which
more or less neutralised each other), when I first read Noam Chomsky, it
occurred to me that his marshalling of evidence, the volume of it, the
relentlessness of it, was a little — how shall I put it? — insane. Even a
quarter of the evidence he had compiled would have been enough to convince
me. I used to wonder why he needed to do so much work. But now I understand
that the magnitude and intensity of Chomsky's work is a barometer of the
magnitude, scope, and relentlessness of the propaganda machine that he's up
against. He's like the wood-borer who lives inside the third rack of my
bookshelf. Day and night, I hear his jaws crunching through the wood,
grinding it to a fine dust. It's as though he disagrees with the literature
and wants to destroy the very structure on which it rests. I call him
Chompsky.
Being
an American working in America, writing to convince Americans of his point of
view must really be like having to tunnel through hard wood. Chomsky is one
of a small band of individuals fighting a whole industry. And that makes him
not only brilliant, but heroic.
Some
years ago, in a poignant interview with James Peck, Chomsky spoke about his
memory of the day Hiroshima was bombed. He was 16 years old:
I
remember that I literally couldn't talk to anybody. There was nobody. I just
walked off by myself. I was at a summer camp at the time, and I walked off
into the woods and stayed alone for a couple of hours when I heard about it.
I could never talk to anyone about it and never understood anyone's reaction.
I felt completely isolated.
That
isolation produced one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our
time. When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam
Chomsky's work will survive.
It
will point a cool, incriminating finger at a merciless, Machiavellian empire
as cruel, self-righteous, and hypocritical as the ones it has replaced. (The
only difference is that it is armed with technology that can visit the kind
of devastation on the world that history has never known and the human race
cannot begin to imagine.)
As
a could've been gook, and who knows, perhaps a potential gook, hardly a day
goes by when I don't find myself thinking — for one reason or another —
"Chomsky Zindabad".
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