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December 3, 2001
Chomsky: Question And Answer Session
www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1824/qa.htm
As a rule, the form of public lectures does not allow the fielding of
questions, comments and criticisms from the audience. Furthermore, providing
for a Question and Answer session in a large auditorium with an overflowing
audience becomes a physical and logistical challenge. Nevertheless, Noam
Chomsky indicated in advance to the organisers his clear preference for Q &
A. Accordingly, a session lasting about forty-five minutes followed the
lecture, attracting great audience interest within the auditorium and also
outside, where hundreds of people watched the proceedings live on close
circuit television, or clustered around loud speakers.
The Q & A format allowed for oral as well as written questions from a highly
engaged audience. A large number of written questions were received and oral
questions and comments came in from various sides. The session was able to
accommodate a representative sample of questions of both types and from
every part of the auditorium. However, when the meeting concluded after
three hours, it was clear that the questions could have kept the lecturer on
his feet for at least another hour.
Q1: Sashi Kumar:
Now we'll take some questions. We have one question from the organisers
here, perhaps we could kick off with this: ``Please go into the question of
what explains the September 11 crimes, the likely perpetrators and the
reservoir of support. And, finally, what are the policy options?''
A1: Noam Chomsky:
Well, who carried out the crimes? We know a number of them, the ones who
killed themselves. So those are known. They were mostly middle class, urban,
educated people, mostly from Saudi Arabia. They certainly were not people
who'd been hiding in caves in Afghanistan.
The United States decided that you have to personalise these things, so you
can carry out a `Crusade'. So they picked Osama bin Laden and the Taliban,
who have interacted with him, which could be true. But they have apparently
no evidence for it. If there were any evidence, it would be presented, you
could be sure of that. Just simply to mobilise support.
The United States selected an increasingly comical client named Tony Blair
[audience laughter and applause] to present the case to the world, while
sort of hiding in the background. I suppose the public relations purpose
there was to convey the image that we really have lots of secret information
that this little boy doesn't know about [audience laughter] but we`ll let
him do it. But whatever the purpose was, they basically have no information,
pretty clearly, and that's not very surprising.
I think it's not at all unlikely that these networks are indeed responsible.
That was everybody's first assumption, mine too, and I think it's the
plausible assumption. But there's a big difference between plausible
assumptions and evidence.
And networks like that are very hard to penetrate. They are decentralised,
non-hierarchic, don't have much communication. They follow a policy that's
actually called `Leaderless Resistance'. It's also used by Christian Right
terrorists in the United States. That's why the FBI [Federal Bureau of
Investigation] can never penetrate those groups. Leaderless Resistance means
there's a kind of a shared point of view, maybe established by
spokespersons, but then actions are initiated and carried out in small
groups. Maybe consistent with those policies, but then actions are carried
out in small groups. Anyone who's been involved in, say, anti-war activities
or resistance activities knows exactly how this works because that's always
the way it's done. Just automatically, resistance activities are always, if
they're serious, going to be carried out with Leaderless Resistance, which
is impenetrable. The FBI was never able to discover the people involved in
the anti-war resistance in the United States, for example – not for lack of
trying. These are just hard groups to penetrate.
So they probably won't be able to find evidence, although it's likely that's
roughly the range in which the perpetrators lie. And if anybody knows about
this, it's the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] because they helped set
them up! They nurtured them for ten years. Not alone, together with British
intelligence, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. They mobilised the best killers
they could find from around the Muslim world who happened to be radical
Islamists and they created a powerful mercenary army – not small, but a
hundred thousand people maybe. Armed them, trained them, gave them manuals,
showed them how to carry out terrorist acts, nurtured them for about ten
years -- not in order to help the people of Afghanistan, on the contrary it
helped destroy the country. And when they were done with them, they said
goodbye.
But these guys had their own agenda and it was no secret. Remember that
twenty years ago, in 1981, they assassinated the President of Egypt, who was
one of the most enthusiastic of their creators. In 1983, one suicide bomber
who may have been connected with these networks drove the U.S. military out
of Lebanon. And right through the 1980s, it continued. After 1990, it spread
around the world. They tell you exactly what they're doing. It's not a big
secret. And within their framework, it's as rational as the framework that's
leading to the destruction of the world within the Western framework. Both
frameworks are rational internally, maybe lunatic looked at from some other
point of view, but internally rational and we know what they are.
So I presume these are the perpetrators and they're doing it for exactly the
reasons they say. Speaking from their point of view, you've heard it all: to
overthrow the oppressive and brutal and corrupt regimes of the Arab-Islamic
world in general, to drive out the infidels, the foreigners who've invaded
Muslim lands, and to protect Muslims everywhere from attack. Okay? That's
it. And they say it pretty straight, they've been saying it for twenty
years. That's the likely perpetrators.
They do draw on a reservoir of support. The support may come from people who
despise them, like, in fact, their targets. You know, rich Muslims in the
Arab world are their targets but they still resonate to their message. They
too are opposed to the corrupt and brutal and oppressive regimes in the Arab
world. Even those who are very strongly supportive of the United States and
closely linked to it despise the United States because of its support for
these corrupt regimes, its undermining of any steps towards democracy, its,
in fact, blocking any independent economic development. And they say it. To
its credit, The Wall Street Journal, our main business journal, after
September 11th began looking at this question. It had some good studies of
the opinions of what it called ``moneyed Muslims,'' rich Muslims – bankers,
international lawyers and people like that, and this is what they say.
On the streets, it's much harsher of course. But this is basically what they
say and they also point to specific policies – the policy of devastating the
civilian society of Iraq while strengthening Saddam Hussein. And although
the West prefers to forget it, it supported Saddam Hussein right through his
worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds and all the rest. That
they remember. And when bin Laden says that, they remember what it means. So
Saddam's being strengthened, civilian society is being destroyed. A little
bit to the South, the U.S. alone has been maintaining the harsh and brutal
Israeli occupation in the Occupied Territories, now going into its
thirty-fifth year.
Well, you know these things arouse enormous antagonism. And out of that
comes a kind of reservoir of support, even by those who despise the
terrorism and its likely perpetrators.
What are the policy options? Well, what are the options when a crime is
committed? So, for example, let's take a much worse terrorist attack – the
U. S. attack on Nicaragua. Far worse, practically they destroyed the
country. It wasn't an instant destruction (it's different in that respect)
but, over a couple of years, much worse.
Nicaragua pursued the right policy options. It went to the International
Court of Justice; presented evidence, which wasn't hard in that case; the
Court considered its case; considered the U. S. case; accepted Nicaragua's
case; condemned the United States for international terrorism. The Court
wasn't going to punish anybody, but it called on the United States to
terminate the crime, to pay reparations. When the U. S. refused, Nicaragua
went to the [U. N.] Security Council, which did try to pass a resolution
calling on states to observe international law. That was vetoed. Nicaragua
then went to the [U. N.] General Assembly. They could get a unanimous vote
practically but it didn't mean anything. But at that point the options were
finished – for a law-abiding state! If the United States were to pursue
those measures, nobody would stop it. In fact, there'd be universal
applause.
It's kind of striking that the U. S. could easily have got a Security
Council resolution to legitimate even its crimes – and they are major
crimes -- in Afghanistan. The attack on Afghanistan is a major crime, in my
opinion far worse than September 11th [audience applause for the statement],
but the U. S. could have got authorisation for that. It also happens to be
illegal, but it could have been legal. You know, crimes can be carried out
under authorisation of law, unfortunately.
The U. S. could easily have got Security Council support for ugly reasons.
The five countries that have veto powers would have supported the U. S.
because they're terrorist states [audience applause] and they all support
massive terrorism. They all want U. S. authorisation for their own terrorist
acts. Actually, India is similar, wants authorisation for its own state
terrorism. And that's true quite generally, that's true of Turkey and
Algeria. Everybody in the Coalition of the Just joined it pretty much for
this reason.
So they could have got authorisation, but they didn't want it. Because to
get Security Council authorisation would imply that you need Security
Council authorisation, that is, that there is an authority to which you have
to defer. And if you're seeking hegemony, you don't want that principle. You
want to be able to act unilaterally, without any authority.
This is not Bush, this is traditional policy. Clinton said this in his first
speech to the United Nations, in 1993. He said: We will act multilaterally
when it works but if it doesn't, we will act unilaterally in support of our
interests. And that's the way you should expect a great power to act if it
can get away with it. So they preferred to do it illegally.
But there are options and the options are hard to pursue. I noticed in the
newspaper this morning that India was very pleased that the United States
was pressuring Pakistan to turn over an accused criminal responsible for
crimes in India and they want Pakistan to extradite him.They [the United
States] could probably have obtained the extradition of Osama bin Laden. We
can't be sure, but the Taliban were making gestures in that direction.
There was only one way to find out whether they were meaningful and that was
to pursue them. But they didn't want to do that because they might have been
meaningful and that would have been a problem. Because then what do you do
with him after you've got him? You don't have the evidence, you don't have
the case and so on. Besides, it opens dangerous directions. Same with the
extraordinary request for Pakistan. If you begin to open that door, there
are a lot of questions waiting right behind it.
For example, the U. S. harbours major war criminals and refuses to extradite
them. Much worse ones than the one in Pakistan. To mention just the obvious
case, the Government of Haiti – poorest country in the hemisphere – for
years has been asking the United States to extradite Emmanuel Constant, who'
s a killer and a murderer, the leading figure in the paramilitary forces in
Haiti that murdered four or five thousand people in the 1990s with the tacit
support of the first Bush and Clinton administrations. That's not what you
read in the newspapers but, in fact, it's true. He's been convicted in
absentia in Haiti (they didn't have much trouble finding evidence) and now
they want him returned. The U. S. refuses, presumably because it is afraid
of what will happen if he stands up in open court and tells people about his
connections with international terrorism, mainly the CIA. And they don't
want that out. So he's not extradited. And there are other cases. When you
begin pushing these questions, all sorts of unpleasant possibilities arise.
But there are options. Those are options if you want to find the
perpetrators of the crime and punish them. If you just want to show you can
slaughter a couple of hundred thousand people and get away with it and have
everybody applaud in the West, well, you do it a different way.
Incidentally, let me mention that this case of Emmanuel Constant has
scarcely been reported in the United States. And it's been going on for
years.
Q2: [Questioner unidentified]:
Professor Chomsky, this question is specifically about what's happening in
Afghanistan. The United States has an economic interest in a political
cleavage to ensure its oil resources in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and other
countries. But militarily speaking, they are bombarding places that have no
relevance whatsoever. That is because, if you look at the successive U. S.
governments, it started with Korean War in 1950, it went on to Vietnam and
Iraq, then to Kosovo and now to Afghanistan. Is it that the U. S. government
is trying its new armaments in these enlarged areas just to test them?
A2: Noam Chomsky
There is an oil interest. Oil is behind anything that happens in that part
of the world. If this were something with the Antarctic, nobody would care
what was going on. But these are the major sources of oil in the world,
energy. Not Central Asia, but the Gulf. That's where most of the oil is.
Central Asia is important but secondary. So yes, that's in the background.
And there have been efforts by U. S. oil companies to push in a pipeline
through Afghanistan from the Central Asian countries for some years. But
that can't be the reason for what's going on because those issues were
always there and they didn't decide to bomb Afghanistan. But they are in the
background, you're right.
Is the United States trying to test its armaments? Really doubt it. We don't
have internal documents now to tell you what they are planning in
Washington, but you can make out a pretty good guess. It's probably the
standard procedure, not just for the United States, but for anyone with
substantial power. Criminal organisations work this way too… say, the mafia.
Suppose you're a mafia don and a storekeeper doesn't pay you protection
money, well what do you do? You don't go to the court and get a court order
and send the police to make them pay the money.
That's the parallel to going to the U. N. Security Council for getting
authorisation. You can't do that. What you do is you send your goons and
then you beat him to a pulp. And the purpose is to establish what's called
`credibility'. Actually, that's the term that's used in the international
affairs literature and it's the term governments use. For example, the
bombing of Serbia. You know intellectuals have to make up stories to make it
look good, that's their job, but the governments were pretty straight about
it, Britain and the United States, particularly. They said: ``We have to
maintain the credibility of NATO.''
"NATO" doesn't mean NATO. Nobody cared about the `credibility' of Belgium,
for example. What it means is the `credibility' of the United States and its
attack dog -- those are the two states whose credibility has to be
maintained --and credibility means just what it means for a mafia don.
Everyone has to be frightened. That's the meaning of those statements I was
reading from the major planning document called the ``The Essentials of
Post-War Deterrence.'' `Our national persona must be irrational and
vindictive…otherwise people might not be afraid enough to do what we tell
them to do …and you regularly have to demonstrate this'. I presume that's
the background thinking in this case too and it's perfectly reasonable.
No, I'm not suggesting there's anything unreasonable about it. It's
reasonable for the mafia don. It's reasonable for world leaders. It's
reasonable for respectable intellectuals to make up stories about how
marvellous their leaders are and committed to benevolence and so on and so
forth. All that goes right back through history. There's practically no
exception, I don't even know of any exceptions to this. Now again this is
speculation, we don't have internal documents in this case but I'm willing
to wager that's what it is.
Q3: Vikram
Professor Chomsky, you have presented a very good overview of the state,
looking outside from the United States. How do you see the current laws
being passed in the
U. S., including the USA Act, Patriot Act and the revocation of the
confidentiality of communication even between lawyer and client? How do you
see the curtailment of civil liberties in the U. S. against the backdrop of
the U. S. looking outside at the world for enemies and somebody to pin it
in?
A3: Noam Chomsky
Personally, my feeling is that measures of that kind are much more dangerous
in India than they are in the United States. The Prevention of Terrorism
Ordinance [audience applause], which is the Indian counterpart. The reason
is that in India, this is handing over power to a violent, repressive
apparatus, which uses it directly. It has given them more power, that's the
last thing India needs. In the United States, it's just different for lots
of reasons, including a couple of hundreds of years of having smashed
everybody in the face.
One result of that is that internally, it's a pretty free society. And there
is a lot of protection of civil liberties that doesn't come from the
government, it comes from the population. There's a deeply rooted tradition
by now and they're not going to give it up. Furthermore, civil liberties are
protected by the rich and the powerful, because they benefit from them. They
do not want the state to be powerful enough to carry out actions against
citizens that could harm them. They want a compliant state, not a powerful
state.
So a more developed form of state capitalism will tend to have civil
libertarian protections. And they have these gains like freedom of speech,
which is very well protected in the Unites States by comparative standards.
That's not a gift, it's not in the Constitution, it's not in the Bill of
Rights, contrary to what they may teach you in school. Didn't say anything
about freedom of speech. Those were rights that were won by giving meaning
to the First Amendment through struggle. In fact, it was pretty recent.
It wasn't until the 1960s that the United States crossed the main barrier,
which has not been passed by any other country to my knowledge, and
eliminated, the Supreme Court eliminated, the rule of the law of seditious
libel, the law that says that you can't assault the state in words. Even if
what you say is true, you can't defame state authority, [that's] seditious
libel. As far as I know, every other country still has those restrictions,
including England. But they were overcome finally in the United States in
1964, and that was in the course of the civil rights movement. It grew out
of the civil rights protest. That's the way these rights were established
and pretty firmly rooted.
There is an attempt to undermine them, you're right, but, frankly, I don't
think it's going to get very far.
Q4: Written question from Peter Alphonse, Member of Parliament, Tamil
Maanila Congress (TMC)
Why does religion play a major role in twenty-first century terrorism? How
do you counter and combat globalisation of Islam, a potential security
threat to Asian countries, non-Islamic, like India? What is your suggestion
for India in the present war?
A4: Noam Chomsky
My impression is that India, the non-Islamic part of India, has its own
forms of extreme religious fanaticism. The United States is a major
fundamentalist country [audience laughter and applause]. That's no joke. If
you really look at it, the fundamentalist Christian movements in the United
States surpass anything I know, certainly in the developed world. For
example, 40 per cent of the population in the United States believe that the
world was created 6,000 years ago. Around 85 per cent believe in miracles or
have even seen them! And a lot of other beliefs. About half the population
thinks there are extra-terrestrials among us [audience laughter], you know,
aliens.
Islamic fundamentalism is not unique in the world. There are a lot of things
developing. Where did Islamic fundamentalism come from? It's a little odd to
talk about Islamic fundamentalism being a problem to India as if it's in
isolation, as if, say, Hindu fundamentalism is not a problem to India. It
surely is [audience applause]. But I agree with you, it's a problem.
But we ask where these things came from. Well, you know, it's not too
obscure. They come from the denial of opportunity. They come from denial of
opportunity for meaningful political participation [audience applause]. Take
a close look in case after case. You know, Algeria, Egypt, Kashmir close by.
You look at other places where people are denied the opportunity to act in a
meaningful way in the political arena. They find other ways to do it.
I suspect that's part of the reason for the rise of extreme fundamentalism
in the United States. Political options have indeed been restricted, not by
force, but by other measures like neo-liberal programmes that diminish
opportunities -- and people want to identify themselves in some way. They
want to press their interests in some way. If political participation is
blocked, they'll find other ways. These ways often turn into religious
fundamentalism, or other forms of fanaticism. That's only one of the forms
and it can be very dangerous. I agree with you on that.
How do you deal with it? By dealing with the causes. Nothing is that simple
but the primary causes in this case are reasonably clear. It is the
diminishing, the reduction or elimination of means of participation in
determining your own fate through some sort of democratic system. If that's
blocked, other things will develop. The history of Kashmir shows it very
dramatically.
Q5: Karthik Ramanathan, a student
We often read in the papers of this Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean.
So proudly, the Indian media display it, that the United States is sending
its forces into whatever place to bomb Afghanistan. What they don't write is
things like the fact that the American forces in the Diego Garcia base are
situated less than five hundred miles away. (I'm not sure about the number
because the media never talk about it.) They are situated less than five
hundred miles from Indian territory, the Lakshwadeep Islands. Nobody seems
to know about it. Nobody knows where Diego Garcia is.
My question is simple: why this media and political complacency towards the
presence of American troops? And why do we see no threat from them? Will
America tolerate Indian troops situated some five hundred miles from its
coast? Nobody seems to be asking that question [audience applause]. The
second question is this. The United States, despite all the CIA intelligence
and its technology, has not been able to prevent a single person planting a
bomb or ramming a jet into its buildings. The question is: whatever
technology they develop, can they really dominate the world?
A5: Noam Chomsky
So the first part is about Diego Garcia. That's just a straight power play.
The United States wanted the island as a military base. It wanted it as part
of the great system of intervention aimed at the Gulf energy resources. The
main U. S. intervention forces, called the Central Command, have been aimed
right at the oil-producing areas for many years. It has nothing to do with
the Russians or anybody else. That's, incidentally, conceded now. With the
collapse of the Russians, it was officially conceded that they had nothing
to do with it. It had to with the fear of independent nationalism, which
might lead to movements that would take over the resources of the region for
the benefit of its own population. And that's intolerable, of course.
The prime beneficiaries of those resources have to be rich westerners. The
United States, Britain, energy corporations, and so on. As long as
governments are in place that accept that rule, like the Saudi Arabian
government, they'll be accepted. But if they aren't, they're going to be
overthrown.
So Diego Garcia is part of it. It extends from Guam in the Pacific all the
way over to the Azores in the Atlantic and it goes through the Indian Ocean
and Diego Garcia is a base. Well, okay. It was a ``British island,'' so the
British kicked out the population, and the United States took it over and
turned it into a military base. As you know, I'm sure, the population has
been pursuing the case through the British courts and won. You know the High
Court in England accepted their case and said that the British Government,
which technically still owns it, has to bring them back. The United States
just said, `get lost', and Britain got lost. It's kind of like the World
Court case [relating to the United States' terrorist war against Nicaragua].
So they stay there. But that's just plain exercise of force.
Nobody knows about it in the United States. If you do a database search in
the press, I doubt if it's been mentioned twice in the last twenty years! So
no one knows. Nobody knows about the dispossessed population or anything
that's happened and therefore there's no protest. You can't protest
something you do not know about.
That's part of the duty of the free press and the intellectual community:
make sure people do not know about things that might lead them to protest.
If people knew, they would do something about it and the forces would have
to get out of the island, the people would be back home.
Does the United States have the technical means to protect the country from
attack? No, it doesn't. I was quoting a high-level technical study, by an
agency close to the government, which said if you tried to bring a small
plutonium bomb into the United States, it had a 90 per cent probability of
success. And the borders are permeable, you can't control the U.S. –
Canadian border. People can find a way to climb across through the forests.
If they can do it over the Himalayas, you know, they can do it across the
Canadian border! There's no way to stop that and never will be a way.
As I mentioned, protecting the security or even the survival of the country
has never been a high priority. If it were a high priority, they would have
blocked Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles fifty years ago. They would
have accepted Khrushchev's offers and all sorts of other things. And that's
not unique to the United States. Take a look at world history. Countries do
start wars and they often end up destroyed. They're doing it for other
reasons, even if they face destruction. There are institutional reasons for
that. They're not nice ones, but they're there.
Yes, they can't protect themselves and it's not a significant issue. The
forty thousand or so loose nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union are a much
greater threat and we're doing very little about that. Because it ranks too
low in the scale of values as compared with establishing `credibility' and
hegemony and so on.
Q6: Prof. Mahmood
I was on a teaching assignment twenty-five years ago in Afghanistan. I have
some observations. Afghanistan is a very poor country, [it's a struggle]
even for a slice of bread. Is it worthwhile to attack Afghanistan? The
second question is this: Is it worthwhile to attack a ten-dollar tent with a
million dollar missile? Where is the world heading?
A6: Noam Chomsky
I think your observation is correct but you're drawing the wrong conclusion
from it. Afghanistan is worth attacking precisely because it's a poor,
defenceless country. I mean, you don't want to attack somebody who can shoot
back [audience applause]. That would be ridiculous.
Think of the mafia don again. I mean, is he going to attack another mafia
don who can send goons in to kill him? If you have a choice, you fight
against defenceless enemies. Then you can stand up on television and, you
know, make heroic gestures and so on and so forth without any concern. So
yes, it's a poor country, it's totally defenceless, therefore it's a fine
punching bag.
Take, say, the U.S. attacks on Libya right through the 1980s. Why did they
attack Libya all the time? Beginning right away, as soon as the Reagan
administration came in, it started attacking Libya, bombed it, all sorts of
things. Well, you know, several reasons. First of all, Libya is defenceless,
can't do a thing about it. Secondly, it's unpopular. Qaddafi is not going to
get any support from anyone, therefore it's a perfect punching bag. Yes,
makes good sense. You want to establish `credibility', that's the way to do
it.
Does it make sense to use expensive missiles to attack a tent? Yes, not a
bad idea! I didn't mention this, barely mentioned this, but the fact of the
matter is that the military system has been a kind of a cover for economic
development. It's not just weapons producers. It's not the
``military-industrial complex,'' that's a misleading term. The military
provides a framework within which economic development takes place. That
goes far back in history. Britain, the United States, Germany and others
developed their economies to a significant extent within the military
system. So you go back a century. One of the hardest problems of mechanical
and electrical engineering, really an advanced frontier, was trying to
figure out how to put a huge gun implacement on a moving platform and make
it possible for it to hit a moving target. That's naval guns. That was one
of the hardest problems of the period. Notice those problems you can solve
at public expense. Private corporations don't have to take a chance on it.
You do it at public expense under the framework of security. The public pays
the costs, takes the risks. If anything works out, as it did, you hand it
over to private corporations for a profit. That's called `free enterprise'.
The whole American system of mass production developed that way. It was
mostly worked out in the Army ordnance system for decades before it was
handed over to private hands. Since the Second World War, this has been the
core of the dynamism of the economy. Virtually the whole high-tech economy
comes straight out of the state sector. That's true of computers, the
Internet, lasers, automation, in fact virtually all of electronics. Over the
last years, government spending has shifted from the Pentagon system, that's
the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, NASA [National Aeronautics and Space
Administration], a number of agencies. It has shifted from them over to the
National Institute of Health, the Center of Disease Control, and others. The
reason is the cutting edge of the economy is shifting to the biology-based
sciences. So therefore the public has to pay the costs of development there
and take the risks if nothing works. And if it turns out okay, you hand over
to some pharmaceutical company which charges exorbitant profits because they
claim they need it for Research and Development, which is mostly done by the
public anyway.
So using a missile to hit a tent, you know, there's nothing wrong with that!
It's just like building a joint strike fighter. Who're they going to fight?
The United States already outspends, in military expenditure, the next
fifteen countries in the world put together. They don't need a joint strike
fighter for that purpose. But it's a spur to economic development. We wouldn
't have any commercial aviation industry if it weren't for the Air Force.
The commercial aviation industry is largely a spin-off from Air Forces. Same
with aerospace, same with a quite large part of the economy. It's kind of
irrational from another point of view, but in terms of the way a state
capitalist economy can proceed with socialising cost and privatising profit,
this makes perfect sense. And an occasional display against a defenceless
enemy is fine.
Q7: Radha Rajan, from Vigil Public Opinion Forum
It's the fashion among the professional dissenters in India to equate Hindu
fundamentalism with Islamic and Christian fundamentalism. I think
semantically it's not right. You cannot have a Hindu fundamentalist. You may
have a Hindu extremist. A Hindu fundamentalist is not in the same category.
Now, I wonder if somebody has ever tried to ask himself what is the reason
for Hindu extremism in India today and how old is Islamic fundamentalism in
India. Secondly, when people campaign for the voice of the people of
Kashmir, why is that they don't want to talk about the voice of the people
of Jammu and Ladakh, who have been victims of Kashmiri oppression [audience
applause].
A7: Noam Chomsky
These are questions that you have to answer, they're not for me to answer
[audience laughter and applause].
Q7a: Radha Rajan (follow-up)
Please comment on it, sir.
Q7b: Noam Chomsky
Look, if you say Hindu extremism is not Hindu fundamentalism, I agree. But
Islamic fundamentalism is extremism and it is not fundamentalism [audience
applause]. And the same is true of Christian fundamentalism. The term
`fundamentalism' is misused, I agree with you. Across the board, it's
misused. It's a form of religious extremism. Doesn't have much to do with
technical fundamentalism, going back to the literal principles of the holy
texts. That's another thing. So, yes, it's misnamed fundamentalism and that's true of Islamic fundamentalism too, it's misnamed.
In fact, when I write about it, I call it `radical Islam,' not `Islamic
fundamentalism,' because that is an inappropriate term. And I assume it's
also an inappropriate term -- `Hindu fundamentalism' and also `Christian
fundamentalism.' This term is used loosely, you're right about that.
As to the specific reasons for the origins of it, it would be ridiculous for
me to comment in this audience. You know much more about it than I do. And
the same with the problems in Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Those are your
problems, not mine [audience applause].
Q8: Subramaniam, an ex-Indian-Army officer
Dear Professor, the day the intelligentsia starts marketing its products
faster than the arms dealers, perhaps the world will have less of these
problems. Will you please do it for the world?
A8: Noam Chomsky
Well, you know I'm much more sceptical about the intelligentsia than you are
[audience laughter]. My view is that if you look over history, intellectuals
have been a very dangerous force [audience laughter]. We have to be very
careful here. If we mean the intellectuals who're called `respectable
intellectuals,' or `responsible intellectuals,' the ones who're accepted
within a society and honoured within that society, they're typically the
flatterers at the court [audience applause]. That goes on right through
history back to the ancient texts. I don't know if it's true of the Sanskrit
texts, but it's certainly true of the Old Testament.
Take, say, the Old Testament. There was a category of intellectuals, they
don't call them intellectuals, but that's what they were. There's an obscure
Hebrew word that's translated in the West as `prophet'. It doesn't have
anything to do with prophet. The people who were `prophets' were
intellectuals. They were doing geo-political analysis and giving moral
lessons and so on. And there were two categories of them. There were the
true prophets and the false prophets. But those designations were given many
centuries after the event. At the time, the false prophets -- the flatterers
at the court -- were honoured. The people who a few centuries later were
called true prophets were jailed, driven into the desert, you know, all
sorts of things. That's the way history works.
So, yes, intellectuals market their product, which is service to power, and
they do it very effectively. There's always a periphery of dissidence and
they don't have anything to market, really. If they are serious, they want
to provide services to activists, public popular organisations that try to
do something. It's nothing to market, you know. You just try to participate.
Q9: Written question from Sadanand Menon, cultural critic and writer
In the context of the French repression in Algeria, Jean Paul-Sartre
remarked: "So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young
people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a
price for it. My dear countrymen, France was once the name of a country.
Take care that in our times it does not become the name of a nervous
disease." Now, we are worried about America. So much violence and
skulduggery from its dirty tricks department. Can America ever be rescued
from itself or is it destined to self-destruct as a rogue state?
A9: Noam Chomsky
Well, let's take France. Sartre was one of the exceptions but, in fact,
there was very little protest against what the French were doing in Algeria.
Very little and there was virtually no protest over they'd been doing in
Indo-China right before that. There was no anti-war movement against the
French effort to re-conquer Indo-China. When Algeria came along, most of the
French intellectuals supported it. When they finally began protest, they
were very mild. Like signing a petition against torture!
There was very little active resistance against the French massacres in
Algeria, which is part of the reason that they've been kept secret. Now,
they're beginning to leak out, but mostly they're not known, because nobody
was pursuing them. The French Communist Party, for example, was trying to
keep people quiet; people who wanted to support the FLN in Algeria had to
leave it and act individually. And, furthermore, that continues until the
present.
There are lots of atrocities going on in Algeria. They're, for the most
part, publicly attributed to ``Islamic fundamentalists,'' -- radical
Islamists -- and to some extent that's probably true. But there is very
strong evidence that the core of those atrocities is carried out by the
state. Often under the pretence that they are carried out by Islamic
fundamentalists. I can tell you, if you're interested, that there is a major
book about this written by Algerian dissidents – scientists, physicists and
others. I have written the introduction to this, one of them is a person I
know from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and they did a very
close analysis of the major atrocities in Algeria through the 1990s. A
careful, detailed analysis of the kind that good scientists would do and
their conclusions are pretty striking. The typical atrocity is a kind of all
day massacre, carried out by people dressed up to look like Islamic
fundamentalists, but taking place, you know, two hundred metres from a big
army base where nobody pays any attention. Then, after everyone's murdered,
a couple of months later, a general buys the property cheaply and builds a
hotel. That's been the typical massacre. For example, the oil installations
have never been subject to these actions.
Now, the chances are pretty strong that French intelligence is involved in
this. Like other imperial countries, including England and Portugal and
Belgium and the rest of them, they were forced to de-colonise. But they
tried to maintain control and one of the ways of maintaining control is
through elite connections, including intelligence connections. So the lack
of protest in France -- and it was very low over things like the Algerian
atrocities -- that has a cost to France and to Algeria and to all of North
and West Africa, namely continuation of similar actions. Well, the Unites
States is much more powerful, but not fundamentally different. So, yes,
there's that cost.
Q10: Murali
Professor Chomsky, your criticism of the West has been lapped up by the
audience. But what is your viewpoint on Kashmir? Do you think it is a
movement for national self-determination?
A10: Noam Chomsky
I don't like to talk about things I don't know very much about. You know
more about it than I do. But if you want my opinion, it's this. There is a
problem of self-determination in Kashmir. A very serious problem. What does
the population want? That's a problem. Maybe that's not the only issue, I'm
sure it's not. But that is an issue. One issue is: what does the population
want? That's why there were U.N. resolutions calling for a referendum way
back. All right, India rejected them. That's a guarantee that there's going
to be trouble, a virtual guarantee that there's going to be trouble. If you
look over the years (you know this much better than I do), there were
efforts to develop some kind of autonomy, some kind of independent…various
moves were made. Finally, it led to the establishment of a political party
calling for…not very clear what, maybe autonomy, maybe independence, wasn't
too clear.
There was an election, I think it was in 1987, which was simply stolen.
India would not allow the election to go through and rammed through a fake
outcome in which the autonomy-independence parties were blocked. And after
that came terrorism. What's the solution to this? Part of the solution
should be allowing a political expression to the population itself. That's
part of a solution. Where it goes from there, how that interacts with others
demands is not obvious. Some kind of autonomy within, maybe, a co-determined
framework would be a possibility. The world allows things like that.
Q11: Parvathy Sundaresan
You have stoked the fires of our frustration and anger about what is
happening in the world. I'm sure today Mr. Sashi Kumar and Mr. Ram would
have seen in The Hindu a boxed item: "U. S. paying for past mistakes:
Clinton." He says we are getting back what we have done to the Native
Americans and what the original Christian Crusaders did to Jews and Muslims
in Jerusalem. [The former U. S. President is reported to have said, in a
speech at Georgetown University, that terror had existed in America for
hundreds of years and that the nation was ``paying a price today'' for its
past mistakes -- how the country ``once looked the other way'' when ``a sign
ificant number of Native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their
land or their mineral rights''; and how ``international terrorism'' dated
back thousands of years because, for example, in the first Crusades, when
the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they burned a synagogue with 300 Jews
in it and proceeded to kill every Muslim woman and child on the Temple
Mount. ``I can tell you that the story is still being told today in the
Middle East and we are still paying for it.''] Now, isn't it ironical? He
waged war on Iraq and, as you mentioned, in Sudan. As you rightly put it,
the facts never came out. What is your reaction to these Clinton remarks?
A11: Noam Chomsky
I didn't see Clinton's full remarks. I saw what was reported in the Indian
press, which was very tepid and it totally avoided his own crimes and, in
fact, any recent crimes. I mean it's true that Clinton could say two hundred
years ago we didn't act very nicely! That's something, but it's not much.
If we go back to, say, 1840, a long time ago, former President John Quincy
Adams, out of office like Clinton, spoke in much harsher terms. He condemned
the fact (I remember the words) ``this hapless race of North Americans that
we are exterminating with such felicity.'' That's way stronger than Clinton
and in 1840 -- right in the middle of the action. They knew what they were
doing. They knew they were exterminating the native population. And it was
not totally suppressed, it was kind of justified.
Actually, if you read [Alexis] de Tocqueville, his famous Democracy in
America, he actually describes -- he was an eyewitness to -- the famous,
infamous I should say, expulsion of the Cherokees [in 1838]. It was the
third time they were expelled in what came to be called the `Trail of Tears'
. And he describes how he is amazed at how Americans can carry out these
murderous expulsion of weeping women and dying children and so on and do it
with complete nobility of purpose and self-justification and admiration of
their own righteousness.
So, if Clinton now happens to notice what was talked about a
hundred-and-fifty years ago, that's nice but I'm not overwhelmed. I'd be
more interested if he had talked about the kind of things you mentioned --
his crimes, which are substantial. The bombing of Sudan, which I mentioned,
that's like a footnote and that one footnote probably meant tens of
thousands killed.
He's regarded as a great peacemaker in the Middle East. That's just not
true. He was responsible for what's called the ``peace process,'' the
Israel-Palestine ``peace process.'' That's an effort to prevent a peaceful
settlement and Clinton continued with it. You look at his Camp David
proposals last year, 2000. I don't think a map was ever published in the
United States, at least not that I saw, showing the form of the
arrangements. And there's a good reason as to why the map was not published.
If you publish the map, you'd see it's a call for a Bantustan. Clinton's
proposals fragmented the West Bank into at least three, maybe four separated
cantons maintained under U.S.–Israeli control.
Just to go on, you read about the atrocities carried out there. For example,
just to pick one, helicopters are regularly used for political assassination
and also for attacking civilian complexes. Why? Where did the helicopters
come from? Israel doesn't manufacture helicopters. It's a big military force
but it can't produce helicopters. So the United States provides them. Take a
look more closely. The current intifada, the fighting broke out on September
30th, 2000. In the next few days, U. S. helicopters flown by Israeli pilots
attacked apartment complexes and other civilian targets, killing dozens of
people. Now, that was part of a massive set of atrocities. There was no fire
then. You know, people were throwing stones under military occupation, but
they weren't shooting.
What did Clinton do about it? Well, on October 3rd, 2000, two days after
this, he made a deal -- the biggest deal in a decade -- to send Israel
advanced military helicopters. That was his contribution.
What was the contribution of the free press? Well, it was to keep it secret.
It still hasn't been published in the United States, not because they don't
know. They know, but they don't want the population to know, that you, the
taxpayer, are sending advanced helicopters to a country that is using them
to attack civilian targets. A couple of weeks later they started using them
for political assassinations. Well, the U. S. makes kind of mild reprimands
about these assassinations. On the other hand, it continues to send the
helicopters.
One of Bush's early acts, when he came into office, was to arrange to send a
new shipment of the most advanced attack helicopters in the U. S. arsenal.
That's because, as he says on television, that there is a universal law that
murder is evil -- except when we provide attack helicopters for you to
commit murder with them. That was barely reported. If you look in the
business pages, you'd find some item about how Boeing has a new contract
sending attack helicopters to Israel – which, as they know but consider too
insignificant to report -- is using them for political assassination and for
attacks on civilians.
A couple of weeks later, Israel started using F-16s, jet planes, to attack
civilians. Within a week, the Bush administration had made a new deal to
send them more F-16s. And it's not just with Israel, the same with Turkey.
Turkey was carrying out some of the worst atrocities of the 1990s, against
the Kurds, its own Kurdish population -- massive ethnic cleansing, two or
three million refugees, killed tens of thousands of people, destroyed about
3500 villages, it's seven times Kosovo under NATO bombing. Where were they
getting the arms from? From Bill Clinton. In fact, the arms continued to
increase as the atrocities increased, major atrocities, these are some of
the worst atrocities of the late-1990s. You can go on. If Clinton wanted to
talk about atrocities, he doesn't have to talk about something that happened
two hundred years ago, which was talked about more strongly then. He can
talk about decisions that he made and give the reasons for them. The way
John Quincy Adams did. He was talking about his own crimes.
Sashi Kumar
Thank you and that's about all the questions we can take.
[Prolonged audience applause for Noam Chomsky.]
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