By Ben Cohen
In the second part of our exclusive interview with Noam Chomsky, we talk to the MIT Professor and human rights activist about the Bush Administration's legacy, America's history of torture, and role of the mainstream media in holding power to account. For Part 1 of the interview, click here.
TDB: Where does the Bush Administration rank in American History in terms of extremism?
NC: It’s off the edge of the spectrum. It’s one of the reasons why it’s come under such intense criticism even from right within the establishments. That’s true on both domestic and international affairs. Also for example, in international affairs, the hall mark of the Bush Administration was the September 2002 National Security Strategy, when authorizing what they called preemptive war, actually preventive war – we can attack anyone who we ultimately think is going to be a threat to us. That received enormous criticism, right from the mainstream. Within a few weeks from when it was announced, Foreign Affairs, the major establishment journal, had an article by a well respected international relations specialist who condemned the strategy as what he called ‘A new imperial grand strategy’, or some phrase like that, and said it would lead to disaster for the United States and for everyone else. And it had a good deal of additional criticism. However, if you look carefully, the criticism was more because of style than content.
That was actually pointed out in the ensuing debate by Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State, she pointed out accurately, that every President has a principle like that in his back pocket, but you don’t flourish it arrogantly, brazenly in the face of others, in a manner which antagonizes even allies, that doesn’t make any sense. Just keep it quiet, and as he knew, Bill Clinton had a similar doctrine. Bill Clinton’s doctrine was announced more quietly, but the doctrine was that the United States has the right to use force, unilaterally, to preserve access to resources and markets. Taken literally, that’s even more extreme than the Bush doctrine, which at least required pretexts. But nobody made a fuss because it the style was reserved and polite, so you could sort of pretend you couldn’t see it and not be insulted by it. And it goes all the way back, I mean basically those policies were spelled out pretty clearly and explicitly in Second World War international planning by high level planners. They planned during the Second World War, they understood that the States would emerge from the war as the world dominant power with enormous advantages, unprecedented advantages, and they called for the creation of a global system in which the U.S would reign supreme, and would be entitled to act to prevent exercises of sovereignty over others that threatened its dominance, and they also recognized that this would require overwhelming military superiority, so they called for immediate large scale rearmament after the war. And then these policies were pretty much implemented in the following years. There’s nothing novel about it, and there’s nothing secret about it. It’s just that the Bush Administration was off the spectrum both in its rhetorical style and its willingness to resort to violence on the flimsiest of pretexts.
TDB: What permits such extremism to exist in a relatively peaceful and prosperous country?
NC: That’s kind of an odd description. I mean the United States is probably the only country in the world that was founded as a ‘nascent empire’ – it’s what George Washington called it. The colonies he said, were a nascent empire and they were just beginning their imperial conquest. They had to conquer the national territory. Thomas Jefferson was the most libertarian of the founders effectively called for conquest of the Western hemisphere. The expansion of the colonies to what is now the national territory, is just imperialism. Historians of imperialism warn against what they call the ‘salt water fallacy’. Namely you only call it imperialism if you cross saltwater. But that is a fallacy. I mean if the Mississippi River was the size of the Irish sea, the conquest of the national territory would be called imperialism. From the point of view of the indigenous population, it’s the same whether you cross water or not. So yes the expansion itself was constant war against the indigenous population. The conquest of Florida, which was an undeclared war, the first executive war in American history without congressional authorization, the Mexican war conquered half of Mexico, then the expansion in the Caribbean, into the pacific, and after the Second World War, interventions everywhere. It’s hard to find a year of peace.
TDB: People have gotten very excited over candidates like Barack Obama. Do you think he represents half of the change he talks about?
NC: I think he represents a change from the extremism of the Bush Administration back to a more centrist, Democrat position, rather like Clinton probably. Not a substantial change.
TDB: To what extent do you see the mainstream media as being culpable for not reporting on the massive abuses of executive power by the Bush Administration?
NC: I mean to an extent, they have reported on it. The power plays of the Bush administration have been so extreme and so brazen that even mainstream corporate power is appalled by it. And in fact it is interesting – what has caused a serious controversy and criticism is primarily the resort to torture. It’s talked about as if it’s something new! It isn’t anything new, it’s just not hidden. During the Vietnam war for example, there was constant torture, but it was mostly delegated to subordinates like the Saigon army. In Central America, U.S clients were directly involved in extensive torture throughout the Reagan years. And U.S forces as well, I mean, some examples, sometimes they were spectacular. The press wouldn’t report them, but they were incredible. So for example in 1986, in El Salvador, the U.S client state, almost the entire Human Rights Commission was arrested, jailed and tortured. Inside the prison they managed to accumulate testimonies, including a video of about over 400 prisoners who testified, giving their names, being seen on video, testified about the torture they had endured. In one case, being tortured by a North American Major in uniform, who was closely described. They succeeded in smuggling that video out of the prison. I mean, if anything like this had happened in an enemy state, they’d have screaming headlines. It was distributed to the press, and they refused to publish it. Okay – that’s not torture? Of course it’s torture! It didn’t happen because it wasn’t reported or discussed. If you read the critics on the left liberal journals on the Bush Administration’s resort to torture, like Jane Mayer, one of the major critics who had a long book about torture in the Bush Administration, what she says, in the New York Review is that during the War on Terror, we lost our way, America lost its way – we did terrible things. What about Reagan’s ‘War on Terror’? We didn’t lose our way then? And that one was much worse than this one. But it wasn’t discussed, so therefore it’s now we lost our way. The point is again that the Bush Administration’s stance was so extreme, so brazen, so visible, so arrogant that they did elicit substantial mainstream criticism, but on very narrow grounds. The same with the war in Iraq. The most extreme criticism of the war in Iraq that you hear anywhere in the mainstream is something like Barack Obama – it was a ‘strategic blunder’. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan or Hungary, we didn’t criticize it because it was a strategic blunder, we criticized it because it was a crime. If it succeed, like in the case of Hungary, or Chechnya, it’s still a crime, even worse a crime. But by our standards we should be praising the Kremlin for those achievements. We are unwilling, or unable to principled criticism to ourselves. Actually, that’s an old observation. George Orwell wrote about it in his classic essay on nationalism. He said ‘The nationalist has a remarkable indifference to reality, and not only does not disapprove of the crimes committed on his own side, but is incapable of even hearing about them.’ Now that’s pretty accurate.
More of this interview will be published in my upcoming book, out early next year. Stay tuned!
