Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (9 page)

M
AN
:
Life
magazine made My Lai famous
.
  ⁸⁰

My Lai, they did—but first of all, note the timing: it’s a year and a half after it happened, a year and a half after corporate America turned against the war. And the reporting was falsified. See, My Lai was presented as if it was a bunch of crazy grunts who got out of control because they were being directed by this Lieutenant Galley, who was kind of a madman.
That
you can handle. But that’s not what My Lai was about. My Lai was a footnote, My Lai was an uninteresting footnote to a military operation called Operation WHEELER WALLAWA—which was a huge mass-murder operation, in which B-52 raids were targeted right on villages. That wasn’t Lieutenant Calley, that was a guy in Washington plotting out coordinates. You know what a B-52 raid is? That means wipe out everything—and it was targeted right on villages. In comparison to that, My Lai doesn’t exist.

In fact, there was a military commission that reviewed My Lai, the Piers Commission, and their most dramatic finding was that there were massacres like My Lai all over the place. For instance, they found another massacre in My Khe, which is about four kilometers down the road—everywhere they looked they found another massacre.
  ⁸¹
Well, what does that tell you? What does that suggest to you, if everywhere you look you find a My Lai? Well, it suggests something, but what it suggests was never brought out in the media.

W
OMAN
: You mentioned that we had a citizens’ army in Vietnam. Do we still have a citizens’ army?

No, now it’s a professional army.

W
OMAN
: I know, that’s what’s scary
.

Exactly.

W
OMAN
: Ironically, not having a draft
…

It’s not ironic. I think the peace movement made a mistake there. I mean, personally I was never in favor of ending the draft, although I was all involved in resistance activities: when it turned to anti-draft activities, I pulled out of them.

W
OMAN
: Me too
.

Look, there is no such thing as a “volunteer army”: a “volunteer army” is a mercenary army of the poor. Take a look at the Marines—what you see is black faces, from the ghettos.

W
OMAN
: And the officers are white
.

Yeah, and the officers are white, of course. That’s like South Africa: the officers are white, the grunts who actually carry out most of the atrocities in places like Namibia are black.
  ⁸²
That’s the way empires have always been run. And sometime in the Seventies, the American army shifted to a traditional mercenary army of the poor, which they call a “volunteer army.” People in power learn, you know. They’re sophisticated, and they’re organized, and they have continuity—and they realize that they made a mistake in Vietnam. They don’t want to make that same mistake again.

And as for the
New York Times
being anti-war—well, we
thought
of it as anti-war at the time, but that was because our standard was so low. Nowadays we would consider that same sort of “criticism” to be pro-war. And that’s just another reflection of the increase in political consciousness and sophistication in the general population over the last twenty years. If you look back at the
Times
in those days, that’s what you’ll find I think.

2

Teach-In: Over Coffee

Based primarily on discussions at Rowe, Massachusetts, April 15–16, 1989
.

“Containing” the Soviet Union in the Cold War

W
OMAN
: Dr. Chomsky, it seems the terms of political discourse themselves are a tool for propagandizing the population. How is language used to prevent us from understanding and to disempower us?

Well, the terminology we use is heavily ideologically laden, always. Pick your term: if it’s a term that has any significance whatsoever—like, not “and” or “or”—it typically has two meanings, a dictionary meaning and a meaning that’s used for ideological warfare. So, “terrorism” is only what other people do. What’s called “Communism” is supposed to be “the far left”: in my view, it’s the far
right
, basically indistinguishable from fascism. These guys that everybody calls “conservative,” any conservative would turn over in their grave at the sight of them—they’re extreme statists, they’re not “conservative” in any traditional meaning of the word. “Special interests” means labor, women, blacks, the poor, the elderly, the young—in other words, the general population. There’s only one sector of the population that
doesn’t
ever get mentioned as a “special interest,” and that’s corporations, and business in general—because they’re the “
national
interest.” Or take “defense”: I have never heard of a state that admits it’s carrying out an aggressive act, they’re always engaged in “defense,” no matter what they’re doing—maybe “preemptive defense” or something.

Or look at the major theme of modern American history, “containment”—as in, “the United States is containing Soviet expansionism.” Unless you accept that framework of discussion when talking about international affairs in the modern period, you are just not a part of accepted discourse here: everybody has to begin by assuming that for the last half-century the United States has been “containing” the Soviet Union.

Well, the rhetoric of “containment” begs all questions—once you’ve accepted the rhetoric of “containment” it really doesn’t matter what you say, you’ve already given up everything. Because the fundamental question is, is it true? Has the United States been “containing” the Soviet Union? Well, you know, on the surface it looks a little odd. I mean, maybe you think the Soviet Union is the worst place in history, but they’re conservative—whatever rotten things they’ve done, they’ve been inside the Soviet Union and right around its borders, in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan and so on. They never do anything anywhere else. They don’t have troops stationed anywhere else. They don’t have intervention forces positioned all over the world like we do.
  ¹
So what does it mean to say we’re “containing” them?

We’ve been talking about the media and dumping on them, so why not turn to scholarship? Diplomatic history’s a big field, people win big prizes, get fancy professorships. Well, if you look at diplomatic history, it too is in the framework of “containment,” even the so-called dissidents. I mean,
everybody
has to accept the premise of “containment,” or you simply will not have an opportunity to proceed in these fields. And in the footnotes of the professional literature on containment, often there are some revealing things said.

For example, one of the major scholarly books on the Cold War is called
Strategies of Containment
, by John Lewis Gaddis—it’s the foremost scholarly study by the top diplomatic historian, so it’s worth taking a look at, Well, in discussing this great theme, “strategies of containment,” Gaddis begins by talking about the terminology. He says at the beginning: it’s true that the term “containment” begs some questions, yes it presupposes some things, but nevertheless, despite the question of whether it’s factually accurate, it still is proper to adopt it as the framework for discussion. And the reason why it’s proper is because it was the
perception
of American leaders that they were taking a defensive position against the Soviet Union—so, Gaddis concludes, since that was the perception of American leaders, and since we’re studying American history, it’s fair to continue in that framework.
  ²

Well, just suppose some diplomatic historian tried that with the Nazis. Suppose somebody were to write a book about German history and say, “Well, look, Hitler and his advisors certainly
perceived
their position as defensive”—which is absolutely true: Germany was under “attack” by the Jews, remember. Go back and look at the Nazi literature, they had to defend themselves against this virus, this bacillus that was eating away at the core of modern civilization—and you’ve got to defend yourself, after all. And they were under “attack” by the Czechs, and by the Poles, and by European encirclement. That’s not a joke. In fact, they had a better argument there than we do with the Soviet Union—they
were
encircled, and “contained,” and they had this enormous Versailles debt stuck on them for no reason after World War I. Okay, so suppose somebody wrote a book saying: “Look, the Nazi leadership
perceived
themselves as taking a defensive stance against external and internal aggression; it’s true it begs some questions, but we’ll proceed that way—now we’ll talk about how they defended themselves against the Jews by building Auschwitz, and how they defended themselves against the Czechs by invading Czechoslovakia, how they defended themselves against the Poles, and so on.” If anybody tried to do that, you wouldn’t even bother to laugh—but about the United States, that’s the
only
thing you can say: it’s not just that it’s
acceptable
, it’s that anything else is
unacceptable
.

And when you pursue the matter further, it becomes even more interesting. So for example, in this same book Gaddis points out—again, in sort of a footnote, an aside he doesn’t elaborate on—that it’s a striking fact that when you look over the American diplomatic record since World War II, all of our decisions about how to contain the Soviet Union, like the arms buildups, the shifts to deténte, all those things, reflected largely domestic economic considerations. Then he sort of drops the point.
  ³
Well, what does that mean? What does Gaddis mean by that? There he’s beginning to enter into the realm of truth. See, the truth of the matter, and it’s very well-supported by declassified documents and other evidence, is that military spending is our method of industrial management—it’s our way of keeping the economy profitable for business. So just take a look at the major declassified documents on military spending, they’re pretty frank about it. For example, N.S.C. 68 [National Security Council Memorandum 68] is the major Cold War document, as everybody agrees, and one of the things it says very clearly is that without military spending, there’s going to be an economic decline both in the United States and world-wide—so consequently it calls for a vast increase in military spending in the U.S., in addition to breaking up the Soviet Union.
  ⁴

You have to remember the context in which these decisions were being made, after all. This was right after the Marshall Plan had failed, right after the post-war aid programs had failed. There still had been no success as yet in reconstructing either the Japanese or Western European economies—and American business needed them; American manufacturers needed those export markets desperately. See, the Marshall Plan was designed largely as an export-promotion operation for American business, not as the noblest effort in history and so on. But it had failed: we hadn’t rebuilt the industrial powers we needed as allies and reconstructed the markets we needed for exports. And at that point, military spending was considered the one thing that could really do it, it was seen as the engine that could drive economic growth after the wartime boom ended, and prevent the U.S. from slipping back into a depression.
  ⁵
And it worked: military spending was a big stimulus to the U.S. economy, and it led to the rebuilding of Japanese industry, and the rebuilding of European industry—and in fact, it has continued to be our mode of industrial management right up to the present. So in that little comment Gaddis was getting near the main story: he was saying, post-war American decisions on rearmament and detente have been keyed to domestic economic considerations—but then he drops it, and we go back to talking about “containment” again.

And if you look still closer at the scholarship on “containment,” it’s even more intriguing. For example, in another book Gaddis discusses the American military intervention in the Soviet Union right after the Bolshevik Revolution—when we tried to overthrow the new Bolshevik government by force—and he says
that
was defensive and
that
was containment: our invasion of the Russian land mass. And remember, I’m not talking about some right-wing historian; this is the major, most respected, liberal diplomatic historian, the dean of the field: he says the military intervention by 13 Western nations in the Soviet Union in 1918 was a “defensive” act. And why was it defensive? Well, there’s a sense in which he’s right. He says it was “defensive” because the Bolsheviks had declared a challenge to the existing order throughout the West, they had offered a challenge to Western capitalism—and naturally we had to defend ourselves. And the only way we could defend ourselves was by sending troops to Russia, so that’s a “defensive” invasion, that’s “defense.”
  ⁶

And if you look at that history in more detail, you’ll find the point is even more revealing. So for example, right after the Bolshevik Revolution, American Secretary of State Robert Lansing warned President Wilson that the Bolsheviks are “issuing an appeal to the proletariat of all nations, to the illiterate and mentally deficient, who by their very numbers are supposed to take control of all governments.” And since they’re issuing an appeal to the mass of the population in other countries to take control of their own affairs, and since that mass of the population are the “mentally deficient” and the “illiterate”—you know, all these poor slobs out there who have to be kept in their place, for their own good—that’s an attack on us, and therefore we have to defend ourselves.
  ⁷
And what Wilson actually
did
was to “defend ourselves” in the two obvious ways: first by invading Russia to try to prevent that challenge from being issued, and second by initiating the Red Scare at home [a 1919 campaign of U.S. government repression and propaganda against “Communists”] to crush the threat that anyone here might answer the appeal. Those were both a part of the same intervention, the same “defensive” intervention.