Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (31 page)

And in fact, you can see that process taking place ever since the Soviet Empire dissolved—and with the standard effects. The so-called “economic reforms” we’ve been instituting in the former Soviet-bloc countries have been an absolute catastrophe for most of their populations—but Western investors and a standard Third World elite of super-rich are making huge fortunes, in part by skimming off most of the “aid” that gets sent there, in various ways.
  ⁹
In fact, U.N.I.C.E.F. [United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund] put out a study a little while ago estimating just the simple human cost, like deaths, of what they call the “capitalist reforms” in Russia and Poland and the others (and incidentally, they
approved
of the reforms)—and for Russia, they calculated that there have been about a half-million extra deaths a year just as a result of them. Poland’s a smaller country, so it was a smaller number, but the results were proportional throughout the region. In the Czech Republic, the percentage of the population living in poverty has gone from 5.7 percent in 1989 to 18.2 percent in 1992; in Poland, the figures are something like from 20 percent to 40 percent. So if you walk down the streets of Warsaw now, sure, you’ll find a lot of nice stuff in the shop windows—but that’s the same as in any Third World country: plenty of wealth, very narrowly concentrated; and poverty, starvation, death, and huge inequality for the vast majority.
  ¹⁰

And actually, that’s the reason the so-called “Communist” Parties in Eastern Europe and Russia are getting votes these days. I mean, when they describe that here, they say, “it’s nostalgia, they forget how bad it was in the old days”—but there’s no nostalgia.
  ¹¹
I don’t think anybody there actually
wants
to go back to the Stalinist dungeon again—it’s not that they’re nostalgic about the
past
, it’s that they’re apprehensive about the
future
. They can see what’s coming very well, namely Brazil and Guatemala, and as bad as their system was, that’s worse. Much worse.

Supporting Terror

So the fact that Russia had pulled itself out of the West’s traditional Third World service-area and was developing on an independent course was really one of the major motivations behind the Cold War. I mean, the standard line you always hear about it is that we were opposing Stalin’s terror—but that’s total bullshit. First of all, we shouldn’t even be able to
repeat
that line without a sense of self-mockery, given our record. Do we oppose anybody else’s terror? Do we oppose Indonesia’s terror in East Timor? Do we oppose terror in Guatemala and El Salvador? Do we oppose what we did to South Vietnam? No, we support terror all the time—in fact, we put it in power.

Just take a look at U.S. aid, for instance. There have been a lot of studies of it, including studies by people who write in the mainstream, and what they show is that there is in fact a very high correlation between U.S. foreign aid and human rights abuses. For example, Lars Schoultz at the University of North Carolina—who’s the major academic specialist on human rights in Latin America and a highly respected mainstream scholar—published a study on U.S. aid to Latin America almost fifteen years ago, in which he identified an extremely close correlation between U.S. aid and torture: as he put it, the more a country tortures its citizens and the more egregious are the violations of human rights, the higher is U.S. aid.
  ¹²

In fact, it’s true at this very moment. The leading human rights violator in the Western Hemisphere by a good margin is Colombia, which has just an atrocious record—they have “social cleansing” programs, before every election members of the opposition parties get murdered, labor union leaders are murdered, students, dissidents are murdered, there are death squads all around. Okay, more than half of U.S. aid to the entire Hemisphere goes to Colombia, and the figure’s increasing under Clinton.
  ¹³
Well, that’s just normal, and like I say, similar results have been shown world-wide.
  ¹⁴
So claims about our concern for human rights are extremely difficult to support: in precisely the regions of the world where we’ve had the most control, the most hideous things you can imagine happen systematically—people have to sell their organs for money in order to survive, police death squads leave flayed bodies hanging by the roadsides with their genitals stuffed in their mouths, children are enslaved, and worse, those aren’t the worst stories.
  ¹⁵

As for Stalin, leaders in the West
admired
him, they didn’t give a damn about his terror. President Truman, for example, described Stalin as “smart as hell,” “honest,” “we can get along with him,” “it’ll be a real catastrophe if he dies.” He said, what goes on in Russia I don’t really care about, it’s not my business, so long as “we get our way 85 percent of the time.”
  ¹⁶
We get our way 85 percent of the time with this nice, smart, decent, honest guy, we can do business with him fine; he wants to murder 40 million people, what do we care? Winston Churchill was the same: the British documents are now being declassified, and after the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Churchill was praising Stalin in internal cabinet meetings as a man of honor we can trust, who can help lead us forward to a new world, a “champion of peace,” “illustrious,” and so on.
  ¹⁷
He was particularly impressed with the fact that Stalin didn’t lift a finger while British troops occupied Greece [beginning in November 1944] and under Churchill’s order treated Athens like “a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress,” carrying out a big massacre to destroy the Greek anti-Nazi resistance and restore the Nazi collaborators to power. Stalin just stood there quietly and let the British do it, so Churchill said he’s a really nice guy.
  ¹⁸

None of these guys had anything against Stalin’s crimes. What’s more, they had nothing against
Hitler
’s crimes—all this talk about Western leaders’ principled opposition to atrocities is just a complete fabrication, totally undermined by a look at the documentary record.
  ¹⁹
It’s just that if you’ve been properly educated, you can’t understand facts like these: even if the information is right in front of your eyes, you can’t comprehend it.

“People’s Democratic Socialist Republics”

Well, let me just end with one last point to do with your question. One of the issues which has devastated a substantial portion of the left in recent years, and caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere, is the alleged fact that there’s been this great battle between socialism and capitalism in the twentieth century, and in the end capitalism won and socialism lost—and the reason we know that socialism lost is because the Soviet Union disintegrated. So you have big cover stories in
The Nation
about “The End of Socialism,” and you have socialists who all their lives considered themselves anti-Stalinist saying, “Yes, it’s true, socialism has lost because Russia failed.”
  ²⁰
I mean, even to raise questions about this is something you’re not supposed to do in our culture, but let’s try it. Suppose you ask a simple question: namely, why do people like the editors at
The Nation
say that “socialism” failed, why don’t they say that “democracy” failed?—and the proof that “democracy” failed is, look what happened to Eastern Europe. After all, those countries also called themselves “democratic”—in fact, they called themselves “People’s Democracies,” real advanced forms of democracy. So why don’t we conclude that “democracy” failed, not just that “socialism” failed? Well, I haven’t seen any articles anywhere saying, “Look, democracy failed, let’s forget about democracy.” And it’s obvious why: the fact that they
called
themselves democratic doesn’t mean that they
were
democratic. Pretty obvious, right?

Okay, then in what sense did socialism fail? I mean, it’s true that the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe
called
themselves “socialist”—but they also called themselves “democratic.” Were they socialist? Well, you can argue about what socialism is, but there are some ideas that are sort of at the core of it, like workers’ control over production, elimination of wage labor, things like that. Did those countries have any of those things? They weren’t even a
thought
there. Again, in the pre-Bolshevik part of the Russian Revolution, there
were
socialist initiatives—but they were crushed instantly after the Bolsheviks took power, like within months, In fact, just as the moves towards democracy in Russia were instantly destroyed, the moves towards socialism were equally instantly destroyed. The Bolshevik takeover was a coup—and that was perfectly well understood at the time, in fact. So if you look in the mainstream of the Marxist movement, Lenin’s takeover was regarded as counter-revolutionary; if you look at independent leftists like Bertrand Russell, it was instantly obvious to them; to the libertarian left, it was a truism.
  ²¹

But that truism has been driven out of people’s heads over the years, as part of a whole prolonged effort to discredit the very idea of socialism by associating it with Soviet totalitarianism. And obviously that effort has been extremely successful—that’s why people can tell themselves that socialism failed when they look at what happened to the Soviet Union, and not even see the slightest thing odd about it. And that’s been a very valuable propaganda triumph for elites in the West—because it’s made it very easy to undercut moves towards real changes in the social system here by saying, “Well, that’s socialism—and look what it leads to.”

Okay, hopefully with the fall of the Soviet Union we can at least begin to get past that barrier, and start recovering an understanding of what socialism could really stand for.

The Organ Trade

W
OMAN
: You mentioned “social cleansing” and people in the Third World selling their body parts for money. I don’t know if you saw the recent Barbara Walters program
…

The answer is, “No by definition,”

W
OMAN
: Well, I have to admit I watched it. She had a segment on some American women who were attacked by villagers in Guatemala and put in jail for allegedly stealing babies for the organ trade. The gist of the story was that the Guatemalan people are totally out of their minds for supposing that babies are being taken out of the country and used for black market sale of organs.
  ²²
What I’d like to know is, do you know of any evidence that this black market trade in children’s organs does in fact exist, and do you think the U.S. might be playing a role in it?

Well, look: suppose you started a rumor in Boston that children from the Boston suburbs are being kidnapped by Guatemalans and taken to Guatemala so their bodies could be used for organ transplants. How far off the ground do you think that rumor would get?

W
OMAN
: Not far
.

Okay, but in Guatemalan peasant societies it does get off the ground. Do they have different genes than we do?

W
OMAN
: No
.

Alright, so there’s got to be some reason why the story spreads there and it wouldn’t spread here. And the reason is very clear. Though the specific stories are doubtless false in this case, there’s a background which is true—that’s why nobody would believe it here, and they do believe it there: because they know about other things that go on.

For one thing, in Latin America there is plenty of kidnapping of children. Now, what the children are used for, you can argue. Some of them are kidnapped for adoption, some of them are used for prostitution—and that goes on throughout the U.S. domains. I mean, you take a look at the U.S. domains—Thailand, Brazil, practically everywhere you go—there are young children being kidnapped for sex-slavery, or just plain slavery.
  ²³
So kidnapping of children unquestionably takes place. And there is strong evidence—I don’t think anybody doubts it very much—that people in these regions are killed for organ transplants.
  ²⁴
Now, whether it’s children or not, I don’t know. But if you take a look at the recent Amnesty International report on Colombia, for example, they say almost casually—just because it’s so routine—that in Colombia they carry out what’s called “social cleansing”: the army and the paramilitary forces go through the cities and pick up “undesirables,” like homeless people, or homosexuals, or prostitutes, or drug addicts, anybody they don’t like, and they just take them and murder them, then chop them up and mutilate their bodies for organ transplants. That’s called “social cleansing,” and everybody thinks it’s a great idea.
  ²⁵
And again, this goes on throughout the U.S. domains.

In fact, it’s even beginning now in Eastern Europe as they’re being turned back into another sector of the Third World—people are starting to sell organs to survive, like you sell a cornea or a kidney or something.
  ²⁶

W
OMAN
: Your own?

Yeah, your own. You just sell it because you’re totally desperate—so you sell your eyes, or your kidney, something that can be taken out without killing you. That goes on, and it’s been going on for a long time.

Well, you know, that’s a background, and against that background these stories, which have been rampant, are believable—and they are in fact believed. And it’s not just by peasants in the highlands: the chief official in the Salvadoran government in charge of children [Victoria de Aviles], the “Procurator for the Defense of Children,” she’s called, recently stated that children in El Salvador are being kidnapped for adoption, crime, and organ transplants. Well, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s not an authority you just dismiss. In Brazil too there’s been a lot of testimony about these things from very respectable sources: church sources, medical investigators, legal sources, and others.
  ²⁷