Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (44 page)

The next big demonstration was in March ’66, that was the second International Days of Protest. We figured there was no point in having a public demonstration, because we’d get killed, and we didn’t want to have it at a university because the university would probably get smashed to dust, so we decided to have it in a church. So there was a march from Harvard Square down to the Arlington Street Church in downtown Boston, the Unitarian Church which was kind of the center of the movement activities, and the march was pretty well protected—guys on motorcycles were driving up and back trying to keep people from getting slaughtered and so on. Finally we got down to the church and went in: the church was attacked—there were big mobs outside throwing projectiles, tomatoes, cans. I mean, the police were
there
, and they were preventing people from getting killed, but they weren’t doing much more than that. That was in 1966.

There’s been a big change since then—a big, big change. All of that stuff is
inconceivable
today, absolutely inconceivable.

M
AN
: What I’m struck with in each of the three major misunderstandings that are used against you—the Faurisson affair [Chomsky made public statements in 1979 and ’80 that a French professor who denied the Holocaust should not be jailed for his writings by the French government, and was denounced as a defender of the man’s views
  ²⁴
], your statements about Cambodia [Chomsky compared the genocide in Cambodia to that in Fast Timor, corrected numerous statistical falsifications about Cambodia, and was labeled an apologist for Pol Pot
  ²⁵
], and your stance on the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict
  ²⁶
—is how much your views have been distorted and oversimplified by the press. I don’t understand why you’d want to keep bringing these ideas to the mass media when they always insist on misrepresenting them
.

But why is that surprising? First of all, this is not happening in the mass media, this is happening in the intellectual journals. And intellectuals are specialists in defamation, they’re basically commissars [Soviet officials responsible for political indoctrination]—they’re the ideological managers, so they are the ones who feel the most threatened by dissidence. The mass media don’t care that much, they just ignore it, or say it’s crazy or something like that. In fact, this stuff barely enters the national media; sure, you’ll get a throwaway line saying, “this guy’s an apologist for this that and the other thing,” but that’s just feeding off the intellectual culture. The place where it’s really done is inside the intellectual journals—because that’s their specialty. They’re commissars: it’s not fundamentally different from the Communist Party.

And also, I’m a particular target for other reasons—a lot of what I write is a critique of the American liberal intellectual establishment, and they don’t like that particularly.

W
OMAN
: You also criticize Israel, right?

Yeah, the most sensitive of these issues has to do with the Middle East. In fact, there are organizations which are just dedicated to defamation on that issue. I mean, I didn’t even get involved in writing about the Middle East at first, although that was always my main interest since childhood, partially for this reason—because they’re very Stalinist-like, and I knew how they worked from the inside. In fact, I was one of the people who was doing it when I was a kid; you sort of get absorbed in this stuff, you know. And they’re just
desperate
to prevent discussion of the issues.

So for example, the Anti-Defamation League [of B’nai B’rith], which masquerades as a civil rights organization, is in fact just a defamation organization. The office in Boston happens to be a rather leaky place, and I’ve been leaked a lot of stuff from there by people working in the office who are just outraged by what goes on. For instance, they leaked me my file a couple years ago—it had hundreds of pages of material, because whenever I speak anywhere, they’ve got a spy working for them who’s taking notes and sending them back to some central office. So somebody will be here, say, taking notes on what I’m saying, and some version of it will get into my file and then be circulated around to their offices in the rest of the country: there are intercepted communications, and fevered inter-office memos, “he said so-and-so at such-and-such”—all kinds of
schmutz
, as they call it in my culture [“
schmutz
” means “dirt” in Yiddish].
  ²⁷

But if any of you have ever looked at your F.B.I, file through a Freedom of Information Act release, you’ve probably discovered that intelligence agencies are in general extremely incompetent—that’s one of the reasons why there are so many intelligence failures: they just never get anything straight, for all kinds of reasons. And part of it is because the information they get typically is being transmitted to them by agents and informants who are ideological fanatics, and they always misunderstand things in their own crazy ways. So if you look at an F.B.I. file where you actually know what the facts are, you’ll usually see that the information has some relation to reality—you can sort of figure out what they’re talking about—but by the time it’s worked its way through the ideological fanaticism of the intelligence system, there’s been all sorts of weird distortion. And that’s true of the Anti-Defamation League’s intelligence too.

But this stuff certainly is circulated around—like, probably somebody in this area received it from the regional office, and there’ll be some article in the local newspaper tomorrow that’ll pull a lot of junk out of the file, that’s what usually happens when I go places. And the point is that it’s used to close off the discussion: since they can’t deal with the issues, they’ve got to close off the discussion—and the best way to do it is by throwing enough slime so that maybe people will figure, where there’s smoke there’s fire, so we’d better not listen.

Well, the A.D.L. is an organized group where that’s their main job.
  ²⁸
But there are plenty of others who do the same sort of thing—because this is really the institutional task of the whole intellectual community. I mean, the job of mainstream intellectuals is to serve as a kind of secular priesthood, to ensure that the doctrinal faith is maintained. So if you go back to a period when the Church was dominant, the priesthood did it: they were the ones who watched out for heresy and went after it. And as societies became more secular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the same controls were needed: the institutions still had to defend themselves, after all, and if they couldn’t do it by burning people at the stake or sending them to inquisitions anymore, they had to find other ways. Well, over time that responsibility was transferred to the intellectual class—to be guardians of the sacred political truths, hatchet-men of one sort or another.

So you see, as a dissident, you shouldn’t be surprised to get all of this stuff done to you, it’s in fact a positive sign—it means that you can’t just be ignored anymore.

W
OMAN
: You’re really not discouraged by the fact that your work almost never gets portrayed accurately to the public or reviewed in a serious way by the press?

No, not at all—and we really
shouldn’t
get discouraged by that kind of thing. Look, I am not expecting to be applauded by people in editorial offices and at Faculty Clubs—that’s not my audience. I mean, I was in India a little while ago and visited rural self-governing villages, and the people there were happy to see me. I was in Australia at the invitation of Timorese refugees, and they were glad that I was trying to help them. Recently I gave talks at a labor federation in Canada, and I’ve done that in the United States often—those are the people that I want to talk to, they’re the audience I’d like to address.

Now, it’s interesting and worth pointing out that the media in the United States are different in this respect—I do get pretty easy access to national media in other countries. In fact, it’s only in the United States and the old Soviet Empire that I haven’t had any real access to the major media over the years. And it’s not just me, of course: the major media in the U.S., as was the case in the former Soviet Empire, pretty much exclude
anybody
with a dissident voice. So I can have interviews and articles in major journals and newspapers in Western Europe, and in Australia, and all up and down the Western Hemisphere. And often I get invitations from leading journals in other countries to write for them—like, recently I had an article in Israel’s most important newspaper,
Ha’aretz
, which is kind of the equivalent of the
New York Times:
it was an invited critique of their foreign policy, and of the so-called “peace process.”
  ²⁹
Or in Australia, I gave a talk at the National Press Club in the Parliament Building, which was nationally televised twice on Australian World Services, their version of the B.B.C.—they wanted me to speak about
Australia’s
foreign policy, so I gave a very critical talk to a national audience, and I spoke to Parliamentarians and journalists and so on, and was all over the press and papers there. And the same thing is true in Europe; I’m often on the C.B.C. nationally in Canada; and so on. Well, as you say, that’s all unheard of in the United States—and the main reason, I think, is just that what people think, and are allowed to think, is much more important here, so the controls are much greater.
  ³⁰

M
AN
: I heard something vaguely about your books being burned in Canada once. Were you there? What was that like for you?

That was in Toronto. Yeah, I was there. I mean, I think people have a right to burn books if they want. I was in fact interviewed about it, I said the obvious thing—I’d rather they read them than burn them, but if they want to burn them, I don’t care. Actually, you don’t really have to worry about burning books—burning books is virtually impossible. Books are like bricks: they’re very hard to burn.

M
AN
: Was that a popular rabble or something? How did it happen?

It was actually Vietnamese refugees. There’s a Vietnamese refugee community that heard, or decided, or whatever, that I was … I don’t know what. It was impossible to find out what they’d heard. They obviously knew that I was against the Vietnam War, and they were obviously very pro-war—you know, they thought the Americans should have stayed in and won it, that’s why they’re Vietnamese refugees. So they burned the books—which is fine, it’s a reasonable form of protest. Now, if the
government
burns books, that’s a different story, or if a
corporation
burns books, that’s a different story.

In fact, just as an aside, I should say that I’ve had much worse destruction of books than that. You know how there’s been all this business all over the front pages recently about big media mega-mergers, and there’s all kinds of thoughtful discussion about whether this is going to harm the freedom of the press and so on? I really have to laugh. The first book that Ed Herman and I wrote together was published in 1974 by a rather profitable textbook publisher which happened to be owned by Warner Communications. Well, one of the executives at the corporation [William Sarnoff] didn’t like the advertising copy that he saw about it, and he asked to see the book—and he was horrified by the book, and wouldn’t let the publisher distribute it. Then came a long hassle, in which the people who ran the publishing company tried to insist on their right to publish, and in the end Warner Communications just put the publisher out of business, they decided that the easiest way to deal with the situation was just to terminate them. That meant that not only was
our
book destroyed, but
everybody’s
books were destroyed. That does the Ayatollah one better: that’s way beyond burning a book, that’s destroying every book by this publisher to prevent one particular book, which had already been printed, from being distributed.
  ³¹
Now,
that
I would regard as much more serious than a number of people burning a book for symbolic reasons. If they want to do that, fine.

W
OMAN
: How significant do you think these media mega-mergers really are in the end?

Well, the first chapter of our book
Manufacturing Consent
does talk a bit about the corporate concentration of the media—and that part actually was written by Ed Herman, who’s a specialist in corporate control; I didn’t have anything to do with it. But my own feeling is that that particular issue is not quite as important as it’s sometimes made out to be. I mean, if there were fifty media corporations instead of three, for example, I think they’d do about the same thing they do now—just because they all have basically the same interests. Maybe there’d be a little bit more competition, but probably not much. That’s my view of the question, at least.

M
AN
: Have you ever had your linguistics work censored or impeded in publication because of your politics?

Never in the United States—but in the rest of the world, sure. For instance, I’ll never forget one week, it must have been around 1979 or so, when I was sent two newspapers: one from Argentina and one from the Soviet Union. Argentina was then under the rule of these neo-Nazi generals, and I was sent
ha Prensa
from Buenos Aires, the big newspaper in Argentina—there was a big article saying, “You can’t read this guy’s linguistics work because it’s Marxist and subversive.” The same week I got an article from
Izvestia
in the Soviet Union which said, “You can’t read this guy’s linguistics work because he’s idealist and counter-revolutionary.” I thought that was pretty nice.