Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (62 page)

As for American business, I suspect that powerful interests in the United States would more or less prefer things to stay the way they are—just because it’s too disruptive: you don’t know what all the consequences of separation would be. The way the relationship between the two countries is now, things sort of work—and after all, all of Canada is going to become a colony of the United States anyway, through things like N.A.F.T.A., so why go and pick off one piece and have all of these other disruptive effects?

Remember, people here were trying to take over Canada as early as the 1770s—it’s not a new idea. And if you look back at the history of the two countries, in 1775—before the American Revolution even began—the American colonists had already invaded Canada, and had to be driven back by the British [the Continental Congress’s first act before declaring independence from Britain was to send an invasion force to Canada in the unsuccessful “Quebec Campaign”]. Then through the nineteenth century, the only reason the U.S. didn’t conquer Canada was that the British forces in Canada were just too strong to allow it [e.g. invading American forces were repulsed by British and Canadian soldiers several times in the War of 1812]. And ever since then, it’s just been a matter of the United States integrating Canada into our economy through other means: the so-called Free Trade Agreement of 1989 gave that a big shot forward, N.A.F.T.A. is accelerating it still further, and it is very quickly taking place.

Deciphering “China”

M
AN
: Noam, China has been in the news a lot recently, especially in light of their resistance to intellectual property rights, and worldwide concern over some of their extremely destructive environmental practices and human rights abuses. What I’m wondering is, what do you think would be viable diplomatic measures now to improve U.S. relations with China?

Well, I don’t know—do we
want
to improve relations with China? China’s a very brutal society, a brutal government: I don’t feel any particular interest in improving relations with it.

Look, the ways in which issues are framed for us in the media and in the mainstream culture typically involve so many assumptions and presuppositions that you’re kind of trapped as soon as you get into a discussion of them—you’re trapped in a discussion you don’t want to be in. And I think you have to start by taking apart the assumptions.

So I don’t think we should be asking the question “How do we improve relations with China?”—we should be asking other questions, like “What kind of relations do we want to have with China?” And when we talk about “China,” who exactly do we mean? China has a very wealthy sector now—businessmen, bureaucrats and others, the guys who make the decisions—and when the U.S. press talks about “China,” that’s who they mean. But there are plenty of other people in China too. So for example, you take these Southeastern sections of China which are supposed to be “economic miracles” and huge growth areas—yeah, they’re economic miracles alright, but a good deal of that growth is because of foreign investment, which means absolutely horrendous working conditions. So you have women from farms who are locked into factories where they work 12 hours a day for essentially nothing, and sometimes a couple hundred of them will be burned to death because there’s a factory fire and the factory doors have been locked so no one can leave, and so on and so forth.
  ³²
Well, that’s “China” too—and the same is true of any other country. So which “China” are we talking about?

In fact, in this case there’s also a geographical split, there’s a geographical break between Southeast China, which is a big growth area, and Central China, where most of the population still lives, and where things are maybe even going downhill in terms of development and modernization. Well, the differences between those areas are so substantial that some China specialists suspect that China may just break apart into a more coastal area that’s
part
of the general East Asian growth area, with a lot of Japanese capital and overseas Chinese capital and foreign investment feeding into it, and then a big area with hundreds of millions of people living in it which is kind of like a declining peasant society—surely not part of the big growth rate, and maybe even declining.
  ³³
So even within the geographical entity that’s called “China,” there are regions that are like completely different countries, and in some areas things could go back, as some suspect, even to the days of peasant wars and other things like that. So, again, you have to ask what exactly you mean by “China.”

And in fact, if you look still more closely, the big “economic growth” areas in China
themselves
are not so simple. So it turns out that a good deal of the economic growth in those regions is coming from cooperative structures, not from foreign-based investment—I mean, nobody’s really studied these cooperatives in detail, because China’s such a closed society, but they’re not private enterprise and they’re not foreign investment, they’re some other thing. But certainly they have been picking up, and they do have kind of a cooperative structure. And you don’t have to go to “lefty” magazines to find this out—there are articles about it in mainstream journals like
The Economist
and the
Asian Wall Street Journal
and so on.
  ³⁴
Well, those cooperatives are a big part of the growth of Southeast China, and they represent very different interests from the foreign investment-driven industrial structures, with all their horrendously exploitative conditions. So that’s yet another “China.”

And like I say, within all the various “Chinas” one can identify, there always are different sectors of the population with differing interests: like, for people working in the electronics factories and toy factories in Guangdong Province, life is anything but pretty, they live under absolutely horrible conditions—but there’s also a managerial elite sector that is growing and getting rich at the same time. So I think the first step in figuring out what to do about policies towards something like “China” has to be to dismantle all the assumptions and presuppositions and biases behind the issues as they’re being presented by the institutions. And while I don’t think there are anything like simple answers, on some of these issues of conflict that you read about in the media now, I think it’s a very mixed story.

Take intellectual property rights. The Chinese leadership hasn’t completely accepted intellectual property rights, it hasn’t completely accepted these new developments to ensure that rich and powerful corporations have a monopoly on technology and information—so now the U.S. is using various sanctions against them to try to force compliance. Well, I don’t think I’m in favor of
that
. Like, I don’t think I want to improve
those
relations with China, what I would like to do is to dismantle this whole crazy system.

Or look at the fact that China is one of the only countries in the world that imprisons its population at roughly the same level as the United States—the United States is way in the lead of other countries that keep statistics on imprisonment, and while we don’t have precise statistics on China, from the work that’s been done by criminologists who’ve tried to make sense of it, it looks as though they’re roughly in our ballpark.
  ³⁵
Well, is that a good thing—that they throw huge amounts of their population in jail like we do? I don’t think it’s a great thing. And it’s probable that their prison system is even as brutal as ours, maybe worse. Well, the U.S. government and U.S. power systems certainly don’t care about that—any more than they care about the fact that the
United States
is imprisoning its population at a rate way beyond anyone else in the world; in fact, that’s going up right now. So that can’t be why U.S. relations with China are bad.

There was some talk in the U.S. media a while ago about prison labor in China—but take a close look at that discussion. The only objection to prison labor in China that you heard was that the
products
of that prison labor were being exported to the United States—hence that’s state industry, and the U.S. never wants state industry to compete with privately owned U.S.-based firms. But if China wanted to have prison labor and export it somewhere else, that was fine. In fact, right at the time that the U.S. government and the media were making a fuss about
Chinese
prison labor, the
United States
was exporting products of prison labor to Asia: California and Oregon were producing textiles in prisons which were being exported to Asia under the name “Prison Blues”—didn’t even try to hide it. And in fact, prison production is going way up in the United States right now.
  ³⁶
So there’s no objection to prison labor in principle, just don’t interfere with the profits of American-based corporations—that was the real meaning of that debate, when you got to the core of it.

So what you want to do on every issue, I think, is to extricate yourself from the way the discussion is being presented in the official culture, and begin to ask these kinds of questions about it. I mean, U.S. power doesn’t care much if the Chinese leaders murder dissidents, what they care about is that the Chinese leaders let them make money—and I don’t think that is something which ordinary people in the United States ought to buy into. I mean, China’s a very complicated, big story, and I don’t think there’s anything like a simple answer as to what should be done in terms of U.S. relations: like anything else, you just have to look at all the various subparts. But the first step, I think, as with everything, is to reframe in your mind what’s really going on, remind yourself what the real issues are, and not get trapped in discussions you don’t want to be part of in the first place.

Indonesia’s Killing Fields: U.S.-Backed Genocide in East Timor

W
OMAN
: Noam, a little earlier you mentioned the East Timor massacre. I’m an organizer on that issue in Canada, and it seems to me that some encouraging things have been happening in the big picture on that in the past few years, in terms of maybe pressuring Indonesia to withdraw and stop their extermination sometime in the future. Do you agree with that kind of optimistic assessment at all?

[Editors’ Note: Indonesia finally was forced to hold a referendum in which the East Timorese voted for independence in September 1999. The following discussion of the media, the great powers, and popular activism—given before those events—provides critical background.]

Well, it’s very hard to quantify, but I think you’re right. I mean, I don’t know Indonesia that well myself, but people who do, like Ben Anderson [American professor], say they definitely find something positive taking place there. I hope so—but you know, it’s really up to
us
what happens in East Timor: what happens there is going to depend on how much pressure and activism ordinary people in the Western societies can put together.

First of all, does everybody know the situation we’re talking about? Want me to summarize it? It’s an extremely revealing case, actually—if you really want to learn something about our own society and values, this is a very good place to start. It’s probably the biggest slaughter relative to the population since the Holocaust, which makes it not small. And this is genocide, if you want to use the term, for which the United States continues to be directly responsible.

East Timor is a small island north of Australia. Indonesia invaded it illegally in 1975, and ever since they have just been slaughtering people. It’s continuing as we speak, after more than two decades. And that massacre has been going on because the United States has actively, consistently, and crucially supported it: it’s been supported by every American administration, and also by the entire Western media, which have totally silenced the story. The worst phase of the killing was in the late 1970s during the Carter administration. At that time, the casualties were about at the scale of the Pol Pot massacres in Cambodia. Relative to the population, they were much greater. But they were radically different from Pol Pot’s in one critical respect: nobody had any idea about how to stop the Pol Pot slaughter, but it was trivial how to stop this one. And it’s still trivial how we can stop it—we can stop supporting it.

Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 with the explicit authorization of Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger [the American President and Secretary of State].
  ³⁷
Kissinger then at once (secretly, though it leaked) moved to increase U.S. weapons and counterinsurgency equipment sales to Indonesia, which already was about 90 percent armed with U.S. weapons.
  ³⁸
It’s now known from leaked documents that the British, Australians, and Americans all were aware of the invasion plans in advance, and that they monitored its progress as it was unfolding. Of course, they only applauded.
  ³⁹

The U.S. media have real complicity in genocide in this case. Before the invasion, news coverage of East Timor had in fact been rather high in the United States, surprisingly high actually—and the reason was that East Timor had been part of the Portuguese Empire, which was collapsing in the 1970s, and there was a lot of concern back then that the former Portuguese colonies might do what’s called “moving towards Communism,” meaning moving towards independence, which is not allowed. So before the invasion, there was a lot of media coverage of East Timor. After Indonesia attacked, coverage started to decline—and then it declined very sharply. By 1978, when the atrocities reached their peak, coverage reached flat zero, literally zero in the United States and Canada, which has been another big supporter of the occupation.
  ⁴⁰