Interview With Chomsky

Radio Havana Interviews Chomsky

By Noam Chomsky

Telephone interview by Bernie Dwyer for
www.cubadebate.cu with Professor Noam Chomsky of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 28th August
2003.

[Bernie Dwyer] A couple of new popular books have
recently been published such as Weapons of Mass
Deception and Stupid White Men. Do you see them as a
viable alternative to the corporate media?

[Noam Chomsky] No, they are not trying to be an
alternative to the corporate media. They are just books
among the many books written about the way the
corporate media function and there is by now, in the
United States, more than any other western country that
I know, a rather significant popular movement concerned
with the corporate media, which is virtually all the
media within the United States, and the way they
function as a kind of propaganda system.

There is also a lot of popular protest against efforts
to increase the concentration of the media in fewer and
fewer hands so as to prevent even the limited diversity
that exists. The books that you mention are just two of
the many. The books themselves, the critical literature
- I've written on it too- aren't an alternative to the
corporate media but rather a part of an on-going effort
to construct alternatives or to compel them to function
in a more honest fashion.

[Bernie Dwyer] The recent war on Iraq and the current
US occupation was fully supported by the mainstream
press in the US to the extent that the media became the
political wing of the Bush administration. Isn't that
pushing the power of the press beyond all limits?

[Noam Chomsky] It's hard to answer that. An independent
press, of course, would not function in that fashion.
You are quite right. The press became essentially an
instrument of state policy, but there is nothing new
about that. That happens during just about every
military conflict and in fact during any general
confrontation. The press tends overwhelmingly to
function within the framework of state-corporate policy
and those are very closely linked.

During the Vietnam War, which went on for years
remember, the press was almost entirely supportive of
the war. Toward the end, when it started getting costly
to the United States and the business world then you
started getting timid criticisms about how it was going
to cost us too much and so on and you'll find that
criticism now too: it's costing us too much. This goes
back as far as you would like. The First World War was
the same. And it's pretty much true in other countries
too.

The mass media, the business world, and the
intellectual community in general, tend to line up in
support of concentrated power - which in the US is
state and corporate power. And the same is true on the
issues of Cuba. For example almost nobody knows the
history of US terrorism in Cuba since 1959. Terrorism
is a big word. Everybody talks about it. You wouldn't
find a person in a thousand or maybe a hundred thousand
who is aware of the fact that the Kennedy
administration intensified the on-going terrorist
operations (against Cuba) and pressed them to such a
point that they almost led to a terminal nuclear war
and then they went on for years after that. In fact
they are still going on. Almost no one knows that. It's
not covered.

[Bernie Dwyer] The US media has branded several nations
as terrorist nation or as harbouring terrorists or as
being perpetrators of terrorist attacks. Cuba has been
pigeonholed as falling into one if not all of these
categories when we know that Cuba has suffered more
terrorist attacks against it than any other country.
How serious do you take these accusations against Cuba?
Is the drum beat getting louder?

[Noam Chomsky] Louder than when? Not louder than when
Kennedy invaded Cuba and then launched Operation
Mongoose leading right to the missile crisis which
practically destroyed the world. But, yes, it's picking
up. The fact that the United States can label other
countries as terrorist states itself is quite
remarkable because it not a secret that the United
States is incontrovertibly a terrorist state.

The US is the only country in the world that has been
condemned by the World Court for international
terrorism. The words they used were: 'unlawful use of
force' in their war against Nicaragua. That's
international terrorism. There were two Security
Council resolutions supporting that judgement. The US
of course vetoed them. And that was no small terrorist
war. It practically destroyed the country. US terrorism
against Cuba has been going on since 1959 and the fact
that the US can label Cuba a terrorist state when it
has been carrying out a major terrorist campaign
against Cuba since 1959, picking up heavily in the'60s
and peaking in the '70s in fact, that's pretty
astonishing.

But I think if you do a careful study of the American
media and intellectual journals and intellectual
opinions and so on, you will find nothing about this
and not a word suggesting that there is anything
strange about it. And if you look at the scholarly
literature on terrorism by people like Walter Laqueur
and other respected scholars, and take a look at the
index, you find Cuba mentioned often and if you look at
the page references, what is mentioned is suspicions
that Cuba may have been involved in some terrorist
actions, but what you will not find is a reference to
the very well documented US terrorist operations
against Cuba.

And that is not controversial. We have reams of
declassified government documents on it. There is
extensive scholarship on it, but it cannot enter into
public discourse. It's a pretty remarkable achievement,
not just of the media but of the intellectual community
altogether. It's not very different in Europe. If you
did an investigation in England you would probably find
pretty much the same.

[Bernie Dwyer] The US and the people of the US have
nothing to fear from Cuba. Cuba is not a threat. So why
is the government doing such a closed job on Cuba?

[Noam Chomsky] The United States, to its credit, is a
very free country, maybe the freest country in the
world in many respects. One result of that is that we
have extremely rich internal documentation. We have a
rich record of high level planning documents which tell
us the answer to your question. And that's an
achievement of American democracy. However, almost
nobody knows about it and that is a failure of
democracy.

So the information is there. It's in the scholarly
literature. It's in the declassified record and it
answers your question very clearly. So when the Kennedy
administration took over, for example, it immediately
organised a Latin American mission. Latin America was
going to be a centre piece of the Kennedy
administration policy. It was headed by a well-known
American historian, Arthur Schlesinger, who was adviser
to the president. Schlesinger's report of the Latin
American mission has been declassified for the last
number of years and the mission explains to Kennedy the
importance of overthrowing the government of Cuba.

The reason is that they are concerned about, virtually
quoting, the spread of the Castro idea of taking
matters into one's own hands which will have a lot of
appeal to suffering and impoverished people around the
hemisphere who are facing very similar problems. We
don't want that idea to spread. If you go on in the
declassified records, you find descriptions by the CIA
and the intelligence agencies of how the problem with
Cuba is what they call its successful defiance of US
policies going back a hundred and fifty years. That's a
reference to the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine,
which the US was not powerful enough to implement at
the time, stated that the US would become the dominant
force in this hemisphere and Cuba is not submitting to
that. That is successful defiance of a policy that goes
back a hundred and fifty years and that can't be
tolerated. They make it very clear. They are not
worried about Cuban aggression or even subversion or
anything. They are worried about Cuba's successful
defiance and that's not just Cuban. That's common.

When the US overthrew the government of Guatemala in
1954 - again we have that rich record of declassified
documents - what they explain is that the threat of
Guatemala was that its the first democratic government
had enormous popular support. It was mobilising the
peasantry, instituting social reforms and this was
likely to appeal to surrounding countries that might
want to do the same thing. And that couldn't be
tolerated or else the whole framework of US domination
of the hemisphere would collapse.

And it was the same in South East Asia and the rest of
the world. The threat of independent nationalism has
always been a primary threat. And actually if you go
back far enough, remember the American colonies when
they liberated themselves from England, they were
regarded by European statesmen as a tremendous threat.
The Czar, Metternich and others were extremely upset by
this threat of republicanism which might appeal to
others and undermine the conservative world order and
its moral foundations. It's the kind of thing that you
can't really accept. It's basically the threat of
independence, of taking matters into your own hands,
that can't be accepted. And anyone who wants to know
about this can find it out.

As I say, it's a very free country. We have a rich
documentary record of high level planning going way
back and it's constantly the same thing. I mean why did
the United States, Britain and France support Mussolini
and Hitler as they did? Well, because they were afraid
of what they called the masses in Italy and Germany. If
the masses, inspired by the Soviet Union, might try to
take matters into their own hands and threaten the
rights of property and power, and the only people who
can stop them are Hitler and Mussolini, then that's why
they supported them almost to the day that the war
began. These are old policies and they're
understandable. They're understandable if you want the
world to be subordinated primarily to domestic power
interests.

[Bernie Dwyer] Because of 43 years of non-stop
aggression Cuba has obviously had to take matters into
their its own hands even though they did appeal to the
United States to stop some of this terrorism emanating
from the right-wing anti-Cuba groups in Miami. Are you
familiar with the case of the five Cuban political
prisoners in the US who were incarcerated for fighting
against terrorism?

[Noam Chomsky] That's an amazing case! Cuba approached
the United States with an offer to cooperate in
combating terrorism and, in fact, the FBI sent people
to Cuba to get information from the Cubans about it.
The next thing was that Cubans who had infiltrated the
terrorist groups in the United States were arrested.
That is utterly shocking! Do you think it's reported?
Nobody knows about it. I mean, here are Cubans who are
infiltrating illegal, terrorist organisations in the
United States, which are violating US law and the
infiltrators are arrested, not the terrorists. It's
astonishing. The US has refused intelligence
cooperation with Cuba on terrorism because it would
lead directly back to terrorist groups based in the
United States.

Actually, since the 1970s, the United States has at
least officially opposed this US-based terrorism. But
it still tolerates it - it doesn't close down the
terrorist bases or the terrorist funding - but
theoretically it opposes it and in fact has even
occasionally prosecuted people. Up until then (the
1970s) the US wasn't relying on Cuban exiles. It was
itself organising the terrorism. That's right into the
1970s officially. What is going on now, we don't know.
We know the official record up until 20 or 30 years
ago.

[Bernie Dwyer] How are you following the case of the
five Cubans considering the media silence surrounding
the case?

[Noam Chomsky] There are, fortunately, independent
sources although I can't think of an article in the
United States. The British press has covered it. There
are several independent alternative journals in the
United States that have covered it. There was quite a
good article on it by William Blum in Counterpunch.
There's a good quarterly journal called Socialism and
Democracy which published the testimonies of the Cuban
prisoners. You can find material on some of the
Internet sites like Z-net. So, it is possible for
people to find out about it, but it's a research
project. An ordinary person cannot be expected to do
that. It's a major research project.

[Bernie Dwyer] The US obsession with overthrowing the
Cuban Revolution reached new heights when James Cason
became chief at the US Interests Section here in
Havana. He deliberately set out to subvert the Cuban
social project from the inside by recruiting, for money
and favours, Cubans who would act as agents for the US.
When the Cuban government reacted by arresting, putting
on trial and imprisoning those mercenaries, there was a
lot of criticism from many of Cuba's friends.

[Noam Chomsky] Yes, I have criticized them for that. I
think it was a mistake. In the case of the petition I
signed we insisted that it emphasised US terrorist
actions and any illegal economic warfare going on
against Cuba since 1959. It went on to say that in case
of the people that were imprisoned, no public
information had been available - and it still isn't -
to justify the charge that they are US government
agents, not critical dissidents. I mean the fact that
they met with Cason, I may be wrong, but it doesn't
prove it. I think it was the wrong thing to do and not
very wise. It was just a gift to the harshest elements
in the United States.

[Bernie Dwyer] You would still uphold your admiration
of the Cuban system as you did before?

[Noam Chomsky] As far as I am concerned, I do not pass
judgement on what Cubans decide to do. I am in favour
of Cuba's successful defiance of the United States. I
am in favour of them taking matters into their own
hands. Exactly how they carry it out - I have my own
opinions. A lot of things I think are fine, a lot not,
but it's a matter for the Cubans to decide. My concern
is that the hemispheric superpower not resort to
violence, pressure, force, threat, and embargo in order
to prevent Cubans from deciding how to determine their
own fate.

[Bernie Dwyer] There seems to be a move forward in
Latin America with Chavez, Lula and Kirchner. Are you
feeling optimistic for the future of Latin America?

[Noam Chomsky] There certainly are opportunities. What
happened in Brazil is quite dramatic. It's a real
lesson for the industrial democracies. Brazil taught a
lesson to the industrial democracies that they ought to
learn. There was an achievement of democracy in Brazil
which has not been equalled in any of the rich
industrial democracies. Popular forces based in the
working class, in the peasantry, human rights
organisations and others actually succeeded in electing
their own president - a quite marvellous person, I
think - over tremendous odds.

That doesn't happen in the western countries. It can't
happen in the United States for example. But how far
that can go is a difficult question. Forty years ago
when Brazil had a moderately populist president -
nothing like Lula, but at least moderately populist -
the Kennedy administration just organised a military
coup which overthrew him. It was one of the actions
that set off a major plague of repression throughout
the hemisphere. They are not doing it this time even
though Lula is a far more significant figure than
Goulart was and has much more popular support. They are
not doing it for a number of reasons. One of them is
that the international economic arrangement that has
been imposed in the last 20 or 30 years in neo-liberal
structures creates a stranglehold which prevents
democracy from functioning. The main purpose, I
believe, of the main neo-liberal measures is to reduce
the options for democratic choice.

Now whether Brazil and others in the region will be
able to combat this is a serious question and it
certainly will require a very high degree of
North/South solidarity for them to break out of this
network of controls that has been designed to prevent
people from making democratic choices without military
coups.

http://www.countercurrents.org/chomsky-cuba050903.htm


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