Barsamian writes: "The threat of nuclear war is
serious and increasing. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just moved their
famous Doomsday Clock a little closer to midnight."
Prof. Noam Chomsky, linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist and activist. (photo: Va Shiva)
Noam Chomsky: Popular Movement Needed to 'Reverse the
Mad Rush Toward Destruction'
By
David Barsamian, International Socialist Review
19 August 15
Noam Chomsky interviewed by
David Barsamian
To what extent are the multiple crises in the Middle
East due to internal factors and to what extent are they linked to US policies
in the region? There is an interesting interview with Graham Fuller. He’s a
highly respected Middle East analyst with a long background in the CIA. He goes
on to say that he’s not contributing to the conspiracy tales that are floating
around the Middle East about how the United States actually set up ISIS. But
what he says is that the invasion of Iraq, which hit this vulnerable society
with a sledgehammer, excited ethnic conflicts that had not really been there
before and they blew up and grew further, and other US interventions increased
the violence and instability. Out of this grew ISIS, which is a kind of radical
offshoot of the already radical Wahhabi-Salafi doctrines that are promulgated
by Washington’s chief ally, Saudi Arabia, which provides the doctrinal basis,
the missionary zeal, and the money that keeps the jihadi movement going. So out
of this complex comes ISIS as a particular excrescence, a horrible outgrowth.
Iraq was already extremely vulnerable because of the
wars, the sanctions that devastated the society. Along comes the invasion, which
wrecked what was left. The US policies—Paul Bremer’s policies—insisted on
sectarian divisions that had not been there before. The US, in its wisdom,
decided that there should be sectarian divisions in everything—offices,
whatever. That plus the violence and the brutality of the invasion elicited
counterreactions. Within a couple of years there was a major Shi’a-Sunni
conflict raging, which had not been there before.
If you go back to Baghdad in 2000, it was an
intermingled city: Shi’ites and Sunnis were living in the same neighborhoods,
they intermarried. Some Iraqis, like Raed Jarrar, have pointed out that you
often didn’t even know what sect your neighbor belonged to. His analogy is, in
the United States you might not know what Protestant sect your neighbor belongs
to. But it didn’t take long for this to blow up. Now we have ISIS on our hands.
What about the legacy of British, French, and Italian
imperialism? No one talks about Italy and Libya, Italy and Eritrea.
The first real genocidal attack in the twentieth
century was Italy’s in Libya. Italy initiated a bombing of what it called
“rebellious tribes” in the late 1920s. It was virtually a genocidal assault on
Libya. Of course, Benito Mussolini invaded Abyssinia and Eritrea. They were
horribly treated. Italy left a legacy of violence and repression, and it’s all
barely simmering. It all blows up as soon as you hit the society again. The
final blow was when the three traditional imperial powers—the United States, Britain,
and France—France was actually in the lead—decided to violate the Security
Council resolution which had called for a no-fly zone, ceasefire, and
negotiations. They decided instead to become the air force of the rebels and
led the way to what is now the destruction of Libya.
In fact, the Economist calls Libya “the next failed
state, spiraling into chaos.” The words “chaos” and “chaotic” come up a lot now
attached to different countries in the Middle East. Yemen, again, is another
example.
Just this morning, according to the press, one of the
Libyan factions seized bank resources, which apparently have a ton of gold. The
markets are concerned about what’s going to happen to that. When you smash up
vulnerable societies, it’s likely to lead to chaos and destruction and
violence. That’s a very good reason for pursuing peaceful diplomatic means
instead of using your strength, which is violence.
What about the situation in Nigeria, where there
hasn’t been overt US military intervention and there has been the growth of
Boko Haram?
Boko Haram is partly an outgrowth of the violence in
Libya, which has poured arms all over the region, from the Levant to Northern
Africa. Nigeria is traditionally British and it’s in the midst of the
Francophone area. And out of this complex are coming all kinds of tribal
conflicts, violence, repression. The governments are extremely corrupt. Nigeria
is in the hands, pretty much, of Shell and other Western oil companies, which
have been carrying out very destructive operations there also, inciting
violence.
Africa is beginning slowly to pull together from
centuries of imperial violence and repression, but it’s going to be a very hard
path.
I’m interested that you haven’t mentioned neoliberal
economic policies as being a factor in producing chaos and dislocation.
Oh, they have, repeatedly. In fact, structural
adjustment programs, the neoliberal policy, had a terrible effect in the 1980s
in Rwanda, in Yugoslavia, in Southern Africa, in Latin America. In Rwanda they
were a major factor in intensifying crises and conflicts that already existed.
When the society begins to break down, all kinds of conflicts erupt. That’s one
of the factors that led to the horrible atrocities in the early 1990s. The same
happened in Yugoslavia. Structural adjustment programs contributed to
fracturing the society, laying the basis for the conflicts that developed
later. The most loyal adherents to the neoliberal programs were Southern Africa
and Latin America, and both had several decades of de-development and stagnation,
which have had a very severe effect. Latin America has begun to pull out of it.
Africa is barely beginning. But it also has, of course, a history of extreme
violence and imperial aggression, which leaves an incredible legacy.
Amidst all the turmoil in the Middle East, the feudal
monarchies remain in place: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates,
Bahrain, Qatar. How do they pull it off?
Mainly force. When the Arab Spring began in 2011,
there were efforts in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates to join in in a very mild
way. So in Saudi Arabia there were some calls for reformist protests on Friday
after the religious services. They were crushed by force immediately. People
were afraid to go out in the streets of Riyadh. In Bahrain there were protests
by the Shi’ite majority—it’s a Sunni monarchy—for some time, but as soon as it
seemed to be getting out of control, the Saudi army moved in, leading a Gulf
force which repressed it violently.
It’s important to remember that eastern Saudi Arabia,
right across the causeway from Bahrain, has a very large Shi’ite population,
and that’s also the area where most of the oil is. So it’s a very sensitive
thing for the Saudi dictatorship.
What’s the significance in the dramatic fall in the
price of oil? It’s said also that Secretary of State John Kerry met with the
Saudis and persuaded them—I don’t know if they needed persuasion—to keep their
production at a very high level and flood the market.
The fall in the price of oil is primarily due to the
huge increase in US shale production, which has changed the oil market
significantly. The Saudis, in the past, had cut back production to try to
maintain higher prices. But this time they made the decision—I doubt that Kerry
had anything to do with it—to keep prices high, for several reasons. One, to
maintain their own market share, but also to drive American shale producers out
of the market. Shale production is pretty expensive, and in fact oil wells are
being closed down all over the United States because at this level of pricing
they’re not economical. I think the Saudis want to make sure that there’s not a
major competitor in the future.
What about the side effect that it is going to hurt
designated US enemies such as Russia, Iran, and Venezuela?
It will. It will hurt all oil producers. It’s hurting
US producers. In fact, that’s why they’re closing down some of their
operations.
What about the environmental impact? There’s article
after article saying this is great for the American consumers, gas is under two
dollars a gallon, people will be driving more, they will have extra money in
their pockets, and so on.
It’s a total catastrophe. In fact, it’s astonishing to
read the articles, which say exactly what you described, without mentioning
that this is going to destroy our grandchildren. Who cares about that? The
price of oil is already way too low. Oil should be priced much higher on the
American market—the way it is in Europe, for example—to try to discourage
excessive use of fossil fuels, which are destroying the environment.
It’s pretty dangerous, and it’s getting worse every
day. The latest concern—again, they’ve been in the background for a while—is
that there might be an explosion of methane from the melting of the Arctic and
the permafrost. If that happens, some of the predictions are very dire, even
within a short time span, a couple of decades. It’s an incredible moment, when
you look at it. The business pages and the press are lauding the prospect that
we can devastate the world for our grandchildren. There ought to be a headline:
“Let’s Destroy the Possibility for Our Grandchildren to Have a Decent Life.”
In mid-January there were a couple of new
developments, headlines saying “Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction,” “2014
Hottest Year Since Record-Keeping Began in 1880,” and “Ten Hottest Years Have
Occurred Since 1997.” The evidence seems to be incontrovertible and should be
totally noncontroversial. Yet the response from the political class and the
owners of the economy seems lukewarm, tepid, and cosmetic.
There was just an interesting poll by the Pew polling
agency. It was released at Davos, the meeting of all the big shots. It was a
study of attitudes of CEOs of corporations. They polled them on what they
considered to be the significant issues that they faced. Climate change was so
low that they didn’t even include it in the final poll. What they cared about
was profits tomorrow, prospects a week from now, what’s the growth situation
like, are we going to have enough low-paid workers? And finally, at the very
bottom, was climate change, a minor thing off on the edges.
It’s not that they’re bad people. It reveals an
institutional pathology. There is an institutional structure that says that if
you’re the CEO of a major corporation, which incidentally means that you have enormous
influence in the political system, then you simply don’t care about what
happens to the world in the next generation, including your own grandchildren.
What you care about is profits tomorrow. It’s an institutional imperative.
There is some attention being paid to the Ebola
outbreak in West Africa. I’m wondering if perhaps climate change should be seen
as a global medical emergency that, if untreated, if not addressed, will lead
to massive dislocation, destruction, and death.
It certainly will. You mentioned the ocean life being
devastated. But it’s all over. The level of species destruction now is
estimated to be at about the level of 65 million years ago, the last major
extinction, when a huge asteroid hit Earth. That ended the age of the dinosaurs
and actually led to an opening for small mammals, ultimately us. But there was
huge species extinction. That’s the level of extinction today.
It’s been assumed that the oceans would be resilient
because of their scale and so on, but that turns out, unexpectedly, not to be
true. They can absorb a certain amount of CO2, but there is a limit.
There is a Yanomami shaman leader named Davi Kopinawa.
There are about 30,000 to 40,000 Yanomami in northern Brazil and southern
Venezuela. He says, “The white people want to kill everything. They will soil
the rivers and lakes and take what is left. Their thoughts are constantly
attached to their merchandise. They relentlessly and always desire new goods.
They do not think that they are spoiling the earth and the sky and that they
will never be able to recreate new ones.” Indigenous people—I’m not saying
across the board—certainly have a different connection or relation to the land,
to nature.
That’s pretty much true around the world. So, in
Canada, the First Nations, the Indigenous people, are leading the struggles,
mobilizations, legal efforts to try to prevent the extremely dangerous
expansion of the use of highly destructive fossil fuels in southwestern Canada.
Go down to Bolivia, Ecuador, the Amazon, it’s the
Indigenous people who are in the forefront of trying to prevent overuse of
fossil fuels and other resources and to restore some kind of balance with
nature. In fact, the countries with the largest Indigenous populations—first
Bolivia, which actually has a real majority, and Ecuador, a large
population—have been in the lead in trying to establish what they call “rights
of nature.” It’s even a constitutional provision in Bolivia. In Ecuador, the
government did make an offer to leave their oil in the ground, which is where
it ought to be, and asked in return that the European countries provide them
with a small compensation for a fraction of the loss of revenue. They refused.
So they’re now exploiting the oil. At least they made a move.
The same is true everywhere. It’s true in Australia.
In India, the tribal people are trying to protect resources. These are
communities which for very long periods have lived in some kind of balance with
nature. I don’t want to turn it into Utopia, but at least they had some concern
for a balance with nature. And it’s true that the capitalist, imperialist
invasion did not have that concern. You could see it from the poll of CEOs,
which is perfectly typical of the attitude of the imperial powers that just
want to ravage the world and take it for themselves, for their immediate use.
You had some contact with, I believe, Indigenous
groups in Colombia, in the rainforest there.
I have spent some time in southern Colombia, which is
a highly embattled region. It’s under attack. Campesinos and Indigenous people
and Afro-Colombians, all of them, are under constant attack by paramilitaries,
by the military, and now also by the guerillas, which used to be connected to
the local populations. But thanks to the militarization of the war, FARC [the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] particularly has just been turned into
another army preying on the peasants.
Also, what we call “fumigation,” which is chemical
warfare, destroys virtually everything. Theoretically, it’s aimed at coca
production, whatever one thinks of that, but in fact it destroys crops,
livestock. You walk through the villages and you see children with all kinds of
sores on their arms. People are dying.
Once when I went, the area was so violent that they
wouldn’t let us go out of the local town, Popayán, so people came in from the
countryside to talk to us, a couple of Colombian human-rights activists whom I
joined. Another time I went with them to a remote village. A mixture of
campesinos and Indigenous peoples—Afro-Colombians elsewhere—are trying to
preserve their water supplies. There is a mountain that is a virgin forest and
is their source of water, and also has symbolism of all kinds in their cultural
life. It is threatened by mining, which would destroy it. They have quite
sophisticated, thoughtful plans as to how to preserve the hydrological and
other resources, but they’re fighting against powerful forces: the mining
companies, the government, the multinationals in the background. It’s a battle.
And also it’s very violent. The first time we tried to go there, they wouldn’t
let us come because there was too much killing going on. The second time, we
were able to get through.
You have a family connection as well. Can you talk
about that?
Yes. I was there because they were dedicating a forest
on the mountain to my late wife, Carol, and I went there for the ceremony of
the dedication, climbing the mountain. There were shamans and so on. The
villagers all participated. It was a moving and warm ceremony. The men climbed
up the mountain while the women stayed and prepared a communal meal. It was a
pretty dramatic occurrence.
In Power Systems, the last book we did together, you
said that “Latin America has shown increasing independence in international
affairs.” Is that trend continuing?
It is, definitely. I think it’s probably the major
factor behind President Barack Obama’s move to what we call “normalized
relations” with Cuba, meaning lifting partially the attack on Cuba that’s been
going on for fifty years. That’s “normalized relations.” He has moved in that
direction. I suspect part of the reason was that the United States was being
increasingly excluded from the hemisphere on this issue. The US government
insisted back in the early 1960s, when it kind of ran the show, that Cuba be
excluded from the hemispheric organizations. As Latin America has become more
independent, more free of US dominance, it has increasingly insisted that Cuba
be allowed back into them.
At the last hemispheric meeting, which was in
Colombia, this was a major issue. The United States and Canada were isolated.
The other issue on which they were isolated was drugs. The Latin American
countries are the victims of the drug war, which is centered in the United
States. They want to temper these actions, which are devastating them and are
based here—not just the demand but even the guns. You go to Mexico, a majority
of the guns that are picked up from the cartels happen to come from the United
States. This is having a ruinous effect in Latin America. They want to end it.
They want to move toward decriminalization and other measures.
There is another meeting coming up in Panama. It’s
likely that the US would simply have been excluded if it insisted on its
unilateral rejection of Cuban membership.
When Obama announced the shift in policy vis-à-vis
Cuba, I didn’t see any mention of the extensive terrorist campaign, the trade
embargo and economic warfare the US government carried out against Cuba. And no
mention, of course, of reparations or compensation.
There is one mention of the terrorist war, and that is
witticisms about the silly CIA pranks, trying to burn Castro’s beard or
something like that.
Poison pens.
Poison pens. You’re allowed to make fun of that. But
not of the fact that Kennedy launched a major terrorist war against Cuba, in
fact a very serious one. It was his brother, Robert Kennedy, who was placed in
charge of it. It was his highest priority. And the goal was to bring “the
terrors of the earth” to Cuba. That’s the phrase that was used by Arthur Schlesinger,
Kennedy’s Latin America adviser, in his biography of Robert Kennedy. It was
very serious: blowing up petrochemical plants, sinking ships in the harbor,
poisoning crops and livestock, shelling hotels—incidentally, with Russian
visitors in them. It went on for years. It was one of the factors that led to
the missile crisis, which immediately after almost led to a nuclear war. When
the missile crisis ended, Kennedy instantly relaunched the terrorist war, which
went on in various forms for years, into the 1990s. That’s not discussed.
Obama’s message, if you read it, which was then echoed
in commentary, is that our efforts to bring democracy and freedom to Cuba have
not succeeded. Although they were all benevolent in intent, they haven’t
worked. It’s therefore time to try a new method to achieve our benevolent
goals. That’s Obama’s description, echoed in the commentary, for a record of
fifty years of massive terrorism, of economic strangulation which was so
extreme that if, say, a European manufacturer of some medical equipment used a
little piece of nickel taken from Cuba, it had to be banned from international
commerce. The United States has plenty of power to do that. It’s really been
savage. But that’s our benevolent effort to bring democracy and freedom to
Cuba. Not to the dictatorships that we support. We don’t make benevolent
efforts there, somehow.
The US war on Cambodia was called a sideshow, the main
event being Vietnam. The sideshow to the sideshow was landlocked, mostly rural
Laos. In March 1970, you were on your way to Hanoi and you were delayed for a
week in Vientiane, Laos. You wrote about that in the New York Review of Books
and in At War with Asia. I was struck with your descriptive journalistic
writing about what you saw: clear, terse sentences. You had a very moving
experience with Fred Branfman, who passed away in September 2014. He had been
in Laos for many years and spoke Laotian. You went with him to a refugee camp
outside of Vientiane and you wrote about that.
Fred had been trying for some time to get some Western
exposure to the atrocities that were going on. He was one of the very few
people—there were a few others, Walt Haney, a couple of others—who were working
in Laos and had discovered the crimes that were being committed, which were
really shocking. That book that you have there, Voices from the Plain of Jars,
is the result of Fred’s research with victims of the horrific air war that was
going on.
There had been bombing of Laos from the mid-1960s.
But, in 1968, there was a cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam. There were
negotiations beginning, and they cut back the bombing of North Vietnam. The
United States officially announced that they had all these extra bombers around
and nothing to do with them, so they decided to bomb northern Laos. This is a
remote area of peasant villages, primitive. Most of them probably didn’t even
know they were in Laos. They were subjected to years of extremely intensive
bombing. People were living in caves, trying to survive. One should really read
the testimonies in Fred’s book to get a picture of it. He was trying to expose
this.
Anyway, we met as soon as I got there. I spent most of
the week with him. I was there for a week, thanks to the boredom of an Indian
bureaucrat. Bureaucrats have nothing to do except to make life difficult for
people. This guy was in charge of the United Nations flights from Vientiane to
Hanoi. There was one flight a week in a special protected corridor. You flew
there and you saw jet planes flying all over the place on their way to bomb
whoever. For some reason, he decided not to let us go the first week. It kind
of amused him. So I stayed in Laos, which was a very good thing, because I
learned a lot. I spent most of the week with Fred, not just in the refugee
camp. I went to the village where he had lived. I met some of his many
contacts.
I had an interview with a member of the government, a
rich landowner who was secretly, in a sense, a supporter of the Pathet Lao, the
guerillas. When I wrote about him I didn’t want to identify him, so in the book
he’s called an “urban intellectual.” He was actually a government minister. He
said that if the Pathet Lao took over, he would be finished. They would take
his land, everything he owned, they might kill him. But he still wanted them to
take over because the alternative would be the destruction of Laos. It would
become a Thai protectorate. Everything would be bought up by somebody else.
I met underground Pathet Lao cadres. Had an interview
with the prime minister, Souvanna Phouma. It was a very interesting week and a
very moving one.
You don’t name Fred in your article. You said you were
“in the company of a Lao-speaking American.”
That’s what he requested. He did not want to be
identified at that time.
Historian Al McCoy, who has written himself about
Indochina, in his foreword to the second edition of Voices from the Plain of
Jars, writes that approximately 20,000 civilians have been killed or maimed by
unexploded cluster bombs since the bombing ended—and those numbers continue to
mount.
That’s correct. I’ve written about it, too. There has
been a British demining team working there, but apparently the area is
saturated with cluster bombs. These are tiny little bomblets, which a child
could pick up thinking it is a toy and then it will blow up, or a farmer could
hit one with a hoe and it explodes. They’re all over the place. It’s a massive
effort to remove them. And very limited resources have been devoted to it by
the United States, which was responsible for them being there, of course. Even
today there are people being blown up by cluster bombs.
McCoy suggests that Laos was a test case for future US
wars, with the extensive reliance on air power. We see that today with the use
of drones.
Fred also talked about that. There’s something to it.
It’s a test case. We have other test cases, which are pretty remarkable. Just
recently a detailed study of the Guantánamo torture system came out by
researchers at the Seton Hall Law School. It appeared in their law journal and
I think there’s more coming out in a book. They point out something quite
interesting. A lot of it has been exposed, but there was another part of the
Guantánamo torture system, the Dick Cheney–Donald Rumsfeld torture system,
which they called the “Battle Lab.” The purpose of the torture in the “Battle
Lab,” which was supervised by medics, was to determine the most effective
techniques of torture. It was a laboratory experiment, not designed to get
information. Just let’s see how much torture can be applied—psychological,
physical, drugs—before the person becomes unable to comment. So it was
essentially a laboratory of torture.
In fact, if you take a look at the Senate report on
the torture system, it raises one question: Did the torture work? It claims the
torture didn’t work, so it was therefore bad. The commentary has been pretty
much the same. The torture didn’t work, so we shouldn’t do it. When they say
the torture didn’t work, it means it didn’t stop terrorist acts.
Was that the purpose? Probably not. The initial
purpose of the Cheney-Rumsfeld torture seems to have been to try to extricate
some information—true or false, it doesn’t matter—some kind of claim that would
justify the war in Iraq. The planned war in Iraq began before the war. They
were seeking to find some kind of evidence that there were connections between
Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. When they didn’t find it, they called for more
torture. Finally, because people under torture will say anything, they claimed
they got some evidence. Apparently, that was the first major goal. And that was
achieved.
Another goal has been things like the “Battle Lab,” to
see how far you can go in torture. So to say that it didn’t succeed may not be
correct, if you look at its actual goals. Incidentally, it’s pretty remarkable
that the only thing we discuss is: Did it succeed?
Fred Branfman wrote an article about your visit and
his friendship with you. It came out in Salon in 2012. I don’t want to
embarrass you, but he said that you broke down when you were talking to those
villagers and when you heard their stories of what they had gone through under
the US bombing.
Laos was the first time—there have been many since—in
which I saw firsthand the effect on the victims of massive atrocities. I had
been in the South in the United States during the civil rights movement, which
was bad enough, but I hadn’t had exposure overseas before the Laotian
experience. Since then I have, many times. And, yes, it’s a shattering
experience.
We discussed this a little bit—I wrote about it, I think
he did in his book later—that when we went to the refugee camp, the refugees
were extremely reticent. From their point of view, I was just some American
soldier who is coming to endanger them. In fact, Fred talked to some of them
privately, and they said that. Why should they expose themselves? They don’t
know what’s happening. They’re living in miserable conditions. They’re under
the control of some foreign force that has driven them out of their homes and
destroyed them and killed their children. Why should they say anything to this
person? It took a while before they were even willing to begin to talk. I’ve
seen that elsewhere, too. That’s understandable. When you’re dealing with
refugees, you cannot take for granted what they say right away. They’re afraid
of you, rightly, and see no reason why they should tell you anything. So, in
fact, some of the first villagers, when I was asking questions about the
bombing, said, “No problem. We kind of liked it. It was fireworks. It didn’t
bother us.” Why should they tell an American visitor what it’s like to be
bombed by American bombs? That’s pretty common in refugee testimony. Every
investigator is quite aware of that.
Have you heard of Leonard Cohen? He’s a Canadian
singer and a poet.
No, I’m afraid not.
He’s fairly well-known. One of his songs is called
“Anthem.” He says, “Ring the bells that can still ring,/ Forget your perfect
offering./ There’s a crack, a crack in everything./ That’s how the light gets
in.” I was wondering where you see the cracks in the system where people can
widen those cracks and create a sustained movement for social justice. We’ve
seen demonstrations in Ferguson, New York, and elsewhere. Where do you see
those openings that can be exploited effectively?
Probably the major one has to do with climate change.
There simply has to be a mass popular movement to try to reverse the mad rush
toward destruction. There are others. The threat of nuclear war is serious and
increasing. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just moved their famous Doomsday
Clock a little closer to midnight. At least in that case, we know in principle
how to end the threat—and it’s a serious one. It’s coming up also in connection
with the Iran issue, which is very much on the agenda today. In all of these
domains, large-scale popular movements could be effective.
There is an economic crisis. We have been through this
neoliberal period for a generation. There has been economic growth, but it has
not reached most of the population. For the majority of the population, it’s
been a period of stagnation or decline. Economic activity goes increasingly
into predatory financial institutions, which are basically harmful to the
economy but are absorbing enormous amounts of capital, skill, the possibilities
for economic progress. And then, of course, it’s led to enormous inequality. In
the last roughly ten years, maybe 95 percent of the growth has gone to 1
percent of the population, which actually means a fraction of 1 percent, if you
look at it. These are all very serious problems.
There are responses. So, for example, in Europe, which
has been subjected to an extreme form of neoliberal madness, where these
austerity programs have been very harmful, it has led to the growth of popular
movements. Syriza in Greece is a new party which developed out of the protest
against the vicious austerity programs that are destroying Greece. In Spain,
Podemos is another new party that grew out of the indignados, the mostly young
people who were protesting these policies. It’s now a mass political organization.
According to polls, it might even win the next election.
This could spread. It could spread here. There are
reactions. They’re kind of scattered, but they’re substantial. If they can come
together, they could become a very powerful force. Even the Republican Party
now, which is just in the pockets of the superrich, is feeling that it has to
begin to talk about poverty and inequality.
Speaking of coming together, with the fiftieth
anniversary of the march on Selma and a major film on it, Martin Luther King is
getting some attention. In Memphis, on April 3, 1968, he said, “When the slaves
get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.”
And he was assassinated the next day. Using his normal
biblical rhetoric, he described himself as like Moses, who could see the
Promised Land but wouldn’t reach it, though you, the people he was speaking to,
can reach it if the slaves get together. He was at that point inaugurating a
movement of the poor, not just blacks, but of the poor.
There was a march on Washington after his death, led
by his wife, Coretta. They set up a tent city, Resurrection City, and called on
Congress to enact legislation to do something about the miserable fate of huge
numbers of poor people. The police drove them out of town, broke up the tent
city, and ended that. We don’t hear much about that on Martin Luther King Day.
The film Selma led to a pretty interesting article in
the New York Times arts section. There was a review of new films. The review
started off with kind of derisive comments about the coastal intelligentsia,
who were looking at little art films which nobody cares about while the real
Americans in the mainstream, the patriotic, red-blooded decent Americans, are
flooding to another film, American Sniper, which has broken all attendance
records. It’s a patriotic, pro-family film, it said. Actually, it was applauded
in the New Yorker because of its cinematic virtues and denounced elsewhere
because of its appalling content.
It’s about a man, Chris Kyle, who is the most
murderous sniper in American history. He claims to have killed a couple hundred
people. He has a memoir in which he describes what it was like to murder these
savages, these inhuman creatures. You can only describe them as savage
barbarians. We hated them; we wanted to kill them. He describes his first kill,
which was easy, he said. It was a woman who was holding a grenade in her hand
when the Marines were attacking her village. So he managed to kill her with a
single shot. He was very proud of that. But what else can you do with savages?
And it goes on with this kind of psychopathic raving. That’s the patriotic,
pro-family film that people are flooding toward. At the end of this review, the
last paragraph, it says there were some other films that came out, one of them
Selma, which had only moderate attendance, nothing like the patriotic,
pro-family film which is so exciting.
You mentioned the Seton Hall Law Review. I confess to
not having read it ever. That speaks to your voracious reading habits, finding
things, nuggets of information. Fred Branfman, in a Salon article he wrote
about you, mentions that he gave you a 500-page book one night while you were
in Laos and the next morning you were citing statistics from that book. What
about your reading habits? How do you make your choices? How do you decide?
Well, the Seton Hall Law Review actually was sent to
me by my sister-in-law, Judy, who is a lawyer. Just last night I read an
article by Victoria Brittain, a friend in England, a wonderful journalist and
investigator. It’s about investigations that are being undertaken by these same
people about the Guantánamo torture system and about a new book that’s coming
out by one of them. So if you keep your eyes open, you can find all sorts of
things. I have no particular technique. I look at what looks important.
Could you talk about a popular trend in education,
something called online tutorials? There is an MIT grad, Salman Khan, who runs
something called the Khan Academy online. Apparently it has millions of users.
It teaches math and science. Is that the future of teaching, as you see it?
I doubt it very much. These programs can have
beneficial effects. There have been some studies of them. There are people who
otherwise would not have any access to such resources. I think many of them are
adults, older people, who picked up the math courses and so on. That’s a fine
thing. Their actual educational value, say, as a substitute for college, seems
to be extremely poor in outcomes. And you can see why.
An experience in a classroom is very different from
watching a video. I recall maybe twenty to thirty years ago, there was a
cartoon in the New Yorker of a seminar in a university. The professor wasn’t
there. He had a tape recorder playing his lecture. And around the room, there
weren’t students, there were recorders picking up the lecture. That’s one form
of education. But human interaction is a different form—direct participation
not only with the instructor but with your fellow students. And not just
sitting in class, but when you’re out in the hall talking about it or back in
your room working together. You yourself, I’m sure, if you think about your
college experience—I think you went to college, didn’t you?
One year.
One year, okay. But what was worthwhile in it? Interaction
with others. That’s never going to be possible with the electronic media. It’s
not to say that they can’t serve a purpose. They can. And if they’re well done,
it could be a useful supplement, probably as a form of adult education, to
other educational efforts. But it can’t replace a real educational experience.
You came to some conclusions about God as a result of
observing something your paternal grandfather did. What conclusion did you
reach from that particular experience?
My father’s family was extremely Orthodox,
ultrareligious, especially my grandfather, who had come from Eastern Europe and
maintained the sort of semimedieval characteristics of the Eastern European
rural Jewish community. I remember we would go there for the Jewish holidays to
visit. I noticed on one of the holidays, Passover, that my grandfather was
smoking. I asked my father how he could be smoking, because I knew there was a
Talmudic proscription that says there is no difference between the holidays and
the Sabbath except with regard to eating. So you’re allowed to make a fire to
cook on the holidays, not on the Sabbath. And my father told me that my
grandfather had concluded that smoking was a form of eating. So I realized that
he thinks that God is so stupid that he won’t be able to see through this.
And then when I thought about it—and it’s kind of
obvious, and some people have written about it—practically all of organized
religion is based on the assumption that God is so stupid that he can’t see
that you’re violating his commandments. So you find all kinds of trickery and
devices to get around the commandments, which almost nobody can live up to. And
if that’s your conception of God, from a ten-year-old’s point of view it didn’t
seem worth pursuing.
When did you become convinced that there was no God?
I never became convinced, because I don’t even know
what the question is. There is no what? What is it that there isn’t? There is
no coherent answer that I know of.
At a talk you gave in Princeton a couple of years ago,
you recalled that as a teenager one of the things that got you interested in
linguistics was that you realized the Bible was mistranslated.
I was informed of this. I was studying Arabic in
college. I was a sixteen-year-old freshman and I was taking Arabic courses with
a great scholar. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was a leading scholar,
Giorgio Levi Della Vida, an Italian antifascist émigré. We became good friends
later.
This was in Pennsylvania?
Yes. He just mentioned to me once that the first
sentence of the Bible was misvocalized. In the Hebrew script, you have
consonants but no vowels. Around the eighth to tenth centuries, there were
scribes, Masoretes, who put in the vowels. And they made a mistake in the first
two words of the Bible. He said they were always mistranslated. By now, some of
them are translated correctly, but the standard translations keep to the Hebrew
vocalization, which is a mistranslation because the phrase doesn’t mean
anything. What it says is Bereshit bara, and it’s translated, “In the beginning
God created.” But it should be translated as, “At the outset of the creation
there was chaos” and so on, which is more or less the same sense but different.
It had gone for a thousand years, with nobody noticing that the first two words
of the Bible were mistranslated and misvocalized in the original, which struck
me as kind of striking.
But you inferred something from that.
That there is a lot to learn.
Why do you say the Talmud is your ideal text?
If you look at a page of the Talmud, a big volume—open
it up sometime—in the middle of the page there is a kind of a sentence taken
from the Mishnah, a book of laws and so on. And then around it there are
running commentaries. So in the upper right-hand corner there is a commentary
from someone. Every page, the same person, his commentaries. And then in the
upper left-hand corner, a commentary from someone else. Ninety percent of the
page is commentary running constantly about this line that’s in the middle. If
you could only write footnotes like that, it would be fantastic.
And what’s meshuge?
What the world is doing to itself.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent to
the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.
Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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