Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

As soon as you set up the idea of “Marxism” or “Freudianism” or something, you’ve already abandoned rationality. It seems to me the question a rational person ought to ask is, what is there in Marx’s work that’s worth saving and modifying, and what is there that ought to be abandoned? Okay, then you look and you find things. I think Marx did some very interesting descriptive work on nineteenth-century history. He was a very good journalist. When he describes the British in India, or the Paris Commune [70-day French workers’ revolution in 1871], or the parts of Capital that talk about industrial London, a lot of that is kind of interesting—I think later scholarship has improved it and changed it, but it’s quite interesting.5 He had an abstract model of capitalism which—I’m not sure how valuable it is, to tell you the truth. It was an abstract model, and like any abstract model, it’s not really intended to be descriptively accurate in detail, it’s intended to sort of pull out some crucial features and study those. And you have to ask in the case of an abstract model, how much of the complex reality does it really capture? That’s questionable in this case—first of all, it’s questionable how much of nineteenth-century capitalism it captured, and I think it’s even more questionable how much of late-twentieth-century capitalism it captures.

Whenever I hear a four-syllable word I get skeptical, because I want to make sure you can’t say it in monosyllables. Don’t forget, part of the whole intellectual vocation is creating a niche for yourself, and if everybody can understand what you’re talking about, you’ve sort of lost, because then what makes you special? What makes you special has got to be something that you had to work really hard to understand, and you mastered it, and all those guys out there don’t understand it, and then that becomes the basis for your privilege and your power.

I could go to someone in the Physics Department and say, “Tell me why everybody’s excited about this stuff,” and they could adapt it to my level and tell me how to pursue it further. Maybe I wouldn’t understand it very deeply, or I couldn’t have invented it or something, but I’d at least begin to understand it. On the other hand, when I look at a page of Marxist philosophy or literary theory, I have the feeling that I could stare at it for the rest of my life and I’d never understand it—and I don’t know how to proceed to get to understand it any better, I don’t even know what steps I could take.

You only learn things and learn how to think if there’s some purpose for learning, some motivation that’s coming out of you somehow. In fact, all of the methodology in education isn’t really much more than that—getting students to want to learn. Once they want to learn, they’ll do it. But the point is that this model Bloom and all these other people are calling for is just a part of the whole method of imposing discipline through the schools, and of preventing people from learning how to think for themselves. So what you do is make students go through and sort of memorize a canon of what are called “Good Books,” which you force on them, and then somehow great things are supposed to happen.

I mean, you can read the “Good Books,” and memorize what they said, and forget them a week later—if it doesn’t mean anything to you personally, you’d might as well not have read them. And it’s very hard to know what’s going to mean something to different people. But there’s plenty of exciting literature around in the world, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that unless you’ve read the Greeks and Dante and so on, you’ve missed things—I mean, yeah, you’ve missed things, but you’ve also missed things if you haven’t learned something about other cultural traditions too.

if you’re, say, a young person in college, or in journalism, or for that matter a fourth grader, and you have too much of an independent mind, there’s a whole variety of devices that will be used to deflect you from that error—and if you can’t be controlled, to marginalize or just eliminate you. In fourth grade, you’re a “behavior problem.” In college, you may be “irresponsible,” or “erratic,” or “not the right kind of student.” If you make it to the faculty, you’ll fail in what’s sometimes called “collegiality,” getting along with your colleagues. If you’re a young journalist and you’re pursuing stories that the people at the managerial level above you understand, either intuitively or explicitly, are not to be pursued, you can be sent off to work at the Police desk, and advised that you don’t have “proper standards of objectivity.” There’s a whole range of these techniques.

After I finished college, I went to this program at Harvard called the “Society of Fellows”—which is kind of this elite finishing school, where they teach you to be a Harvard or Yale professor, and to drink the right wine, and say the right things, and so on and so forth. I mean, you had all of the resources of Harvard available to you and your only responsibility was to show up at a dinner once a week, so it was great for just doing your work if you wanted to. But the real point of the whole thing was socialization: teaching the right values. For instance, I remember there was a lot of anglophilia at Harvard at the time—you were supposed to wear British clothes, and pretend you spoke with a British accent, that sort of stuff. In fact, there were actually guys there who I thought were British, who had never been outside of the United States.

And there are many other subtle mechanisms which contribute to ideological control as well, of course—including just the fact that the universities support and encourage people to occupy themselves with irrelevant and innocuous work.

why has Japan been so economically competitive? I mean, there are a lot of reasons why, but the major reason is very clear. Both Japan and the United States (and every other industrial country in the world, actually) have essentially state-coordinated economies—but our traditional system of state coordination is less efficient than theirs. Remember, talk about “free trade” is fine in editorials, but nobody actually practices it in reality: in every modern economy, the taxpayers are made to subsidize the private corporations, who then keep the profits for themselves.

the Pentagon also purchases the output of high-technology industry, it serves as a state-guaranteed market for waste-production—that’s what contracts for developing weapons systems are; I mean, you don’t actually use the weapons you’re paying for, you just destroy them in a couple years and replace them with the next array of even more advanced stuff you don’t need. Well, all of that is just perfect for pouring continuous taxpayer subsidies into high-tech industry, and it’s because of these enormous subsidies that American high tech is competitive internationally.

since the Japanese are no dumber than we are, and they have an efficient system of state-coordination while we have an inefficient one, over the years they succeeded in the economic competition. Well, these are major phenomena of modern life—but where do you go to study them in the universities or the academic profession? That’s a very interesting question. You don’t go to the economics department, because that’s not what they look at: the real hot-shot economics departments are interested in abstract models of how a pure free-enterprise economy works—you know, generalizations to ten-dimensional space of some nonexistent free-market system. You don’t go to the political science department, because they’re concerned with electoral statistics, and voting patterns, and micro-bureaucracy—like the way one government bureaucrat talks to another in some detailed air. You don’t go to the anthropology department, because they’re studying hill tribesmen in New Guinea. You don’t go to the sociology department, because they’re studying crime in the ghettos. In fact, you don’t go anywhere—there isn’t any field that deals with these topics. There’s no journal that deals with them. In fact, there is no academic profession that is concerned with the central problems of modern society. Now, you can go to the business school, and there they’ll talk about them—because those people are in the real world. But not in the academic departments: nobody there is going to tell you what’s really goin...

there’s nothing in what I just said that you couldn’t explain to junior high school students, it’s all pretty straightforward. But it’s not what you study in a junior high Civics course—what you study there is propaganda about the way systems are supposed to work but don’t. Incidentally, part of the genius of this aspect of the higher education system is that it can get people to sell out even while they think they’re doing exactly the right thing. So some young person going into academia will say to themself, “Look, I’m going to be a real radical here”—and you can be, as long as you adapt yourself to these categories which guarantee that you’ll never ask the right questions, and that you’ll never even look at the right questions.

Ireland’s the oldest colony in the world: it could have been a rich place, just like England, but it’s been a colony for 800 years, and it’s one of the few parts of the world that was not only underdeveloped, like most colonies, but also depopulated—Ireland now has about half the population it had in the early nineteenth century, in fact. And the Irish famine was an economists’ famine—Ireland was actually exporting food to England during the famine, because the sacred principles of Political Economy said that that’s the way it has to be: if there’s a better market for it in England, that’s where the food has to go, and you certainly couldn’t send food to Ireland, because that would have interfered with the market.28

shoemakers would hire people to read to them while they were working—and that didn’t mean read Stephen King or something, it meant read real stuff. These were people who had libraries, and they wanted to live lives, they wanted to control their own work—but they were being forced into shoe-manufacturing plants in places like Lowell where they were treated, not even like animals, like machines.

it wasn’t until recent years that laissez-faire ideology was revived again—and again, it was as a weapon of class warfare. I mean, as far as I can see, the principles of classical economics in effect are still taught: I don’t think what’s taught in the University of Chicago Economics Department today is all that different, what’s called “neo-liberalism” [an economic stance stressing cutbacks in social services, stable currencies, and balanced budgets]. And it doesn’t have any more validity than it had in the early nineteenth century—in fact, it has even less. At least in the early nineteenth century, Ricardo’s and Malthus’s assumptions had some relation to reality. Today those assumptions have no relation to reality.

Take the fact that there is not a single case on record in history of any country that has developed successfully through adherence to “free market” principles: none. Certainly not the United States. I mean, the United States has always had extensive state intervention in the economy, right from the earliest days—we would be exporting fur right now if we were following the principles of comparative advantage. Look, the reason why the industrial revolution took off in places like Lowell and Lawrence is because of high protectionist tariffs the U.S. government set up to keep out British goods. And the same thing runs right up to today: like, we would not have successful high-tech industry in the United States today if it wasn’t for a huge public subsidy to advanced industry, mostly through the Pentagon system and N.A.S.A. and so on—that doesn’t have the vaguest relation to a “free market.”

Of course, the “free market” ideology is very useful—it’s a weapon against the general population here, because it’s an argument against social spending, and it’s a weapon against poor people abroad, because we can hold it up to them and say “You guys have to follow these rules,” then just go ahead and rob them.

Or take the fact that so many people live in the suburbs and everybody has to drive their own car everywhere. Was that a result of the “free market”? No, it was because the U.S. government carried out a massive social-engineering project in the 1950s to destroy the public transportation system in favor of expanding a highly inefficient system based on cars and airplanes—because that’s what benefits big industry. It started with corporate conspiracies to buy up and eliminate streetcar systems, and then continued with huge public subsidies to build the highway system and encourage an extremely inefficient and environmentally destructive alternative. That’s what led to the suburbanization of the country—so you get huge shopping malls in the suburbs, and devastation in the inner cities.44 But these policies were a result of planning—they had nothing to do with the “free market.”

See, the Luddites are always accused of having wanted to destroy machinery, but it’s been known in scholarship for a long time that that’s not true—what they really wanted to do was to prevent themselves from being de-skilled, and Noble talks about this in his book. The Luddites had nothing against machinery itself, they just didn’t want it to destroy them, they wanted it to be developed in such a way that it would enhance their skills and their power, and not degrade and destroy them—which of course makes perfect sense. And that sentiment runs right throughout the working-class movements of the nineteenth century, actually—and you can even see it today.

MAN: Noam, given an intellectual culture like the one you’ve been describing—can you find any “honest” intellectuals in the U.S.? You can find them, but like I say, usually they’re not inside the institutions—and that’s for a very good reason: there is no reason why institutions of power and domination should tolerate or encourage people who try to undermine them. That would be completely dysfunctional. So typically you’re going to find major efforts made to marginalize the honest and serious intellectuals, the people who are committed to what I would call Enlightenment values—values of truth, and freedom, and liberty, and justice. And those efforts will to a large extent succeed. MAN: Who are those people? I mean, you make the whole situation look very bleak—who would you say are the intellectuals that are going about things in the right way? Well, very often they’re the people who have done things to make a real change in the world. Take the S.N.C.C. [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] activists, for example—they were serious intellectuals, and they made a big change. Or take the people in the 1960s who did the work that’s led to so many of the improvements we’ve seen in the country over the last twenty years—and “work” didn’t just mean running around the streets waving signs, you know, it also meant thinking about things, and figuring out what the problems were, and trying to teach people about them and convince them. Despite what you always hear, that was not e...

These people recognize that there can’t be classical interventions anymore—you know, U.S. soldiers slogging it out in Vietnam for years and years—it has to be either clandestine warfare, as in Peru now, where not one American in ten thousand knows there are U.S. troops, or the Panama/Iraq game, with enormous propaganda about the enemy ready to destroy us, and then a quick victory without any fighting.59

And of course, it’s natural that the official culture would take that view: it does not want people to understand that you can make changes, that’s the last thing it wants people to understand. So if there have been changes, it’s because “We the elites are so great that we carried through the changes.” When they bow to pressures, they’re going to present that as their benevolence. Like, “We ended slavery because we were such great moral figures that we decided we didn’t like slavery”—but the cause is gone, the slave revolts and the Abolitionist movement are gone.

So the American Constitution was basically for white male property-owners, because they’re the only ones who are real people—but the idea was supposed to be that they’re more or less equal, and therefore you want to break down the concentrations of power that are oppressing them. Well, in those days that meant Church power, state power, the feudal system, and so on—and what you were supposed to get was this egalitarian society for “the People,” equals white male property-owners. Well, it didn’t work out that way, even for the white male property-owners, but that was the picture behind it. And to some extent it was achieved—some forms of centralized power were in fact dissolved. And the course of American history since then has just gone on from there. In the nineteenth century, concentrated power began to be located in corporations—that’s another center of power that now has to be dissolved, and if you’re an eighteenth-century-style libertarian, that’s what your main critique will be of today.

Take the Supreme Court: as many free speech cases came to the United States Supreme Court from 1959 to 1974 as in the entire preceding history of the Court—it was only then that freedom of speech was being won.2 I mean, there had been important advances towards it through the struggles of the labor movement, which had expanded it to include the rights of picketing and labor organizing, but it wasn’t until around the late 1950s that the right of freedom of speech really began to be claimed by popular movements—and because of that it found its way into the courts, and the courts began passing decisions. It wasn’t until 1964 that the Supreme Court struck down the 1798 Sedition Act [which forbade spoken or written criticism of the government, Congress, or the President]—that’s very recent history.

See, whether you have seditious libel is sort of at the core of whether it’s a free society or not: if you’re not allowed to criticize the government, if you can be punished for assaulting the government with words, even if that’s in the background somewhere, the society is not really free. And truth is no defense to this kind of libel charge, keep in mind—in fact, traditionally truth makes the crime worse, because if what you’re saying is true, then the undermining of state authority is even worse. So this elected sheriff in Alabama sued the New York Times saying they had defamed him: the idea was that by publishing this ad, the Times had undermined his authority as an agent of the state. Well, it went up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court—I think it was Brennan who wrote the opinion—for the first time said that seditious libel is unacceptable. In fact, they referred to the 1798 Sedition Act, which had never been struck down by the Court, and said this is inconsistent with the First Amendment.8 That’s the first case in which the courts struck down seditious libel.

See, there are conflicting rights. Rights aren’t an axiom system [i.e. where there are no contradictions], and if you look closely at them, they often conflict—so you just have to make judgments between them in those cases. And like freedom of speech, another right that people have is to work without getting harassed.

Another thing I’ve found is that there’s a kind of degraded character to e-mail messages. People are just too casual about them—they send you any half-baked idea they haven’t even thought through yet, whenever the impulse hits them. And the result is, it ends up being a tremendous burden even to read everything that comes across, let alone to answer it—so that can easily end up being all you do with your time. And people do put huge numbers of hours into it. In fact, there are friends of mine whose quality of work I think is seriously declining, because of their overwhelming involvement in e-mail interactions. It’s extremely seductive just to sit at the computer screen and bang at it all day.

G.A.T.T. is something of major significance. The idea that it’s going to be rammed through Congress on a fast track without public discussion just shows that anything resembling democracy in the United States has completely collapsed. So whatever one thinks about G.A.T.T., at least it should be a topic for the general public to become informed about, and to investigate, and to look at, and think about carefully. That much is easy.

Twenty years ago, Congress enacted a Trade Act requiring that before any trade-related legislation or treaty is passed, there has to be consultation with a “Labor Advisory Committee” they set up which is based in the unions, such as they are. That’s by law: the Labor Advisory Committee has to give an analysis and a critique of any American trade-related issue, so obviously that would include N.A.F.T.A.21 Well, the Labor Advisory Committee was informed by the Clinton White House that their report was due on September 9th; they were not given an inkling of what was in the treaty until September 8th—so obviously they couldn’t even convene to meet. Then on top of that, they weren’t even given the whole text of the treaty—it’s this huge treaty, hundreds and hundreds of pages. But somehow they did manage to write a response to it anyway, and it was a very angry response—both because of the utter contempt for democracy revealed by these maneuvers, but also because from the glimmerings of what they could get out of N.A.F.T.A. when they sort of flipped through it for a couple of hours, it was obvious that this thing was just going to have a devastating effect on American labor, and probably also a devastating effect on Mexican labor too, though of course it will be highly beneficial to American investors, and probably also to Mexican investors.22 It’s also certain to have a highly destructive effect on the environment—because its laws supersede federal and state legislation. So obv...

at the time that N.A.F.T.A. was passed, there was a lot of talk in the press about U.S. trade with Mexico soaring—but there wasn’t talk about the fact that more than half of U.S. exports to Mexico were internal to corporations. So in fact, N.A.F.T.A. and G.A.T.T. might really end up reducing trade—they’ll probably increase things moving across borders, but that’s not the same as trade: those transfers are not market interactions. Well, okay, these are complicated matters, and you don’t just want to sloganize about them—but in my opinion, all of these international agreements are part of a general attack on democracy and free markets that we’re seeing in the contemporary period, as banks, investment firms, and transnational corporations develop new methods to extend their power free from public scrutiny. And in that context, it’s not very surprising that they’re all being rammed through as quickly and secretly as they are.

As far as the moral issue goes—I mean, it’s not as if there’s some clean money somewhere. If you’re in a university, you’re on dirty money—you’re on money which is coming from people who are working somewhere, and whose money is being taken away, and is going to support things like universities. Now, there are a lot of ways in which that money can be taken away from those working people and get fed into the universities. One way is by diverting it through taxes and government bureaucracies. Another way is by channeling it through profits—like, some rich benefactor gives it as a gift to the university, meaning he stole it from his workers. And there are all sorts of other ways in which it happens too. But it all comes down to the same point: if you’re at a university, you’re there because there is a social structure which commits a certain amount of “surplus product,” if you want to use a Marxist term, to funding people sitting around in universities.

It’s like the joke about the drunk and the streetlight: you see some drunk guy looking for something under the streetlight and you go over to him and ask, “What’s the matter?” He says, “I lost my key.” You say, “Where did you lose it?” He says, “On the other side of the street.” You say, “So why are you looking over here?” “Well, this is where the light is.” That’s the way the sciences work: you look where the light is—because that’s all you can do.

WOMAN: Noam, people often attack you as a political commentator for focusing your criticism against the activities of the United States, and not so much against the old Soviet Union, or Vietnam, or Cuba and so on—the official enemies. I’d like to know what you think about that kind of criticism? Well, it’s true that’s one of the standard things I get—but see, if that criticism is meant honestly (and most of the time it’s not), then it’s really missing the crucial point, I think. See, I focus my efforts against the terror and violence of my own state for really two main reasons. First of all, in my case the actions of my state happen to make up the main component of international violence in the world. But much more importantly than that, it’s because American actions are the things that I can do something about. So even if the United States were causing only a tiny fraction of the repression and violence in the world—which obviously is very far from the truth—that tiny fraction would still be what I’m responsible for, and what I should focus my efforts against. And that’s based on a very simple ethical principle —namely, that the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated consequences for human beings: I think that’s kind of like a fundamental moral truism.

Honest people are just going to have to face the fact that whenever possible, people with power are going to exploit any actions which serve their violent ends. So when American dissidents criticize the atrocities of some enemy state like Cuba or Vietnam or something, it’s no secret what the effects of that criticism are going to be: it’s not going have any effect whatsoever on the Cuban regime, for example, but it certainly will help the torturers in Washington and Miami to keep inflicting their campaign of suffering on the Cuban population [i.e. through the U.S.-led embargo]. Well, that is something I do not think a moral person would want to contribute to.

So perfectly accurate criticism of the regime in Cuba, say, will predictably be used by ideologists and politicians in the United States to help extend our absolutely barbaric stranglehold on Cuba. Your criticism could be perfectly correct—though obviously much of what we do hear today is in fact false. But even so, an honest person will always ask, “What are the likely consequences of this going to be for other people?”

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 applaude...

Another thing that’s never reported, though it’s completely public and was perfectly well known at the time, is that one of the main reasons why the Western powers supported the invasion was that there’s a huge offshore oil field in Timor’s territorial waters, and before 1975 the Australians and the Western oil companies had been trying unsuccessfully to make a deal with Portugal to exploit it. Well, they hadn’t had any luck with Portugal, and they figured an independent East Timor would be even harder to deal with—but they knew that Indonesia would be easy: that’s one of our boys, we’ve been running it ever since the huge massacre there in 1965 that the West applauded, when they wiped out the Communist Party and killed maybe 600,000 people.44 So for instance, leaked diplomatic records in Australia show that right around the time of the invasion, top Australian officials said that they would do better with an Indonesian takeover, and that Indonesia should be supported.45 Again, I have yet to see a word about any of this in the U.S. media.

even though this virtually genocidal massacre has received almost no coverage from the U.S. press, a very small number of people started working on the issue—literally it was a tiny group of activists, probably not more than a dozen.46 And finally, after a few years, they’ve gotten somewhere: around the early 1980s, just through constant pressure and organizing, they managed to get the media to start reporting on Timor very occasionally. The coverage has been highly selective, and it still always excludes the crucial role that the United States has played, both in providing arms and in giving Indonesia the diplomatic support they’ve needed to maintain the occupation over the years—but there has been some.47 And they’ve gotten some Congressmen interested, mostly conservative Congressmen, incidentally. Wider public pressure began to develop; the East Timor Action Network was started—and there has been a real change, just thanks to this small, indeed growing, number of activists.

In fact, if we’re talking about activism, this is a very revealing case—because if you can organize successfully on an issue like East Timor, you can do it on almost anything. It’s a pretty hard topic to get people interested in, you’d think, yet popular pressure here has forced things to the point of at least symbolic gestures by the U.S. government—and symbolic gestures on the part of the United States are very important. Remember, everyone in the world is scared shitless of us: we’re a brutal terrorist power of enormous strength, and if you get in our way, you’re in trouble. Nobody steps on Uncle Sam’s toes. So when the United States Congress makes a symbolic gesture like banning military-training aid or banning small-arms sales, the Indonesian generals hear it, even if they can get whatever they want from some other country, or even from Bill Clinton in the end.

The U.S., Britain and France immediately threatened trade and aid sanctions against Indonesia if, in their role as head of the Non-Aligned Movement for that year, they submitted this resolution at the General Assembly. So Indonesia instantly withdrew it, of course—when they get orders from the boss, they stop. And they stop fast.61 Well, that just shows that there are some atrocities that go too far for the Western powers: genocide in East Timor we can support, but endorsement of a request for an opinion on the legality of nuclear weapons is an atrocity we simply cannot tolerate.

the United States was threatening North Korea with nuclear weapons at least as late as the 1960s.62 And after all, just remember what we did to that country—it was absolutely flattened. Here people may not be aware of what we did to them, but they certainly know it well enough. Towards the end of what we call the “Korean War”—which was really just one phase in a much longer struggle [beginning when the U.S. destroyed the indigenous nationalist movement in Korea in the late 1940s]—the United States ran out of good bombing targets. We had total command of the air of course, but there was nothing good left to bomb—because everything had already been flattened. So we started going after things like dikes. Okay, that’s just a major war crime.63 In fact, if you take a look at the official U.S. Air Force history of the Korean War, it’s absolutely mind-boggling, it’s like something straight out of the Nazi archives.

As far as Western concern about nuclear weapons goes, obviously it’s highly selective—like, nobody cares that the United States has nuclear weapons, nobody cares that Israel has nuclear weapons, they just don’t want them in the hands of people we don’t control, like North Korea.

the fact of the matter is that the Korean War is much more complex than the way it’s presented in mainstream circles. In this case, incidentally, the scholarship is considerably better than is usual, and if you look at the serious monograph literature on the Korean War, you’ll see that a different position is presented than the one we always hear.66 The 1950 North Korean attack on the southern part of the country was really the tail end of a long war. In fact, before North Korea attacked the South in 1950, already about 100,000 Koreans had been killed—that’s something we forget. What happened in Korea is essentially this. When the American forces landed in 1945 at the end of World War II, they found that an already functioning local government had been set up. There had been an anti-Japanese resistance, and it had established local administrations and Peoples’ Committees and so on, all over North and South Korea. Well, when the United States moved into the South, we dismantled all of that, destroyed it by force—we used the Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese, and in fact even reinstituted the Japanese police to destroy it all [Japan had occupied Korea for 35 years until its defeat in the Second World War]. And that led to serious conflict in the South, a rather bitter conflict which went on for four or five years with a lot of people killed, and also there was a lot of cross-border fighting at the time (going both ways, incidentally). Then there was sort of a lu...

“Peace process” is a very funny word for what’s happened, actually—it’s a “peace process” in the same sense that it was a “peace process” in South Africa when they instituted apartheid [the system of official white supremacy]. So when South Africa instituted its apartheid system in the 1950s and set up the Bantustans [partially self-governing black territories], that was also a “peace process”—it stabilized the country, there was peace for a while, and so on. Well, in many ways that’s similar to what’s called “the peace process” in the Middle East right now, although if you look closely, that comparison is not quite fair. It’s unfair to South Africa. See, the Bantustans that South Africa set up in the 1950s were much more viable economically than any scattered fragment that may someday be allowed for a Palestinian state under the Oslo Agreements.

Furthermore, Israel is not taking any responsibility for what it’s done to the Territories during the occupation [which began in 1967]: the peace treaty in fact says explicitly that Israel has no liability for anything that was done in that time, that’s all the sole responsibility of the Palestinian Authority. In fact, it’s the only thing that the Palestinian Authority does get full responsibility for—everything else they don’t get, but they do get full responsibility for paying all the costs of the occupation. And the treaty explicitly says that if there is any future claim against Israel for something that happened during the occupation, the Palestinian Authority also is responsible for paying that claim and for reimbursing Israel if there are any charges against Israel. So here as well, what’s happened in the “peace process” is not quite like South Africa: the South African Bantustans were far more forthcoming.

So for the moment, things are pretty much finished in the Territories—I mean, you can’t predict the future, but the point of the “peace process” was to destroy the Palestinians, crush them, demoralize them, eliminate them, ensure that the U.S. and Israel take over everything. That’s why it’s all so admired here.

See, the support for the Likud Party was from several sources. They got close to 100 percent of the religious vote—because there’s a very big fundamentalist religious community in Israel, and since it’s a very totalitarian community, they just do what the rabbis say, and the rabbis said “Vote for Likud.” Then they also got a lot of the sort of chauvinist nationalist Jewish vote. And actually they got the vote of most of the working class and the poor as well—because the Labor Party in Israel, despite its name, is the party of the rich elites and professionals and the Europeanized segments of the population, and big business really likes it: I mean, they don’t mind Likud, but they really like Labor. In case you were confused about this, the fact that the United States has supported the Labor Party ought to be a giveaway about its real interests: the United States does not support parties of working people and the poor. But the point is, most of these voting blocks that joined to put Netanyahu in power have a kind of religious chauvinist element to them—you know, they want to restore and establish Jewish identity, their emphasis is on what are called in the United States “the cultural issues,” that’s what Likud won on. And often that does have sort of a populist appeal: so Likud got the support of poor and working people, and they got it in the same kind of way as Pat Buchanan gets their support here—and with about as much authenticity in terms of concern for their interests.

So what in fact happened is that the most Americanized element that has ever existed in Israeli politics won the election on a nationalist/religious program. And since you’ve got to give some crumbs to your constituency, the question now is, how are they going to do it? Well, that’s the issue after the Israeli elections. And right now the more secular European-types in the Israeli population are extremely worried about it—and they’re extremely worried about it for the exact same reason we would be extremely worried about it if the Christian Right turned out to be the major constituency of the guy who wins the Presidential election in the United States. So suppose Bob Dole had won the Presidency here in 1996 with the overwhelming support of the Christian Right, and chauvinist fanatics, and the “militias,” and so on and so forth. I mean, basic policies wouldn’t change much as a result, but something would have to be done—there would have to be some kind of palliative offer to the constituency that voted him in. And that can mean things, it can have serious effects. So those are the sorts of changes I think one can expect to see in Israel, and it’s not very clear how these internal factors will play out.

now where the P.L.O. leadership fits in is just as part of the standard Third World model: they are the ruling Third World elite. So take a classic case, look at the history of India for a couple hundred years under the British Empire: the country was run by Indians, not by British—the bureaucrats who actually ran things were Indians, the soldiers who beat people up and smashed their heads were Indians. There was an Indian leadership which became very rich and privileged by being the agents of the British imperial system—and it’s the same thing everywhere else. So for example, if you look at Southern Africa in the more recent period, the most brutal atrocities were carried out by black soldiers, who were basically mercenaries for the white racist South African regime. And every Third World country is like that. Whatever you want to call it, the whole American sort of “neocolonial system”—El Salvador, Brazil, the Philippines, and so on—is not run by Americans. The U.S. may be in the background, and when things get out of hand you may send in the American army or something—but basically it’s all being run by local agents of the imperial power, whose internal power depends on their support from the outside, but who very much enrich themselves by their client ruler status. Alright, that’s the standard colonial relationship, and the P.L.O. is intending to play that role.

international law will only work if the powers subjected to it are willing to accept it, and the United States is not willing to accept it. If the World Court condemns us, we simply disregard it, it’s not our problem—we’re above the law, we’re a lawless state.