Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

And when the ocean starts rising to the level of whatever building they’re in and whatever floor they’re on as they write their editorials, yeah, then they’ll agree that there’s a greenhouse effect and we’d better do something about it. Sure, no matter how lunatic people are, at some point or other they’re going to realize that these problems exist, and they are approaching fast. It’s just that the next thing they’ll ask is, “So how can we make some money off it?” In fact, anybody in business who didn’t ask that question would find themselves out of business—just because that’s the way that capitalist institutions work. I mean, if some executive came along and said, “I’m not going to look at it that way, I’m going to do things differently,” well, they’d get replaced by someone who would try to make more money off it—because these are simply institutional facts, these are facts about the structure of the institutions. And if you don’t like them, and I don’t, then you’re going to have to change the institutions.

Well, this term “conspiracy theory” is kind of an interesting one. For example, if I was talking about Soviet planning and I said, “Look, here’s what the Politburo decided, and then the Kremlin did this,” nobody would call that a “conspiracy theory”—everyone would just assume that I was talking about planning. But as soon as you start talking about anything that’s done by power in the West, then everybody calls it a “conspiracy theory.” You’re not allowed to talk about planning in the West, it’s not allowed to exist. So if you’re a political scientist, one of the things you learn—you don’t even make it into graduate school unless you’ve already internalized it—is that nobody here ever plans anything: we just act out of a kind of general benevolence, stumbling from here to here, sometimes making mistakes and so on. The guys in power aren’t idiots, after all. They do planning. In fact, they do very careful and sophisticated planning. But anybody who talks about it, and uses government records or anything else to back it up, is into “conspiracy theory.”

not telling you anything new when I tell you that top editors, top government officials, and major businessmen have meetings together—of course. And not only do they have meetings, they belong to the same golf clubs, they go to the same parties, they went to the same schools, they flow up and back from one position to another in the government and private sector, and so on and so forth. In other words, they represent the same social class: they’d be crazy if they didn’t communicate and plan with each other. So of course the Board of Directors of General Motors plans, the same way the National Security Council plans, and the National Association of Manufacturers’ P.R. agencies plan. I mean, this was a truism to Adam Smith: if you read Adam Smith [classical economist], he says that every time two businessmen get together in a room, you can be sure there’s some plan being cooked up which is going to harm the public. Yeah, how could it be otherwise? And there’s nothing particularly new about this—as Smith pointed out over two hundred years ago, the “masters of mankind,” as he called them, will do what they have to in order to follow “the vile maxim”: “all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.”

here I must say I would like to complain about a recent cover of Z Magazine. I had an article in there, and on the cover there was the title: “Corporate Greed.” But that’s just an absurd phrase.92 I mean, to talk about “corporate greed” is like talking about “military weapons” or something like that—there just is no other possibility. A corporation is something that is trying to maximize power and profit: that’s what it is. There is no “phenomenon” of corporate greed, and we shouldn’t mislead people into thinking there is. It’s like talking about “robber’s greed” or something like that—it’s not a meaningful thing, it’s misleading. A corporation’s purpose is to maximize profit and market share and return to investors, and all that kind of stuff, and if its officers don’t pursue that goal, for one thing they are legally liable for not pursuing it.

I do feel this period is kind of a turning point. I mean, you can see very clearly where policy is driving people, and you know exactly what its goals are. The only question you can’t answer is how the population is going to react as they get slammed in the face—and they are getting slammed in the face. One way it could go would be like the building of the C.I.O. [an integrated mass union formed in 1935], or the Civil Rights and feminist movements, or the Freedom Rides [whites and blacks rode buses together into the American South in 1961 to challenge segregation laws]. Other ways it could go would be Nazism, Khomeini’s Iran, Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria—those are all ways people could go too. But the country is very disturbed. You can see it in polls, and you can certainly see it traveling around—and I travel around a lot. There’s complete disaffection about everything. People don’t trust anyone, they think everyone’s lying to them, everyone’s working for somebody else. The whole civil society has completely broken down. And when you talk about the mood of people—well, whether it’s on right-wing talk radio, or among students, or just among the general population, you get a very good reception these days for the kinds of things I talk about. But it’s scary—because if you came and told people, “Clinton’s organizing a U.N. army with aliens to come and carry out genocide, you’d better go to the hills,” you’d get the same favorable response. That’s the problem—you’d get t...

In fact, all these reactions, from the “militias,” to conspiracy theories, to the Unabomber, to the L.A. riots, they’re all the result of a kind of collapse of civil society in the United States. The vestiges of an integrated, socially cohesive, functioning society, with some kind of solidarity and continuity to it, have just been destroyed here.

The rich and the powerful are going to survive longer, but the effects are very real—and they’re getting worse very quickly as more and more people get marginalized because they play no role in profit-making, which is considered the only human value. Well, the environmental problems are simply much more significant in scale than anything else in the past. And there’s a fair possibility—certainly a possibility high enough so that no rational person would exclude it—that within a couple hundred years the world’s water-level will have risen to the point that most of human life will have been destroyed. Alright, if we don’t start to do something about that now, it’s not impossible that that’ll happen. In fact, it’s even likely. So whatever I happen to think, that’s irrelevant. The answer to your question is: if you remain marginalized, there’s not going to be much history to worry about. Whether people will react or not, who knows? You know? Everyone’s got to decide.

Chomsky notes that, among other grounds for Nuremberg punishment -- based upon either direct or indirect involvement in atrocities and war crimes -- are Truman’s counter-insurgency campaign in Greece; Eisenhower’s role in the Guatemala coup; Kennedy’s invasions of Cuba and Vietnam; Johnson’s invasion of the Dominican Republic; Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia; Ford’s support for the invasion of East Timor; Carter’s support for the genocide in East Timor and his administration’s activities in Nicaragua (where, for example, it helped to spirit Somoza’s National Guard out of the country in planes with Red Cross markings, a war crime, in order to establish them elsewhere); Reagan’s activities in Central America and his administration’s support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon; Bush’s invasion of Panama and activities in Nicaragua; and Clinton’s missile strikes against Iraq, the Sudan, and Afghanistan.

The “demonstration effect” on other poor countries -- or “threat of a good example” -- that occurs when one Third World nation begins successful independent development is an extremely important topic. Chomsky argues that it is crucial to understanding the Vietnam War and post-war U.S. policies towards Vietnam; the Central America interventions of the 1980s; U.S. attacks on Cuba and the longstanding embargo; the 1983 Grenada invasion; and other major foreign policy events.