Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

And ever since then, every time popular movements have succeeded in dissolving power to a certain extent, there has been a deepening recognition among elites in the West that as you begin to lose the power to control people by force, you have to start to control what they think. And in the United States, that recognition has reached its apogee.

Why do we have to get rid of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua? In reality it’s not because anybody really thinks that they’re a Communist power about to conquer the Hemisphere—it’s because they were carrying out social programs that were beginning to succeed, and which would have appealed to other people in Latin America who want the same things.

You look at any other term of political discourse, and you’re going to find the same thing: the terms of political discourse are designed so as to prevent thought. One of the main ones is this notion of “defense.” So look at the diplomatic record of any country you want—Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Libya, pick your favorite horror-story—you’ll find that everything they ever did was “defensive”; I’m sure if we had records from Genghis Khan we would find that what he was doing was “defensive” too. And here in the United States you cannot challenge that—no matter how absurd it gets.

WOMAN: Then is the basic goal of the United States when it intervenes in Third World countries to destroy left-wing governments in order to keep them from power? No, the primary concern is to prevent independence, regardless of the ideology. Remember, we’re the global power, so we have to make sure that all the various parts of the world continue serving their assigned functions in our global system. And the assigned functions of Third World countries are to be markets for American business, sources of resources for American business, to provide cheap labor for American business, and so on. I mean, there’s no big secret about that—the media won’t tell you and scholarship won’t tell you, but all you have to do is look at declassified government documents and this is all explained very frankly and explicitly.

In January 1959, Cuba had a popular nationalist revolution. We now know from declassified U.S. government documents that the formal decision to overthrow Castro was made by the American government in March 1960—that’s very important, because at that point there were no Russians around, and Castro was in fact considered anti-Communist by the U.S. [Castro did not align with the Soviet Union until May 1961, after the U.S. had severed diplomatic relations with Cuba in January and had sponsored an invasion attempt in April.]29 So the reason for deciding to overthrow the Castro government can’t have had anything to do with Cuba being a Russian outpost in the Cold War—Cuba was just taking an independent path, which has always been unacceptable to powerful interests in the United States.

The real crime of Cuba was the successes, in terms of things like health care and feeding people, and the general threat of a “demonstration effect” that follows from that—that is, the threat that people in other countries might try to do the same things. That’s what they call a rotten apple that might spoil the barrel, or a virus that might infect the region—and then our whole imperial system begins to fall apart. I mean, for thirty years, Cuba has been doing things which are simply intolerable—such as sending tens of thousands of doctors to support suffering people around the Third World, or developing biotechnology in a poor country with no options, or having health services roughly at the level of the advanced countries and way out of line with the rest of Latin America.31 These things are not tolerable to American power—they’d be intolerable anywhere in the Third World, and they’re multiply intolerable in a country which is expected to be a U.S. colony. That’s Cuba’s real crime.

For instance, take this supposed big phenomenon that swept the country in the 1970s, the “Culture of Narcissism,” and the “Me Generation” and so on. I’m just convinced that that whole thing was crafted by the public relations industry to tell mainly young people, “Look, this is who you are—you don’t care about all this solidarity and sympathy and helping people” that had started to break out. And of course, that’s what they would do. In fact, they shouldn’t get their salaries if they don’t do things like that. We should expect them to do it, we should expect them to tell us: “You guys can’t do anything, you’re all alone, you’re each separate; you’ve never achieved anything, and you never will achieve anything.” Of course they should tell us that—and they should even tell us, “You don’t want to achieve anything, all you want to do is consume more.” As long as power’s concentrated, that’s what it’s going to tell us—“There’s no point in working to help other people, you don’t care about them, you’re just out for yourself.” Sure it’s going to tell us that, because that’s what’s in its interests. There’s no point in telling ourselves, “They’re lying to us” over and over again. Of course they are; it’s like saying the sun’s setting or something like that. Obviously they are.

Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it’s necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything—that’s part of how you teach people they can’t do anything, they’re helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.

With regard to the domestic scene, take the fact that the criminal justice system increasingly is becoming a system for targeting the poor and minorities, who are being turned into people under military occupation. Look, that’s an easy one to change—you really just have to change public opinion on that one. You aren’t striking at the core of private power when you begin to have a civilized criminal justice system instead of a brutal, barbaric one. So that’s an example of something I think is changeable. Or you could start by getting us to stop torturing people in the Third World, right? Easy things to do are, stop killing children in Cuba, stop massacring people in East Timor, get people in the United States to realize that Palestinians are human beings—those are easy things. So let’s do those, first do the easy things.

After all, why do corporations have the rights they do? Why are they treated as “immortal persons,” contrary to the warnings of people like Adam Smith and others?10 It’s not by nature—in fact, these rights weren’t even granted by Congress, this happened because of decisions made in courts by judges and lawyers, which simply changed the world totally.

But I think you have to think through the non-violence question in detail. I mean, anybody is going to try to do things non-violently if possible: what’s the point of violence? But when you begin to encroach on power, you may find that it’s necessary to defend your rights—and defense of your rights sometimes does require violence, then either you use it or you don’t, depending on your moral values.

Look, violence usually comes from the powerful—people may talk about it coming from the revolutionaries, but that’s typically because they’re attacked and they then defend themselves with violence.