Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (37 page)

Well, there are a lot of major issues on which I simply haven’t taken any position—just because I don’t really know what to say. For example, take the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s [i.e. after the breakup of the Soviet bloc in 1991 and ’92, Bosnia and Herzegovina began the process of seceding from Yugoslavia and several years of civil war between the Croat, Muslim, and Serb populations followed]. I didn’t really have any opinion on what to do about that, actually. I never heard a good proposal about how to resolve it, and I didn’t have one myself—so when people asked me to comment on it, I just talked about the general problems and gave no proposal. And in fact, there are plenty of major issues like that in the world, where I just don’t know what to say—I don’t see any good solutions, or even anything very helpful that could be done. Fortunately there are hundreds of other cases where there are obvious things that can be done, and I think those are the ones where we really ought to focus our attention.

But Bosnia was a striking example—just because everybody was talking so much about it—of an issue where if anyone had a good idea about how to stop the atrocities, I missed it. I mean, lots of people said, “Let’s bomb everybody”—okay, great. And there were a lot of people posturing and preening their feathers about how they were the only moral ones because they were opposed to what was happening in Sarajevo [the Bosnian capital, where ethnic warfare raged in the early 1990s]. Yeah, sure, we all were opposed to what was happening in Sarajevo—but what did you propose to do about it? That’s where it got a lot less obvious. Kill the Serbs? They’re human beings too, you know, and it’s not like the position of these Serb peasants up in the hills is zero. I mean, maybe their lifestyle’s not as much like ours as all those nice Europeans in Sarajevo, but they’re people too. In fact, I should say that there’s been a lot of class bias in general in the Western reactions to what’s been going on there, and in the media coverage in particular. But even if you did decide that it was the Serb peasants who were the killers and the people in Sarajevo were like Gandhi, still the question remained: what should you do? Okay, that’s where it got very hard.

And there are plenty of other issues like that too. Take Rwanda [where more than half a million people were killed in a civil war in 1994]—you can see plenty of things people shouldn’t have done, but once the massacres got started, I don’t know of a lot that anybody could do about them. They were horrendous, certainly, but what exactly could you do?

Toying With India

M
AN
: Professor Chomsky, India is refusing to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty unless the countries that already have nuclear weapons agree to give them up. That seems to me to be a pretty brazen contravention of U.S. authority, especially for a poor Third World country like India. Why do you think they’re saying that, and what is the U.S. reaction going to be to that kind of disobedience?

Well, India is basically just saying what everybody else in the Third World
thinks
but is afraid to say publicly: that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is a ridiculous joke. I mean, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is just a way of ensuring that the rich powerful countries have a monopoly of nuclear weapons—not much else. Now, obviously nuclear proliferation is a bad thing—but you know, is it better for the
United States
to have them? Do we have a better record in international affairs than India? Well, everybody in the Third World can appreciate that hypocrisy, but not a lot of them are willing to get up and say it. In India they do say it—and actually that’s not so surprising.

You see, India is a fairly independent country. It was the head of the Non-Aligned Movement [a coalition of Third World nations at the U.N.], and it’s a big country—in fact, within a small number of years India will probably be larger than China, if you project the current population growth rates.
  ¹⁰⁶
India was also one of the first countries to be colonized, and it was destroyed by colonialism—and however brainwashed Indian intellectuals may be (and they are), an understanding of that history is not very deep below the surface. And it does show up in independence. For example, take Nehru [the first Indian Prime Minister]: although he was very pro-Western and very anglophile, he was absolutely
despised
by American leaders. You should see the stuff that’s coming out about him these days in declassified American documents, they just hated him with a passion. And the reason was, he was standing up for some level of Indian independence.
  ¹⁰⁷
And that streak of independence in India has remained.

In fact, if you look over the history of U.S. attitudes towards India since British decolonization [in 1947], they’ve in general been kind of ambivalent. On the one hand, the U.S. was opposed to India because it was fairly independent—it was trying to develop an independent economy and an independent foreign policy. But on the other hand, the U.S. was extremely worried about
China
right next door—they were worried about Chinese economic success in the years after their revolution [in 1949], because they were very much afraid that China would be a development model that other Third World countries would want to follow. So we have extensive declassified documents on this stretching until roughly the early 1960s, and right into the time of the Kennedy administration the documentary record is very explicit: the big fear was that China was starting to look too successful. And therefore, much as they disliked it, U.S. planners determined that they had to support India as sort of the democratic alternative to China, so then they could say to other countries: the Indian way is better than the Chinese way, be capitalist, have a parliament and so on. And if you look over the history, that ambivalence did lead to policy conflicts.
  ¹⁰⁸

For instance, the U.S. gave very little aid to India. In fact, sometimes it was absolutely scandalous—like, right after Indian independence, in around 1950, India had its last massive famine (under the British there were famines all the time), and while there aren’t very good statistics, probably something on the order of maybe 13 to 15 million people died from starvation. Well, we have the U.S. internal records from that period, and at first there wasn’t even any
question
of giving them aid—I mean, we had food coming out our ears, just huge food surpluses, but there was no aid going to India because we did not like Nehru’s independence and his moves towards non-alignment and neutrality. But then there was a discussion about whether the U.S. should give India food aid as a
weapon
—that is, we give them some food aid as a way of forcing them to accept U.S. policies on various issues. And after that, a little bit of aid was trickled out—but it was delayed and conditioned on India’s accepting American positions on things like the Korean War and so on. Nobody knows exactly how many millions of people died because of that.
  ¹⁰⁹

By the 1960s under Kennedy, the U.S. was shifting towards giving some aid to India to make it sort of a counterweight to China, so they’d look good as compared with Communist China—but again, the aid was with strings attached. For instance, India badly needed fertilizers, and they wanted to develop their own fertilizer industry using hydrocarbon resources—which they had plenty of, along with a lot of other energy resources—but they needed U.S. aid to do it. And after a big discussion in the United States, which you can read about in the pages of the
New York Times
if you look back, a decision was made here to help them do it—but only if they would use
Western
-based hydrocarbons. So India was not allowed to develop its own hydrocarbon resources, instead they had to buy them from the American oil companies, and in addition they had to allow dominant U.S. control over the fertilizer and any other industries which developed. Well, India resisted those conditions very strongly—but in the end, they had to give in. And you can read
New York Times
articles in the 1960s recognizing this situation, and basically saying: well, the Indians don’t like it, but there’s nothing they can do about it, because we’ve got them by the throat—they’ll just have to do what we want.
  ¹¹⁰

Well, alright, that sort of ambivalent dynamic continued through the 1970s and Eighties. In the 1980s, India had a very fast growth rate, but it also adopted extremely bad fiscal policies which got them deeply into debt—and the debt crisis led them into accepting structural adjustment “reforms,” as throughout the Third World. In India’s case, the reforms have actually been fairly moderate, though they’ve still had the usual effects: for most of the population there’s been a decline, and for an elite sector it’s meant wealth. The country shot into a deep depression right away, but recently it’s been pulling out of it, though still it hasn’t recovered the 1980s growth rates—and of course, the recovery is extremely inegalitarian in terms of who actually “recovers.” But right now the U.S. is very supportive of India, because the country has opened itself even more to Western control. Still, there’s also this history of independence which doesn’t go away so easily. And sometimes it does show up in India doing things like speaking up against the hypocrisy of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, when most other Third World countries would be too afraid to step out of line like that.

The Oslo Agreement and Imperialist Revival

M
AN
: Noam, you said that the Oslo Agreement in the Middle East was sort of a consequence of the Gulf War—I’m wondering, what do you think are the prospects for the Palestinians now that they’ve signed it? And do you see them still being able to organize resistance to the Israeli occupation, even without pressure from international solidarity movements in the West?

Well, first of all, it’s not the
Palestinians
who signed anything. It was the group around Arafat—and they simply made a decision to capitulate. And as far as the prospects go for the Palestinian people right now, in the absence of serious international solidarity movements, their hopes are dead—because this agreement was a complete sellout, it was a total capitulation.

A couple nights ago I was reading an article in the Israeli press by a friend of mine at Tel Aviv University, who summarized what’s been going on very nicely. She said: people in Israel are comparing this agreement with the end of apartheid in South Africa, but the true comparison is with the
onset
of apartheid—with the enactment of the 1950s laws in South Africa which set up the Bantustans [partially self-governing black districts].
  ¹¹¹
And that’s right, that’s more or less what the Oslo Agreement is: it’s enslavement, it’s a plan for enslavement, with about as much independence for the Territories—less maybe—as the Bantustans had. So that means that the whole struggle against apartheid is just
beginning
right now, not ending.

Israel and the United States essentially got the settlement they’d been holding out for for more than twenty years, and for which the U.S. has blocked every international diplomatic initiative without exception for well over twenty years.
  ¹¹²
In 1994 they finally won, the world capitulated—it’s not that the
Palestinians
capitulated, the whole world capitulated on this one. In fact, it capitulated so profoundly that it doesn’t even remember what it stood for for so long.

It’s amazing in Europe: Europe has become extraordinarily colonized culturally by the United States, to an extent that is almost unbelievable—Europeans aren’t aware of it apparently, but if you go there it’s kind of like a pale United States at this point, yet they still have this feeling of great independence, so it’s even more dramatic. I mean, Western European intellectuals like to think of themselves as very sophisticated and sort of laughing about these dumb Americans—but they are so brainwashed by the United States that it’s a joke. Their perceptions of the world and their misunderstandings and so on are all filtered through American television and movies and newspapers, but somehow by this point they just don’t recognize it. And one of the issues where this is most clearly demonstrated is with respect to the Middle East. I mean, it’s not ancient history, but on the issue of the right of self-determination for the Palestinians, the Europeans have just forgotten what they stood for, at least on paper, until around the time of the Gulf War—because anything like self-determination is completely
out
of the Oslo Agreement.
  ¹¹³

The long-term arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians now will be in terms of U.N. 242 alone. [U.N. 242 was a November 1967 United Nations Security Council Resolution calling for Israel to withdraw from the territory it had just seized and for a regional peace treaty.] Well, the whole battle all along has been about whether a settlement in the Middle East is going to be
just
in terms of U.N. 242, which doesn’t say anything about the Palestinians, or U.N. 242 plus
other
U.N. Resolutions which also call for Palestinian rights. Well, now it turns out that the answer is just 242—so Israel does whatever it feels like.

Right now there are huge construction projects going up all over the Occupied Territories (with, as always, U.S. funding), and Israel will just continue with its settlement program [the idea is to “settle” Jewish citizens in the Palestinian territories, which are not officially part of the state of Israel, to solidify Israel’s claim to them]. And what they’ve pretty much been doing is creating a large bulge of Jewish settlers around this big area they call “Greater Jerusalem,” in order to break the West Bank into two separate parts and enclose Jerusalem—they’re basically breaking the West Bank into two cantons, where they’ll then gladly cede authority to the local cops to do the dirty business of keeping order. It would be like asking the New York City police force whether they would like to turn Harlem over to local mercenaries to patrol, while they hold on to Wall Street, the Upper East Side, Madison Avenue, and so on—if you asked the New York City police force that, I’m sure they’d be delighted. Who wants to patrol Harlem?