Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (38 page)

Well, that’s in effect what’s happening in the Occupied Territories right now: the idea is, see if you can get local mercenaries, who are still always under your whip, to run the place for you, while you continue integrating the area into Israel. Actually, some Israeli commentators have used the term “neocolonialism” to describe what’s being done with the Territories, and that’s essentially correct, I think.
  ¹¹⁴

In fact, I think what’s been taking place in the Middle East is really just a part of something much broader that’s happened throughout the West in recent years, particularly since the Gulf War: there’s been a real revival of traditional European racism and imperialism, in a very dramatic way. I mean, people often talk about neo-fascists being on the rise, but I think that’s really missing the point: they’re just the froth on the surface. In my view, what we’re seeing now is a profound revival of pure old-fashioned racist imperialism, with regard to the entire Third World. You see it in articles by British journalists in the
New York Times Magazine
about how the best thing we can do for Africa is to recolonize it; it shows up at the economic level in structural adjustment programs, which are a big part of how we siphon off the wealth of the Third World to the rich countries; the anti-immigrant campaigns in the U.S. and Europe are a part of it; this program for the Palestinians is another part of it—and one could go on and on.
  ¹¹⁵
The idea is, “We smashed up the world and stole everything from it—now we’re not going to let anyone come and take any piece of it back.” That’s an attitude I see right on the surface all over the place in the West these days.

So to go back to your question, the Oslo Agreement was just a complete capitulation. I mean, I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been signed—like, maybe that’s the best that the Palestinians could do given the state they were in. But we shouldn’t have any illusions about it: all of their problems are exactly the same, maybe worse. And unless there’s support from the West … I don’t know what to say. Without support from inside the imperial countries, no group in the Third World has any hope. The Palestinians certainly don’t.

6

Community Activists

Based on discussions in British Columbia, Massachusetts, Illinois, Maryland, and Wyoming in 1989 and between 1993 and 1996
.

Discussion Circle

… I hardly know what to say. What all of you said reflects, I think very accurately, the state that we’re in. Any place I go to, there are people like you. They’re all interested in significant, important problems—problems of personal empowerment, of understanding the world, of working with others, of just finding out what your values are; of trying to figure out how people can control their own lives, and helping each other to do it. We’re all facing essentially the same fact: there’s no structure of popular institutions around within which we can work.

You don’t have to go back very far in history to find that in past days, a group like us wouldn’t have been meeting in a place like this: we would have been meeting in the labor union headquarters. There’s still a residue of that in parts of the world. For instance, I was in England last week giving political talks, and talks in England are not in churches or on college campuses, they’re in a guild hall—because in England there’s still a residue of the period when there was a popular movement, a workers’ movement, with its own media, its own places of gathering, its own ways of bringing people together. There was a time when we had a working-class culture here too. I mean, I can remember it—barely, because I was a child—but there was a live working-class culture in the United States not that long ago. My family was in it, that’s how I got my political education. A lot of it was centered around the Communist Party [U.S.A.], which for the people who were involved in it didn’t mean supporting Stalin’s crimes, it meant saving people’s lives in the South, and unionizing industry, and being at the front of every civil rights struggle, doing everything that was important.

I mean, the American Communist Party had a lot of terrible things about it, but it also had a lot of very good things too. And one of them was this—I mean, that was a
life
. The Communist Party wasn’t something you voted for, it was something where if you were an unemployed seamstress in New York and you wanted to get away for the summer, they had a summer camp where you could go and be with your friends, get into the Catskill Mountains, that sort of thing. And it was picnics, and meetings, and concerts, fighting on picket lines, demonstrations, the whole business. That was all just normal life, it was very organic.

And they had their own media. In fact, you don’t have to go back too far in the United States, a little earlier than that, to find working-class and community-based newspapers that were roughly at the scale of the mainstream capitalist press. So a journal like
Appeal to Reason
, which was sort of a socialist journal in the early part of the century, had I think about three quarters of a million subscribers—meaning who knows how many people actually read it.
  ¹
And that was in a much smaller population than today of course, much smaller.

Now, we’re not in anything like that situation: we don’t have parties, we don’t have media, we don’t have stable institutions—so, this group isn’t meeting in a union hall, because there isn’t any such thing. On the other hand, we have other advantages. There’s a tremendous diversity and range of interests and concerns now, and an awful lot of people are involved. And that gives us a kind of strength: an organized, centralized movement can easily be crushed; a very diverse movement that’s rooted all over the society—well, you can get rid of this piece and that piece and the other piece, but it’ll just come back up somewhere else. So there are both strengths and weaknesses, and I think we should recognize that.

My own feeling is that the right approach is to build on the strengths: to recognize what’s healthy and solid about having not hundreds, but thousands of flowers blooming all over the place—people with parallel concerns, maybe differently focused, but at the core sort of similar values and a similar interest in empowerment, in learning, in helping people understand how to defend themselves against external power and take control of their own lives, in reaching out your hand to people who need it. All the things that you people have talked about—that’s a common array of concerns. And the fact that there’s a tremendous diversity can be a real advantage—it can be a real way of learning, of learning about yourself, and what you care about, and what you want to do, and so on. But of course, if it’s going to bring about real change, that broad array of concerns is going to require some form of integration and inter-communication and collaboration among its various sub-parts.

Now, we’re not going to develop that sort of integration through the mainstream institutions—that would be crazy. I mean, you should not expect an institution to say, “Help me destroy myself,” that’s not the way institutions function. And if anybody
inside
the institution tried to do that, they wouldn’t be inside it much longer. Now, that’s not to say that you can do nothing if you’re already in something like the mass media. People who have seeped in from the popular movements can have effects—and people outside them can also have effects, just by barraging the editors and so on. I mean, the editors don’t like people coming to their doors and causing trouble any more than politicians do, or businessmen do. And if you come and you bother them, and give them material, and pressure them, you can sometimes get results. But in the end, there really are only small changes that can be made within the existing institutions—because they’ve got their own commitments, which are basically to private power. In the case of the media, they have a commitment to indoctrination in the interests of power, and that imposes pretty strict limits on what they can do.

So the answer is, we’ve got to create alternatives, and the alternatives have got to integrate these lots and lots of different interests and concerns into a movement—or maybe not
one
necessarily, which somebody could then cut the head off of, but a series of interconnected ones: lots of associations of people with similar concerns, who’ve got in mind the other people next door who have related concerns, and who can get together with them to work for changes. Maybe then we can ultimately construct serious alternative media—I mean, not “serious” in the sense that the
concerns
of existing alternative media aren’t serious, but serious in scale, at the point where they can consistently present people with a different picture of the world, a picture different than the one you get from an indoctrination system based on private control over resources. And as to how you can do that, well, I don’t think there’s any big secret about it—if there’s any big secret about getting social change, I’ve never heard of it.

W
OMAN
: Just keep organizing
.

Yes—large-scale social change in the past and major social revolutions in the past, so far as I know, have come about just because lots of people, working wherever they are, have worked hard, and have looked around to find other people who are working hard, and have tried to work together with them when they find them. I think every social change in history, from the democratic revolutions to things like the Civil Rights Movement, has worked that way. It’s mostly just a question of scale and dedication. There are plenty of resources around that people can use; they’re very scattered—but part of the way the institutions protect themselves is to
keep
them scattered. It’s very important for institutions of concentrated power to keep people alone and isolated: that way they’re ineffective, they can’t defend themselves against indoctrination, they can’t even figure out what they think.

So I think it makes sense to look at what the institutions are doing and to take that almost as a key: what they’re trying to do is what we’re trying to combat. If they’re keeping people isolated and separate, well, we’re trying to do the opposite, we’re trying to bring them together. So in your local community, you want to have “unity groups” or whatever they’re called, I don’t know, “ ‘left’ unity groups”—I don’t even like the word. But you want to turn them into sources of alternative action that people can get involved with, and can join in together to fight the effects of atomization. There are plenty of resources around, enormous numbers of people are interested—and if you don’t see organizations that are doing things, well, figure out what you can do, and do it yourself. I don’t think there are any secrets.

M
AN
: The greatest source of information for me in these past couple years has been our co-op radio. And I trust everyone here supports co-op radio—if not, well, you should. Because we have to cultivate and develop any form of alternate media that is working, or that we can think of that will work. So I just want to say, hats off to co-op radio: I’m glad you’re here
.

It’s certainly true—when you go to towns or communities that have alternative radio or other media that involve community participation, the general mood is strikingly different. And the reason is, people there are constantly challenged with a different point of view, and they can participate in the debates, they’re not just passive spectators. That’s the way you learn, that’s the way you discover who you are, and what you really want, it’s how you figure out your own values and gain understanding. You have to be able to knock ideas off other people and hear them get beaten down in order to find out what you actually think. That’s learning, as distinct from indoctrination—and listener-supported radio is very good in that respect. But the same is true of the whole tremendous network of alternative media that exists by now on just about every imaginable issue, all over Canada and the United States.

For instance, I don’t know how many of you know the journal
Z Magazine
, but it’s a political journal that’s an offshoot of South End Press, which brings together interests of essentially the sort that you’ve all been raising here. And it’s national, and you read it in one place and see that people are thinking about the same things somewhere else, and you write a letter in, or propose an article and so on—that’s the type of serious intercommunication that we want to foster. After all, we’re living in a world where you don’t have to talk just to the person who lives next door, we have the same interests as people all across the world, and these days we can communicate with them. In fact, as they develop, things like this could really help to unify the popular movements, and they should be pressed as far as they can go, I think.
  ²

The Early Peace Movement and a Change in the 1970s

M
AN
: Noam, there are two contradictory strains that I can identify in your work on the question of “hope.” On the one hand, you speak about the efforts organizing on behalf of Central America and East Timor and other activist causes—some of the successes that people like us have had. But on the other hand, I hear you always talking about the destructions the U.S. and other powers are causing all over the world, and it seems to me that you draw a picture of an overall global trend which is very despairing. I’m wondering, how do you deal with that tension personally—do you just keep doing what you do because it’s the right thing to do, or do you actually have a sense of hope in it?

Do I personally? Well, first of all, I don’t think that matters very much—because that’s only a reflection of
my
personality and mood, and who gives a damn? But if I try to be realistic about it and ask myself what I could say that would mean something to someone else—well, you know, twenty-five years ago I did it because I thought you just have to do it, you can’t look yourself in the mirror if you don’t do it. I didn’t think that there was any hope at all at the time. I mean, when I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me
impossible
that it would ever have any effect. In fact, the few of us who got involved in the early Sixties confidently expected that the only consequence of what we were doing would be that we’d spend years and years in jail and destroy our lives; I came very close to that, incidentally.