Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (61 page)

So for example, it was a very easy thing in the 1980s for people in the United States to denounce the atrocities of the Soviet Union in its occupation of Afghanistan—but those denunciations had no effects which could have helped people. In terms of their ethical value, they were about the same as denouncing Napoleon’s atrocities, or things that happened in the Middle Ages. Useful and significant actions are ones which have consequences for human beings, and usually those will concern things that you can influence and control—which means for people in the United States, American actions primarily, not those of some other state.

Actually, the principle that I think we ought to follow is the principle we rightly expected Soviet dissidents to follow. So what principle did we expect Sakharov [a Soviet scientist punished for his criticism of the U.S.S.R.] to follow? Why did people here decide that Sakharov was a moral person? I think he was. Sakharov did not treat every atrocity as identical—he had nothing to say about American atrocities. When he was asked about them, he said, “I don’t know anything about them, I don’t care about them, what I talk about are Soviet atrocities.” And that was right—because those were the ones that he was responsible for, and that he might have been able to influence. Again, it’s a very simple ethical point: you are responsible for the predictable consequences of
your
actions, you’re not responsible for the predictable consequences of somebody else’s actions.

Now, we understand this perfectly well when we’re talking about dissidents in the old Soviet Union or in some other enemy state, but we fail to understand it when we’re talking about ourselves—for obvious reasons. I mean, commissars in the old Soviet Union didn’t understand it about dissidents there either: commissars in the old Soviet Union attacked Sakharov and other Soviet dissidents because they weren’t denouncing
American
crimes. In fact, an old joke fifty years ago was that if you went to a Stalinist and criticized the Soviet slave-labor camps, the Stalinist would say, “Well, what about the lynchings in the American South?” Alright, in that case the dishonesty’s obvious, and we can easily understand why.

Now, just personally speaking, it turns out that I
do
spend a fair amount of effort talking about the crimes of official enemies—in fact, there are a number of people now living in the United States and Canada from the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who are there because of my own personal activities on their behalf. But I don’t take great pride in that part of my work, particularly: I just do it because I’m interested in it. The most important thing for me, and for you, is to think about the greater consequences of your criticisms: what you can have the most effect on. And especially in a relatively open society like ours, which does allow a lot of freedom for dissent, that means American crimes primarily.

Well, that’s the main point here, I think. But there’s also another consideration which is important—and which simply can’t be ignored, in my opinion. 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.

I mean, if a Russian intellectual had started publishing articles denouncing very real atrocities committed by the Afghan resistance forces at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, knowing that his accurate criticism would have helped enable the Kremlin to mobilize popular support for further atrocities by the Red Army, I do not think that would have been a morally responsible thing for that person to do. Of course, this often creates difficult dilemmas. But again, honest people have to recognize that they are responsible for the predictable consequences of their acts. 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?” And the consequences in that case at least are clear. Well, making decisions in these circumstances can often be difficult—but these are just dilemmas that human beings have to face in life, and all you can do is try to deal with them the best way you can.

Canada’s Media

W
OMAN
: I’m from Canada, Professor Chomsky, and when I come to the United States and turn on the T. V., to me the propaganda all seems so blatant—I see this woman talking about guilt and abortion, there’s this black woman saying, “I’m on welfare because I’m lazy,” it’s just one image like that after another, there’s no subtlety to it whatsoever. On Canadian T. V. it’s more subtle: the C.B.C. [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] wouldn’t put on the black woman saying, “I’m lazy, I’m on welfare because I’m lazy”—they’d put up a chart or something that tries to say the same thing
.

That’s right.

W
OMAN
: The
Globe and Mail
[self-billed “Canada’s National Newspaper”] also is more subtle than the papers I see here—it’s not as obvious. What I’m wondering is, how do you explain this difference in the two countries’ media systems? I mean, I don’t think I could apply the “Propaganda Model” you and Edward Herman laid out in
Manufacturing Consent
to the Canadian media—it really wouldn’t work
.

I think you could, actually—I think you’re wrong about that. Let me just give you some examples. The first part of my book
Necessary Illusions
was made up of talks on the media that I was invited to give in Canada over C.B.C. national public radio [titled “Thought Control in Democratic Societies”]. Okay, obviously that would never happen in the United States.
  ²⁹
So that’s a difference.

On the other hand, in preparation for those lectures I figured that it would be interesting to compare the
Globe and Mail
, Canada’s main newspaper, with the
New York Times
, and maybe I’d discuss the results in my talks. So for a year I subscribed to the
Globe and Mail
—which I must say cost about $1,500 or something in the United States, and apparently all their U.S. subscribers are rich investors, because every two weeks or so you’d get a big fat glossy book about investment opportunities in Canada. But anyhow, for about a year I read the
Globe and Mail
every day and the
New York Times
every day, plus all the other junk, and at first I figured it would be an interesting comparison. Alright, it turned out that it
wasn’t
an interesting comparison. Reading the
Globe and Mail
is like reading the
Boston Globe
—it’s like an ordinary, quality local newspaper in the United States: small amount of international coverage, huge amount of business news, and mostly picking stories off sources in the United States.

Now, it’s true that over that year I did find things in the
Globe and Mail
which did not appear in the United States, or which appeared only in really remote places. And also I have friends in the Canadian media who clip the Canadian press regularly for me, and they often find stuff there that doesn’t appear anywhere in the United States. So you’re right, there are some differences. But overall, reading the
Globe and Mail
for a year, I didn’t get a different picture of the world than I get from reading the
Boston Globe
or the
L.A. Times
or any other quality local newspaper in the United States. The
Globe and Mail
was more local in orientation and less international than the
New York Times
, but I didn’t feel that it was qualitatively different—it’s mostly a business paper like all the others.

Now, when I go to Canada, I do get asked onto mainstream national radio and television a lot, as distinct from here—a lot. But see, that’s because I criticize the United States, and in Canada they like it when people come up and dump on the United States—because the United States is always pushing them around all the time, so it’s nice if somebody comes and says how rotten the United States is once in a while. On the other hand, I got sick of this a couple times, and I started talking about Canada—and I was off so fast you couldn’t even see it. The first time I did it was on this big morning radio show they have there, with this guy whose name I can never remember …

M
AN
: Peter Gzowski
.

Gzowski, yeah. There’s this nation-wide radio talk show in Canada which everybody tunes into some time in the morning [
Morningside
, on C.B.C], and every time I’d go to Toronto they would invite me to come on that show. So we’d have whatever it is, fifteen minutes, and this guy would ask me some leading questions, I’d tell him how rotten the United States is, big smile.

Well, one time I really got sick of this, and I started talking about Canada. He said some line about, “I hear you just flew in.” I said, “Yeah, I landed at the War Criminal Airport.” He said: “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, you know, the Lester B. Pearson Airport.” And he says, “What do you mean, ‘war criminal’?” Lester Pearson’s the big hero in Canada [he was a prominent diplomat and Prime Minister from 1963 to ’68]. So I started running through Pearson’s involvement in criminal activity—he was a major criminal, really extreme. He didn’t have the power to be like an American President, but if he’d had it, he would have been the same—he tried, you know. And I went through some of this.
  ³⁰
The guy got infuriated.

Then I said something about Canada and the Vietnam War—Canada was always denouncing the United States during the Vietnam War for its criminal actions, meanwhile Canada was probably the leading military exporter in the world per capita, enriching itself on the destruction of Indochina.
  ³¹
So I mentioned some of this stuff. He went into kind of a tantrum. I actually thought it was sort of funny, but apparently his listeners didn’t—when I left, after about ten minutes of listening to this harangue, the producer, sort of quivering, stopped me and said: “Oh my God, the switchboard’s lighting up, we’re getting thousands of phone calls from all over Canada.”

And apparently the phone calls were all just about the fact that this guy Gzowski was being impolite—I don’t know if people agreed with me particularly, but there were a lot of people who were very angry at the way he was going about it. Like I said, I thought it was comical, didn’t bother me.

W
OMAN
: I’m sorry, they got angry at
him?

Him
, yeah—and they were pretty upset, because there were a lot of calls. Alright, so then the producer asked me “Well, look, could you go on again?” And I said, “No, I’m leaving; I’m busy while I’m here, and then I’m going home, I don’t have that kind of time.” So he said, “Well, can we call you in Boston to do a follow-up?”—which they never do, it’s an in-studio program. So I said, “Okay, if you can arrange it, I’ll do it.” Anyway, they made a big effort, they called me up in Boston, and we went through another show—in which Gzowski was very contrite and quiet, just to make up to the audience. But that was the last time I ever heard from them; I’ve never been asked on that show with him again.

And that’s happened to me elsewhere in Canada too, I should say—I mean, I’ve been invited to universities in Canada where they’ve literally refused to pay my plane fare after I gave talks in which I denounced Canada. So you know, Canada’s very nice as long as you’re criticizing the United States—try going after Canada and see what happens to you.

But the point is, I think the media system works the same in both countries. I don’t think it works the same in
detail
—like, there’s a labor movement there, and there are other factors that are different between the two countries as well which may influence the range of coverage a bit. But I doubt that the differences in the media product are very great—and if you examine the question in detail, I’m pretty sure that’s what you’ll find as well.

Should Quebec Separate from Canada?

M
AN
: In Canada there’s been a strong movement for Quebec to separate from the English-speaking part of the country—do you think it would be in Quebec’s self-interest to become independent like that? And also, do you think it would be to the advantage of American business to see that kind of instability in Canada, or is it better for powerful interests here if Canada just remains stable?

Well, I don’t know the whole situation in detail, but my guess is that it’s in Quebec’s self-interest to stay part of Canada—because the alternative is to become part of the United States. Quebec’s not going to be able to remain independent, so it can either become part of the United States or stay part of Canada. And given that choice, I think it’s better off staying part of Canada. I mean, if Quebec became independent from Canada, it wouldn’t necessarily be
called
part of the United States—like it wouldn’t get colored the same as the United States on the map—but it would be so integrated into the American economy that it would effectively be a colony. And I don’t think that’s in the interest of the people of Quebec, I think they’re better off staying part of Canada.